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As announced on the web site of the Apple Mac Store in London’s Regent Street:
The Making of The God Interviews
Get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Natalie d’Arbeloff’s The God Interviews. Natalie will show you how she turned her popular web-based comic strip into a paperback book, using her Mac and print-on-demand technology.
Friday June 29th, 7.00 pm
If you are in London, you can’t miss it!
Nicked verbatim from Ernesto, since I couldn't put it better.
Dulwich,
to my delight when I was taking a class in herbal medicine a few years ago with
Nina, is full of Lime or Linden trees. A
herb of tranquillity and soothing sleep. One of my favourites. Soft green green
yellow sticky medicinal blossoms by
the thousand.
I went out with big bags and brought back hundreds of them.
Spread them out carefully to dry on shelves, on top of cupboards, in empty
wooden drawers behind the sofa. Complacently watched them dry to soft green
yellow yellow crumbly. Ceremonially
brewed my first tisane and sipped it,
hot and steamy. Savoured the fresh, slightly soapy taste. Felt nothing. Sniffed,
swallowed. Nothing. This tea was pleasant enough, but had no soothing
properties.
The many gracious, tall and spreading Linden trees in Dulwich parks
and lanes must all be cultivars of some variety without medicinal properties.
I
was deeply disappointed. Still, every year at this time - my
disappointment faded long ago with that year’s blossoms - they are lush, lovely
harbingers of Summer.
Photo: Bert Teunissen, Spain, 2005
I've been meaning to post a note about the new Aperture Foundation blog, with the majority of posts so far from one of my very, very favourite photographers, whom I've raved about before, Bert Teunissen.
Jorg Colberg of Conscientious, who's done more than anyone to extend my knowledge of the best photographers working today, points to Bert's latest blogpost, where he writes with stunning lack of pretention about some of his very best photographs of people living a traditional life in a traditional house, with very little, and a lot of everything that matters.
Love, a mission, clear sight, immense skill and patience: I am incredibly impressed by, and grateful for, Bert Teunissen and his work. What he writes, and the images he captures, resonate so strongly with my own memories of people I knew in rural France thirty years ago, the texture of whose lives and personalities will, I hope, always be with me.
His gentle, clever face looking at me every time I pass Bush House (several times a day).
Just like another gentle, clever face that looks at me every day - that of my dear boss who died nearly a year ago and whose photo now hangs in the corridor outside my office.
Both of them make my heart lurch with the remembrance of tragedy and then lurch again - a little guiltily, but such feelings are merely human, I suppose - with joy in my own life and freedom and a renewed sense that it's too short and precious to waste in whatever daft anxiety has been gnawing at me.
I'm tempted to say: perhaps Tony Blair could offer himself to the hostage takers in exchange for Alan now he's out of a job - more useful than this, about which Robert Fisk's passionately angry article says it all.
A laboured metaphor is forming in my mind - something about "rhubarb, rhubarb", as proverbially muttered by crowd-scene extras, and the clamorous "rhubarb, rhubarb" of cyberspace, the fog of communication and miscommunication that sometimes clears, as a kindred man or woman steps into focus, holding out a hand and mind you recognise.
Last night was alternately chilly and clammy, between thunderstorms. Strange Midsummer weather, and strange times in England as the chilly, clammy disillusion of the Blair decade comes to its eerily low-key end this week.
We shared two portions of Rhubarb Pavlova between the four of us, spoons clinking in the sublime gunk of sweet, sticky meringue and sharp, shiny fruit - very delicious. The faces around the table were all familiar, but two of the voices were not. The weird world of Blairdom and climate change and internet friendships.
My dear blogger friend Tamar flew into London from Philadelphia yesterday, on her way to a walking holiday in the North of England, providing an excuse for a bloggers' meet-up with me and Natalie (whom I can't any longer imagine not being a friend, but it's less than two years since, very pleased but very intimidated to be meeting such a talented artist, I accepted her invitation to tea) and Andy, who's been not far away, but never in the flesh until now (not far away for a very long time, in fact, since we were students at the same time in Cambridge more than 30 years ago, but never met then either).
So here we are in a pub dining-room in North London, close to Natalie's welcoming, art-filled house where we gathered earlier, with too much to say, and nothing quite adequate. "You remember what you wrote 6 months ago about that? It made me cry and I thought about it for weeks." would be kind-of embarrassing. And so would staring longer than is quite polite at a smile that is wider and wryer than in their photographs.
So we talk in enthusiastic bursts, with sudden small silences. And gratefully share our delight in the dessert.
And later I humiliatingly get us completely lost and walk in circles in the rain between the bus-stop and Tamar's hotel.
How sour-sweetly shocking and amazing that we met.
Tamar brought the Hershey's Hugs, and I've just eaten too many while writing this.
simple things: the bottle of water again
Finished the translation. Eyes on stalks and brain like mashed potato. Took the afternoon off; sometimes it's the only sane thing to do. And the light was good, with strong shadows, but not much glare. So I took some photos, which unfailingly puts me back together.
sunny
shady
I was wondering: does getting behind a camera lens feel so good because it reinforces that edge, or because it dissolves it?
Perhaps, in a magical way, it does both?
artist
facing South: another of the silent visitors
Anyhow, photography boosts serotonin levels - definitely.
The edge between self and other, my body and the rest of matter: it's the effort of always keeping that edge in sight, endlessly reconstructing it, that makes me so damned tired, I think. An awfully futile enterprise, since of course there is no edge.
The slight, good-looking, usually self-contained young man weeps in my office, hiccuping, hanging his head, trying not to weep.
In the last exam, his sleep-deprived mind went blank, all the facts and strategies he knew that morning left him, and he sat for two hours trembling in fear and disbelief.
He wants to wind the clock back, make the nightmare disappear. Can't I do it again? No, not until next year, and all your faraway, aspiring, expecting family will know your shame. The old, naive, dramatic story that coexists with the blasé culture of global youth.
'I want to die', he chokes out, and I want to hug him and tell him there is so much more to life than exam results, but I'm not sure if it's alright, where he comes from, to be hugged by a woman - even a woman older than your mother.
I'm so sorry. Sorry that an overpriced British education is such a precious, laboured for, burdensome prize. Sorry his young life is consumed by this. But who am I to feel sorry? At least he strives for something, knows what he wants.
A sleepy morning, after working late on Saturday. On the radio, an enthralliing setting of Psalm 137 (By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept) by Claude Goudimel. Quite appropriate, said the presenter, reading out a news snippet from Iraq. Some comfort, though, in its spare loveliness.
A day of heavy showers. The leafy park like a freshly washed and spun green salad. The thick, damp sunshine that bursts out between rain-clouds.
More than half way through, much more - and it seems no bad place to be. It's a fuller, more interesting picture with half the petals dropped. Feeling hope, and even equanimity, as far as it is possible to feel them in a world that inspires neither. For one day, anyway, flowers, and the news firmly switched off.
