Apr 16, 2023
I am in possession of no fewer than eleven mechanical typewriters in more or less working order, and another two that don’t currently work at all. One could all too easily argue it’s a few more than I really need. The machine shown above is my last-but-one acquisition, a 1937 Imperial ‘The Good Companion’ portable I bought about a year ago for the bargain price of £25. Despite its age it’s in handsome cosmetic condition and it still works well.
Among the symbols on its keyboard are acute and grave accents; a diaresis, tilde, cedilla and circumflex; and upside-down exclamation and question marks (¡/¿), such as could be used to type French, Portuguese or Spanish text. I wonder, given its date of manufacture, if it may have been intended for use in connection with the then-current Spanish Civil War.
‘The Good Companion’ as a product name was inspired by J.B. Priestley’s bestselling 1929 novel The Good Companions. After buying the typewriter, I bought a copy of the book. It proved to be a mostly upbeat comedy-drama following the vicissitudes of life on the road with an itinerant concert party (i.e. a vaudeville/variety troupe). It’s a story which hasn’t perhaps aged quite as gracefully as the typewriter, but I did enjoy it nevertheless.
Apr 14, 2023
The block of records above represents nearly a quarter of my collection of 12" vinyl. it’s a motley mix with a growing minority of albums I’ve bought new (or that were gifts) amidst a majority of scruffy charity shop and junk-shop aquisitions. Leftmost is In My Tribe by 10,000 Maniacs; rightmost are a few Supraphon LPs featuring some of Dvořák’s chamber music. Among the other classical composers represented are Beethoven, Berg, Berwald, Boccherini, Borodin, Bottesini, Chabrier, Chopin, Couperin (Louis & François) and Dukas.
Composers, musicians and bands who appear more than once include Black Uhuru, The Brothers Johnson, J.J. Cale, Circulatory System, The Colorblind James Experience, Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis and Drums Off Chaos (all x2); Blondie, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, Nick Drake and Dvořák (x3); David Bowie and Nat ‘King’ Cole (x4); Chopin (x5); with Leonard Cohen (x6) second only to Ludwig van Beethoven (x8) in terms of representation in this particular Kallax cube.
I’ve owned the two albums of Beethoven’s violin sonatas (played by David Oistrakh and Lev Oborin) for over twenty years - they were among my earliest vinyl buys. The most recent newcomers here are the Brothers Johnson records, picked up within the last couple of months: I’m still pondering whether or not they’ll be staying on the shelf over the longer term.
Apr 12, 2023
Midweek - either Tuesday or Wednesday - I will often have a glass of wine. Only one glass, but quite a large one. It’s a wasteful activity as the rest of the bottle doesn’t get used (I’m determined not to reprise the excesses of my youth). For a time I bought half-bottles, or, closer to my ideal portion size, 25cl ones: but grew frustrated at the limited choice available in those sizes. One has a few more widely-available options in the quarter-bottle format (18.7cl ) but for me that’s too unsatisfyingly small a serving. Perhaps I ought to try the offerings of half-bottle specialists The Little Fine Wine Company, who I’ve only just learned about.
Or perhaps I should just make an effort to find someone else to share the bottles with. Hypotheticals aside, most of my recent wine-buying has been from the shelves of Aldi and Lidl. Last week, for example, I greatly enjoyed the latter’s 2019 Torre de Ferro Reserva from the Dão region of Portugal; while later this evening I’ll be sampling the former’s Chassaux Et Fils Specially Selected Pézenas, from the Languedoc region of France, also a ‘19 vintage. Apparently (though neither the bottle, nor Aldi’s website says as much), it’s a blend of 40% Syrah, 30% Grenache and 20% Mourvèdre - a combination which bodes well - with the balance presumably made up of the likes of Carignan and/or Cinsaut.
There follow a couple of poems mentioning wine:
Your time of wine and roses
Your time of wine and roses
has gone away
when your beautiful beloved
leaves you.
When he leaves you
the rose is so lonely,
the wine, like a sculpture in the glass.
—Sirkka Turkka (translated by Kirsi Simonsuuri).
I imagine the wine (and the roses) to be red in the above, white wine to my mind seeming less sculptural.
Red Ice
The year 1812 in Russia
while the soldiers retreated
among cadavers
of men and horses
the wine froze hard
so the sapper’s axe
had to share out
for everyone likewise the dying
the stout block of wine
in the shape of a cask
no museum
could ever have preserved.
—Jean Follain (translated by Christpopher Middleton).
Apr 10, 2023
John Heath is my father’s name, so when I saw a box of John Heath brand ‘Telephone Pen’ dip pen nibs on ebay I felt inclined to buy them.
‘JOHN HEATH’S FIRST CLASS EXTRA STRONG PENS.’ says the back of the box ‘Combine great thickness of metal with perfect flexibility and smoothness of action, and are far more durable than any others.’ A bold claim: I have my doubts.
