The Leopard

Last night I finished Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard. It’s a book I’d been meaning to read for years. I never advanced beyond the opening few pages of the copy I bought in Italy ca. 1996, which didn’t then accompany me back to the UK. A similar fate befell a second copy, obtained about a decade later. I hoped for a case of ‘third time lucky’ when I found the volume pictured above at Stephen’s booksop in Monmouth earlier this year. It’s from a 1961 book club edition, and cost me about a fiver.

After breezing through the opening chapter I felt like the time might at last be right to enjoy the novel. Then, however, I became becalmed in Chapter II, and my attention wandered on to other things. Would the third time be so lucky after all? The Leopard has been described as ‘a perfect novel’. Thankfully it isn’t, but it does offer many pleasures: rich & fragrant prose; unexpected and delightful turns of phrase; acute psychological insight – and so on. Somehow though, no matter how much I savoured the text, after putting the book down I would feel scant appetite to pick it back up again.

Having summoned the requisite willpower over the past few days I was amply rewarded on reaching the end. It is an excellent book, and one better appreciated, I suspect, in middle age than in youth – so perhaps it’s just as well my path toward it was such a lengthy & indirect one.

In the Fog

It’s the “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” again so here we have a couple of autumnal photographs taken in the fog, both captured in Karlskrona, Sweden, on the same October day in 2008. Above is a view of some houses at the tip of a small island barely visible throgh the murk. It’s a digital shot, taken using a Nikon D80, with a 24mm lens attached. The vantage point was Gamla Långöbron (‘The Old Long Island Bridge’) and the subject was the islet of Lilla Pantarholmen.

The fog was a little less dense when I took the shot below in Hoglands Park. This one was taken with my Yashica Mat loaded with Kodak Portra 400 VC film.

Global

Pictured above are four of the Global-brand stainless steel kitchen knives I bought about twenty years ago. I originally had eight, of which six remain – one got mislaid and another one broke. I also have a knife-block and a sharpening steel to match. I don’t recall know much they cost exactly, but they were certainly expensive. They have lasted a good long while, at least. My best intentions of looking after them and maintaining them properly went all to hell in fairly short order. Since then they’ve been treated with regrettably little respect, hence the signs of pitting and corrosion. They’re also quite blunt, and have been quite blunt for quite some time. I really ought to see if I can get them sharpened, as there should be some life left in them yet.

Solid Air

Out of the latest batch of old records I brought back from Chepstow (a few weeks ago), I was especially pleased to have found a copy of John Martyn’s 1973 album Solid Air, a well-regarded record that has made its way on to a few all-time best-of lists. I’d quite often heard the songs ‘May You Never’ & ‘Over the Hill’ and was also acquainted with the title-track, whereas the other six numbers were unfamiliar territory. The copy I picked up, moreover, was from an early pressing with the ‘pink rim’ Island Records label. It would have been worth a lot more than I paid for it, had it not been in such poor condition.

While the sleeve was still in decent shape, the disc, unprotected by an inner sleeve, had picked up a dense tracery of scratches. On giving it a spin there was hardly a moment without a pop or a crackle, yet somehow none of the damage was deep enough to make the stylus skip. I greatly enjoyed the music but knew that all the surface noise would be an impediment to my future listening pleasure. I resolved to buy another copy, opting for the 2013 repress – which had the benefit of reproducing the original label design. When the new record arrived I put the unblemished disc into the old sleeve and discarded the scratched one, an arrangement which suits me even if it confuses or annoys whoever ultimately inherits my records.

Xinomavro

This evening’s bottle of wine is some Greek ‘Athlon Xinomavro Syrah’ (2022). While Syrah is a long-standing favourite, I can’t recall having tried a Xinomavro-based wine before. I’ve learned it’s a variety native to northern Greece. The name apparently means ‘acid black’, which doesn’t seem especially promising, but, according to the wikipedia article, “good examples age well due to the wine’s high acidity and tannin content”.

I picked the bottle up at the local Aldi. The label on the back promises notes of strawberry, cherry, plum and cranberry; along with hints of lavender, thyme and black pepper. For me, sour fruit flavours were immediately in evidence, with their sharp edges rounded somewhat by a warmly tannic savouriness. One reviewer reckoned it a wine that could further improve after another year or two in the cellar – which struck me as plausible, but that’s never going to happen in this house.

