A blog about anything and everything…
Plucked from our homes
to populate His harem
we spend our days
in hazy, lazy
pointless conversations
pretending we are not in competition
whilst on and on time runs
nothing to gain and all to lose
because all that matters
at the end of the day
is which of us He, will choose
and with us lay…
Written for dVerse – Poets Pub Ekphrastic poetry challenge.
Posted by Grace in Poetics with help with the images from Melissa Lemay.
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
America I would like to visit you but
I have a fear of repeatedly feeling
déjà vu having seen
your treasures and tragedies
over and over
on big screens and small
I have come to absorb
through books and films
and blogs – those love-children
of Letter From America
some understanding of your ways.
It is only my personal view
others see you quite differently
from The Land of Opportunity
to The Great Satan.
I also, of course,
know real Americans
both in the flesh
and in the virtual world
and even have relatives
a whole branch of the family.
Since my grandfather’s brother
emigrated before the First World War
he and his descendants
have demonstrated the positives
the opportunity to make good
– it might have been less opportune
if he had not been white.
Now I understand the wealth
of America could not have been so great
without the dispossession
of the previous occupants
or the relocation of millions
of slaves who
even after emancipation
worked a different kind of bondage
in the factories of Chicago.
I cannot preach
we British have no right…
just this week I read a supplement
of The [Manchester] Guardian
on how Manchester’s cotton wealth
was the fruit of slavery
just at one remove
and the Guardian
famously liberal
did little to recognise
even its own failure to comment
until now.
America
so much is squeezed into your great cities
each pressure-cooking a distinct language
which is so much more than mere accent
but in between, the vast wildernesses
still exist free of graffiti
the poor of the cities not banned
but excluded from access nevertheless
by lacking the means to get there
And so
America
you are a land of opposites
of natural beauty and urban ugliness
of obscene wealth and unforgivable poverty
of liberal tolerance and extreme hatred.
Maybe this is true of all countries
but America – You proclaimed yourself
to be the Great and the Good
to be the World’s Policeman
but all your policemen
carry guns
and so therefore do the bad guys
and the poor
and the rich
by inalienable right.
America
Dorothy has
pulled back the curtain
and the little man revealed
does not match up to the rhetoric
or the dream.
But still I would like to visit you
America…
Written in response to “America [superstorm]”
by Kathleen Graber from her collection – The River Twice
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
We travelled twice to Crete
once was a holidayof two weeks
once was something different for six months.
The first time we stayed with
my sister-in-law and her partner
who gave up their bed
for her sister and I.
We hired a car
and left him to his work
and her to hers
rescuing cats
thankless by Cretans
and we travelled that corner of Crete
the lofty coast road south to Sitia
great banks of flowering shrubs
in their pomp
painting our way
giving glimpses of the empty sea
blue below.
Returning, the sunset meal
above a dizzying drop
down to the sea
and opposite the entrance
the coolest water flowing silently
into a trough
out of the heart of the mountain.
We gazed in awe at the Ha Gorge
where only younger people
in wetsuits might slide down
from pool to pool
and then not without risk
to life and limb.
In the year of the pandemic
in September, the disease settling in
for the long haul and we
periodically locked down
made an escape before borders
clanged firmly shut
at the sister-in-law’s suggestion
because Crete had no cases
and the winter would be warmer
than that in England
and we could keep company
installed in a winter vacant flat next door.
Two weeks in
Crete locked down
with a decisive severity
at odds with England’s ‘s Boris led
shilly-shallying silliness
even though Crete was almost Covid free
and England certainly was not!
The winter, as promised
as warm as an English summer
as befits a country
a mere stone’s throw from Africa
with only the occasional storm
thundering around the many mountains.
Oh! We had a grandstand view
from our apartment in Elounda
the sun bursting up across the bay
the evening light rendering
the mountains purple and gold
so crisply shadowed
you felt you could reach out
across twenty miles
and touch their roughness
where they fought
a losing battle against the elements
solid slabs descending into slopes of scree.
But when all was said and done
we were trapped in a gilded cage
on a short leash at best
allowed to local shops
suitably masked and sidestepping
others in a semblance of social distancing
but longer trips forbidden
more living but less sightseeing.
