Nickel, Nickel, Quarter, Quarter, Penny

 

There's a bit in a rather unloved American Eighties film, in which Danny De Vito shows Billy Crystal his coin collection. From out of a box De Vito spills a handful of coins, and arranges them on the floor carefully (why, I wonder, do I remember these characters lying together on the floor?). 'This one's a nickel...This one is also a nickel,' etc, spreading them out, until all the coins are in this sacred uniform line. Nickel, nickel, quarter, quarter, penny. How many times, we wonder, has De Vito's character enacted this secret little ceremony? But are these coins actually worth anything, the Billy Crystal character wants to know. De Vito then explains that these are the coins his father let him keep, how his father always let him keep the change.

It occurs to me that we all do this, writers especially. Taking something as banal and everyday as pocket change and making it meaningful. That is, we hold things sacred by arranging them like so, sharing them, savouring them, and saying, 'Here. Look. Look what we're missing.'

The Art of Direction

Somewhere, there is footage of Leonard Bernstein lecturing an orchestra on the meaning of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. He asks his musicians to remember ‘lying on the ground, in spring or summer; you lie down, face down on the ground, and you want to kiss it. You watch the grass grow and you want it to just enfold you.’

It occurs to me now, that all art might be a seeking out of the sublime. To know what we want, to desire, and yet to allow for a fundamental freedom too, communing with stuff bigger than ourselves. What Simone Weil calls shaking the branch rather than reaching for the fruit.

For the love of Claire Fisher

The above images were found in various articles in The Guardian over the past two years. The last, of Aung San Suu Kyi (in Oxford?) in the Seventies, is one of my all time favourite photographs.

I was talking with a friend the other night about film versus digital photography, trying to explain that it's the process of film I like. The idea of a semi-accidental chemical reaction taking place, a little annunciation taking place in a box held in your hands. Not only that, but then the lack of immediacy--the having to wait. For instance, I've had a roll of Provia X in my bag for weeks now, and I now have little idea about what's on it. I know that I finished it in London, but where it begins, I can't remember. Months ago, most likely. A visit to the Freud Museum in there somewhere. And, the fact is, I love this. I love the patience and the surprise involved. I think I value the images more because they are embedded in time...And this, I suppose, is the most essential thing. I like memories. Not so much memories as they exist now, but real old memories. What you used to find leafing through old family photo albums, those slightly faded colours, times and places that pre-existed you. That is precisely what I aspire to, what I long for in photography and, perhaps, in art generally. The poignancy of a memory that calls you back, that haunts you from the pages of a family photo album. It's a look, a feel, I think I'm always striving for: the sticky-backed pages turning with an audible gasp, the images reflecting something both lost and found. 

One of mine, California 2010 (while dreaming of Sweden)

 The rest are from photo albums. Of my sister and me, California, 1980-81

 

Balance Beaming

Doing yoga (nothing serious, just once a week) has reminded me of nothing so much as going to Occupational Therapy when I was a child. Then, as now, the problem was an inner-ear-derived lack of balance, but I've since learned and absorbed little tricks to help hide the fact. That is, until I have to strike a yoga pose that requires only one of my feet to be lifted off the ground a twisted around at a weird angle. It's funny because it feels so much like re-visiting Peninsula Hospital every Wednesday and being asked to perform similar feats.The difficulty is something I associate with childhood.

I remember walking along a balance beam and rolling around the floor--game-playing as therapy. But my favourite experience was at the end when my therapist (a curly-haired woman who was the first colour blind person I'd ever met) would allow me to root through a treasure chest filled with sand and pull out one of the little toys hidden around the base.

            

Finland

Oxford preview of the LOST Theatre production of Book Ends, along with a new play called Finland.

ALEX
Oh shut up.
ABIGAIL
I see us, now, very clearly. On holiday. There is a heavy mist resting over everything and it’s cold. Unexpectedly cold. Unbearably cold. The ground is damp, with patches of snow. We shuffle along a path, me with my hood up and you getting all wet. The rain still trickling from the trees. You’re ahead of me, leading the way.  
ALEX
Where are we?
ABIGAIL
Finland.
ALEX
Oh Finland, finally.