Instruction Manual

I’ve mentioned in passing my unwise purchase of a photographic enlarger. Specifically it is an LPL C6700, capable of enlarging from colour negatives as well as black and white ones; and able to handle 35mm and 120 film (up to 6x7) alike. It was far from cheap, setting me back something in the region of £700-800 in 2008 money. It was supplied without an enlarging lens – I afterwards bought not one but two of those as well. And I’ve used the thing three times.

Not only has it stood idle, but it’s an ungainly, bulky white elephant for which I don’t even have a suitable storage space. So it perches awkwardly on top of a chest of drawers, draped in its dust-cover (the one part of it that has served its purpose) as an on-going reminder of my occasional tendency to over-reach and get a bit carried away acquiring things I don’t end up using. The cover of the enlarger’s instruction manual, which I have dutifully retained, is shown above.

Shelf Portrait No. 9

Completing my survey of the downstairs bookcase, here’s the second shelf from the bottom. It’s a work-in-progress with only eight volumes currently on display. I was aiming for a shelf of decorative un-jacketed reference-books, and this is how it’s worked out so far. All but one of these are relatively recent acquisitions, though I’ve owned other copies of The Art Book and The Oxford Companion to English Literature in the past. My prior copy of the former got left behind in a house-move; whereas I’d previously had a fourth edition volume of the latter, now replaced by one from the fifth edition in a garish red fake-leather binding.

To join the The Oxford Companion to English Literature I bought the Companions for Wine and for Cheese. thereby covering three major sources of nourishment. To go with the Phaidon Art Book (a cheap charity-shop find), I ordered a matching copy of The Photography Book via ebay. The other three volumes are Leonard Feather’s & Ira Gitler’s The Biographical Encyclopedia of Jazz, The Grammar of Spice by Caz Hildebrand, and The Encyclopaedia of Type Faces by W. Pincus Jaspert et al. in a late ’50s edition.

Escapism

Having written about my Nikon FM3a (see the previous post), here’s a frame taken with it. It’s a snap of a busking escapologist mid-performance at the 2010 ‘Big Cheese’ festival in the grounds of Caerphilly Castle. The FM3a in this case was loaded with Fomapan 100 black & white film, which I later home-developed in Rodinal R09. It was taken the same day as this shot.

The one aspect of the FM3a I’m less fond of is the abrupt clunk of its shutter mechanism. Some cameras have smoothly quiet shutters but with this one you distinctly feel it every time you take a picture. The effect is less pronounced, it seems to me, when a bulkier or heavier lens is mounted on the camera, which seems to absorb the shock of that mechanism a little better.

FM3a

Some hobbyist photographers can’t help taking pictures of their own cameras. I fell victim to this impulse more than once myself, with the picture above of my Nikon FM3a one instance of it. I bought this camera via ebay in the May or June of 2008. I think it cost me somewhere in the region of £350. According to the seller it had formerly been the property of the British Army. Whoever had owned it had ‘modified’ it by taking out the standard-issue focussing screen and wedging in a different one that wasn’t made for the camera and didn’t fit properly. It took me a little while to work out why the viewfinder image looked so odd, and to order and install a replacement ‘K3’ screen.

When I learned that the FM3a was often sold in a kit with the Nikkor 45 mm f/2.8P lens, I resolved to get one. Most of those kits, however, had included the chrome-finished variant of the body & lens, and I wanted the all-black version. In the end I managed to acquire such a unit by ordering from a vendor in Japan – though that set me back nearly as much as the camera itself had done. In any case, a different lens, an 85mm f/2 AI-s, is shown in the picture. I now have five AI-s lenses. The strap is a green fake leather one that had hitherto belonged to some binoculars I’d bought in a junk-shop.

Thanks to its retro styling, no few people have been surprised to learn this is a 21st century device. The FM3a was made between 2001 and ‘06, and has been reckoned “the last great mechanical film SLR”. I haven’t used that many other cameras so can’t properly judge such a claim, but it is an excellent thing that has been a joy to use. At present, though, it’s out of action. The last time I used it there was evidence of a light-leak, so its seals need re-doing. And I daresay it’s overdue a CLA.