And yet…
on my solitary exercise walks
down to the two town supermarkets
I watched the tiny Cretan olives
ripen to purple-blackish bloom
the family bubbles
spread the nets beneath the trees
and mechanically flail
the harvest to the ground
afterward – pruning-burning bonfires
raising columns of smoke
all over the island
and eventually I saw
the tiny olive flowers
blossom to make next year’s crop
sights you wouldn’t see
on a two-week holiday.
My reward when I reach the town
a masked conversation
with the supermarket’s owner
at her checkout
an unexpected Pink Floyd superfan
telling of a last ticket
last minute flight
to see the group play
an ancient Athens amphitheatre
whilst I exchange a treasured memory
of the week I worked for the group
in the run-up to the premiere of The Wall
my bucket list never saw that coming!
I add the memories
and many photos
to my store.
We do not look back on it
as a holiday
more time served
under lockdown
albeit in a beautiful cell
and though we can say
we lived in Crete for six months
it was not life as we know it…
Posted for dVerse Poets Pub to the prompt Vacation. We don’t use the word vacation so much as holiday if I may be permitted…
© Andrew Wilson 2023
Ask a baker for a dozen rolls
and he may give you
out of the kindness of his heart
thirteen
a baker’s dozen
so with the Poets Pub
you go there not merely
to read and listen to poems
but for that bit extra…
This Quadrille (44 words not including the title) was written to celebrate the 12th Anniversary of the Poets Pub…
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
This is a post in the 6 Degrees of Separation run by Kate W. over at books are my favourite and best in which she gives the starting point of a particular book and invites you to take a journey through 6 other books of your choice, all connecting in some way and perhaps ending up back at the beginning – why not have a go yourself? Challenges are to writing, what scales and arpeggios are to those learning musical instruments, they exercise the faculties, but unlike scales, this challenge is most enjoyable, teasing out as it does, the connections, at a thinking level, between books…
In Time Shelter a 2020 novel by Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, Gaustine, a psychiatrist, creates a clinic for people with Alzheimer’s disease in Zürich which works by immersing patients into rooms containing articles from past decades and stimulating their memories of that period. The narrator is tasked with collecting the artefacts with which the rooms are stocked and travels throughout Europe to complete his mission. But soon the clinic is attracting healthy people who also want to escape a mundane present reality and return, nostalgically to other decades.
This rang a massive bell with me because some thirty-five years ago, I came into contact with a charity called Age Exchange in London, propelled by Pam Schweitzer MBE who pursued funds with the indomitable spirit that is ideal for such a role. They did exactly what the fictional clinic did – trained reminiscence workers to assist suitable dementia patients in recovering memories from the past using a library of artefacts gathered by the charity in Blackheath. The Exchange part of the charity’s name arose because they gathered reminiscences on various themes such as “Can we afford the Doctor?” and turned them into plays (that one was about Britain before the National Health Service) and performed them in schools thus recycling memories through the generations!
Time Shelter is a satire on nostalgia, populism, irony and melancholy and though I had not read it, I have ordered a copy…
Timequake is a 1997 novel by Kurt Vonnegut Junior (yes – him again!) in which he makes the world relive a decade of their lives with no possibility of change – a study of determinism in which he asserts that people have no free will. As so often with Vonnegut, he weaves personal and family history into the tale with the wry humour which is his hallmark. I think I read this book so long ago that it was back when I still used libraries to source my reading material…
The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (such a Wagnerian-sounding name!) is a book that I had read before watching the film adaptation and although it was a faithful adaptation of it, I still prefer to imagine a story as told in its original form. This book takes further the idea of not being able to be in control of one’s destiny. The eponymous wife is powerless to know when or for how long her husband will disappear into the past or future including her own any more than her husband who is at the mercy of a genetic mutation that plucks him in and out of his timeline at random, each know things about the other’s past and future at different times, often uncomfortably so. This book is a thought experiment, a “what if” but like much speculative fiction, it ultimately reveals more about how we as human beings are than how we might be in the unlikely event that time travel is possible…
A Connecticut Yankeee at the Court of King Arthur by Mark Twain is a satire about monarchy and feudalism. We meet another hapless time-traveller – a Yankee engineer called Hank Morgan who awakes after a bump on the head, to discover that he is in the past at the court of King Arthur. He decides to use his skill to improve the world with his modern knowledge so the book also celebrates Hank’s homespun ingenuity and his sense of the rightness of democracy. Although he ultimately fails (darn that determinism), the book marked a move by Twain from portraying the America of the Gilded Age, to more progressive values.
