Nameless.

Sometimes I forget why I chose to come to this part of the world and start getting ungrateful about the scenery, wide skies, deserted beaches, hills, and the horizon to horizon wilderness on my doorstep. Sometimes I long for a greater access to the arts, music, cinema, a theatre I don't have to drive 25 miles to get to that has a better quality of production when I get there, and so on. Then I look in the paper and see that it is all here within 4 miles - if I care to use it. For years now I've been refusing to use what's available because I fell out of patience with the community down the road that has brought much of this creative life to the area. I got sniffy about the community and therefore didn't want to support it.I think that's called cutting off ones nose to spite ones face. Recently a neighbouring town 8 miles away has begun to add to the rich mix of possibilities with a steady programme of concerts and an annual Book & Arts festival which this year drew Carol Ann Duffy, amongst others. I suspect that although that town has had regional funding there has been plenty of input from their resident film star, Tilda Swinton who seems to be very supportive of her chosen home.

I thought about all these life-enhancing opportunities I've been ignoring today especially when I went to cast an eye over the Art Centre begun by one enthusiastic and dedicated individual who for many years held a vision. Unlike most of us who have a good idea and wish it would happen, he set out to make it happen and raised over half a million from grants, lottery funding and donations to get the beautiful building which now houses his vision. He has - and this is probably even more significant because others have managed to raise huge sums of money for projects in the area but they aren't always so good at actually running them ones they have them - he continues to amaze by bring together notable exhibitions.

I read in the blog (that he hasn't updated for a long time so come on Randy) that at some moment in New York he realised he wanted to create a place for beauty to flourish. It's the word 'beauty' that is remarkable here. Considering the most acclaimed works of recent art he does seem to be in a minority. My sister-in-law has a real sister who is an artist and sculptor. I wouldn't say her work was merely pretty or without meaningful impact but she was almost denied entrance into an exhibition in Brussels which, rather like the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, is open to almost everyone who calls themselves an artist. The reason given was very vague, but what it amounted to was that her work is too representational - not shocking, or ugly, or impossible to see the point of without a verbal explanation as a side dish.

The pendulum has to swing I suppose and when art broke free from the patronage of the churches and the rich that had confined it to religious subjects and portraits, still life and hunting scenes to hang on noble walls, it started to go a little wild. We haven't reached the end of the swing yet.

The recent exhibition in the Arts Centre is of a few of the hundreds of works by artists that lie in the vaults of the great galleries and museums of the world, unseen by anyone most - probably all - of the time. Randy has persuaded the British Museum, the Courtauld gallery and the National Galleries of Scotland to send over samples of 15th & 16th century Italian works by unknown artists. That's quite a feat and the logistics involved make my heart quail - all that insurance and shipping costs and keeping them at the right temperature and so on and so on.. I am terrifically impressed.

I was impressed by the works too. Rather small, tinged by age and oxidisation in less careful, or technically advanced environments over the centuries they have to be peered at to be marveled at for their tiny intricate detail and liveliness of line.

I learned a new word in the art context too - anamorphic. The strangely shaped painting that doesn't show up too well in a photo of a photo is just as difficult to view on the wall. It has to be viewed from one side or the other when the horse and rider (terrifying enough to be one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) become visible. So even the old masters where playing with possibilities!

I could only photograph the photos in the catalogue and then only the ones that were large or clear enough. Some of my favourites were very small, almost sketches but still very details.

The young men are rather beautiful though!

Siege Perilous

I read a report about the dangers of the in-car screen-spray facility (their words not mine). A high number of sufferers from Legionnaires Disease were drivers who spent long hours in their cars and tended to spray their windscreens with naked water. The dreaded bacteria breeds in the nice warm environment causing all the horrible, hard-to-get-rid of symptoms of LD.

My son, once free as a bird to go ski-ing and windsurfing, now a twice-times dad with heavy responsibilities, spends the greater part of his days behind the wheel of a van driving between watersports centres in Cornwall, keeping the dishes spinning at each of them. I felt he should have this information, so sent him the newspaper report. His reply was: ‘Thanks mum. That it Explains It All. I’ve been feeling a bit c**p lately but a dose of screen cleaner in the mornings will soon fix that.’

I suppose he could gargle it.

A brief history of chapbooks

I love chapbooks. If I had enough money I would start collecting, looking for the really old ones. By their nature they don't survive well so it wouldn't be too easy. I bought some for the shop in 2009, 11 out of a set of 16 children's rhymes and stories, and gave them to a friend to try round the book fairs but by strange serendipity they haven't sold yet and I'm hoping to get them back this weekend.