Endlessness

I loved Nala Sinephro’s debut album Space 1.8 (and wrote a little about it on my previous blog), so I was very much looking forward to hearing its follow-up: Endlessness. My CD copy, pre-ordered from Bandcamp, arrived in the post the day before last. I’ve properly listened to it only once so far, hence, while it delighted me, I can’t provide much more than some initial impressions of it.

One immediately feels in a similar sound-world as conjured up by Space 1.8, albeit with some additional elements. Foremost of those is the presence of a string section, which, when called upon, provides extra light & shade, foreground highlights & background textures. The ten tracks (titled ‘Continuum 1’ to ‘Continuum 10’) all apparently revolve around the same repeated arpeggio, presented in various guises as the album progresses, providing a connecting thread to the record as a whole.

Some of the supporting musicians (such as Nubya Garcia & James Mollison) also lent contributions to the first album; while others (e.g. Sheila Maurice-Grey & Morgan Simpson) are new faces. All have combined their efforts to make music that speaks softly but seriously, and in a manner that compels attention. Their playing variously complements and counteracts the orderly progression of the synthesizer parts. There are a some moments when what I perceive as voice-like sounds (which could be actual voices or synthesized approximations) float just under the surface of the mix to highly intriguing effect.

It’s soft-edged, but not merely soothing; coherent without being unduly repetitive; and, in a word, fascinating. I’ll be getting to know it much better!

Mochi

Something of a novelty in the supermarkets hereabouts: mochi ice-cream. According to Wikipedia “Mochi ice cream gained huge popularity in the UK following a viral TikTok trend, which began in January 2021”. That fact that I’ve only begun to notice the things this year goes to demonstrate just how far removed from the virality loop I am. All I can do is add my belated approbation to the phenomenon: I do like them. The contrast in texture and temperature between the ‘shell’ and the ice-cream is pleasing; and the small unit size is ideal for me. The one pictured above contains coconut ice-cream, and came from the local Aldi.

Eisbergfreistadt

As well as some regular decks of playing cards, I also have a more unusual pack, one in which the four suits are birds, chimneys, icebergs and weeds. The ‘King’ cards from the former two suits are pictured above, those of the latter pair below. These were devised as part of an elaborate art project called Eisbergfreistadt realised in 2006-07 by the American artists Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick. The conceit behind it was that of an iceberg drifting into the Baltic in 1923, running aground off the German port town of Lübeck, whereupon some of the the townspeople moved on to the ice, establishing a short-lived ‘free city’ there with its own laws and currency.

The ‘joker’ cards in the deck bear a rhyme alluding to this scenario, one of them in English, the other in German. Nicholas Kahn had contacted me in connection with my old weblog, and we had sporadically corresponded for a time after that. He very kindly sent me two packs of these cards (“one to use + one to give away” as he wrote in an accompanying note). There are some more images from the Eisbergfreistadt project here & here, and more images of the playing cards here.

Lincoln in the Bardo

When George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo was published in 2017 I skimmed through or glanced at a few very favourable reviews for it but was not tempted at that time to obtain a copy. I’m not sure it even registered with me when the novel won that year’s Man Booker Prize. Some years later, a friend enthused in a letter about Saunders' short story collection Tenth of December. While I didn’t act on that recommendation either, it did come back to mind when, late last year, I pulled a second-hand copy of Lincoln in the Bardo from a shelf at Broadleaf Books. As I was paying for it, the shop’s co-proprietor warmly praised the book, having lately read it himself with his book club. Even then, I didn’t read it right away.

The book, from the 7th printing of the UK hardback edition, was still somewhere in the middle of my ‘to be read’ pile at the time when I would have perused the listicle in which “The New York Times named it the 18th-best book of the 21st century”, which, again, failed to induce me to open it. Then, last month, while reading Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard and feeling not quite in the right mood for its leisurely pace, I wandered over to the to pile in which Lincoln in the Bardo had been languishing and picked it up. On the back of its jacket were snippets from reviews I’d skimmed though or glanced at. Printed on the front so as to resemble a sticker (that I kept wanting to peel off), was mention of its Man Booker Prize win.

