With the aim of encouraging literary exchanges and cross-cultural initiatives between cities, a few years ago UNESCO launched a new world-wide award, for a City of Literature. In order to be considered for this accolade, a city had to meet the following criteria:
It has to be an urban environment in which literature plays an integral part. It must be a centre with a reputation for hosting literary events and festivals. A wide range of libraries, bookstores and cultural centres must be accessible to all citizens. There should be diversity in publishing initiatives, using new media to promote and strengthen the literary market.
The city which was awarded the first City of Literature, certainly meets all of the criteriaand more. It is often described as ‘a city built on books’ and with the first printing press set up there in 1507, it became recognised as a world centre for publishing. It has a rich literary heritage and thriving contemporary book scene.
Many great writers created their best-known characters there:
Arthur Conan Doyle brought us Sherlock Holmes, J.M. Barrie created Peter Pan, and Robert Louis Stevenson delivered Jekyll and Hyde.
The city also nurtures contemporary writers who have made their mark on literature; Muriel Spark, J.K. Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith and Ian Rankin to name only a few.
Ian Rankin said: "I feel part of a tradition which is as vibrant now as ever before. Edinburgh is a city of the mind, a writer's city.”
And, yes, in 2004, Edinburgh was the proud city to be granted the status as the world's first UNESCO City of Literature. Since then various campaigns to encourage reading and enjoyment of literature have been set up annually in the city. Throughout February this year, the campaign is ‘Carry a Poem!’
Sparking off a month of poetry events, such fun happenings as Poetree Swaps, Poetry Pub Quizzes and a Poetry Olympics have been planned, and thousands of free books and poetry pocket-cards are being given away. ‘On the Carry a Poem’ website, people are asked to post messages explaining where they carry their poems, and which poems they are carrying. How they are carried vary from such obvious places as in pockets, purses, pinned to jackets, to the more radical and permanent place - a tattoo!
I liked Scottish actor Alan Cumming's response that he carries his poem "in his heart" Awww!
The website also has a lengthy list of ‘the most carried poets’ which includes many of my personal favourites: Carol Anne Duffy, Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, John Betjeman, Johne Dunne, Norman MacCaig, Robert Frost, Wendy Cope - and leaving the best until last - Robert Burns.
Now, with Valentine's Day coming up, I have a suggestion as to how you can impress your object of desire. Forget the supermarket roses, Carry a Poem! Deliver your rose in a love poem, pulled out with a flourish from your pocket. Here’s my recommendation to impress; Burns' most quoted love poem:
My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose
That's newly spring in June
My Love is Like a Melody
That's sweetly played in tune
So fair thou art my bonnie lass (or lad if you like)
Sae deep in love am I
And I will love thee still my dear, till a' the seas gang dry.
Should bring a wee thrill to even the most jaded cynic. However, if you're in the unfortunate position of having been ‘dumped’ by the love of your life, well you can pin another Burns poem to your sleeve, this time with added angst. Burns had a poem for every occasion and in these lines he also conjures up a rose, which, sadly, is now no longer a symbol of love. The abandoned lover is wandering by the banks of the River Doon, recalling the good times which have ended in heartbreak:
Oft hae I roved by Bonnie Doon
Tae see the Rose and woodbine twine
And every bird sang o' its love
As fondly sae did I o' mine.
Wi a lightsome heart I pu'd a rose
Full sweet upon it's thorny tree -
But my false lover stole that rose
And ahh - he left the thorn wi' me.
Bastard! (my expression, not the Bard's) Of course Valentine's Day isn’t the only day you could carry a poem, nor do you have to live in Edinburgh to join in this February poetry fest. You can brighten up the chilly grey month by acting on some of the inspirational ideas from the Carry a Poem website www.carryapoem.com
So, who is for setting up a Poetry Olympics? Poem and Spoon Race, Tossing the Poem anyone?
But there is one place where a poem will be carried that must surely top all others - this Sunday, Valentines Day, when dusk falls, to celebrate the importance of love in all its forms, lines from a poem will be projected on the north face of the great rock of Edinburgh Castle.