If Hank’s time travel left him in the service of King Arthur, then our next hapless hero is forced to become a king having descended, albeit distantly, from Charlemagne. The Short Reign of Pippin IV by John Steinbeck sits on my bookshelf in a very battered state having belonged first to my father as a young man – it was published when I was just two years old. In a kind of false flag operation by the French communist party, Pippin Héristal, an amateur astronomer is proclaimed King of France (in order that the French people may have something to rebel against – which they eventually do!). Like Hank Morgan, Pippin Héristal tries to make the best of what has been thrust upon him by doing what he thinks might make a difference but fate is already against both of them…
In the next link, another man is tested, this time by two different and opposing societies – in The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, the world of Urras is a capitalist society divided into two competing superpowers – so much like our own world. The habitable, but resource-poor moon of Urras, is Annares and 200 years before, the rebellious factions of Urras have been sent or volunteered to go there where they have formed a society based on anarcho-syndicalism. Given the lack of resources and the inefficiency of the societal model, Annares is not exactly a thriving place to live. The leading character is Shevek, who Le Gin identified as being based on J. Robert Oppenheimer – often referred to as “the father of the atomic bomb” and who regarded his involvement in the Manhattan Project as that of a physicist and on seeing the first test of the Trinity bomb, said he thought to himself “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”. Of the subsequent use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he told President Truman he felt he had “blood on my hands”, which did not go down well. In The Dispossessed. Shevek has a similar quandary when he tries to develop a General Temporal Theory and is blocked by a jealous superior and frustrated by his obligation to contribute manual work to society. He decides to go to Annares where he is welcomed because the capitalists see in his work, the opportunity to develop a spacecraft that will make crossing to the stars possible. But while capitalism thrives on his work, Shevek becomes involved with a new revolutionary underclass… Once again, Ursula Le Guin gives the lie to the writing maxim that “big issues are dead weights” – you just need to be a brilliant writer to incorporate them into the right story!
After such erudite stuff, the last book of my six may seem a little frivolous in style, but it contains all the elements we have seen on this journey, a man thrust out of his own time and/or place, into a different world in which he must try to do his best to survive, thrive and even contribute what he knows to the betterment of the society he finds himself in. A Princess of Mars (Barsoom) – is a genre-busting novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, he of Tarzan fame, and in his Barsoom series, he gives us – planetary-romance, fantasy, sword and planet, and post-apocalyptic speculative fiction from before those terms were even minted! This is not a science fiction book that depends on technology such as spacecraft since the hero – John Carter – transitions to Mars without explanation when in a tight spot on Earth and later returns, again without any control on his part. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ works are full of violent action and derring-do, but the breadth and depth of his imagination made him a huge influence on many later writers – Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, James Cameron, and George Lucas to name a few.
Finally, what links A Princess of Mars back to Time Shelter, is nostalgia – just as the “healthy” people in Time Shelter, are drawn to use the retro rooms of the clinic because they are fed up with their contemporary lives, so A Princess of Mars harks back to a rose-tinted view of American past – the frontier life when the good were good, you knew who was bad, and men were men and women swooned –” “the good old days”…?
What is a spy if not a cursed liar
Who for love puts hand in fiercest fire
But not the love given to a sweet woman
The love of country is inhuman.
We watched a French, great tragedy conclude
Where agents of The Bureau were deluded
Believing they could steer their star-crossed fate
Clinging to the happy ending till too late.
For once your life is built on falsehood complex
The web you weave the fates will always vex
And you must pay for secrets stolen, finally
No matter how handlers and bosses rally
The cause of saving hapless agents’ lives
Is hard on lovers, colleagues, friends and wives
All pawns in what is known as the Great Game
The spy is destined for a life without fame
And if their life of infamy be revealed
Be sure the fates no happiness will deal.
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
This poem was written in response to a challenge from Posted by Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Poetry Forms on dVerse – The Poet’s Pub, to write a Heroic Sonnet in iambic pentameter – you can read about it here.