I finished it the day before yesterday. My estimation isn’t so very far from that of The New York Times: it’s somewhere up there among the most inventive, interesting and affecting novels I’ve read in recent decades. Unlike them, it wouldn’t occur to me to try to give it a numerical ranking. I thought it a story with many virtues and few flaws. It did strike me as a little baggy in places, and could perhaps have been edited down and tightened up just a smidgeon. I don’t think any summarisation of mine could do the book justice. I’d just suggest that if you happen to see a copy on a shelf somewhere (and you’ve not already read it), then pick it up, have a look, and see what you think.

Subjektiv

The photos here were taken with something called the ‘Monochrom Subjektiv’. This was a kind of kit comprising a piece in the shape of a 35mm camera lens into which one would fit interchangeable elements for use in achieving specific photographic effects. Those elements included a pinhole, a ‘zone plate’, and a plastic lens. The last of these was used for these images, lending them a dreamily soft-focus quality. Monochrom, I believe, was the brand-name, and Subjektiv the name of the product: a play on words as objektiv is the German term for a camera lens.

The Subjektiv was in this case attached to a Nikon F80 camera loaded with Fuji Astia 100F film. The pictures were taken in the autumn of 2008 in the Swedish town of Karlskrona.

Wristwatch

Pictured above is my current wristwatch, a Seiko 5 Sports model, specifically an SRPD51K2. It cost me £186 two years ago. It’s my second automatic/self-winding clockwork watch. My previous one had been a Vostok Amphibia which was still more or less keeping time (as well as it ever had) after five years' use, but in light of events in Ukraine I didn’t want to go on wearing a Russian-made watch. One thing I appreciated about the Amphibia was its rotating bezel, a feature I found very useful, so when it came time to buy something new that’s something I looked for in its replacement.

I think my first ever childhood watch was some kind of basic Timex model. I was much more impressed with my second one: an LED digital watch of the kind where you had to press a button to see the time in glowing red digits. As a nine or ten year old in the late ’70s, this seemed to me the height of cool. I was never as enthused about LCD watches, and didn’t much care for the look of the Casio with the plastic strap that I wore while in secondary school, but there’s no disputing it was a reliable and hard-wearing unit. When I was eighteen I was given a gold-plated analogue watch with a metal bracelet (possibly a Seiko – I forget) which I wore for all of a couple of years before it was stolen.

In my twenties and thirties I had a succession of inexpensive watches, most of which I barely remember. I know I had a number of Swatch models, and particularly liked one from their ‘Irony’ line with a green face and a green leather strap to match. I’d formed a preference for leather straps, even though they only ever tended to last me for a year or so before they would wear out. After my father-in-law died in 2008 I inherited his ca. 1950s Swiss-made watch and wore that for a few years. When I bought the new Seiko it came with a nylon ‘NATO’ strap, which I was favourably impressed with. It lasted me a little longer than a leather one would have done. The one in the picture was its first replacement.

Synchro System

On the cover of Synchro System (1983) by King Sunny Adé and his African Beats we see portraits of what, presumably, is the whole band, all eighteen of them. Adé himself is top-left in the white suit. He played lead guitar and sang. Five of the men pictured provided additional vocals. There were two further supporting guitarists, one rhythm guitarist, one steel guitarist and one bassist. The remaining seven band-members were all percussionists, among them two exponents of the talking drum, apparently “the lead and predominant instrument” of jùjú music, of which this is an example.

This was the second of three albums that Adé et al. recorded for Island Records, their signing reportedly a result of the label’s attempts to fill the gap in its roster left by the untimely death of Bob Marley. It’s too bad that the cover on my copy, obtained recently, is slightly marred by the remnants of two large stickers. The record itself sounds excellent: the recording, mastering and pressing collectively serve the music very well. I’ve only played the LP a couple of times and haven’t yet got to know it especially well, but my first encounters with its infectious, insistent grooves have been very enjoyable ones. I’ll have to put it on again over the weekend. The whole thing (Side A/Side B) is on YouTube, for anyone curious to hear it.

Lincolnshire Poacher

At the cheese counter the lady unwrapped a half-wheel of Lincolnshire Poacher cheese and, with the wire poised over it, asked “this much?” Although at first glance it had seemed like a good amount, by the time she’d finished cutting I realised it was a significantly heftier slab than I’d had in mind. Even so, I said I’d take it, striving not to twitch as much as an eyelid when I learned how much it would cost. At least it did very nearly all get used and I felt like I got something like my money’s worth in the end. A small remnant of it is pictured above.