The chosen lines are from the poem, Disenchantments by the brilliant Scottish poet, Douglas Dunn:
‘Look to the living, love them, and hold on’
Like the castle rock, love endures. Happy Valentine's Day
little little gals
young gal
Keith and Paul
Elise enjoys the band
Dottie, Dave Temple and co
Denis Aguera on guitar with Josef behind
Dave Temple encore
The first Saturday in February at La Gavotte, Riberac was just as unpredictable as the others have been. It was packed out when we arrived, with a sprawling spill-out on the pavement outside (even though the temperatures were decidedly chilly. A far cry from those mellow, mild summer nights.
Inside, a very young teenage girl was confidently singing. A cluster of even younger gals were harmonizing at the mike. Around the bar was a no-go area of little little girls. One of my friends looked positively dismayed at the sight. It was a brief timeless aberration. Once the gal-set was over and strongly applauded, the littl’uns trotted off home.
A scene ouverte is an unruly beast that needs a tight hand otherwise, less-than-competent or merely inexperienced performers can delude themselves into staying on stage too long and then someone really ace finds the hanging-around, the indecision, too inconclusive and they are tempted to grab their gear and go.
I think the fact that most people have travelled quite a few kilometers either to perform or to watch, means that they are prepared to stay the distance. They don’t leave, they grit their teeth or better still, they start chatting to someone. They stay.
By the time, the owners had given Peter the definitive nod to stop (about half past 12) everyone had had a go. Sadly the last group, who were getting into their stride, only managed to squeeze in one number, before the plug got pulled on them. Hopefully they will be back because they were sounding good.
There’s a lot of tolerance on tap because the range is huge – in style and talent. I figure if I hear 2 or 3 numbers that I love. That’s fine. I just blank out the others. I hope that the guitarist Denis Aguera will be back. He did fine.
Keith and the boys came up with new material. The first number was sad and sombre ‘everyone I know goes away in the end …’.They sound like they are in it for the long haul. They generate a big sound and they bounce off each other very nicely.
Dottie only sang one number with the seasoned Dave Temple. There was no mistaking where Careless Love would take you and leave you as she sang, ‘I love my Papa and my Mama too but now I’m going away with you.’
I say 3 cheers to the staff and the musicians and the paying punters because something fun has sprung out of nothing. It’s great to see French and English rubbing along so well, all the cracks smoothed over by the shared enjoyment of the music they are playing or listening to. They are pulling in a great crowd of people, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a cold unremitting winter. Pretty damn good. We won’t be here for the March gig but we’ll be champing at the bit for the April one.
image from Johburg airport
burnt stump from last year's Ozzie fires
rounding up the beau-frere's Melbourne sheep
Melbourne beach houses
We are in New Zealand after a surprisingly successful week or so in Oz. Five beds in seven days - eight counting tonight. We are shacked up in a sort of airport hotel before picking up a camper-van in the morning. This will allow us one bed for five different places before we collapse into somewhere luxurious in down-town Auckland next weekend.
Back to Oz. The Melbourne bit was, well, sort-of Melbourne like, but the highlight was getting out of town and into the bush where Gay's week-day dentist brother runs a real live sheep station. We hurtled across scorched country in a beat-up Toyota Land Cruiser filled with dogs, fencing wire and unlikely looking bits of scrap iron and herded several thousand Merino wool sheep into one great flock which for some reason or other had to be chased into a different pen/ field / hill / mountain / state / whatever ... This we found more thrilling and real than all of the phony game-drives we have been on in Africa. And all much closer with significantly less danger of being eaten. No brown snakes or red-back spiders either. We were not far from where the great bush fires of February 2009 struck and the Australian papers (so vastly superior to the now democratically much dumbed-down South African papers) were filled with stories of bravery and tragedy - 170 people died when a wall of fire 45 kilometres long, traveling at 40 kph with flames reaching to a height of 50 metres consumed all before it. So much so that windscreen glass was melted in cars trapped on the Hume Highway, which is, today, still lined with blackened tree stumps. Sobering stuff. Fortunately this anniversary weekend was marked by welcome cool rain The same weekend a year ago the mercury hit 49 degrees for three days in a row. Makes S W France a pretty safe place to live, huh? Ah, and I forgot to mention the real live kangaroos which watched the shepherd bit from a safe distance and added to the true outback flavour.
