The Pity of War - Romano Cagnoni

Watching the heavily edited and filtered images coming out of Syria at the moment, proved to be a sobering context for Romano Cagnoni's latest exhibition.   I've blogged about him before, when he had a small show in London, but this one is a big retrospective at the Palazzo Mediceo (the wonderful former home of the Medici family) in Seravezza.  Romano is probably Italy's greatest living photographer and has made his reputation  in war zones.  He specialised in going in under the radar and reaching the places the authorities didn't want anyone to see.

The result is a  narrative record of the terrible things that human beings do to each other.   His photographs of Biafra are brilliant, but too horrific for me to reproduce here.  He was also in Vietnam and in Croatia and Bosnia when Yugoslavia imploded.   His pictures of what was left of Vukovar are particularly shocking.

More recently he's been to Groszny to photograph the conflict in the Chechen Republic.

One of the most interesting things about the exhibition is Romano's commentary on what is, effectively, a record of his life.   Under a stunning black and white photo of a room full of men all sitting at separate tables in a bar, he writes that  'men's loneliness is linked with fear.  Men fear one another.'  And fear leads to war.

  
 And he sees the Chechen guerilla fighters as modern-day Greek heroes like Ulysses.

With his recent work he's been experimenting with a large format camera and huge colour prints that use landscape, colour and texture with the dexterity of a painter.  I'm afraid my poor little sony pot-shots can't even begin to convey the beauty of these photographs, or the size - the canvases above and below were both life-size.

As a writer, struggling with words, I do envy the amount of narrative that can be conveyed (without any translation) in a single image.  This is work of the highest possible calibre.  The exhibition lasts until 9th April.

Tuesday Poem: Martin Figura's 'Whistle'

 This poem comes from the compelling narrative sequence of poems 'Whistle' by Martin Figura, published by Arrowhead Poetry.  For a full review of the collection and the context of the poem please click here.

Strange Boy

We believe there is a one in ten chance
the boy will inherit it from his father
The boy is top in maths
He is near the bottom of the class in everything else
He writes wild imaginative essays with little regard
for spelling or grammar
He cries easily
The boy’s house is Belmont 47 (a prime number)
We know he steals, but are letting it go for now
We also know he smokes
He pulls a face when he concentrates
The other boys have noticed this
The boy is left here during half-term breaks
He occupies himself with dice games of cricket and football
that can take days to complete
They are too complex for anyone else to participate in
The boy maintains a number of statistical graphs
He is a good goalkeeper
He has made some friends through football
He has invented an elaborate past
He carries a 1966-67 News of the World Football Year Book at all times
Father William lets him complete his pools coupon
He has had some small successes

Copyright Martin Figura
reproduced with permission.
www.martinfigura.co.uk

Martin Figura was born in Liverpool in 1956 and works part-time at the Writers’ Centre, Norwich and as a photographer. He is a member of the poetry ensemble The Joy of 6. A spoken word version of his new collection Whistle (Arrowhead Press, 2010) is being toured by Apples and Snakes. He is Chair of the Café Writers Live Literature organisation in Norwich.

For a review of the whole collection please visit http://www.kathleenjonesdiary.blogspot.com

For  more stunning Tuesday Poems please visit the website at  http://www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

When Women Writers were Mad, Bad and definitely Dangerous.

The seventeenth century Margaret Cavendish - one of the very first women writers to publish her own work -  was known as the Mad Duchess.  King Charles II is alleged to have described her as ‘an entire Raree-Show in her own person - a universal masquerade - indeed a sort of private Bedlam-hospital, her whole ideas being like so many patients crazed upon the subjects of love and literature’. 

Although she lived like a nun, scribbling away in her study, so that even her ladies in waiting hardly saw her, she was still nicknamed ‘the Whore of Welbeck’. 

Margaret was born in Colchester in 1623, the daughter of a wealthy gentleman. She had a very eventful life - living through the English civil war.  Her family home was razed to the ground by Cromwell's troops, her mother imprisoned,  two of her brothers killed, and she escaped to France to join the court of Queen Henrietta in Paris, where she met her husband.  She was only a gentleman's daughter, Newcastle was a friend of the king and one of the greatest landowners in England, so there was a lot of opposition to their marriage.  It was a genuine love match - they lived in relative poverty and exile for 20 years before they were able to return to England. Newcastle (a cavalier author himself) encouraged his wife to write and paid for publication of her work.