The lazy way to explain the history of the chapbook is to quote Wikkipedia:

Chapbook is a generic term to cover a particular genre of pocket-sized booklet, popular from the sixteenth through to the later part of the nineteenth century. No exact definition can be applied.

The term chap-book was formalized by bibliophiles of the 19th century, as a variety of ephemera (disposable printed material), popular or folk literature. It includes many kinds of printed material such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales, children's literature and almanacs. Where there were illustrations, they would be popular prints. The term is derived from chapmen, a variety of peddler, who circulated such literature as part of their stock.

Chapbooks are mostly small paper-covered booklets, usually printed on a single sheet folded into books of 8, 12, 16 and 24 pages, often illustrated with crude woodcuts, which sometimes bear no relation to the text. They were produced cheaply. One collector, Harry Weiss, wrote: "the printing in many cases was execrable, the paper even worse, and the woodcut illustrations, some of which did duty for various tales regardless of their fitness, were sometimes worse than the paper and presswork combined". However, the category has no real limits: some chapbooks were long, some well produced, and some even historically accurate.

Chapbooks were an important medium for the dissemination of popular culture to the common people, especially in rural areas. They were a medium of entertainment, information and (generally unreliable) history. They are now valued as a record of popular culture, preserving cultural artifacts that may not survive in any other form.

Chapbooks were priced for sales to workers, although their market was not limited to the working classes. Broadside ballads were sold for a halfpenny, or a few pence. Prices of chapbooks were from 2d. to 6d., when agricultural labourers wages were 12d. per day. It needs to be remembered that in early modern England literacy was not uncommon, and in Scotland probably more so.

Modern times:

Chapbook is also a term currently used to denote publications of up to about 40 pages, usually poetry bound with some form of saddle stitch, though many are perfect bound, folded, or wrapped.

The genre has been revitalized in the past 40 years by the widespread availability of first mimeograph technology, then low-cost copy centers and digital printing, and by the cultural revolutions spurred by both zines and poetry slams, the latter generating hundreds upon hundreds of self-published chapbooks that are used to fund tours.

With the recent popularity of blogs, online literary journals, and other online publishers, short collections of poetry published online are frequently referred to as "online chapbooks."

The publisher that is publishing Sophie's poems will have them bound by Lulu (which is available to all for vanity publishing) but their publishing house name will be on the finished product. The copyright will still be Soph's.

Proud day.

Poet daughter Sophie has been asked to submit a small collection of poems to be bound into a chapbook by an American publisher - obviously a discerning one and I give full marks to them for their excellent taste!

I'm bursting with pride and "I told you so's" here.

Better not duffer be.

I'm sitting here hoping that my grandson is somewhere in the midst of this scenery in a tent just waking up to cook his breakfast. He has trouble sleeping when not at home and went off for the three day expedition canoeing down the Great Glen looking a bit white and worried but fingers crossed he will have been tired enough to zone out. His mum and I are nervously quoting and requoting that telegram from the father in 'Swallows and Amazons': "Better drowned if duffers: if not duffers won't drown.' He isn't a duffer so...

Between the acts.

My reading is always a bit behind the times (unless it’s the new Phil Rickman). This week my Red Cross trawl got me Damon Galgut ‘Small Circle of Beings’ a collection of short stories and one novelette published in 2005, and Kenneth Steven ‘A Highland Trilogy.’ Both took me out of my comfort zone (jolly, cosy, English crime like Agatha C, Agatha Raisin and Midsummer Murders) and both made me rather grumpy , for different reasons, but maybe also for the same reasons because by some bizarre coincidence the first story in Galgut’s collection and the first of the Highland Trilogy were stories of boys existing through the intensity of family life.

Calgut’s tale is narrated by the mother and is ostensibly her story, but the feelings of the boy are clearly audible . He’s quite undeniably an excellent writer. His style is sparse, distilled, like the very best cask strength single malt whisky (watch it - you’re on your way to Pseuds Corner here Carol!) Quite against my natural inclinations I was held from the first page. I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy the story because the very thought of my own childhood in family gives me asthma; I had to go on reading anyway . By the end I was wrung out, but satisfied.

