Only a Blockhead

Monday daybreak

(Photo by M)

The rapidly waning moon is high and bright in the early morning sky. Crows fly from roost toward scavenging grounds. Fallen leaves lie moist and brown, or hang twisting from spiders' webs. Drops of dew and yesterday's rain line the roadside wires, and glisten from the tips of pine needles. 

On the fields at the top of the valley there's a layer of mist close to the ground, a meter or two thick. A couple, the oldest generation of the neighboring farming family, are pulling long white daikon radishes from the damp earth, and the smell of the crushed green leaves fills the air. 

The sky turns pink, and the sun breaks the horizon. Looking across the fields, the landscape recedes in silhouettes, the darkest nearest, the furthest horizon a misty, milky gray that blends with the sky.

In the space of thirty minutes, the day is born.

--Julian

What a beautiful morning

(photo by M)

Blue the sky for the first time in days, scrubbed by the wind that dried the washing even under gray skies yesterday.

White, Mount Fuji, snow covered, and less mysterious for having been climbed last August.

Orange the persimmons hanging on leafless trees, glinting in the sunshine against a green background of bamboo.

Red the leaves of the kaede maple trees, brighter now than the ochre bricks of the university buildings.

And tonight there is a full moon. Night by night, it has been waxing behind a gauze of cloud, but when the sun sets it will be seen round and high in a clear black sky.

--Julian

On Photography

This, just in, from NC Tate:

Ah, photography: you just go on your nerve - nerve needed as, during one example of the act, these days especially, you're likely to be chased down the street by someone with a knife, an objection-taker.

Pace: photography is faithless and encouraging. And seemingly democratic, and a photograph now quick to erase, even before it is one. It attracts adverbs.

Photographs are shades, lines and shapes, and how they're ordered is paramount. Most of us will leave behind, and may feature in, a large number. As ever, the best caught shots are few. Which is the reason not to stop.

England, November 2008 

Lunchtime

—NC Tate

Library

Library

—NC Tate

Guy Browning and the castoffs of the universe

That I very much enjoy humorist Guy Browning may be known only to those who explore the folder in the sidebar of this blog labeled "Books Julian Finished in 2008." A spare, chill, echoey place is that folder. Almost a year's worth of reading, and the contents can be counted on both hands. Only when you click on an icon does the book cover fill the screen, and you can read my comment on the book at the bottom. Compare this to the warm, bright, populated spaces of "Books David Finished in 2008." You could spend an afternoon happily poking around in there, clicking icon after icon to bring David to your elbow as a genial guide to the pleasures of the written word.

But I digress. Back in my own cold, dark vault, a spotlight illuminates a pair of titles by Guy Browning, both extravagantly praised. For more of the same, I'm presently reading, not for the first time, his Never Hit a Jellyfish with a Spade collection of "How to" columns. The last time was aloud with my mother aged well over 90. Lines like,

(How to eat a box of chocolates) "Starting on the bottom tray before the top tray has been finished is the devil's work. Even if the last one on the top layer is a disgusting praline prepuce, you've got to choke it down before you can go for the orange cream downstairs."

were likely to reduce us to helpless laughter to the point that I was forbidden to open the book until she'd taken a trip to the bathroom.

I digress again. What I really want to say is that Browning last weekend wrote a Guardian column on the current financial crisis, specifically, the future of the players who brought it on. Now that they are unable to pursue their vocations, he proposes alternative and suitable employment.  Enjoy! (Thanks, Chas, for the tip.)

--Julian

Illiteracy

American Gothic

A recent article in the International Herald Tribune describes the life and work of Maine novelist Carolyn Chute.  The article, by Charles McGrath, is good, the picture that accompanies it is priceless, and Chute's forthcoming work sound intriguing, but I was troubled by the following sentence, about Ms. Chute's husband:

Michael Chute, her second husband, is illiterate and used to work as a woodcutter and gravedigger.

How is it that the husband of a woman who evidently values literacy—she's a novelist, after all—is still unable to read?  Perhaps he has some physiological condition which makes reading impossible?  If that's not the case, I hope Ms. Chute is busy teaching him how to decipher those marks on the page that have given so many of us so much pleasure.

—David

In early November

It was a blue skied, sunny afternoon. A pair of kites wheeled over the valley. In the bushes outside the window, dead leaves disengaged and clattered down through the branches to the ground. It was warm enough in the sunshine to hark back to one of the joys of summer: needing little to cover the body--T-short, shorts and sandals--to go out. Also of summer was the crunch of a juicy tomato from the strange and welcome second crop, sliced into a sandwich.

But it was late fall, shading to winter. The plum orchard was beginning to look bald and leafless. By the road, susuki grass waved in the breeze, ends now splayed. The tallest trees of the valley, towering presences, were turning a warm brown. I had lunch on the patio in the warm sunshine. Not a mosquito. An electric green mantis dropped from somewhere onto a palm frond and swayed hypnotically, glaring with its goggle eyes.

That was a week ago. Today, with a light rain falling, it's a day for reading with a hot cup of tea in the warmth of the kotatsu.

--Julian

Tea of Choice

Tea of Choice

—NC Tate

Asian Shopping

Asian Shopping

Untitled

Untitled

—NC Tate