My partner and I have been binge-watching a five-series drama made by the French company Canal called The Bureau. Since the French are famed for their interest in love, this drama, whilst being a cracking, edge-of-your-seat tale of the life of spies, also examines the philosophical implications for the loves of those who make their living by living a lie – can they find happiness? Since the poem might be spoiler enough, I will say no more…
This is the first time I have attempted a Sonnet in Iambic Pentameter – something I vaguely remember being taught in school but had to resort to Wikpedia for the finer points, including all the exceptions to the rules which make lines memorable – I hope I have done it justice. I guess that we many of us have this poetry form flowing through our veins with so many great poets and playwrights having embraced the form.
When successful singer
and writer of songs
Harry Nilsson
schmoosed his foray
into the Great American Songbook
he little knew
it would ruin his career.
A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night
was a decade before such
sentimental standards
would slip down easily
sumptuously
with the richness
of a cocktail
knowingly too sweet
but too delicious to pass up.
The ninth album
following a trail
of hit songs
embedded in each one
nothing prepared his fans
for this shift in pace
and orchestrations
that out Hollywooded Hollywood.
Frank Sinatra’s arranger
sewed the songs together
slipping seamlessly
from track to track
in a welter of schmaltz
that should make us sick
but succeeds In pulling at
our heartstrings.
All the emotional
tricks of film scores
with swooping glissandos
of silvery strings
dramatic pauses
and sudden quietening
that make way for
heart-rending lyrics.
I can’t recall
When or where
Nilson whispered
pure emotion
in my ears
or the joy of rediscovering
this iced gem
decades after
Nilsson bombed
his career.
Wikipedia
told me the sorry tale
but I was too awash with the joy
of rediscovery
to truly sympathise
and if there is a heaven
then he is surely there
and I hope he hears
my tribute and my
sincere judgement
that this beauty
was simply
ahead of its time…
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Intro
Lazy Moon
For Me and My Gal
It Had to be You
Always
Makin’ Whoopee
You Made Me Love You
Lullaby in Ragtime
I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now
What’ll I Do
Nevertheless (I’m in Love With You)
This is All I Ask
As Time Goes By
I’m Always Chasing Rainbows
Make Believe
Trust in Me
It’s Only a Paper Moon
Thanks for the Memory
Over the Rainbow
Outro
Written for a musical evening over at dVerse – Poetics – The Poet’s Pub where tonight the theme is Musical Muses, hosted this evening by msjadeli…
During the month of April this year, whilst participating in the A to Z Challenge, I was privileged to encounter the work of Misky whose blog It’s Still Life, showcases two distinct things, poetry written by Misky and illustrated using Generative Artwork created by Misky using the Midjourney AI app. So amazing were these images to someone who is in part, a visual artist, that it inspired me to make an exploration of Generative AI for myself. At the same time, AI has been hitting the headlines big time and mainly for its use in text generation and the impact it might have on jobs and since writing is another thing that I do in my day job, I was also intrigued to see whether AI might be of any use in a company such as I work for. (I am the gradually retiring General Manager of a food manufacturing company). It has been a fascinating voyage of discovery and to cap it all, lying awake at 4 o’clock this morning, I found myself listening to “The Conversation” on the BBC World Service and what should be the topic, but AI with special reference to the involvement of women. So – mind on fire, I am going to draw this series together, although I freely acknowledge I have but dipped my toe in the waters of AI and I may return to the topic in the future…
To recap the three articles I have already written:- In the first one, I tried out ChatGPT to see what it research and write about one of the topics from my A to Z and immediately encountered the phenomena of AI hallucination – the ability, in fact tendency of AI to make things up. I also “showcased” my first attempts at visual collaboration with the Midjourney bot .
In the second report, I compared ChatGPT to Writesonic which produces more lengthy articles – testing them against a typical (for me) work assignment.
