Culling Again

Almost invisible on the far left between the field microscope I have no real reason for owning except I like the box it comes in, and the big fat Martin Amis book, is The Case of the Caretaker's Cat by Erle Stanley Gardner, which I'm pretty sure I would have loved in my teens when I was reading Saint novels and Christie's 'Bright Young Things' spy books. It's all a bit too sassy and dramatic for me now. 

Next to that Martin Amis' The War Against Cliche, a collection of essays and reviews. Some of it's great - such as his comments on what used to be called Lit and Soc, and it's demise (or at least, it's painful earnestness and eventual becoming very poorly indeed), his review of Philip Roth, sympathy for Lydia Bennet, and dry appreciation of Martin Seymour-Smith. 

It feels like he's just skimming over the books he's writing about though, a stone across the surface of a pond. Fine for a magazine review intended to give the reader a flavour of such and such a thing to decide if they want it, but not a book I need to hang on to.

Jean Rhys Letters. I gave up on this half way through. She is so thin skinned and I felt like I was nosing into something absolutely none of my business, a fellow human being like a wasp trying to get out of a window and only crashing into it again and again.

Willam Golding The Hot Gates - much of what I wrote about Martin Amis above probably applies here. Individually entertaining essays, but I don't need to read them again.

David Mitchell - Thinking About it Only Makes it Worse - ditto the above.

Matt Haig Reasons to Stay Alive - I'm pretty sure I was given this by an aunt, along with a book by Danny Baker I haven't read yet and Swallow This by Joanna Blythman, with the idea I would read them if I wanted and take them to the bookswap. Blythman was excellent and I'm hanging onto that, and the Danny Baker is on my bathroom bookshelves.
Reasons I took against on the very first page. I'm sure there are people out there this book will help, and I'm glad if it helped Mr Haig to write it, but I don't want to read it. Sorry.

Nicholas Bentley How Can You Bear to be Human - I simply don't find him funny, and since there isn't much to this book except humour and draftmanship there doesn't seem any point in keeping it.

James Thurber Alarms and Diversions - slightly more amusing but not really. I think part of the problem is that the odd cartoon makes me smile, but pages of them make me shrug.

Colin Watson's Coffin, Scarcely Used is a perfectly workmanlike murder mystery that I know the solution to now.

The Various Haunts of Men by Susan Hill is not perfectly workmanlike, it's too long, There are three perfectly good first chapters from different points of view, and for some reason she's included them all. I bailed out at 150 pages. Odd because I've read short stories by Susan Hill and she's good at building tension so surely realised she was letting it deflate over and over here?

The Memorial, Christopher Isherwood. I wrote a review of this here. I won't reread it.

And those last three books on the right are actually library books waiting to be returned. Ways of Seeing by John Berger followed as a logical step on from Breakfast at Sothebys by Philip Hook. Seeing was written in 1971 but is still relevant today. In fact the essay on publicity images is more relevant than ever, and the one on nudes highlights an attitude to women and which women had towards themselves that it's in no-ones interest we slip back into.

Speaking of which Gladys Mitchell's The Devil's Elbow is a nice little murder story badly spoilt by the constant negative 'she asked for it' refrain around the woman who has been killed. She appears to have been a nymphomaniac, or a good time girl. I'm not sure why that's a murdering offence.

On the far right is Heads and Straights by Lucy Wadham, which is one of the best of the 'tube line' books I've read so far. It's the Circle Line, but not really about the Circle Line. I won't say what it is about, because these books are so slim that they're easily spoilt.

Incidentally my least favourite was Waterloo-City, City-Waterloo by Leanne Shapton, which is basically the thoughts of people going to work, and then coming back again, and which was an insult to the human imagination. I don't believe the human being has been born that is as dull as this book makes us all out to be.

Incidentally - or not - one of the characters is reading Mrs Dalloway, in which Virginia Woolf does a much better and richer job of getting inside people’s heads and memories and internal dialogue. Maybe that’s meant to be the point, that people on the Drain going back and forth are duller, or that work anaesthetises us into dullness. I dunno. 

Don't care much. It's that sort of book. 

No idea what this is about but leaving it here.

Life Class

Last week Tuesday I went to a life drawing class at The Exhibit in Balham. It's not très sérieux, but it's serious enough, while getting you to loosen up and think about drawing in different ways. Anyway here are a couple of the things I did. 

this was with the left hand - I've noticed before how drawing with the left hand brings things I've only subconsciously noticed to the fore. That nose like a bird of prey that I hadn't really spotted when using the right hand.

and this is a back. Lots of muscle on this model. Interesting to see how the tissue distributes itself. Wide back, strong thighs and arms, and then all the softness in the belly and the rump. Nothing like the 'ideal' images you get in statuary and painting.

Anyway that's two out of nine or ten drawings they got us to to - like music it's practice, practice, practice if you ever want to get good.

The View From the Shard/A View of the Shard.

