The previous post about Tracey Emin marrying
a rock asked, “I wonder how the rock feels about this. Will no one consider
the rocks?”
Rocks have feelings too. Maybe not all of them, but some do.
Basalt not so much, probably, or granite, but at
Amazon a large, Italian, maritime rock named Jamie considers the book How to Avoid Huge Ships (Cornell
Maritime Pr/Tidewater Pub., 1993) by John W. Trimmer and gives it 3 out of 5
stars:
Good Advice For Most
Readers, But Doesn’t Cover All The Bases
There is one major oversight in this generally well-written
book, and that is that it addresses animate readers exclusively. As a large
rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the coast of Giglio Island, I have recently been
confronted with instances in which avoiding huge ships was of fundamental
interest to my personal well-being. However, the methods presented in Capt.
Trimmer’s book were none too useful in my efforts to avoid huge ships, as I was
recently struck by a very large ship indeed, a cruise vessel called the ‘Costa
Concordia’. I think the ship came off slightly worse in the exchange, but the
experience was disruptive to my afternoon and rather jarring. In a situation
such as this, Capt. Trimmer’s advice would have been immensely beneficial to
humans, fish, seabirds, and other animals, but I am none of those things. I’m a
big rock. I can’t zig-zag or duck and cover. Rocks don’t do that. I’ve tried. I
tried some time ago to scoot over to the left a bit to get some better
sunlight, and it took me three thousand years! That’s not fast enough to avoid
even the slowest huge ships. It is for precisely this reason that I would
advise Capt. Trimmer to augment this edition with a section intended for
readers like me—perhaps “How To Avoid Huge Ships If You Are A Rock, Iceberg, Or
Coral Reef”. There is an audience out there for this, Capt. Trimmer, and I
assure you it would be well worth your time and effort.
The Art Newspaper reports that “last summer, under an olive
tree in her garden in France and wearing her father’s white funeral shroud”, Tracey Emin,
professor of drawing at the Royal Academy 2011-13 (above: Trying to Find You 1, 2007), married
a rock. Not a rock star, a rock. Quote unquote:
You formed a union
with a stone outside your studio in the south of France last summer. What does
this mean to you?
It just means that at the moment I am not alone; somewhere
on a hill facing the sea, there is a very beautiful ancient stone, and it’s not
going anywhere. It will be there, waiting for me.
I wonder how the rock feels about this. Slightly used? Will no one consider
the rocks?
So here are Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention with “Help,
I’m a Rock” from their 1966 – 50 years ago on 27 June – debut album Freak Out!, the first double album in rock but not the last, oh no:
For the last two weeks I have mostly been reading three novels
by JRR Tolkein. You might have heard of them. Kind of a trilogy. As in the recent
post about a week spent reading three books by Stephen Fry, this was for
work, not for pleasure. I also had to watch the DVDs of Peter Jackson’s movie
version of the trilogy. The extended
editions.
I expected the Jackson movies to be tedious, but I had
completely forgotten how awful the Tolkein novels are. I loved them when I was
a teenager , which just goes to show what terrible judgement teenagers have.
Not
quite an interview with, more an observation of, legendary journalist Clare
Hollingworth. She did many great things but is best known for reporting live on
Germany’s invasion of Poland. She is still with us, aged 104. I had a drink
with her once, in the FCC, aka the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. I
say “with”. We were seated side by side, were not introduced so did not speak,
but I knew exactly who she was. It was thrilling just to be in her presence.
Quote unquote:
By then, Clare was back in her Polish hotel in Katowice and
saw the first German tanks moving past her window. When she called the British
embassy in Warsaw, a diplomat refused to believe her story – so she held the
telephone out of her bedroom window so he could hear the sound of German tank
tracks.
Brent Underwood shows how to become a #1 Best-Selling Author
on Amazon in five
minutes. His one secret trick you won’t believe? He took a photo of his
foot and published it. Quote unquote:
I decided my foot was worthy of the “Transpersonal” category
under psychology books and “Freemasonry & Secret Societies” category under
social sciences books. I’ve always wanted to have an affiliation with the
Freemasons.