In the third report, I looked at the most controversial assertion about AI – that AI might in the future, eliminate human beings – Terminator-style and referenced articles that thoroughly refute the need to worry about that particular outcome – go re-assure yourselves! However, there are many things about our present and future use of AI that do bear looking at and these were raised in the episode of “The Conversation” that woke me up this morning. The programme, presented by a woman, featured two women working in the field of AI, one a philosopher and one an expert in data analysis and as well as the general concerns that need addressing about AI, they highlighted the general lack of representation of women in the field of AI – only one CEO, qualifying women failing to get jobs in the industry and so on. They did however point out that one of the changes to AI itself in recent times, has been the accessibility of use – no longer do you need to have a degree in computer programming – you could make your first interaction with ChatGPT in the same time it would take you to query something on Google. Which brings me back to Misky…
Misky was not only the inspiration for my (deepish?) dive into AI, but was extremely helpful and encouraging to me at the outset, itself a reflection of how women tend to be more collaborative, good team players – a fact which the contributors to “The Conversation” suggested is a good reason for women to me more involved in AI companies, in reviewing the implications and in forming the regulation which is undoubtedly necessary around AI. A few days ago, I was delighted to meet Misky face-to-face on a Zoom call after many text interactions online and one of the things that she shared in our too-brief call, was that she had had some push-back from certain readers of her blog, about the use of AI images. I would like to talk to her more about these issues, but the participants in “The Conversation” raised the issue of how artists, whose work has been studied by AI to create new images “in the style of”, are being short-changed. You may have been wondering about the image at the top of this post – I created in Midjourney by prompting it to “imagine” Knaresborough railway viaduct “in the style of Hokusai” – a master of Japanese woodblock prints. I have used this subject as my test piece for exploring what Midjourney can do as you will see in the previous post. Now Hokusai is long dead and so the issue of compensation is hardly an issue, but another group of more recent artists might object. I am working on a spoof post – “How to Make a Body” a tale of human reproduction in the style of an Internet recipe ad although, like Misky, the writing is all my own, I wanted an illustration to fit with the tone of the piece and prompted Midjourney to “imagine” a woman in a hospital bed, holding her newborn baby and with her husband leaning in “in the style of a Ladybird book cover”. For those of you who may not be familiar with Ladybird books, they were written for children starting in the 1940’s and running until the 1980’s and they feature a distinct style of illustration.
In recent years, a series of spoof books in the Ladybird style and aimed at those who had grown up with the original series, have been vert successful, for example…
I had no idea whether Midjourney would be able to fulfil my prompt, there are lists of artists’ styles you can use with Midjourney but I hadn’t seen this one – I was not disappointed!
I am keeping my powder dry as to the final image I chose but this first set of four (Midjourney shows off by producing not one, but four attempts in under sixty seconds) – which was done to the prompt of “A new mother in a hospital bed with her husband leaning in as she holds their new baby in the style of a Ladybird Book Cover” has misunderstood my intention and the mother is holding a magazine rather than a baby – though the graphic style is very Ladybird book-like. I acknowledge that I am still only a beginner in my use of prompts with all the forms of AI I have tried so far and there is undoubtedly an “art” to getting it right which is why I said “I created in Midjourney”. Although I am a competent watercolourist, screen-printer and other forms of illustrative art, I could not produce images such as the above and certainly not in sixty seconds. So, how much of this creation is my prompt, how much is the brilliant programming behind Midjourney and how much is owed to the various artists who could produce the illustrations of the Ladybird books? I cannot begin to answer that question but it does raise an issue which needs considering in formulating regulation around the use of AI. Meanwhile, like Misky and I, jump in and have a go and get a feel for yourself of the answer to the god-like feeling of creating with an AI tool…
Much of the debate around the consequences of the rise of AI, is around its impact on jobs and the potential losses and gains. As I described in my first report, the development of computer spreadsheets swept away the lowly positions in Accountancy but opened up many more jobs at the high end of the profession and although this might be the hope for AI, that it liberates us from the menial and allows us to create new roles – roles which might be beyond the capability of AI to imagine, at present, it is not just the menial tasks that are being threatened by bots like ChatGPT, but some roles higher up in various industries. Having said that, given the tendency of AI’s to hallucinate, I wouldn’t trust an AI’s writing without an experienced human checking the output of any writing before sending it out! Also, when you are a creative individual yourself, then trying to get AIs to produce exactly what you have in mind is tricky. In my 2021 A to Z challenge, I was trying to complete a science-fiction novel and the exercise gave me enough momentum to indeed finish it a few months later. Then I set about creating a book cover for it – to feature the final denouement – a tense scene set in a space-elevator on the edge of space. I prepared the background view by Photoshopping some NASA photographs looking the length of the Red Sea towards Palestine, painted in a great river estuary as per my planet, and then superimposed some 3D elements which I drew up in AutoCAD and finally added the title and my name. You can see this below, however, I felt that the result was not quite up to the standard of artwork commissioned by big sci-fi publishers and imagined that in the unlikely event of the novel being published, an improved version of the cover would be substituted for my “sketch”.