Late Fees

Inv #                         Description                         Amount
   479428 OVERDUE  Wings of madness [videorecording] / France 5 ; d     $0.75
   515070 OVERDUE  Le Dernier metro [videorecording] = The last met     $0.25
   515071 OVERDUE  The iceman cometh [videorecording] / produced by     $0.75
   515072 OVERDUE  Ich hiess Sabina Spielrein [videorecording] : =      $0.50
   537322 OVERDUE  Hits [sound recording] / Joni Mitchell..........     $0.50
   537323 OVERDUE  Aberdeen [videorecording] / Norsk Film AS presen     $0.25
   587193 OVERDUE  Aberdeen [videorecording] / Norsk Film AS presen     $1.25
   431123 OVERDUE  The Decalogue [videorecording] = Dekalog / direc     $0.25
   431126 OVERDUE  The Decalogue [videorecording] = Dekalog / direc     $0.25
   431143 OVERDUE  Eternity and a day [videorecording] / directed b     $0.25
   438041 OVERDUE  The book of illusions : a novel / Paul Auster...     $0.25
   451193 REQUEST 08-15-10 02:59PM: The West Wing. The complete fou     $0.75
   468248 OVERDUE  Jaguar of sweet laughter : new & selected poems      $1.75
   468249 OVERDUE  Ballets Russes [videorecording] / a Zeitgeist Fi     $0.25
   604098 OVERDUE  Ballet suites [sound recording] / Shostakovich..     $1.00
   604099 OVERDUE  Solaris [videorecording] / Mosfilm Studios ; Sov     $1.00
   615873 OVERDUE  Campo Santo / W.G. Sebald ; translated by Anthea     $0.25
   662380 OVERDUE  Hits [sound recording] / Joni Mitchell..........     $1.75
   662421 OVERDUE  Children of a lesser god [videorecording] / Para     $2.00
   667287 OVERDUE  What I loved : a novel / Siri Hustvedt..........     $2.75
   677610 OVERDUE  The West Wing. The complete fifth season [videor     $0.75
 

An image from Wings of Madness, listed above. A documentary about Santos-Dumont, the early aviator.

On Sat, Oct 24, 2009 at 11:26 PM, David K. O'Hara <dohara50@hotmail.com> wrote:
Dear K,
...
Currently, I'm back in California, staying in my mother's spare spare bedroom and trying to get a handle on my future. Or trying to will one into shape. I've been applying for temporary teaching jobs out here (to no avail) and also to permanent university posts on the east coast and back in the UK, most beginning in January. I've yet to hear anything, though. Mainly, I'm just re-acclimatizing to old surroundings and trying my best not to fall into old habits, old systems of thought. I've been thinking a lot about the concept of redemption lately, primarily because, the other night, I happened to read Cynthia Ozick on the redemptive thrust of literature:

'The tales we care for lastingly are the ones that touch on redemption--not it should be understood, on the guaranteed promise of redemption, and not on goodness, kindness, decency, all the usual virtues...Redemption means fluidity; the notion that people and things are subject to willed alteration; the sense of possibility; of turning away from, or turning toward; of deliverance; the sense that we act for ourselves rather than are acted upon; the sense that we are responsible...above all that we can surprise ourselves...Implicit in redemption is everything against the fated or the static: everything that hates death and harm and elevates the life-giving...'   

Please do tell me anything you've found particularly inspiring lately. Again, even the smallest thing...

Personally, I've been a little bit obsessed with public libraries, falling in love with these old school American architectural lovesongs to the book. Seriously. I'd forgotten them. The quaintness, but also the wealth of real, intimate culutre. The kind of stuff that gets clouded from one's vision after three years in the Bodleian. A strange sort of giddiness totally absent in academia. 

Later the recipient of this email told me that she herself had gone to the library to look up this essay of Ozick's, but someone had torn it out of the book.   

Return to Sender

I once knew a girl who said she wanted to live in the countryside. She used to send me postcards and letters telling me about this, describing the life she wanted: picking apples and working sometimes in some dusty old general store where old people came to drink coffee in the mornings. She hoped, one day, to find herself drinking bottles of beer on a porch somewhere, watching the sun go down, maybe listening to the radio, birdsong in the trees. Once, when we were on the phone late at night, she told me how she would paint in an upstairs bedroom she had converted into a studio, with windows that overlooked a lawn, a hammock, a tandem bike leaning against a fence. In her most honest, most vulnerable moments she might mention children and trips to a lake with water wings and blankets and buckets and spades. It bowled me over, hearing all this.

We kissed once at a party. That's how we met. She had herself an awful boyfriend at the time, we got talking, we had an encounter in a hallway. As far as I know, she's engaged to a lawyer now (who, I’m told, treats her very well) and lives at the edge of a city she once refused, categorically, ever to return to. She no longer writes to me, or phones me late at night. Last I heard, she was dreaming of traveling to India, or New York, or Japan, like all the other women I know.