I finally got up the Shard a week or two ago, and then posted about something else but anyway, this is the best photo I took - it's not perfect, because it's through glass, but look how tiny everything is, like castles built of wooden blocks and airfix battleships. 

This weekend we walked from Crystal Palace to Nunhead - about 7 miles - along the Green Chain walk, through Horniman Gardens, which has a really nice but very busy cafe, and this view below.

And then went up One Tree Hill, but that picture didn't come out as well so have a watercolour of a goldfish instead. 

(In case you're wondering the bottom right hand corner had an angel fish in it, and there was a guppy too, but I wasn't pleased with them so I chopped them out.) I've been painting a lot of watercolours as part of the Cass Art Make A Splash challenge and if you want to see all my attempts they're on my twitter feed. Some are better than others and some are distinctly worse, but it motivated me to practice, which is always good.

Painting - Sagrada Familia

Just a quick pencil and paint sketch of the Basilica in Barcelona. I'm not 100% happy with it - the colours are off a bit - but I'm going with for now. 

For those people who care about these things - which includes me - I drew this with a plain HB pencil then used a Winsor and Newton pocket box, with the extendable paintbrush included, to colour and highlight. Some additional bright blue was created with a Pilot erasable v-pen fountain pen. The book itself is a Seawhite travel journal, with lined pages one side and plain paper the other.

And I used the vignette function on my computer to keep the detail of the pic and blur the writing on the other page so it wouldn't be a distraction.

Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks

I think this might be my first truly negative review. Normally I just stop reading books I don’t care for.

Anyway, in brief, Notebooks would have made a very entertaining paperback of about half the length it actually is. I’m reluctant to entirely blame the writer – I picture him like Tuppence in her attic with ‘old favourites’ scattered around her, getting much too carried away by his own enthusiasm – but a decent editor should have given it a gentle pruning at the very least. 

Unfortunately the lack of this has resulted in a book long and dry and detailed enough to be a textbook – with each plot device described and a list of all those books where it was used scrupulously included for evidence every single time – but which couldn’t actually be used as a textbook, largely because of the way Curran’s explanations are given not after Christie’s own words, so that the reader could use their own judgement for at least a few blissful seconds, but before.

I found it difficult to work out who the book is for. It’s chock-full of spoilers, and if you’re a fan you’ll find many of the things pointed out are those you’ve already noticed from your own reading of Christie. Whereas if you’re not a Christie fan - well, actually you wouldn’t be reading this book in the first place, would you? - but if you weren’t and you did (maybe if it was 1988 and you were 15 years old and everyone else in the house was watching Nightmare on Elm Street or in bed, and the only other books available were by Barbara Cartland) you would be utterly indifferent.

Actually I’ve read at least two books by Barbara Cartland. Not my cup of tea perhaps but she was good at what she did. She had a lightness of touch sadly missing here.

It’s not all bad - knowing Christie’s device for changing scenes around is interesting, and so is the revelation that she often hadn’t fixed on the murderer until quite late on. (Although I’m not sure that was the case in all of the book jottings Curran uses to support this argument. I think she might sometimes have been plotting red herrings). 

The loose groupings: ‘Murder in Retrospect’ or ‘The Nursery Rhyme Murders’ work well, and Curran does his best to date the notes, which was clearly incredibly difficult because Christie herself dated almost nothing, always had multiple notebooks on the go, and generally used whichever was nearest to hand. Putting the notes of all these tales back together must have been like doing a vast jigsaw puzzle.

They’re also quite cryptic in themselves and reminded me of my notes from work (see about half a list pasted below for reference):

Whistleblowing

Collating emails – maybe look to see if some of the questions answered by the policies sent. after that will be referral rates.

S11 action chase ups worded as ‘not wanting a gap.. helpful to see the actions from last time...’

CNWL

Other health partners (shame they’ve all left!)

Other than that check spreadsheet and email to Angela 28^th Jan

Sending S11s out to schools

Have everything on except independent school heads. Have started googling. EB going to provide letter/announcement to go.

x-check distribution list

May have to contact Elaine and Darren for CDOP and L&D. Annex A it

Future dates for case review subgroup and MASH

Feb and April ok now. Check Sept. Attendance on spreadsheet for Case review. Booked in for 11^th April MASH also booked until April.

Awful aren’t they? They work for me and no-one else.

Now imagine going through all the previous task lists like that, decades of them, and you’ll get an idea of what Curran was undertaking with the Christie notebooks.

So it’s a shame that there’s so much solid work here, and yet it’s so difficult to read.  

Not all the blame can be laid at the foot of the publisher though. Curran has a nasty habit of talking down some of Christie’s work as well. Death in the Sun is a ‘brave but not completely successful experiment.’ Lily’s alibi in Sleeping Murder 'shines out' in an ‘otherwise lacklustre book’. 