The British composer Peter Maxwell Davies died last week, at
81. A good innings, though 81 does seem young these days. I saw him in the Auckland
Town Hall some time in the very late 70s or early 80s conducting the Fires of
London in Eight Songs for a Mad King, which
featured a man screaming, and Le Jongleur de Notre
Dame, which had a juggler. I have spent many evenings in the Auckland
Town Hall, but that was the most memorable. Here
is a decent obituary from the Guardian.
Quote unquote:
In these later years there was no let-up in Maxwell Davies’s
productivity. He was one of the most driven and hard-working composers of all
time, with an output that easily exceeds the work-lists of Stravinsky and
Schoenberg combined. His second opera, The
Doctor of Myddfai (1995) was written in six weeks, during which Maxwell
Davies worked 16 hours a day, pausing only to sleep or cook a quick bowl of
pasta (the love of Italian food he had acquired in his Rome days was his one
concession to human frailty). It was premiered by Welsh National Opera the
following year.
This amazing productivity is actually an obstacle to the
survival of his music. It is hard to know where to start, and plunging in at
random may lead to one of the many grey patches in his music, particularly in
the later works such as the Strathclyde concertos.
I’ve been playing that opera over the last few days – it’s
great fun. And I don’t agree that the concertos are grey, not compared to the
sludge of some of the symphonies. But his music is always interesting – as was
the composer. Here
from 2005 is the best story ever about him, when he was arrested for being in
possession of a dead swan. Quote unquote:
He told the BBC: “I didn’t realise the police had also taken
some wings from previous swans which were hanging in the shed. I was going to
give them to the school because they use them as Gabriel’s wings in the
nativity play.
“On Monday morning a police car came whizzing up the lane
with a very charming young man and a very beautiful young lady. They didn’t
accuse me of killing the swan, they accused me of being in possession illegally
of a corpse of a protected species.
“I had to give a statement. I offered them coffee and asked
them if they would like to try some swan terrine but I think they were rather
horrified. That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”
So here is Kelvin Thomas
as King George III in Eight Songs of a Mad King, Salford, 2012. Talk about uneasy listening:
They can’t all be like this, surely. Here is Nigel Farndale
in the Spectator in a piece celebrating
the magazineCountry Life:
The Queen Mother was once drawing up a list of guests when
someone suggested Country Life’s
architectural historian, John Cornforth. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘Corners is far too
grand for us.’ I don’t know about that, but Cornforth, who died in 2004, was
certainly a convivial and flamboyant character who, it was rumoured, had a
penchant for experimentation regarding the attire he wore in private.
Chatelaines were said to lock their wardrobes when he came to stay, not least
because he was ample–figured, and silk gowns tear easily.
I know a few architectural historians and writers, because
for a few unhappy years I was editor of Architecture
New Zealand, journal of the NZ Institute of Architects. Unhappy because
while I was very interested in architecture and counted many architects as
friends – two of them asked me to apply for the job – that was a problem for
the publisher, who basically hated architects. I was regarded with deep suspicion
because I had been to dinner at Patrick Clifford’s, Malcolm Walker came to my
wedding, I’d shared an office with Nigel Cook, I knew Marshall Cook, Jane Aimer
and other big names in the NZIA, Peter Shaw was a former colleague and so on. And
now there is Paul Litterick.
But I don’t know that if any of these people came to stay I would
have to lock up my wife’s wardrobe.
So here are Genesis with Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett in
the 1970s performing “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)”:
I have always admired my friend Murray Grimsdale’s decoration
of the Leys Institute and Grey
Lynn library. The 1722 Klementinum library in Prague lacks the South
Pacific element Murray brings to much of his work, but even so it has a certain
something:
And:
And:
Our libraries here in Cambridge and Te Awamutu are pretty good. But on balance I have to say that Prague is the winner on the day.