And New Zealand? It is Tuesday and we are in some of the most beautiful countryside we have ever seen. And there is a lot of it. And not a lot of people. Behind us mountains drop sheer to a pale blue shimmering South Pacific Ocean. There are green, green and lush, lush forests with great tree ferns filling every gap and white beaches with sun-bleached sea shells 10 centimetres deep at high water mark. All around us the rather curious cultural diversity which seems to typify the new New Zealand. Example: at the Pacific end of the Coromandel Peninsula (so named after Her Majesty's Ship Coromandel) sits yet another small town with a Maori name - Whangamata - most places here - big cities apart - have Maori names but all manage to contain all that is worst about colonial longing for 'back Home' when it comes to street naming. I spotted Wentworth Valley Avenue as a shining example - this on the corner where the local fire-station wall was flashily decorated with a mural (USA inspired?) saying 'C'mon Guys - Be Firewise' Hmm.
New Zealand then? Wonderful because it is just like England used to be. Or the reverse? When we showed our passports on arrival here and said we might want to linger a little longer than our outward bound air tickets showed the uniform guy replied 'No worries - I have given you six month visa anyway'. Some difference from the brusque Aussie cow that gave Gay severe aggro because her entry form missed out a fourth and non-used given name. And in Australia Gay has a brother, a brace of sister in laws, nephews, nieces and grand versions of the same. Yet in NZ we know not a soul. But here a cab driver was proud of the fact that the Queen (the English version) is still on the money. I have not come across that sort of reverse patriotism since I was in Nova Scotia, Canada. It is said that, of all the countries in the world, NZ has the greatest percentage of its citizens who live abroad. We wonder why. Maybe because it really is so very far away from anywhere. Very nice but a tad parochial perhaps?
This week has been a disaster. I started two pieces and abandoned them because they were going to be way too long(although the part1, part 2 thing is attractive.)
Then I started a third piece - Kerala Backwaters. I pulled up the wikipedia entry on it and began to write a piece that would include some wikipedia stuff (acknowledged of course) but two things happened. First I jammed my
overloaded computor so that I could only save or edit the piece that I had spent two hours on. Only way out was to abandon it too. Second the earache that had been bothering me for a few days turned out to be a middle ear infection so lost most of Friday and all of Saturday toexcruciating pain. Now the antibiotics seem to be winning and the feeling has been reduced to ‘the day after a kick in the ear from a horse.’ (Still, no broken bones.)
But the result is no blog piece for this week - I couldn't even mine my old pieces. I will get a new hard drive of 200g which will release me from the 49g I have now. My back up hard drive melted in India and awaits some action.
Glad you got another Suzuki. I hired a new Toyota Corrolla in Auckland that seemed pretty good. My old comfortable Mercedes is going to last for a while I think (unless Jack wipes it out - if he passes his driving test this week.)
13 years and counting, with only 132,000 on the clock. It did only 2,400 in its first 3 years as it belonged to an eastern suburbs 'walker'.
A walker is a male used by a wealthy woman to accompany her on social outings. This walker received his car as part of the deal but they always used her more expensive Mercedes. When she died he got her car and I got his. Not a bad job if you didn't have a life.
Stephen O’R from Sydney
Photo by Roger Morton
Careful nifty parking in Angouleme - a large nearby town in the Charente, that we are very fond of.
Thursday this week was an important date in the U.K. radio calendar, as the RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research) listening figures were published. These covered the last quarter of 2009 - from October to December.