I could list twenty more examples, but unlike Curran, I know when to stop. I also know that if these were balanced by irrational enthusiasm about some of the other stories or if what he had written was a more frivolous, shorter, less ‘authorised by family and publishers’ sort of book I would shrug and move on. However in something like this that sets itself up as authoritative it’s much harder to excuse. He’s like one of those mildly but constantly criticising parents who don’t realise just how undermining they are. Or one of those Doctor Who fans who nitpick every episode and slate the producer, the new actor, the sets, but still always watch. 

One for the Christie completist perhaps, but not one I’ll be picking up again.  

And now I’m moving on (sort of) to Agatha Christie – An Autobiography. Wish me luck.

There is no reason this griffin is here. 

I just like him.

Inks...

Guess who bought herself some permanent drawing inks in the Black Friday sales.. 

Right hand picture drawn in pencil on the tube and coloured in later with ink and pen. Left hand one drawn in Amsterdam in biro at the breakfast bar on my last day and later painted in with ink and watercolour brush.

Amsterdam is great by the way, I adored the Van Gogh museum and they gave me a free mini sketchbook to use as I went round the Rijksmuseum and the food is good and.. you get the jist.

Strangely they didn't give my brother a free sketchbook. He thinks it's something to do with my hair.

Things

I have been painting:    

Also walking: 

near Reigate, North Downs Way

and last but not least reading:

In the Mountains - Elizabeth Von Arnim 

I’ve started this before, then stopped because it didn’t accord with my ideas of Von Arnim and what I expected and wanted from a book by Von Arnim. Being miserable in the last two months – for good reasons that I'm not ready to go into – it suited me rather well this time round. 

The main protagonist crawls (her word) into the Swiss mountains where she was once so happy before the war, trying to heal from her shattering of faith in goodness, the deaths of loved ones and possibly more that is never explained.

The book is written in diary format and as the diarist heals she starts to look outwards, to her guests, and the attention shifts and becomes more typically fairytale and less interesting, but I was still engaged to the end. 

The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rugen. 

If this book is even half true Von Arnim seems to have tried to do for real life people what she does so well for her fictional characters. Sadly real people don’t always play along. I was astonished that she ever thought they would.

With a Zero at its Heart – Charles Lambert

it’s a shame I didn’t read this in paperback. The book has a charming cover that doesn’t come through in pixels and certainly not the dull black and white of second generation kindle.  As always though once you start reading you don’t notice. 

It’s written in fragments of memory, sorted loosely, some more significant and some less and really, who knows which is which? Highly recommended. (Pretty sure I first read about this on Savidge Reads, which is also recommended.).

I'm also rereading:

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch. 

I’ve kind of lost momentum with the Rivers of London series. Foxglove Summer disappointed me and I’ve not managed to rekindle my enthusiasm with this one despite thoroughly enjoying it the first time round.

The Pale Horse

One of the creepier Agatha Christies, written in the 60s and in a setting contemporary for the time. Unlike TV Poirots and Marples, eternally suspended in the age of Art Deco and sombre suits, or retired colonels and summer dresses, Christie wrote of what was happening at the time. The Pale Horse starts among the coffee bar set in Chelsea.   

There is no Poirot or Marple in this one, but Marple’s Dane Calthrops (The Moving Finger) and Poirot’s Despards (Cards on the Table) are there, raising the interesting prospect that Marple and Poirot could, under certain circumstances, have actually met.

Also along for the ride is Ariadne Oliver, Agatha Christie’s alter ego, always a joy in small doses like the ones we get of her here.   

One of the things I've always liked about Christie - from when I started reading her in my teens, is that she doesn't despise or have low expectations of the young people in her books. Occasionally one might be naive, or an older character may find their fashions or politics confusing, but there's none of this sweeping dismissal of anyone under 20 or 18 or 14 which you get from supposedly broadminded journos. Third Girl is a good example of that, and so to a lesser extent is this. 

Cambridge revisited.

I know that people do sometimes read this blog, because Google gives me the stats, although I don't know if it's different people or sometimes the same people and if they come here looking for something completely different and click straight off again, so it seems silly to talk as if earlier posts have been seen.

However if anyone is reading regularly they will know I went to Cambridge in the Summer and completely failed to draw the Organ in Kings College Chapel and then completely failed to draw something else more recently and resolved to practice. 

I have been practicing - although not as much as I promised myself - and now I've tidied up my original sketch and am much happier with it I thought I'd post it. The perspective is still slightly off and how much it still resembles King College Chapel I'm not sure, but I do know the lectern is correct. That was the only bit I was pleased with at the time. 

A small sketch

I did my second part of the Oxford Canal on Saturday - Rugby to Napton on the Hill, with a pause in Braunston to eat a veggie burger and chips and sketch this down in ink (colours added in when I got home). My scanner has washed out the colours slightly, but not too much.

Braunston sits at the junction of the Oxford and Grand Union Canals, and must have been an incredibly important and busy hub for trade and transport in it's day. I went through it before when I was doing the Grand Union last year, and it's one of the places I intended -  and still intend - to go back and take a leisurely look around at some stage.

Next bit - Napton to Banbury with a pause in Fenny Compton for lunch.