Sunday, May 31, 2015

Karl Blossfeldt / A Teacher of Contemplation





Karl Blossfeldt
A TEACHER OF CONTEMPLATION


Karl Blossfeldt was an attentive observers of nature, a teacher of contemplation. He used photography in the early days but his images are still powerful today. It reminds us to look at the ordinary and realize the immanent wonder.





Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) was a German instructor of sculpture who used his remarkable photographs of plant studies to educate his students about design elements in nature. Self-taught in photography, he devoted himself to the study of nature, photographing nothing but flowers, buds and seed capsules for thirty-five years. He once said,"The plant never lapses into mere arid functionalism; it fashions and shapes according to logic and suitability, and with its primeval force compels everything to attain the highest artistic form."

Blossfeldt's photographs were made with a homemade camera that could magnify the subject up to thirty times its actual size. By doing so he revealed extraordinary details within the natural structure of the plants. In the process he created some of the most innovative photographic work of his time. The simple yet expressive forms captured on film affirmed his boundless artistic and intellectual ability.

Published in 1928 when Blossfeldt was sixty-three and a professor of applied art at the Berliner Kunsthochschule,Urformen der Kunst quickly became an international bestseller and in turn made Blossfeldt famous almost overnight. His contemporaries were enchanted by the abstract shapes and structures in nature that he revealed to the world. In 2001 Urformen der Kunst was included in "The Book of 101 Books" as one of the seminal photographic books of the Twentieth Century.

































Saturday, May 30, 2015

Maupassant / Mademoiselle Fifi


Mademoiselle Fifi
By Guy de Maupassant



Guy de Maupassant / Mademoiselle Fiji (Short Story in French)

The Major, Graf von Farlsberg, the Prussian commandant, was reading his newspaper, lying back in a great armchair, with his booted feet on the beautiful marble fire-place, where his spurs had made two holes, which grew deeper every day, during the three months that he had been in the château of Urville.
A cup of coffee was smoking on a small, inlaid table, which was stained with liquors, burnt by cigars, notched by the pen-knife of the victorious officer, who occasionally would stop while sharpening a pencil, to jot down figures, or to make a drawing on it, just as it took his fancy.

My hero / Football by David Conn



My hero: 

Football

 by David Conn

The game should be governed in a way that makes all football lovers proud


David Conn
Saturday 30 May 2015

T
he former Argentine footballer Jorge Valdano once wrote that the journey of every adult football lover begins with a child, kicking a ball to the park. For some of those involved at the highest ranks of Fifa, their journey from the park ended this week in dawn arrests or guilty pleas to alleged corruption beyond a child’s imagination. One ineradicable image conjured by the US criminal indictment is the allegation that the Fifa executive committee member Jeffrey Webb had a $3m bribe partly routed to the man who was building him a swimming pool. The 164-page indictment of 14 defendants indeed left one almost drowning in detail, but still the anger and disgust came through. I fell in love with football as a boy in the parks, playgrounds and in the very air of Manchester, and I still believe – more than ever – in its beauty as a sport and the essential effort, spirit and team ethos it requires. Yet the game is subject to relentless exploitation by people entrusted to be its custodians, what the Swiss attorney general, referring to allegations regarding Fifa’s award of the 2018 and 2022 World Cups to Russia and Qatar, described this week as “unjust enrichment”. Yet unjust enrichment is not restricted to the bribes or kickbacks that fall under the strict definition of corruption. Would it have been more admirable had Webb, if this bribe is proven, taken a grossly inflated fee from a TV rights contract by being on the payroll legitimately? Many whose enrichment has outraged football lovers have made millions by selling shares in football companies that supporters still quaintly refer to as clubs. The guiding light for running football should be as simple as the game’s essence. Picture the young boy, running to the park with his ball, and nurture a sport fit for his lifelong loyalty.

 David Conn’s books about football include The Beautiful Game? and Richer than God.




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser

007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville

011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016




Nancy Tucker / How I got back from anorexia

 

Nancy Tucker with her mother, Jessica. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Nancy Tucker

How I got back from anorexia

At 15, Nancy Tucker went to her GP about her problems with food. She felt fobbed off and spiralled out of control – she and her mother talk about why turning to the medical profession was a disaster


Joanna Moorhead
Sat 30 May 2015 06.45 BST


W

hen Nancy Tucker was 15, her mother, Jessica realised that she had a problem with food. Nancy had gone on a diet, but the diet seemed to be going on and on, she seemed more and more obsessed with what was on her plate, and she was behaving strangely at mealtimes.

