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ashlymeI spent most of the last week out West with cybermule cybermule . I introduced H to the Penny Woolcock, BSP-scored documentary From The Sea To The Land Beyond. We watched Who, Brett's Holmes, gardening programmes. We grubbed up celandine in her back garden, went out to swim (well, H and her son did, I read and watched from the shade of a yew tree) at a pool on the way to Clevedon. That day, the heat felt like a forcefield. Teenagers smoked dope and bantered in a dinghy. Saturday, we went to see Inkubus Sukkubus play at St Briavel's Castle in the Forest of Dean. The trip took us through Gloucester - there were two young lads on a horse-drawn cart at the edge of a main road. Gloucester is a place I want to spend a lot more time in. The little corner H took me through was a patchwork of time and architecture: the stubs of old priories, thirties terraces rubbing up against bits of industrial estate; a security alarm company in a half-timbered building, a park bench under a railway bridge. You'd go from graffiti of a rugby player to a spraypainted portrait of Dali with the turn of a street corner. We drank rhubarb cider and coffee-flavoured milk stout at a lovely pub called The Pelican. Inkubus were good - they're the only Goth band I know of who've used a bodhran over a drum machine (take that Dr Avalanche!) - but the storytellers who preceded them were a bit earnest for my taste. The last day, we saw a thin fox near the coach stop, lots of ash in its coat; as my coach got into the city, I looked up from my book and saw the smoke from a factory hang absolutely still, just as if we were driving through a picture.
I've finished reading Alexandra Harris' wonderful Weatherland, a study of how England's climate has influenced its artists and writers, stretching from Beowulf to Turner's painted suns to a performance of Noyes Fludd held in a town itself prone to flooding. (The subject line is the last few words of the epilogue.) I've become fascinated by the "Claude glass", the black-tinted pocket mirror eighteenth century painters and tourists used to look at the landscape: it seems fit for a Jamesian haunting. You could also buy tinted lenses to overlay other times and weathers on the land: blue for moonlight, grey for fog, yellow for autumn.
My elderly Nokia died last week. H was lovely enough to give me a second-hand smartphone of hers. <3 I'm just getting used to a touchscreen keyboard. She also gave me a brazen crow's skull pendant, which I'm wearing now. I'll let you know if this changes anything with the local corbies....
(ETA: Not One Of Us have accepted my poem "Abhaus"! It might be out in the October issue. More news as and when.)
cybermule cybermule . I introduced H to the Penny Woolcock, BSP-scored documentary From The Sea To The Land Beyond. We watched Who, Brett's Holmes, gardening programmes. We grubbed up celandine in her back garden, went out to swim (well, H and her son did, I read and watched from the shade of a yew tree) at a pool on the way to Clevedon. That day, the heat felt like a forcefield. Teenagers smoked dope and bantered in a dinghy. Saturday, we went to see Inkubus Sukkubus play at St Briavel's Castle in the Forest of Dean. The trip took us through Gloucester - there were two young lads on a horse-drawn cart at the edge of a main road. Gloucester is a place I want to spend a lot more time in. The little corner H took me through was a patchwork of time and architecture: the stubs of old priories, thirties terraces rubbing up against bits of industrial estate; a security alarm company in a half-timbered building, a park bench under a railway bridge. You'd go from graffiti of a rugby player to a spraypainted portrait of Dali with the turn of a street corner. We drank rhubarb cider and coffee-flavoured milk stout at a lovely pub called The Pelican. Inkubus were good - they're the only Goth band I know of who've used a bodhran over a drum machine (take that Dr Avalanche!) - but the storytellers who preceded them were a bit earnest for my taste. The last day, we saw a thin fox near the coach stop, lots of ash in its coat; as my coach got into the city, I looked up from my book and saw the smoke from a factory hang absolutely still, just as if we were driving through a picture.I've finished reading Alexandra Harris' wonderful Weatherland, a study of how England's climate has influenced its artists and writers, stretching from Beowulf to Turner's painted suns to a performance of Noyes Fludd held in a town itself prone to flooding. (The subject line is the last few words of the epilogue.) I've become fascinated by the "Claude glass", the black-tinted pocket mirror eighteenth century painters and tourists used to look at the landscape: it seems fit for a Jamesian haunting. You could also buy tinted lenses to overlay other times and weathers on the land: blue for moonlight, grey for fog, yellow for autumn.
My elderly Nokia died last week. H was lovely enough to give me a second-hand smartphone of hers. <3 I'm just getting used to a touchscreen keyboard. She also gave me a brazen crow's skull pendant, which I'm wearing now. I'll let you know if this changes anything with the local corbies....
(ETA: Not One Of Us have accepted my poem "Abhaus"! It might be out in the October issue. More news as and when.)
no subject
Date: 2017-06-27 10:56 pm (UTC)Do something with that.
I've become fascinated by the "Claude glass", the black-tinted pocket mirror eighteenth century painters and tourists used to look at the landscape: it seems fit for a Jamesian haunting.
Oh, seriously. I don't know why anyone would expect to see merely a landscape—or a landscape of the present day—in that. It feels like inviting A Field in England.
(ETA: Not One Of Us have accepted my poem "Abhaus"! It might be out in the October issue. More news as and when.)
Congratulations! That should be the issue I have "Dive" in. I hope we share a ToC.
Rhubarb cider sounds like a magnificent thing.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-28 04:52 pm (UTC)I'm glad you had a nice time in the West Country.
My elderly Nokia died last week. H was lovely enough to give me a second-hand smartphone of hers.
I was tired enough when I read this that I was worried some much loved pet had died and wondered what the smartphone connection was. /o\ Yay, new(ish) tech?
no subject
Date: 2017-06-30 04:46 pm (UTC)I will! It's salted away in the thought-bank.
*It feels like inviting A Field in England.*
And that's got a black mirror in it too, if I remember rightly. Though that's more like Dee's shewstone. Either way I'm not sure what would come to the glass.
*I hope we share a ToC.*
Me too! Fingers crossed! And rhubarb cider can be deceptively mellow. I'll look for it in a decent off-licence.
no subject
Date: 2017-06-30 04:48 pm (UTC)The smartphone is also a few years old, but I'm more comfortable with old tech. :)
(Oh, who's in yer icon?)
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Date: 2017-06-30 08:23 pm (UTC)That's Suzanne Neve, one of my favourite old telly people - she was big in the 60s (played Isabel Archer opposite Richard Chamberlain in the BBC's Portrait of a Lady among many other things) but she and her husband, Richard Martin, retired to run a drama school in about 1980, so no one's ever heard of her any more. Still, as far as I know, she's probably still alive, which is always something. :-)