Back to today, and naturally, I thought it would be a good test of Midjourney to see whether it could be used to produce a better version of my cover. Well, the first attempts were brilliant style-wise, but nothing like the image I wanted and many attempts followed to no avail…
My prompt read “space lift arriving at 300 miles above Earth like planet over Sahara like region array of cargo containers spread out in one layer small spaceship approaching“Midjourney couldn’t understand Space lift and I had to change lift to elevator, it couldn’t understand “array of cargo containers” but it did have all the sci-fi style I wanted. So then I decided to create a space view background without the lift and substitute it into my own cover illustration. Bingo!
Still I hanker for the crisply detailed images of the elevator that Midjourney is capable of if only I could prompt it correctly – so a work in progress… What this exercise does show, is that it is possible to use AI for the things it can do better in combination with human talent.
This exploration of AI has felt like a marathon and it is just one person’s experience and I am really only at the beginning of my exploration, I’m sure I will find both text and image-generative bots to be of use in my future work and play. I urge you all to experiment for yourselves, form your own judgements (and please share your results by linking in the comments), join the debate over the regulation of AI, and explore other artists, in particular, Misky, who began this journey…
This is a post in the 6 Degrees of Separation run by Kate W. over at books are my favourite and best in which she gives the starting point of a particular book and invites you to take a journey through 6 other books of your choice, all connecting in some way and perhaps ending up back at the beginning…
As will often be the case in this challenge, I have not read this book, a non-fiction exploration of just what it is that makes friendship so important to Elizabeth Day. Ubiquitous as Amazon is, other booksellers are available so here is part of what the Waterstones’ blurb says about Friendaholic. “Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict tells the story of one woman’s journey to understand why she’s addicted to friendship. […] In Friendaholic, Elizabeth unpacks the significance and evolution of friendship. From exploring her own personal friendships and the distinct importance of each of them in her life, to the unique and powerful insights of others across the globe, Elizabeth asks why there isn’t a language that can express its crucial influence on our world.
From ghosting to frenemies, to social media and communication styles, to the impact of seismic life events, Elizabeth leaves no stone untouched. Friendaholic is the book you buy for the people you love but it’s also the book you read to become a better friend to yourself.”
So everything you wanted to know about friendship but never dared to ask – well hardly because there are as many types of friendship as there are fish in the sea and as a prodigious reader of books growing up in a rather claustrophobic childhood, I suspect that the friendships depicted in books have been a great influence on me so all these books have personal significance for me beyond the mere reading…
Will and Tom by Mathew Plamplin – my first choice- was a recent read but what drew me to it, was that it concerns two painters well known to me and is set in one of England’s great country house not far from where I now reside – Harewood House. My last year at school was an extra year to resit Geography which I had ambitiously paired with Physics and English A-levels in an attempt to straddle education from Art to Science and Geography, which I wanted to study at university got squeezed in the middle. So now I added Geology and Atr A-levels, and, since my friends had all left and I only had 11 hours timetabled lessons, I was allowed to roam the streets of Oxford, sketching and visiting art galleries and museums. At the Ashmolean Museum, I was allowed to handle and peruse, FIVE boxes of Turner watercolours and for good measure, the staff suggested I compare his work with that of his contemporary and friend – Thomas Girtin. Girtin is as unknown to most people as Turner is famous, and that is in part because he died tragically young, but this book brings their life and friendship not to mention the times and the place. Below is one of Thomas’ paintings.