Jessica persuaded Nancy to visit their GP, but the GP’s reaction was unexpected. She weighed Nancy, consulted lots of charts, and then said she didn’t meet the criteria for referral. Her weight wasn’t “low enough”, it seemed, to trigger help.

Three years later, Nancy was as dangerously ill with anorexia as it is possible to be. Twice she had to be hospitalised: Jessica remembers phoning the ward in the middle of the night to check whether her daughter was still alive. Could things have been different if the GP had heeded Jessica’s initial flag-waving? It is impossible to know, but what is clear, talking to the two of them, is that what should have been “help” on the part of medics and therapists was often more of a hindrance. “When the GP told me I wasn’t bad enough to merit referral, what that said to me was: go away and lose more weight,” says Nancy.

Then there was the fact that, once Nancy was diagnosed and referred to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS), Jessica felt undermined and unsupported. “I felt blamed, disapproved of, traumatised. One therapist in particular was very suspicious of our relationship – she felt we were unhealthily close, and that I was colluding in Nancy’s illness.” Looking back, Jessica feels she was simply struggling with an incredibly difficult situation, with her daughter wasting away in front of her and a younger child to look after as well. The attitude of the therapists became one more burden.

Now Nancy is 21, and in a very different place. When doctor after doctor, therapist after therapist and hospital visit after hospital visit failed to make things any better, at least in the longer term, Jessica made the drastic decision to give up her job and to take Nancy out of the pressurised atmosphere of the independent girls’ school she attended: like CAMHS, she felt it was problematic rather than helpful. It was Nancy’s GCSE year: she continued to study, but she did it with guidance from tutors, and from home. “People around us were very disapproving,” says Jessica. Nancy agrees: “I think they thought that if I was allowed to retreat from the world, I’d never want to go back there.”

But Jessica had a strong instinct that this was the right way forward, and Nancy says now that, although her year cocooned at home with her mother wasn’t the end of her anorexia, it was a step on the road to recovery. “It got me to a place where I was living a life again, and that allowed me to move forward,” she says.

Nancy did well in her GCSEs, and went to a different school to do A-levels. Then, at the age of 19, she decided to write down the story of her illness. Strangely enough she had written to children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, of whom she is a big fan, a few years earlier, when she was in the throes of the worst stage of her illness, suggesting Wilson should tackle the subject in one of her books. “She wrote back straight away, and she said she had thought about it but she was worried about the sensitivities. But she said maybe I should be the person writing the book. And I suddenly realised it was something I had to do, and once I’d decided to do it, the story just rushed out of me.

Nancy Tucker as a small child.
Nancy Tucker as a small child. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Guardian

“I wrote it in three days and three nights – I hardly slept. I just wrote it all down. I wrote it in a purging sort of way: it was as though I had this story inside me and I simply had to get it out.”

The story was never intended for publication, but then Nancy heard from a friend she hadn’t spoken to for a while and decided to send her what she had written as a way of explaining what she’d been through. That friend sent it to another friend, whose mother was a writer: when she read it, she sent it to her agent, who is now Nancy’s agent, and this month the story arrived in bookshops as The Time in Between: A Memoir of Hunger and Hope. Wilson, who gave her that initial prompt to write it, has said it “isn’t just another anorexia misery memoir – it’s a work of literature”.

It is easy to see why that writer mother sent Nancy’s story to her agent: the book is stylish and incisive, and she weaves her tale of fear and food, confusion and calories grippingly and with skill. At one point she provides the kind of description of how anorexia feels that could only have come from the vortex of the condition itself. “I am too big and too small and too much and not enough and too frightened to change and too sad to stay the same,” she writes. “I am an addict and a slave to the beauty myth and I diet and regress and reject and control and cry for help and I still can’t stop the ring-ring-ringing in my ears telling me that something bad is coming, something bad is coming RIGHT NOW. I want to shine and I want to be invisible and I want to be myself and I want to be anyone else in the world and in the end I think the only solution is to get smaller and smaller and smaller and then one day to disappear.”

For all its writerly skill, The Time in Between makes uncomfortable reading and not only because it describes such a complex and disturbing medical condition. The other disquieting element is how frank Nancy is about her family relationships, and especially what she feels about her father, David.

He is described, at times, as distant and critical and not as involved in her life as her friends’ fathers are. Some of the best parts of the book are written script-style, like scenes from a movie or a documentary, with camera directions (“Stay with Nancy’s face. She blinks heavily; she looks very tired”); and when Jessica reveals that her father directs TV dramas you can’t help feeling that what Nancy really wants is to please her dad.

Can it be that simple? Apparently, he criticised the book when he first read it, though he has since read it again and declared it extremely well written.