The grump with Kenneth Steven was different. Firstly I was irritated by its publishing history. It was undertaken by the Scottish Cultural Press, presumably because his stories ‘preserve a lost way of life.’ This made me uncomfortable even before I started to read. If the limit of the remit of the Scottish Arts Council is, as it seems to be, to choose books reflecting the old ways of life in Scotland, their field is far too narrow and many good writers are going to be overlooked by them. We already have acclaimed authors preserving the old ways of life: George Mackay Brown, Jessie Kesson, Neil Gunn, George Macdonald, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Hugh Macdiarmid, to rush off a few obvious ones.

I wasn’t surprised therefore to experience the prose as naive and bumpy after the elegance of Damon Galgut, who could also be seen to be recording the old ways of life in South Africa, but his novel is so much more universal than that.

Perhaps I’m unfair. Stevens writes well enough, and for Scottish readers who are more comfortable with a novel solidly set in a Scottish landscape or cityscape then he’s probably a welcome addition to the fold. My views on the content of his novels are driven by my own dislike of maudlin longings for disappearing ways of life. Much of his experience resonates with my own upbringing, though that happened 700 miles away in the south of England. The predominance of religion is the worst thing I remember about my own childhood, The stagnating self-righteousness, and mindlessness of a church with a terror-inflicting message darkened my days too. I was luckier than Dan, the hero of the first novel, for though I had to go to Sunday School and to an evening service I was spared the dreadful Sabbaths spent indoors in a stuffy parlour, unused any other day of the week with only a Bible or Pilgrim’s Progress for company. I was at least allowed to read my own books and play outside in between these Chapel visits.

My childhood wasn’t quite so dreadful but still enough like this to make me gasp for air. The repressive, marrow-minded rectitude of these isolated people, evolved over generations, must have been well nigh unbearable, yet there was no possibility but bear it if you were born into the close-knit little communities. For example, Dan’s paternal grandparents disapproved of his mother because she painted - an unheard of frivolity in a wife. The days of a crofter’s wife were strictly delineated and any deviation to this routine would be seen as almost blasphemous. Is the passing of this circumscription of the spirit to be mourned? The men were rough and unable to show affection. It would be their habit to show pent-up emotion through their fists when they could hold it in no longer. Dan’s father was so unable to communicate that he had no close friends and could make no connection with his small son. Is this emotional stuntedness to be mourned?

The hatred of farmers for the creatures of the wild, their only ambition being to kill them and never mind how painfully, is this to be mourned?

I can’t believe Stevens truly regrets the passing of this way of life. He gives himself away time and time again with words that belie the superficial sentimentality.

The tale, once Dan leaves home, could be the tale of any young man born during the Great War , growing up in the Depression then being called up to fight in the 2nd World War, after which he has to deal - and his kinsfolk have to deal - with his nightmares and rages. Stevens catalogues more than the Scottish way of life; he details life at it was at a time of huge change . Agonising as the process proved to be for those living through it, it brought about a sort of cleansing which has lead to greater perspective, clearer sight, a freeing and recognising of emotions and, most important of all, a breaking down of inbred, religion-based superstition.

It's impolite to ask....

One of the downsides of being a shop assistant is the vulnerability of the position. It’s impossible to hide from folk you'd rather not have to talk to, and some people think they have the inalienable right to cross-question you about personal matters.

I’m generally very open with my highs and lows, but I do like to be able to choose who (when face-to-face) I share my stuff with, and I also like to have some control over what it is I divulge.

Into the store on Saturday strolled a women I met once socially and have been carefully avoiding on the High Street ever since. She was, before retirement, a district nurse or midwife I think, anyway, she still is a person who is feels she has a right to delve into people’s private lives. She’s also one of those bulldozer women who holds you with an intense stare until she has got what she wants.

She came in, stood in the doorway and gasped in horror: ‘Is that YOU Carol? what have you done to yourself.”

Now I know I’m not looking my best at the moment. The asthma has needed lots of cortisone to get it under control and that makes my face swell. I have black rings under my eyes from broken nights. I don’t like this. It isn’t my face that looks back to me from the mirror and I go out as little as possible so I don’t get the sort of reaction I was facing at that moment.

I scowled at her: ‘I have no idea what I ‘ve done to myself. Can I help you? ‘ Undeterred, she asked me if I had given up the bookshop ‘because it got too much?’ ‘Yes - and for other reasons,’ I snapped. ‘Can I help you. ‘ Reluctantly she turned to look at the shelves and a pretext for coming in. Another customer arrived, someone I know well, and we started a conversation. She melted away, eventually, promising to return.

I’ll have to hone my repelling skills!
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