At a time when the future of digital stations is often discussed, it was heartening news for us that the Radio 7 listening figures have increased, and now stand at 931,000. This is up by 48,000 from last quarter, and an increase of 81,000 from this time last year. In the BBC digital radio portfolio, Radio 7 is the most listened-to network.
So, my thanks to all of you who continue to enjoy the station, and to the Radio 7 staff who, within limited resources, put such a lot of effort into bringing you a great schedule.
As a network providing drama and comedy, we don't cover sport events, but in this 5th year of the biennial U.K.event Sport Relief, we're delighted to give some on-air profile to this worthwhile charitable offshoot of Comic Relief.
Be assured that we have no plans to tempt Alex Riley to match Eddie Izzard's recent remarkable achievement of running 43 gruelling marathons in 51 days, neither will we be persuading Jim to don his swimming gear and do a "David Walliams" by taking the plunge and crossing the English Channel in 10 hours, nor will we try to coax Michaela to be the first woman to kayak the Amazon River.
No, our presenters are staying strictly studio-based.
Instead, we've enticed Radio 4 sports presenter, Garry Richardson, to become our Sport Relief Comedy Controller for Saturday 20th March (Sport Relief weekend runs from 19th - 21st March) Garry is a great fan of Radio 7, and is delighted to be able to offer his services for such a laudable cause.
Here's where you come in! There are several archive comedy series which have occasionally included comic sport sketches, for example, one of my favourites is the Radio Active, Wimbledon Special and I know that many of our radio comedy aficionados will remember many more.
What we'd like you to do is e-mail us your requests to hear a comedy programme with a sporting flavour - no matter how tenuous - and then we'll ask Garry to choose the best for his Comedy Controller six-pack.
Send your suggestions, headed Sport Relief Comedy, to us at radio7@bbc.co.uk
We are now in our third continent in the Wonderful New World of Cafe
Latte and chilled Sauvignon Blanc. I am already beginning to think
that all of those Rough Guides and Lonely Planets could be combined
into one thin on-line version covering all of the countries in the
World in one neat file. Gone is the individuality of the Cape Town
docks with their whores and the Navigator's Den - a gloriously low
dive if ever there was one. No more fussing tugs and great grey
cranes unloading hessian sacks by the net-full from the bowels of
rusting cargo carriers from far-away places with strange sounding
names, far over the sea. Now only a vast impersonal container wharf
exists, shielded from thieves and onlookers alike by a huge anti-
terrorist fence topped with razor wire.
Those marvellous old red brick warehouses built to harbour the outbound plunder of Empire and inbound added value production of the Old Country now empty the
pockets of tourists and locals alike at uni-sex hairdressers and
white wine and brunch cafes. Visit a multi-plex cinema and buy a
Louis Vuiton dog collar should the whim take you. And pay, pay, pay
in plastic. Who needs local funny money or to know about exchange
rates when "American Express will do nicely". Where once-upon-time
(now politically incorrect) fleets of tiny black whalers huddled
against the hull of their great blood-stained mother factory ship
there are now tourist boats offering sunset booze cruises and trips to
Robben Island. Not all bad then ... but ... but...
So it is in Fremantle. Take a peek at the buildings above shop-front
level and they are wholly glorious - an almost perfectly preserved
dockside from a maritime past from the days when merchants and
shipping lines carved their names with pride into the stone
and stucco facades of their commercial castles. These are still
there. Shaw-Savill Line. The Wool Exchange. W. D and H.O Wills.
Even tobacco was something to show-off about then. But it is at
pedestrian level it all falls apart. Cheap shoe shops and fried fish
abound. Even trying to buy a T-shirt presented difficulties.
I needed to do this because our luggage was in West Africa not West Australia. But
no way did I want to be branded as 'I love Perth' (which I did not at
that time) or 'Go Aussie Go' was not without complication. Plain
white perhaps? “Sorry Sir, no call for that.”
