// post fourtyone. for a long weekend I went to see my granddad in Totnes. we went to Dartmouth and had a wonderful lunch in an old Tudor manor house (tapas: a mini boar burger and sweet potato chips with guacamole and a giant couscous-stuffed baby bell pepper with goat's cheese, and a caraffe of white wine), which had anamorphic circles in the restaurant, and we went to Brixham and had crème brûlée ice-cream in the sun walked the dog along the harbour where you aren't allowed to fish by order of the harbour master but hundreds of people were catching crabs. and I chose a few piles of books to bring back to Birmingham.

// now I'm back in Birmingham and the heat wave has broken! thunderstorms and lots and lots of rain. I don't know how long it will last, but at the moment I'm enjoying wearing a jumper. the cold is much better than the hot, even if the sun does make photography much easier. xx

I finished Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, oh my what a bloody excellent book. anyone who hasn't read it should read it out loud and speaking fast, and let the words fall to v. special places within you. I fell in love with another sentence:

now the trouble becomes what to read next. I have a few books lined up and I don't know what to choose. xx

so I was going to put some time aside and do some proper blogging, like about a popular subject, or about style, or something that I saw in the news and wanted to comment on, something that people know about that they would like to search and read about, but instead I think I want to talk about a few lines of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. he writes:

and it got me thinking about my idea of beauty in art. immediately I think of Michelangelo's contrapposto David, or Egon Shiele, or to go as far as Kazimir Malevich's Supremus No. 58, and I think of them as beautiful, but even the last one does not challenge my sense of beauty. if I think of a grand sculpture, or an excellent painting, or a precise exercise in colour, then I think of a beauty that I have already in my head. this does not weigh down on the beauty the art has, but it makes it familiar.
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for an overused example, Damien Hirst's tiger shark is a piece of art that challenged my perception of art. if I thought in my head of a shark suspended in a tank, I would not have thought it was beautiful, but in reality it was, so my perception of beauty was changed by a piece of art, and that is a rare and important thing. xx

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P.S. just so there's no confusion, I think that Michelangelo's David is by a v. v. long stretch the better piece of art of the two. xx

I went to Italy in the summer of '11 and I hadn't got round to getting the disposable cameras developed until a few days ago. well one of them had gone bad and came back blank, but the other was 26 or 28 quite good photos. the top is one of places we camped, between an enormous field of sunflowers and a big field of grapevines. that morning we stole a few grapes but they were v. v. sour.

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then underneath is the Pantheon in Rome. the writing on the front says that it was Marcus Agrippa who built the temple, but actually his temple was burnt to the ground in 80AD and another temple was built by the emperor, and then that one was burnt as well, and then this temple was completed by Hadrian in 128AD and he was too polite and modest to put his own name on it, so he gave the credit to Agrippa, the builder of the first Pantheon.

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in other news, I'm worrying about a lot of things, looking back into the past (I know I shouldn't, it's pointless, etc.) and considering what I could have done differently. with all the friends I have lost I think "if I could have just done this..." or "if I hadn't done that..." and I think that maybe we'd still be friends. with the friends I have I think the same things, and I wonder if I could be much closer friends with them if I had just put the effort in. maybe if I had got my hands dirty every once in a while I would be closer to people.

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also, I am rediscovering Avalanche City. listening to their album Our New Life Above The Ground, and every song is beautiful. xx

I found this MUCH too funny!

I spent a few nights in Basel and Lörrach with my family. I was there! you see the France-Germany, France-Switzerland, Germany-Switzerland. I went from Birmingham by plane to Zurich airport and by train to Zurich station and by train to Basel City Rail and by taxi to Lörrach.
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Zurich is a warm city, with lots of people in different colours, but there are no stars in her skies. and on the road from Zurich there's a night club called Your Lady Loving.
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we were there for my cousin's wedding (which was the most fun ever). my brother Harvey and I did a reading there in the ceremony. it was a little embarrassing, and I tripped over my words once or twice, but it was no hexenwerk. xx

someone buy me these, yes? maybe from here and here? they're absolutely beautiful. I go between wanting a  really comfy and lovely and homely colourful place with all round edges and soft pillows and Persian carpets... to wanting just black and white and stark and square and sharp, with minimalism and shocks of cubism and suprematism prints on the walls. xx

I deleted a few posts, and this is yet another try at making this blog more presentable, first, so I can actually look at it and not feel ashamed, and sort out some actual content. I'm going to try to just talk about the things that I'm interested in on here, not be so formal, just try to enjoy it. I suppose this will be like a rebirth thing, I'm going to try to make this more of a blog. xx