If I hadn’t used it in last months 6 Degrees, I could now have gone to This Thing of Darkness telling the tale of the Friendship between Charles Darwin and Fitzroy the Captain of the Beagle but instead I choose another voyage of biological discovery and friendship – The Log from the Sea of Cortes by John Steinbeck. I am going to cheat here and give you a Two-fer since this book is inextricably linked to Cannery Row also by Steinbeck in which we meet Doc – in real life – Ed Ricketts a marine biologist who became a great friend and influence on Steinbeck. Steinbeck was fascinated by marine biology and having achieved initial success with The Grapes of Wrath, as Ricketts had done with his seminal Between Pacific Tides, the pair were looking for new inspiration and eventually settled on a specimen collecting trip up the Gulf of California, or Sea of Cortez as it is more poetically titled. The co-authored book as well as the fictionalised Doc in Cannery Row, paint a portrait of close friendship between two men and Steinbeck was devastated when Ricketts was killed on the railway crossing at Monterey…
A recurring comedic theme throughout the log, is the fractious relationship with the outboard motor of their tender “Our Hansen Sea-Cow was not only a living thing but a mean, irritable, contemptible, vengeful, mischievous, hateful living thing…. [it] loved to ride on the back of a boat, trailing its propeller daintily in the water while we rowed… when attacked with a screwdriver [it] fell apart in simulated death… It loved no one, trusted no one, it had no friends.”
On a journey of my own in the 70’s, by Transalpino, I would have passed through Naples, the seaside location of my third linked book the first in Elena Ferrante’s autobiographical trilogy detailing her growing up in a Naples suburb “My Brilliant Friend”. The picture of Lila and Elena and Naples includes memorable characters from their own families to the more sinister family of the Cosa Nostra and we see the roots of later series such as Gommorah. I first watched My Brilliant Friend as a TV drama but I have since acquired the books to read ( since the read experience is so different) and they are on my Tsundoku (TBR) list…
With no more link than that they are also set in Italy and I vastly enjoyed them as a teenager, I now choose the The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovannino Guareschi. A collection of eight books of short stories, only three of which were published in his lifetime,, Guareschi tells of the amusing but touching conflict between A parish priest in a small town in northern Italy’s Po Valley, and the Communist Mayor. You might be forgiven for thinking that the constant strife between these two protagonists (with many conversations with God on the side) describe enemies rather than friends, but what they share and recognise in each other, even if they wouldn’t openly admit it, is that they both strive ceaselessly in their own ways, for the good of the town and if that doesn’t qualify as friendship…
I read in some pre-internet article, that a survey had discovered that men, asked about their favourite books, will often quote titles they read as teenagers whilst women will cite their most recent reads. The question was posed, tongue in cheek, as to whether this is because men stop reading after puberty whilst women don’t stop… I will acknowledge that half the books mentioned so far were read in my teenage years and with David Copperfield – read in a wrist wearying hardback (particularly when reading on the pillow) by Charles Dickens. I read a few Dickens books from my parents hardback set and formed an early critical notion of his work as being like a tapestry, all the threads are presented near the beginning, a few are lost along the way and a few new ones introduced, but most make it to the last chapter in which things a re resolved with satisfaction for the good and justice for the bad.
David Copperfield is a partly autobiographical account of Dickens life and it is notable for the friends that save young Copperfield from the worst vicissitudes to which he is subject, Peggotty, Steerforth (initially at school) and Barkis, not to mention the unusual friendship between Aunty Betsy Trotwood and Mr Dick.
The thing about these books read as a teenager, is that they have formative influence on the developing mind and I sometimes wonder whether how much of these characters, especially Steinbeck’s Doc, are not in me…
The Surgeon of Crowthorne by Simon Winchester, is the story not only of the monumental task of creating The Oxford English Dictionary, but of the friendship that developed between the chief editor of the dictionary and it’s most prolific, volunteer contributor. Started seven years after Dickens published David Copperfield, the OED took a new approach to dictionary entries by seeking for examples of usage to accompany definitions of meaning and this required an army of volunteers. James Murray, the Chief Editor appointed by The Philological Society, received tens of thousands of examples from one – William Chester Minor – so many that when the first volume was finally published after eight years gruelling work, Murray invited his volunteers to a party. Surprised not to hear from or see his most prolific volunteer, Murray eventually went to Crowthorne Hospital where he assumed Minor worked, only to discover that he was an inmate in what is now the secure psychiatric hospital Broadmoor. Minor, who had had a colourful life, was suffering from what we would now diagnose as Schizophrenia and had stabbed a man. Murray and Minor became firm friends and eventually, Murray petitioned for Minor’s release since his troubled mind had eventually relaxed.