It’s a mature hard cheese with a firm texture. Devised to combine characteristics of Cheddar and Alpine cheeses like Comté, it is to my palate more obviously reminiscent of the latter. It has variously been described as having “rich herbacious notes” of being “nutty” or “savoury and brothy”. Some can discern a pineapple-like hint in it. I found it worked equally well on a cheeseboard as it did grated and used in cooking. This is one of only a small number of cheeses produced on the east coast of England, in an area much better known for arable farming. Its name derives from the title of a traditional folk song.

Associates

An exception to my usual rule of only posting my own pictures, here’s something that just happened to catch my eye somewhere on-line a few years ago. It’s a scan of a page from some 1982 teen magazine, part of a fashion spread with a photo of the late Billy MacKenzie with one of his Associates, Martha Ladly. I’m not sure which magazine exactly. Sheila Rock is credited as the photographer.

Once in a while I’ll spend some time listening to MacKenzie’s singing and feel sad all over again he died so young. Prior to teaming up with him, Ladly had been a member of Martha and the Muffins – not the Martha who sang, but the Muffins' keyboardist who also happened to go by that name. MacKenzie is widely believed to be the subject of The Smiths' song ‘William, it was Really Nothing’. Ladly had a tenuous connection to another classic Manchester 7": on the label of the A-side of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ is a dedication “For ML” from designer Peter Saville, her boyfriend at the time.

Iraqi Poetry Today

Iraqi Poetry Today is an issue of the periodical Modern Poetry in Translation published in 2003. ‘Today’ in this context was a time when the country had left the frying pan of Saddam Hussein’s regime for the fire of the Iraq War. In his introduction, editor Saadi Simawe laments “the difficulty of finding major sources of Iraqi poetry since 1980, when the series of wars began” and regrets his inability to include many of “the new generation of poets who began writing under sanctions and do not have access to publication”. For these reasons and others, the majority of the poems featured are by exiled authors.

As well as translations from the Arabic, there are a number from the Kurdish and a few from the Hebrew. The Kurdish poems represented are for the most part fairly straightforward expressions of nationalism – understandable given Kurdistan’s status as a nation that isn’t a country. There is a great deal more variety and complexity in the poems from the Arabic. Some of the most appealing works for me were ones incorporating Western influences, bringing them on to something more akin to familiar ground. Fadhil al-Azzawi’s poems, for example, were among my favourites in the book. Elsewhere I hadn’t expected to read a poem referencing T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and less still another in praise of the Welsh author R.S. Thomas.

In a different vein is the poet given the most space in the book: Muzaffar al-Nawab. A single long poem ‘Bridge of Old Wonders’ takes up thirty-one pages, followed by another four pages of explanatory notes. It’s a work transcribed from a live performance recorded on cassette tape. Its first part bristles (so I gather from the notes) with historical references and allusions to the Koran & to classical Arabic poets. The second half gives powerful rherotical voice to a sense of wounded grievance on behalf of the Palestinians (a recurring note in the very small cross-section of modern Arabic poetry I’ve encountered). The effect for a Western reader who might be considered by al-Nawab as – if not the enemy – at least a part of the problem his complaints and invective address, is as disconcerting as it is impressive.

Stairs

By 2014 my enthusiasm for film photography had begun to wane. Among the last rolls of 120 film that I developed myself at home were a few that I took on an outing to Raglan Castle in the spring of that year. The shot above is one of the better ones from those rolls. We see steps leading up from a gloomy cellar room, lit by sunlight coming through an open doorway. I’d taken a couple of exposures of the same composition with different shutter speeds – this is the darker of the two. I used my Mamiya C330S loaded with Ilford HP5+ film, and developed it using Kodak D76.

Aftershave

While the use of aftershave lotions has fallen rather out of favour, I’m still a fan of the invigorating sting of an alcohol-based splash hitting one’s freshly-scraped face. Above is my current bottle of the Sandalwood lotion made by D.R. Harris & Co. Ltd. I find it’s warmly lingering aroma reliably pleasant. In contrast, my other regular aftershave option, Proraso’s ‘Rinfrescante’ lotion, has a fleeting, neutrally cool sort of scent.