Jessica, it turns out, has not read the book. “I’m a bit scared of reading it. I lived it, and I don’t want to go back to those times,” she says.

Nancy, meanwhile, says that while she would not say writing the book was the key to her recovery, getting her story out was a catharsis that helped her begin to move on. She’s still “not normal around food”, she says, but she’s a great deal better than she was and hopeful of making a complete recovery one day. This autumn, having twice deferred it, she is taking up a place to study at Oxford University.

“Sometimes I think, what on earth am I doing, going somewhere so pressurised and competitive after everything I’ve been through,” admits Nancy. “But I really don’t think I’m doing it because I want to be an academic star. What I want to do is study psychology; and what my illness has done is made me realise that life isn’t all about getting top marks in exams, it’s about working out who you are and what you want to do with your life.”

 The Time in Between: A Memoir of Hunger and Hope by Nancy Tucker is published by Icon Books, price £12.99. 


THE GUARDIAN

Friday, May 29, 2015

Maupassant / A Mother of Monsters


by  Guy de Maupassant



Maupassant / La mère aux monstres (A short story in French)

I recalled this horrible story, the events of which occurred long ago, and this horrible woman, the other day at a fashionable seaside resort, where I saw on the beach a well-known young, elegant and charming Parisienne, adored and respected by everyone.
I had been invited by a friend to pay him a visit in a little provincial town. He took me about in all directions to do the honors of the place, showed me noted scenes, chateaux, industries, ruins. He pointed out monuments, churches, old carved doorways, enormous or distorted trees, the oak of St. Andrew, and the yew tree of Roqueboise.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

Maupassant / The Hand


THE HAND
By Guy de Maupassant


LA MAIN (Rimbaud)

All were crowding around M. Bermutier, the judge, who was giving his opinion about the Saint-Cloud mystery. For a month this in explicable crime had been the talk of Paris. Nobody could make head or tail of it.
M. Bermutier, standing with his back to the fireplace, was talking, citing the evidence, discussing the various theories, but arriving at no conclusion.
Some women had risen, in order to get nearer to him, and were standing with their eyes fastened on the clean-shaven face of the judge, who was saying such weighty things. They, were shaking and trembling, moved by fear and curiosity, and by the eager and insatiable desire for the horrible, which haunts the soul of every woman. One of them, paler than the others, said during a pause:
"It's terrible. It verges on the supernatural. The truth will never be known."

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Judy Blume “Can’t Imagine” Writing Another Novel

Judy Blume, photographed on Ballast Key, Florida.
Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.

Judy Blume “Can’t Imagine” Writing Another Novel

June 2015
The author of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and other classics returns with In the Unlikely Event, her first adult novel in 17 years. She hints that it might be her last.
Write what you know, novelists are often advised, and Judy Blume knew many things when she wrote the books that proved so influential and iconic that their author eventually became a question on Jeopardy!, and the inspiration for an episode of South Park and a Saturday Night Liveskit, not to mention a hero and sentimental favorite of generations of readers. Among those things is that growing up is a time of powerful, dramatic occurrences. It’s been more than 45 years since Blume’s first book was published, but she is still writing what she knows, and still turning to the early years for that knowledge. Except this time, with In the Unlikely Event, instead of looking inward, examining the emotional upheaval evoked by bodily changes and new physical sensations, Judy Blume is looking outward. Or, more to the point, upward.

In the early 1950s, when Blume was a teenager in Elizabeth, New Jersey, three airplanes crashed in her town within 58 days, creating fear, anxiety, and bewilderment. But though Blume grew up amidst these events, it took her more than half a century to think about turning them into a book. It wasn’t until 2009, while she was listening to the writer Rachel Kushner talk about stories her mother had told of growing up in Cuba in the 1950s, that Blume envisioned her own 1950s novel. It came to her in an instant, with various characters and plots. Blume spent five years on her story, which blends real-life facts with fiction. While the book is multi-generational, it’s not at all surprising that the character at its heart is a 15-year-old girl.

Many of us, having long left behind girlhood and adolescence in a big, Love’s Fresh Lemon-scented puddle of training bras and clogs, still remember with nostalgic pleasure and gratitude Blume’s classic works, which mirrored and illuminated our own experiences. So, with this new book—her first adult novel in 17 years—is Blume, as we might hope, beginning a late-life fiction whirlwind? “I can’t imagine writing another novel,” she says. “Of course I said the same thing after Summer Sisters. I meant it then. But I think I mean it more now. I feel good about that,” she adds. “I feel elated about that. And at 77 I think that’s O.K.”