This true tale of friendship brings us back to Elizabeth Day’s exploration of the nature of friendship and why it is so vital! I hope you have enjoyed the journey through books which feel like old friends to me and which have almost certainly styled my notion of friendship…
Borne up and drawn in
by fast becoming friends’
web of writing prompts
Writing is a unique space for me and increasingly so. My dear departed sister encouraged me to go to a writing group in Sligo, Ireland – a place full of writers and artists and all in the shadow of the poet WB Yeats. Indeed, when I first moved there in 1995, one of my early commissions as a signwriter and, it turns out, a muralist, was to paint a mural of WB Yeats on a new secondhand bookshop – The Winding Stair – named for the title poem of one of Yeats’ books of poetry – you can see me painting it here. I had studied Yeatss at school in English (Literature) which replaces the English (Creative) of earlier school years – why do they do that? I also painted a little but didn’t want to go down the road of fine art because I perceived that artists are so often groomed by galleries encouraging them to produce more of what sells rather than following their own creative wanderings. And so I became a signwriter (painted not computer-cut vinyl) where the creative input is much smaller and constrained by a brief but, I felt, more honest and more sure as a means of making a living. Moving to Ireland gave me a new burst of creative freedom as a signwriter – especially after doing the Yeats mural although some years later, The Winding Stair closed down and the subsequent occupiers of the shop painted over my “masterwork” – a lesson in the zen of attachment to earthly achievement…
Going back to the writing group, it was such a pleasure to rediscover the joy of putting words on the blank canvas of the page – I produced a slim volume of the group’s writings including a CD of the members reading their pieces – and then I discovered blogging… By now it was 2005 and my partner and I moved back to England to see more of our growing grandchildren, and as we waited to complete our stable-to-house conversion, there was no time to make friends in the community and so blogging remained my virtual circle of friendship. I belonged to a blog -site called Mo’time run by an American living in Italy, who created Mo’time as a test bed for ideas for the larger site which was his job. Sadly, the larger site was sold and Mo’time terminated and though we made several attempts to kindle a new space – it was never the same – however I still see quite a few Mo’timers on Facebook.
Then in 2020, on April 1st – I stumbled across the A to ZX Challenge and as the pandemic was taking hold, I plunged in! Each year has been differently themed and I have encountered new fellow writers as well as old friends. This year, however, writing was even more central – my theme was on the etymology of phrases and so was like honey to writing bees and I have joined another writing group – not in the flesh, but by Zoom and our facilitator is also an A to Z-er. What has been different though, is that through the new writing friends I have made (and reviewed here on my Roadtrip) I have encountered a world of other blogging challenges, written, photographic and especially poetry. Since my writing group is prompted by poems and much of what I have written has been (Free) Verse, it was like an alignment of the planets – instead of tailing off into silence after the A to Z finished, I am being tempted and indeed succumbing to all sorts of new challenges as well as writing in my group. I created the picture at the top of this post using Midjourney – another takeaway from this year’s A to Z (thanks to Misky and Vidya) to convey the sense of both support and crazy fear of falling out of control and spending my whole time writing challenge posts! So far I have engaged with Six Degrees of Separation, the Poet’s Pub and Sadje’s WDYS (What Do You See) and in the interests of Life/Work/life balance, I think that may be enough for now – things should be a pleasure and not a pressure… And then there are two novels to get back to, one finished to first draft and the other, a more serious work, with a lot of writing to go! And I used to spend a lot of time keeping abreast of the news! And then there’s the allotment – water and weed it or lose it! And then there is my partner, children and grandchildren not to mention two and a half days at work…
Here’s the thing though, within reason, the more you do, the more you fit in because what goes is the dross, the stuff that didn’t really matter, write poetry not protest seems to be where I am right now…
P. S. I have been told that I am not great at communicating, say, enthusiastic responses, that I may even be on the spectrum, but when I write, even though I may not feel the feelings whilst in the act of writing, be it poetry, prose or fiction, when I read back emotional content, I emote with the best of them, tear up – the works. So I guess writing is my medium of expression…
