Mar 29, 2023
At the local charity shop on Saturday I felt discouraged at just how many of their stock of LPs were ones I’d formerly owned and donated to them over the years that hadn’t yet found a buyer: some have been there for quite some time. Nothing on vinyl caught my eye, but I did pick up three CDs: D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar; Tasty by Kelis; and Duffy’s Rockferry. The total asking price was £2. Brown Sugar joins the copy of Voodoo I bought last year. Tasty meanwhile is aptly described by its title. I’d enjoyed ‘Milkshake’ and ‘Trick Me’ (more especially the latter) when they were new, but such was my blinkered outlook at the time that I never thought of buying the album back then.
It was a case of third time lucky with Rockferry: the other twice I’d ended up with copies that had been pre-enjoyed so much they were in unplayable condition. I’d not heard the album as a whole before and was favourably impressed at first acquaintance. The singles are clear stand-outs among some slightly weaker tracks, but the closing number ‘Distant Dreamer’ was an unfamiliar beauty. If you’d asked me fifteen years ago I’d have predicted Duffy would become a worldwide star and Adele an also-ran. Alas, things have gone very badly for the Welsh singer; as meanwhile the Londoner has gone on to one triumph after another.
In a different vein altogether a recent on-line order brought me new CD copies of
John Luther Adams' Sila: the Breath of the World and Nuit Blanche by everyone’s favourite piano + cello + soprano sax + accordion art-music combo the Tarkovsky Quartet.
Mar 27, 2023
For about twenty years - from my late teens - I was a coffee-drinker. To begin with, I considered it in utilitarian terms as the least disagreeable of the caffeine delivery methods I knew. At length, though, I came to discover the delights of espresso, and thereafter grew to be more of a devotee, if never a true connoisseur. A gruelling case of the flu in the opening months of 2007 brought that to a halt. Something about the illness made me feel hypersensitive to the effects of caffeine, which I forswore entirely for a while, afterwards switching entirely to tea-drinking once my capacity to tolerate the stimulant had returned.
This year, however, I’ve begun to enjoy a daily coffee again, courtesy of a diminutive one-cup Bialetti Moka Express contraption and a cheap bean grinder. The latter was a new departure as back in the old days I simply bought my coffee ready-ground. I’d also bought a pair of fancy cups from Hot Pottery. Beginning with my old standby Lavazza Qualità Rossa, I’ve branched out to try a number of the more readily-available espresso beans, of which my favourite so far has to be The Bold blend by Roastworks. By an irritating coincidence, mere weeks in to my new coffee regime, I came down with a case of flu (my first since 2007), which temporarily derailed my explorations - but I’m back on track again now.
Mar 25, 2023
From an incomplete set of of black-&-white 35mm slides containing movie stills I bought from an antique market in Bristol several years ago, here’s one labelled as follows:
15. In den Fängen des Teufels
R: Harry Keller
R498 Bewegung vor der Kamera
Institut für Film und Bild
“R 498 Bewegung vor der Kamera” (“Movement on Camera”?) is the collective title for the set, from which I have slides 1-5 & 7-17. Google Translate suggests “In the Devil’s Clutches” as an English equivalent for In den Fängen des Teufels, a title which made no attempt to ape the original one: The Unguarded Moment.
This was an apparently undistinguished 1956 movie starring Esther Williams, aka the “million dollar mermaid”, who is depicted on the slide. Although the still looks like it could be something from a starkly monochrome film noir, the movie was a Technicolor one, as the trailer testifies. Why this film was singled out, and to what presumably educational end this image was selected from it - I do not know.
Mar 23, 2023
As a small-time collector of vintage stationery, researching one’s ebay acquisitions can be very difficult. Trying to determine when or where a certain writing paper was made is too often a frustrating matter of the most inexact guesswork, given the paucity of ready references.
One of the best sources of information I have been able to find is a 1923 volume at the Internet Archive entitled Phillips' Paper Trade Directory of the World. Thanks to this book’s ‘Water-Marks and Trade Names’ section, I have, for example, ascertained that the box of ‘English Lawn’ paper shown above was made by the firm of G. Waterston & Sons. As it happens the watermarks in each sheet of the paper include the initials ‘G W & S’. Searching at Grace’s Guide turned up more information about the company, but little that might tell me when my paper might have been manufactured.
To my eye the packaging has a vaguely ‘Arts & Crafts’-influenced look about it which makes me think it may date back to the turn of the 20th century, but it could just as well be a later ‘retro’ design. Evidently, per Phillips' Directory ‘English Lawn’ (Lawn in this context referring to the fabric, rather than an expanse of grass) was a current or recent trade name in the early 1920s. I’d be surprised if the box were post-WWII.
Anyway, it’s lovely paper, in Post Octavo size, in this case in the form of pre-folded Post Quarto (9" x 7") sheets. It feels like fine-quality stuff, and has not discoloured in the least over time. I also have a box of matching Crown Quarto envelopes in the same shade, which can fit a sheet or two of the paper folded in half: trying to squeeze in any more in tends not to work too well. The gum on the envelopes has perished somewhat, but can still be made to stick perfectly well. I have to hope it’s more or less non-toxic!
Mar 20, 2023
With the long-standing ubiquity of hip-hop culture and its many offshoots, poetry must surely be as popular as it’s ever been in the English-speaking world; but literary poetry, as one might term it, has become (in those same territories) something of a special interest: a dusty niche visited by a relative few. Of those few, a smaller minority seek out poetry in translation. And how many of that minor minority are merely readers: that is, not academics, not other poets nor would-be academics or poets? I don’t know, but I get the feeling it’s a sparsely-populated sub-subset of the reading public in which I find myself.
A distinction for me between poems and stories is their re-readability. A poem is like a song in that I can revisit it dozens or even hundreds of times with little or no diminution of pleasure. Whereas it’s not often that I can read a story even a second time without a measure of restless impatience; without a sense that it’s lessened by the remembering of it. With that in mind, looking at all the novels on my shelves that I’m unlikely to read again in any forseeable future, I embarked on a project to reallocate some of that limited space for poetry.
The Goodreads list “Your Obscure Poetry in Translation Anthologies” has been one helpful guide in my recent efforts in filling what has become the dedicated poetry bookcase. I already knew and loved a number of the titles on the list (for instance The Poetry of Survival, Ice Around Our Lips and Modern Arabic Poetry) and have been acquiring some more: Reversible Monuments, Language for a New Century; and, the latest addition, Only the Road / Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry.
Editor/translator Margaret Randall has done a more than admirable job of casting a hundred or more heterogenous poems into English, and in presenting them and their authors to an Anglophone audience. Large anthologies are often necessarily the work of many hands, but here we have labour of love with a solo pilot at the controls. I’d be thrilled to find more volumes of this quality to further flesh out my poetry collection.
Mar 18, 2023
It’s my blue-eyed cat’s fifteenth birthday. His name is Murphy. Falling as it does the day after St. Patrick’s Day, I think of today as St. Murphy’s Day, even if, in his capacity as a cat, he’s as ill-suited for canonization as he is ineligible for it. I gather from this doubtless impeccable source that fifteen for a cat is equivalent to a human age of seventy-six, so he’s getting on a bit. Happy Birthday Murph!