In the past I’ve used and enjoyed the likes of Eternity for Men and Terre d’Hermès. Certain classic lotions have proven less to my liking, at least not in their current formulations. Brut and Old Spice, for example, don’t do much for me, while Tabac has more appeal, but I find it too overpowering for all but the most occasional use.

Megadisc

According to discogs.com, the most valuable CD in my collection is the one to the lower right of the picture above – an album called Revelation which brings together four pieces by the contemporary Latvian composer Georgs Pelēcis. I’d be interested to know how this somewhat obscure recording has come to achieve a median value currently calculated as £37.61. It’s a very good record, and presumably an uncommon one, but I have rarer CDs that aren’t valued as highly.

It, like the other three albums shown above, was put out by the Belgian-based Megadisc Classics label. I have another three of their releases on my shelves, and at one time would have had four or five more again. The consistent look of their covers derives from their all featuring details from abstract paintings by the artist Ilse d’Hollander (1968-97). Many of the label’s releases showcased music by composers from the former Soviet Union. Besides Pelēcis, here we have work from Valentin Silvestrov (Ukrainian); Alexandre Rabinovitch (Russian-born) and Rytis Mažulis (Lithuanian).

Top left is Silvestrov’s Orchestral Works (vol. 1) – I also have vol. 2. The highlight on it for me is his Symphony No. 4, a sombre piece with a little more heft to it than one hears in the same composer’s more disembodied later style. Top right is Die Zeit by Rabinovitch, where a briskly idiosyncratic kind of minimalism is the order of the day. The title piece, featuring a quartet of amplified instruments, is my favourite on the disc. Choral music is the focus of Mažulis' Cum Essem Parvulus, with the track Sibylla the one to really catch my ear.

Coming back to Pelēcis, his music is determinedly consonant and upbeat, drawing much of its inspiration from the composer’s study of ‘early music’. Some listeners might consider it kitsch, but it works for me. Buena Riga is a piece I find particularly enjoyable.

Decaf

Some unhappy experiences with decaffeinated coffee – not all of them intentional – had left me averse to trying it again. Those experiences, however, when I stopped to think about them, all dated back to the last century: what if there had been significant improvements in the interim? Decaffeinated espresso in particular is a paradoxical phenomenon: a method specifically designed to deliver a concentrated dose of caffeine perversely deprived of its very raison d’être. Even so, that’s what I decided to try.

I must say I am persuaded of its merits. I’ve been drinking Lavazza Decaffeinato, which I feel provides a better approximation to a ‘proper’ espresso than it has any right to. Of course it’s not a perfect simulacrum: there remains a melancholy note of disappointment in its aftertaste – something is still obviously missing, but it’s an absence that, for me, doesn’t spoil the show. A number of health benefits have, more or less implausibly, been ascribed to decaf. While I don’t lend those claims much credence, I have found that this stuff feels like it’s doing me good.

The plain white cup and saucer in the picture above were made by Wm Bartleet & Sons: I bought a pair of each at a charity shop last year.

Waldorf, Revisited

There hasn’t been any opportunity to post about old stationery for a while – until now, with this newly-arrived set of Waldorf-brand writing paper and envelopes in a shade they called ‘Marina Blue’. The sixty sheets of un-watermarked ‘Duke’ size paper are of decent quality. The forty envelopes are un-lined. The box arrived from the seller still encased in the original cellophane. More cellophane wrapped the contents, which, over time, had compressed them somewhat out of shape, as can just be discerned in the picture above.

Download Codes

Will download code cards ever be prized by the ephemera collectors of tomorrow, I wonder? If so, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cards or slips from the earlier phase of the vinyl revival might be more highly-prized than later ones, as – in my limited experience at least - a little more care and attention seems to have been devoted to them then than now. Nowadays, if there’s a download code at all in a new record, it might be printed generically on a tiny slip of paper.

Above are scans – front and back – of an appealing example with a colourful design on one side, and all the necessary information on the other, to which has been added some mild flattery. “Why, yes, thank you, my taste is pretty good, isn’t it?” A plainer example from another self-titled album is shown below. In both cases I’ve edited out the actual codes.