TRAVEL / CURIOSITY: Cisterns

CISTERNS that fill with rain water
 - the only way to store water for a
 millennium in Patmos, Greece
 [now topped up by water brought to the island by tanker]

BOOKS: JOSEPH ROTH

I clicked on Amazon to add to my Ipad Kindle library Joseph Roth' s masterpiece The Radetsky March [see my blog entry 27 January 2012] - this led me to Perlefter - the Story of a Bourgeois, such a cynical book and the characters dreaded, I am so glad it was left unfinished.

I then read A Life in Letters, charming letters by Joseph Roth as a boy, fighting fit and a successful journalist, intelligent and fearless, Joseph is a most likeable character who descends into a vortex of despairing alcoholism, somehow never losing his integrity - all this with the rise of the Nazis as background, exile and maltreatment of Jews increasing daily.  Letters to and from Stefan Zweig, a star cosmopolitan writer, are so revealing of the times, both are driven into exile.  Roth, we can see, will die of alcoholism and, most poignantly, we know the glittering Zweig later commits suicide together with his wife.

I then read Job - the Story of a Simple Man, a moving, unforgettable and wholly credible story of Jews in Eastern Europe. The book ends in New York and has a most unlikely but joyful fairytale ending.  It led me to reflect how vast the difference is between Ashkenazy and Sephardic Jews.

LIVING BY DESIGN: Dorset Cow Sheds

Summer loose covers - pale blue cotton and and Ian Mankin stripe on John Stefanidis chairs, Applegrowers matting - often seen in Elizabethan pictures.

Brick floor covered with a specially commissioned dhurrie made in Jaipur [HH the Rajmata had to intervene to hurry it up!], the table is laid for lunch.

FABRICS: John Stefanidis Archive: CAMELLIA

ART I Admire: Jeremy Deller

I go to Venice in September and I am looking forward to seeing the British Pavilion at the Biennale - Jeremy Deller never fails to intrigue and amuse.

POETRY: George Seferis: Stratis Thalassinos Among the Agapanthi

Stratis Thalassinos Among the Agapanthi
There are no asphodels, violets, or hyacinths;
how then can you talk with the dead?
The dead know the language of flowers only;
so they keep silent
they travel and keep silent, endure and keep silent,
beyond the community of dreams, beyond the community of dreams.

If I start to sing I'll call out
and if I call out –
the agapanthi order silence
raising the tiny hand of a blue Arabian child
or even the footfalls of a goose in the air.

It's painful and difficult, the living are not enough for me
first because they do not speak, and then
because I have to ask the dead in order to go on farther.
There's no other way: the moment I fall asleep
the companions cut the silver strings
and the flask of the winds empties.
I fill it and it empties, I fill it and it empties;
I wake
like a goldfish swimming
in the lightning's crevices
and the wind and the flood and the human bodies
and the agapanthi nailed like the arrows of fate
to the unquenchable earth
shaken by convulsive nodding,
as if loaded on an ancient cart
jolting down gutted roads, over old cobblestones,
the agapanthi, asphodels of the negroes:
How can I grasp this religion?

The first thing God made is love
then comes blood
and the thirst for blood
roused by
the body's sperm as by salt.
The first thing God made is the long journey;
that house there is waiting
with its blue smoke
with its aged dog
waiting for the homecoming so that it can die.
But the dead must guide me;
it is the agapanthi that keep them from speaking,
like the depths of the sea or the water in a glass.
And the companions stay on in the palaces of Circe:
my dear Elpenor! My poor, foolish Elpenor!"
Or don't you see them
– 'Oh help us!' –
on the blackened ridge of Psara?

GARDENS: My London garden in August

COMMENT: Clearing out of postcards with apologies to my friends

BOOKS: by Junichiro Tanizaki

A revered writer I had never read. A present of a paperback started me off...Junichiro Tanizaki's THE SECRET  HISTORY  OF THE LORD OF MUSASHI - heads cut off in battle groomed before being triumphantly displayed by the victors - hair washed and combed, cosmetics applied, the procedure arouses a secret and sensual pleasure in the Samurai hero....I shall never feel the same about my head or anyone else's head for that matter.



Then on my I Pad I read THE MAKIOKA

SISTERS which I had resisted because it is over 500 pages...you are less aware of bulk with Kindle books!.....a bourgeois drama, sluggish at times, the repetitions are an integral part of the structure and the book's social message...fascinating Japanese 'moeurs'...strongly in place even now?  A book I will not forget... and more Tanizaki in future....DVD of the movie ordered immediately.

LIVING BY DESIGN: Balance and harmony restored in Cheyne Walk, London, SW1

A Lutyens floor - years of grime removed - A John Stefanidis ebonised wood table with black marble top, an 18th Century working fireplace.  On the wall, one of three 'papier peint' panels in grisaille.  The walls are sponged ochre and the columns marbleised.

ART I admire: James Turrell at the Guggenheim New York

 Rotunda at the Guggenheim Museum, New York 

until September 25, 2013

To quote Peter Schjeldahl [in the New Yorker, July 1, 2013] 'James Turrell, the veteran wizard of installations that involve illusory effects of light, both natural and artificial..... Since 1981, Turrell has maintained a cattle ranch near Flagstaff, Arizona. There he has toiled incessantly [and expensively] to turn an extinct volcano, the Roden Crater, into a sculpted, many chambered observatory of celestial phenonema! [see my blog post of November 2, 2012]

What a guy!  His "Skyspaces" can be seen in the UK at Houghton House in Norfolk and at Yorkshire Sculpture Park [left], Kielder Skyspace on Cat Cairn [above] and, of course, in Salzburg, Austria, in Japan, Argentina etc.