‘All the latest improvements in steel pen machinery’ it continues ‘have been applied to the Manufacture of these pens; every process is conducted with extra care by the best “hands” and the PENS UNDERGO A MOST RIGID EXAMINATION before they are sent out. Purchasers will please observe that NONE ARE GENUINE without a fac-simile of the signature of JOHN HEATH on the label of each box … to imitate which is FORGERY.’
Apr 7, 2023
While its roots are apparently older, black-edged mourning stationery had a long heyday in the ostentatiously mournful Victorian era. The thickness of the black border would frequently be used to signal the severity of the sender’s grief, with the expectation it would become narrower over time until it was no longer used at all. Even while grief-stricken, however, people didn’t always necessarily want to do the same old thing, and some sought novelty: very thin ‘Italian’ borders became more prevalent toward the end of the 19th Century, while another option, introduced in 1890, was stationery marked with a single black triangle.
I have two sets of mourning stationery. Shown above is a box of The Queen’s Parchment paper, some nice-quality pre-folded octavo cream paper with a moderately thick border, along with a smaller number of notecards. Only two of the original envelopes remain. It was made by Thomas de la Rue & Co. Ltd., best known as manufacturers of playing cards, postage stamps and banknotes. One can only guess at its age: I would hazard it could date as far back to the 1900s or ’10s. I’m even less confident about the vintage of the Templecombe Mourning paper shown below, and no idea at all who might have made it. A mid-20th-Century origin wouldn’t surprise me, even though that was a time when such paper had become quite outmoded. It has a narrow ‘Italian’ border and a hammered surface texture.
Apr 5, 2023
“Charco Press” says the blurb on their website, “focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world.” They’ve been at it since 2017, but I only became aware of them a few months ago. On perusing their catalogue, I was intrigued to find I’d barely heard of any of their authors. Not really knowing where to start I took a chance on a couple of their volumes that seemed, in synopsis, like they might interest me: Havana Year Zero by Karla Suárez and The Forgery by Ave Barrera. Both were enjoyable, with the latter in particular very much to my taste.
The Forgery (original title Puertas Demasiado Pequeñas: literally “Doors Too Small”) is Barrera’s first novel. Set in Guadalajara, it follows the fortunes and misfortunes of José Federico Burgos, a struggling artist turned copyist, who is persuaded by a wealthy businessman to engage in the outright forgery of a 16th-century Flemish altarpiece. Barrera skilfully combines naturalistic episodes with hallucinatory ones, and her story takes several surprising turns which yet do not feel like gratuitous twists. The imagery and situations are memorably striking; the characters are well-sketched and the prose is good. All that and something of a fairy-tale ending in a compact 173 pages - I loved it.
In the picture of my copy of The Forgery (above), the geometric background is provided by the cover of a Folio Society edition of Christopher Isherwood’s Mr. Norris Changes Trains. I like the bold designs on the Charco Press covers, which seem somewhat reminiscent to me (in a good way) of ’70s textbooks. I’ve since ordered two more of their titles.
Apr 3, 2023
I came to Kodachrome during its declining days, when there was only one lab in the world that could process it. Each roll of the film came with a small, folded-up, postage-paid envelope bearing a Swiss address. Having exposed the film, one put it in the envelope and mailed it to the Kodak office in Vevey, from where it would be forwarded with a batch of others to Dwayne’s Photo in Parsons, Kansas. The film was quite expensive to buy, as the cost of development and postage was factored into the unit price.
Dwayne’s would process the film, and, if the requisite box had been ticked, they would mount it in cardboard slides. Batches of processed slides from European photographers would be returned to Switzerland; and from there back to their points of origin. The whole tortuous process worked surprisingly well, and would typically take no more than a few weeks. I shot ten rolls of the stuff between the summer of 2008 and the autumn of 2010. Production of the film had ceased in 2009, and Dwayne’s shut down their K-14 development machine in January 2011.
By whatever photochemical sorcery, its beautifully vivid colours somehow seemed truer to memory than reality. Even though my acquaintance with it was brief, I’m glad I had the opportunity to try it for myself.
Apr 1, 2023
How many of a given item does it take to constitute a collection? If, for instance, having purchased a 1970s desk calculator from ebay, one then bought another; and then a third: does that count? My flimsy rationalization is that I have one downstairs, one upstairs, and a spare…
The device pictured is an Olympia CD-520, made in the USA (according to the Calcuseum) from 1974. At present it’s my upstairs calculator. It offers the standard basic arithmetic functions and practically nothing else. The user may choose between calculating to 0, 2, 3 or 4 decimal places: there is no full floating point option. It’s an early and an underpowered enough machine that harder calculations can take a significant fraction of a second to execute. Its orange ‘Panaplex’ display was my main reason for acquring this particular model.
Sometimes it’s reluctant to switch on at all, as if waking only with great difficulty from the deepest of slumbers, thanks to some elderly capacitor within approaching the end of its useful life. That third, spare calculator may yet have its chance to shine. Of course I could just use the calculator app on my phone like someone who has acknowledged the arrival of the 21st century, but where’s the fun in that?
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!