The problem was that women in the 17th century were supposed to know their place, which was in the home, meekly, modestly ruled by their husbands - a state of subservience which had been ordained by God and could not be argued with.  But women did argue - and Margaret Cavendish was one of the most vocal. 

‘Men are happy,’ she wrote, ‘and we women are miserable, for they possess all the ease, rest, pleasure, wealth, power and fame, whereas women are restless with labour, easeless with pain, melancholy for want of pleasure, helpless for want of power and die in oblivion for want of fame; nevertheless men are so unconscionable and cruel against us as they endeavour to bar us of all sorts of kinds of liberty, as not to suffer us freely to associate amongst our own sex, but would fain bury us in their houses or beds as in a grave; the truth is we live like bats or owls, labour like beasts, and die like worms.’

The problem, Margaret identified, was lack of education.  Most women received their instruction from their uneducated mothers - ‘one fool breeding up another’ as Margaret put it.  The result was a spiral of ignorance.   There was also a lack of role models.  ‘What woman was ever so strong as Sampson, or so swift as Hazael?  What woman was ever so wise as Solomon or Aristotle, so politic as Achitophel, so demonstrative as Euclid, so inventive as Archimedes?’  If there had ever been such women they had left no traces to encourage their descendants.

Margaret became so notorious that when she visited London, Samuel Pepys was one of those who crammed the street to see her carriage pass by, with a crowd of small boys running after it trying to get a glimpse of so infamous a woman.

Why did she risk all this?  She confessed to an addiction to words, and being childless, she wanted to avoid the oblivion most women sank into when they died.  In a preface to her autobiography she penned a wistful apology.

‘Some censuring Readers will scornfully say, why hath this lady writ her own life?  Since none cares to know whose daughter she was, or whose wife she is, or how she was bred, or what fortunes she had, or how she lived, or what humour or disposition she was of?  I answer that it is true, that ‘tis to no purpose to the Readers, but it is to the Authoress, because I write it for my own sake, not theirs, to tell the truth, lest after ages should mistake in not knowing I was daughter to one Master Lucas of St John’s, second wife to the Duke of Newcastle.’

Margaret Cavendish ‘A Glorious Fame’ was my first published book, scribbled in the university library while my children were at school and when I should have been studying for my own degree.  It’s been out of print for a few years now and I am very happy to put it up on Kindle with a new, previously unknown portrait of the Duchess and her husband I found in a German art gallery.  Margaret deserves every little bit of fame she can get - we owe our own freedom to write, and publish what we write, to women like her, who risked their sanity and reputations to get into print.  However bad the current publishing industry, it isn’t as bad as that!

Margaret Cavendish:  A Glorious Fame  is available on Kindle at the introductory price of £1.54

Winter comes to Capezzano

Yesterday  we had a blizzard - winds strong enough to blow a steel barbecue across the terrace and relocate the TV aerial, and a few inches of snow frothing over the olive trees like soapsuds. We're on the edge of a Siberian front that's bringing unusually cold weather across europe.    It's still snowing on and off and more snow and freezing temperatures forecast for the weekend.  Winter weather like this doesn't usually last for longer than a couple of weeks, though further north it's more severe.

We're cat and dog sitting at Peralta for ten days or so at the moment - one frisky little hunting dog called Ellie who's obsessed with chasing objects, an elderly, deaf, arthritic, but very aristocratic Spinoni called Frank (short for Frankenstein!), Vaniglia- a shy burmese cross cat, and a big, affectionate black and white male called Pino.  Tonight they're all in beside a roaring fire and we've opened a bottle of wine to keep out the weather.

Neil is about to start another sculpture down in the marble yard, but tomorrow is the feast of San Biaggio, so nothing is open now until Monday.  Typical Italy!