But wait. It's not all bad. Best Italian meal for many a year last night and off to brunch (yes) with prospect of Aussie Open in real time this afternoon. OK, the tennis will be on TV and brunch will be in an ex-biscuit factory
now pretending to be a Farmer's Market - like they do in Sydney and LA and - hell - just about everywhere else. But maybe the universal Grey Goose martini straight up with a lemon twist will lift the spirits. Worth a shot or two anyway.
Later. We watched that marvellous tennis so frequently interrupted by some pretty brash commercials. What is it about Australians that they have to emphasise the Australian-ness of everything. Australia's biggest, Australia's newest, Australia's tastiest ... methinks they have a complex about making the bottom end of the world, the most
important place on earth.
A million years ago Ava Gardner was here filming the screen version of Nevil Shute's On the Beach - a novel about the end of the world. As Ava was quoted as saying " They sure chose the right place to
shoot it."
Our muso friends Judith and Jim suggested we have a listen to Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. On 16 December he played a duet on Taratata with Sting. On Friday 9 April he will be playing at Café de la Danse 5, Passage Louis-Philippe, Paris 11. Tickets are 27€50. He will be singing on Arte’s ‘One Shot Not’ on February 25.
He is an indigenous Australian who was born in 1970. He is blind. In 2009, he was the No.1 best-selling world music album in the UK. (Source; Official UK Charts company). He plays guitar and sings and is a member of the Saltwater band. Have a listen.
The Supreme Court ruled that corporations can suddenly run political adverts during an election campaign – and there is absolutely no limit on how many, or how much they can spend. So if you anger the investment bankers by supporting legislation to break up the too-big-to-fail banks, you will smack into a wall of 24/7 ads exposing your every flaw. If you displease oil companies by supporting legislation to deal with global warming, you will now be hit by a tsunami of advertising saying you are opposed to jobs and the American Way.
If you rile the defence contractors by opposing the gargantuan war budget, you will face a smear-campaign calling you Soft on Terror. Representative Alan Grayson says: "It basically institutionalises and legalises bribery on the largest scale imaginable. Corporations will now be able to reward the politicians that play ball with them – and beat to death the politicians that don't... You won't even hear any more about the Senator from Kansas. It'll be the Senator from General Electric or the Senator from Microsoft."
If Americans want a democratic system, they have to pay for it – and that means fair state funding for political candidates. Candidates are essential for the system to work: you may as well begrudge paying for the polling booths, or the lever you pull. At the same time, the Supreme Court needs to be confronted: when the court tried to stymie the new deal, FDR tried to pack it with justices on the side of the people. Obama needs to be pressured.
None of the crises facing us all – from the global banking system to global warming – can be dealt with if a tiny number of super-rich corporations have a veto over every inch of progress. If Obama funks this challenge, he may as well put the US government on e-Bay – and sell it to the highest bidder. How would we spot the difference?
We get born and, if we are in a lucky country, we don't have to start work until we are five or six. Then we are at it in some way or other until we get to 'retirement' at sixty or sixty five. Our time for doing nothing out of 70 or 80
years of life, is five to twenty years, depending on gender, our health, or the warring habits of our neighbours, plus time off work.
Vernon Richards writing in his piece 'Wasted Manpower' (Why Work. Freedom Press, London, 1983)‘that the average person gets 4000 weeks of life.’ He reckons we spend 1000 weeks finding out what life is about, 1000 weeks sleeping, 250 preparing and eating food so that we can live, perhaps 250 washing and grooming, 600 weeks working to pay for all this, 100 weeks getting to and from work, and if we are generous and assume we don't do a lot of overtime we get 900 weeks to live life to the full’ (assuming we live to 70).
When we get to 'retire' in Australia we will find our local councils have recreation officers who will show us videos in whicha denim-suited retired TV personality wanders through the bush introducing us to the world of
Leisure that is available to 'mature' adults. Whether mature means mature enough to understand what my five year old instinctively knew, or whether it is a polite term for old, I leave to you.