Tuesday Poem: Norman Nicholson

Well, the rabbit is out of the hat and in full view of the audience.  I’d been keeping quiet about the subject of the new biography until everything was signed and sealed, but Melvyn Bragg mentioned it in his BBC Radio 4 programme and newsletter - so now everyone knows that I’m writing about Norman Nicholson!


So, who was Norman Nicholson? An obscure northern poet, from the small town of Millom in Cumbria, born in 1914, a protegee of T.S. Eliot and the Lake District’s second most famous poet after Wordsworth.  'Poem' is NN’s working manifesto.

Poem

I would make a poem
Precise as a pair of scissors, keen,
Cold and asymmetrical, the blades
Meeting like steel lovers to define
The clean shape of the image.

I would make a poem
Organic as an orchid, red
Flowers condensed from dew, with every lobe
Fitted like a female to receive
The bee’s fathering head.

I would make a poem
Solid as a stone, a thing
You can take up, turn, examine and put down;
Bred of the accident of rain and river,
Yet in its build as certain as a circle,
An axiom of itself.


I was approached recently by the Trustees of the Nicholson Estate to write a Life and Work for the Norman Nicholson centenary in 2014. This isn’t a commercial project, more a labour of love - I’ve always loved NN’s poetry - he wrote about the landscape I grew up in - a working landscape, not the pretty picture postcard views sold to the tourists.  His best poems are probably Wall, Sea to the West and On the Dismantling of Millom Ironworks, which is about the brutal de-industrialisation of the north of England in the second half of the twentieth century.  This is an extract:

            ‘They shovelled my childhood
On to a rubbish heap.   Here my father’s father,
Foreman of the back furnace, unsluiced the metal lava
To slop in fiery gutters across the foundry floor
And boil round the workmen’s boots; here five generations
Toasted the bread they earned at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit
And the town thrived on its iron diet.  On the same ground now
Split foundations moulder in the sea air; blizzards
Of slag-grey dust are blown through broken Main Gate uprights;
 Resevoir tanks gape dry beside cracked, empty pig-beds:
And one last core of clinker, like the stump of a dead volcano,
Juts up jagged and unblastable.....
                   
He lived all his life in the house he was born in - stubbornly defending his northernness - always a fierce enemy of Metrocentrism.  When anyone referred to him as a recluse he would say drily ‘They mean I haven’t been seen lately in London.’  People like Philip Larkin denigrated him as a 'Provincial'.  He was emphatic about the truth of Robert Frost’s statement ‘In order to be universal, you must first be provincial’.

I’ve only just embarked on the initial research and will keep you posted.  This will be the first time I’ve ever talked publicly about writing a biography, so it will be a new experience!




For more Poetry please check out the Tuesday Poets at www.tuesdaypoem.blogspot.com

Author and Agent - Mitchell and Webb comedy

This little clip made me laugh a lot! I once had a talk with an agent rather like this, though it wasn't as funny.

A Day in London - Flashbacks.

A bar off Regent Street.  Rich kids in clothes that don't come from department stores;  the casual clunk of Mulberry bags, the click of Sophy Lazlo heels, the over-priced economy of Dolce and Gabbana.  Gyozo Dumpling soup.  A blueberry, free-radical infusion. A man eating sandwiches with one black leather glove.  The Nash church is locked against student protest.  A Bond Street jeweller sells diamonds bigger than the Ritz to Saudi princes and unshaven oligarchs.

Newspaper headlines signal the inevitability of Greek bankruptcy - a financial storm gathering over Davos.  The red lines in the street outside the door. No Stopping.   Someone selling consultancy at the next table. "Third party participancy."   People on the pavement walking, walking, clutching their mobiles, bags, mineral water.  A car with smoked glass windows, single numbers on the plate.

The doorman with a blue-tooth earpiece who wishes us a pleasant day.  Standing in front of a Picasso with six noughts after the price.  Underground, a crowded metal bullet hurtling through darkness.  Another bar.  Beyonce on the speaker system, Amy Winehouse - scorched throat music.  Another tea, another wine.  Spaghetti bolognese.

A spat of rain.  The flowering of umbrellas.

This is my day.

(Extracts from  my journal. Now on my way back to Italy)