When I started my work on this article I came across this notion called ‘The Protestant Work Ethic’ (PWE). In his book The Protestant Work Ethic, the author, Adrian Farnham, quotes Weber ' ... Weber explained that the fact that people pursue wealth and material gain for its own sake, not for necessity was due to Puritan asceticism and the concept of calling for the individual to fulfil his or her duty in this (rather than the other) world.’
I took this to mean that we like to have stuff and will do what's necessary to get it.
Weber maintained that puritans felt obliged to be regarded as chosen by God to perform good works. Success as a ‘calling’ became to be seen as a sign of being the elect. Puritans thus sought to achieve through economic activity. This notion of performing good through work went along nicely with industrialisation and was a major factor to the success of Fordism (the organized process of assembling goods and products ie cars or cigarettes).
Weber understood capitalism as a mass phenomenon: a culturally prescribedway of living, a moral doctrine to advance individuals' material interests. He saw that capitalism went against the traditional sense of effort and
value for work because it replaced the idea of self- sufficiency with accumulation. Weber believed that the desire to acquire is shared by most people; all types & classes ‘ capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise. For which it must be so: that in a wholly capitalistic order and society, an individual capitalist enterprise which did not take opportunities for profit making would be doomed to extinction.’
Given that we in a world that is predominantly a capitalist society (I think only China, Cuba and Vietnam hold out with their own brand of control, communism) WORK is heavily encouraged. (N. Korea? Ed) Ironically it was while I was being paid to work or, in my case wait, or to do nothing, that I began to be attracted to investigating the discourse and culture of NOTHING. I sometimes work as an actor, and a large part of acting in films
involves hours of doing nothing (as does being in prison but of course there is usually choice involved).
I enrolled in a university course after I had been sacked from a position in the Public service. As I was only 'acting ' in the position but had a permanent position at a lower grade, from which it was difficult to sack me, I got to do nothing for a few months. This period of doing nothing gave me the time to think.
So is nothing equal to time?
Weber quotes Benjamin Ferdinand who in 1736 wrote ‘ Necessary hints to those that would be rich’.
'Remember, that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labour, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, or rather thrown away, five shillings, besides.’
The PWE combined with capitalism has constructed a world where to do nothing is 'sinful', 'unpatriotic', 'to be a bludger', to have no status, to be pitied, to be object of charitable works, not to be rewarded or publicly rewarded. Reading PWE made me realise how we are constantly and continuously reminded of the values and necessity of hard work.
Adrian Furnham outlines eight attributes of the PWE.
1.People have a normal and religious obligation to fill their lives with heavy physical toil. For some this means that hard work, effort and drudgery are to be valued ; physical pleasures and enjoyments are to be shunned; and an ascetic existence of methodical labour is the only acceptable way to live.
2.Men and women are expected to spend long hours of work with little or no time for personal recreation and leisure.
3.A worker should have a dependable attendance record with low absenteeism and tardiness.
4. Workers should be highly productive and produce a large quantity of goods or service.
5.Workers should take pride in their work and do their jobs well.
6.Employees should be achievemen-orientated and constantly strive for promotions and advancement.
7.High status jobs with prestige and the respect of others are important indicators of a good person.
8.People should acquire wealth through honest labour and retain it through thrift and wise investment. Frugality is desirable; extravagance and waste should be avoided.
Baptised in the icy waters of Calvinist Theology, the business of life once regarded as perilous to the soul, acquired new sanctity.’ Labour is not merely an economic means: it is a spiritual end.’R.H.Tawny
Seest thou a man diligent in his business. He shall stand before the kings. Proverbs XXII, 29
He who neither worketh for himself nor for others, will not receive the reward of God. The Prophet Mohammed
And just as I feel self-congratulatory about my position on this I find myself thinking of my feelings about Kerry Packer and his gambling and the Royal family and it's apparently inane lifestyle.
We have been told to hate yuppies and their conspicuous consumption by a media which is owned by the rich to make money out of making the poor and bored feel better about their not getting enough.
A BMW is crass but a Bright Red Suzuki is more realistic and a 70's Australian six is groovy.
We are reminded in the presentation of mortgage ads that home ownership and all its pragmatic advantages can have a warm and fuzzy side too. (Which Bank is doing it right for you.) Try getting a mortgage without a job even if it is lower than the rent you pay.
‘You can have, but don't you take too much’ (Chicago Transit Authority 1960's pop group.) Cos it's not good for you. Stop it you will go blind.
We developed newer, softer, work ethics. The old rules are re-marketed, even job ads are written in such away that you don't work for, but report to, a higher authority. Your success and your package will depend on how your personality communicates. How are your people skills. Have you commodified yourself well enough. If not do a course; change yourself; marketing yourself is the go. You can achieve with just a little ambition and aggression. Even women can do it now. NEW WORK ETHIC STATEMENTS
I prefer earning less if it affords me more leisure time. Poor people are just as happy as the rich. Most work in this world is dull and lacks human dignity. Why work hard if things are going well without. There are other ways besides working for making one’s living. I would terrified by the idea of working my whole life-time in the
same company. If earning much more money means less leisure time, then I say no. Most jobs are so boring and uninteresting that I feel aversion to working. I'd like to work but not at the cost of losing my independence and
freedom. Anyone who does not work, has as much right to a normal income as those who work. A life without working would be fine. Meaningless work would make me sick.
I took this simple curiosity of how ‘nothing’ is part of our language and because of my desire/need to write something for the blog and it has caused me to do all this work and risk plumbing new depths of pretension.I am have been conditioned by the PWE and therefore no longer accept responsibility for my self. I shall however try to identify its influences (THE PWE) and, avoiding work, do what I can to expunge them from this planet.
Nothing is a natural state out of which spontaneous ideas and actions arise.
The weather last week was dramatic. Thursday we had ice (on which many people slipped and fell.) Friday we had thick blinding fog; Saturday we had snow (see above).Photo: Roger Morton
L'édition 2010 de l'exposition de la Maison des Auteurs ambitionne de montrer plus particulièrement au public les méthodes et secrets de fabrication de créateurs venus de Corée du Sud, d'Inde, du Québec, d'Espagne, d'Italie mais aussi des quatre coins de France. Crayonnés, croquis, découpage, story-board... de la feuille de papier à la palette graphique, les résidents de la Maison des Auteurs, qu'ils soient illustrateurs, auteurs de bande dessinée ou réalisateurs de films d'animation, explorent tous les outils, convoquent toutes les techniques. Une visite instructive et étonnante pour découvrir comment la jeune création graphique internationale travaille, du premier coup de crayon au résultat final.
Auteurs exposés : Marine Blandin, Lorenzo Chiavini, Rachel Deville, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Catherine Ferrier, Elena Forcato, Nicolas Gazeau, Thomas Gosselin, François Henninger, Alexeï Kispredilov, Jung-Hyoun Lee, Lola Lorente, Andréas Marchal, Alban Marilleau, Sylvie-Anne Menard, Eva Montanari, Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine, Ninie (Virginie Perrot), Yoon-Sun Park, Amruta Patil, Valentina Principe, Aude Samama, Anaël Seghezzi, Clara Tanit, Alfonso Zapico.
The Festival International de la Bande Dessine takes place in Angouleme at the end of January, usually spread over 4 days. The TGV runs from Paris to Angouleme, so this makes it very accessible. The first one was in 1974. The last one we went to was very impressive. We queued in the cold alongside dozens of attractive, vibrant looking people. Once inside, we watched the cartoonists work at speed, alongside those dozens of vibrant, exciting people. My memory is that all the cartoonists were men. They all smoked and they all drew with their left hand.
We would have gone again this year if we weren’t having this hiccup with cars and (as it turns out) 7 broken bones between us. Not to mention that today is the main day of the Festival and it has been snowing most of the day and the temperatures have not risen about zero. We are much too snow-shaken and stirred to venture out in these conditions.
