Sunday 29 March 2020

CORONOVIRUS - SELF-ISOLATING WEEK 2

Baby, it's cold outside... so we stay in.  Both Iain and I are well and keep occupied, mainly indoors.  We both have work using the computer that keeps us from wearying.
The shops and supermarkets are well organised: one person in, one person out. Here is a queue at the beginning of the day at Waitrose.  From 8 - 9 am they reserve it for seniors and front-line workers. 




I tried buying something I have not seen for ages: Scottish pan loaf.  It's plain white bread the kind that foodies would despise.  Never mind, toasted with peanut butter - oops... the British hate peanut butter!... let's say marmalade, it is real comfort food.  It reminds me of tea and toast for patients in hospital - great!... whether you are the one doling it out, or on the receiving end.





We all stood on our porches/balconies/ streets at 8 pm on Thursday and applauded the work done by those working in the NHS.  Very emotional!  

The next day I saw this ambulance outside my window next when sitting at my computer.  My neighbour across the road is now OK; not coronavirus however.



Our little neighbour, Alice, across the road and one along from above family  has put up 2 drawing of rainbows on their porch window.  I took Ellie's off the fridge and put them up to 'wave' to her.  Apparently in Iceland they putTeddies in windows so when the kids go out on their walks they can 'find the Teddy'.

Iain wants them (my 2) taken down "D'ya not know what they mean?!"  "Uh-h-h... excuse me... it 's just a rainbow!"  

Other bits and pieces noted this week


[1] Boy racers on empty streets.  Anne told me about a doctor who was nearly home at the end of the day when he was hit by one of these characters.  He was unharmed.


[2] News item on BBC.  Journalist talking to a woman in Russia who was among a crowd moving in to a church service through the front door of a cathedral.  When pointed out that the gathering of people was maybe not a good idea apparently she said something along the lines of "There's no problem here, it's a church." and, the reporter said "She was a doctor."


* * * * * 
Marks and Spencer are giving out little seed pots complete with composte.  I guess that's as far as I am going to get this year.  

Be that as it may, they really are very good!  I talked about this a couple of posts back.  This is an update.





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Monday 23 March 2020

JOHN BUCHAN: HIGH-LOWBROW ART APPRECIATION


I rather liked a Times Literary Supplement  article entitled High-lowbrow written by Robert Messenger in February 21, 2020 paper, page 17.   It is about John Buchan and a rather interesting item to do with art appreciation. The piece has been misquoted a lot, apparently... not so much misquoted but wrongly attributed to the topic of the appreciation of literature.  It was for this reason that the author of this article made a huge, and ultimately successful, effort to track down the story and so has clarified the context in which it was said.

The whole article is here....

He traced the source of the quotation which, apparently, was said by Buchan at the opening of an art gallery in Montreal February 1939. 

Messenger states:  He was opening a gallery and joking about his lack of any "claim to be any kind of authority on art".  [Buchan stated on this particular occasion] "The President of a famous American University - I think it was Harvard - once divided the members of that University into six classes.  He said there were highbrows,; low-highbrows; high-lowbrows; bone-heads and solid ivory.  If we take this classification I think I should come about the middle in my views on art - shall we say high-lowbrow?"

Equalling interesting in this article is the drawing that accompanies it.  It is by E H Shepherd (he of Winnie the Pooh). 
“Chief of the Big Mountain”, cartoon of John Buchan by E. H. Shepard, Punch, 1936 from Punch Cartoon Library
* * * * * * * 
Here are two paintings by A Y Jackson which would have been around at the time Buchan was giving his talk described above.


Early Spring, Quebec.  A Y Jackson, 1926

Les Eboulements. A Y Jackson   

* * * * * * * * 
Later:  A letter [March 13, 2020] in response to the above TLS article contained something that caught my interest.  The writer owns a letter written by Buchan in 1926.   He observes that the capital B of his surname has 'the shape of a majuscule lambda'.  I had to look that up. He means a capital 'L' of the Greek alphabet...ah yes, 'majuscule' as opposed to 'miniscule'.
Λ λ
I found an image of Buchan's signature in this signed copy of one of his books.
  
The 'B' certainly does take the shape of an upside-down V.

The Autograph Edition of "A History of the Great War", limited to Five Hundred Signed and Numbered Copies, c. 1922.







Sunday 22 March 2020

CORONAVIRUS - SELF ISOLATING WEEK 1

We have been advised by the government to self-isolate as we are of the category of being 'over 70 years old'.  Also both Iain and I  are mindful that we have a history of 'chest trouble', for different reasons, but none-the-less we are aware that we are 'at risk'.  Being the end of winter we feel that we are not as robust constitutionally so that's another reason we are self-isolating.  That means we stay around the house (though we have a garden and back on to a park). So it is time to hunker down.  My goodness, we are used to that: anyone who sails is very experienced in this!  The good news is that we know the tide will eventually turn!

In the meantime some images of our life this week...


This image of the chap playing the pipes came from John.  Wonderful!




Two notifications from our doctor's surgery about a week ago.

* * * * * * * * 

The children are now off school for 3 months.  As families are all self-isolating (or keeping their distance of 2 metres apart) we will no longer be seeing them. However I decided to compose a letter to pass along to Ellie (5) who can now read and Harriet (6) who reads well beyond her years.  (The idea is that they write me a letter back.)

This is my letter to Ellie.  It is a just little story about something that made me feel really old!

Dear Ellie,

It is spring and I am going to plant some seeds.   Last week I was in Marks and Spencer’s shop in Milngavie and the lady gave me a free seed packet with soil to plant the seeds.  

After school I showed the packet to Harriet and she read the instructions for planting while she was sitting at the kitchen table after school.  

It said   "Place the seeds in a saucer and cover with 50 millilitres of water."

She turned to me and asked “Grandma, what’s a saucer?”

Do you know what a saucer is?

During the week I was shopping in the same store in Milngavie and I told the young man at the check-out that Harriet said to me “Grandma, what’s a saucer?’  He looked at me with a puzzled expression... “Uh-h-h-h.  What’s a saucer?” he said.

Alastair was visiting this week because he and Grandpa were going for a walk after school.  I told Alastiar to read the instructions for planting the seeds.  He said the same thing “Uh-h-h-h...what’s a saucer?”

Do you know what’s a saucer?











Wednesday 18 March 2020

BOOK - THE MAN IN THE RED COAT by JULIAN BARNES

I recently bought a book because of the cover. It is The Man in the Red Coat by Julian Barnes, published by Jonathan Cape,  October 2019. It is about a French Surgeon, Soldier and Socialite, Dr Samuel-Jean Pozzi (1846 - 1918).

The Man in the Red Coat is published by Jonathan Cape

It's a great read as William Doyle in the TLS states "Barnes is steeped in French literature"  and the full TLS article is here.

The Painting:  Barnes talks about how he first came across this painting and for all that he knew a lot about French artists and writers he had never come across this man, Dr Pozzi, who was based in Paris.


He starts out telling about the story of the painting.  


The original painting by John Singer SargentDr. Pozzi at Home, 1881

In 1881 John Singer Sargent, then 25 and based in Paris, submitted his first portrait to the Royal Academy. Entitled Dr Pozzi at Home, it was a full-length study of a young, bearded man in a long crimson robe in front of a set of luxuriant burgundy velvet curtains. The sensual, sanguinary colour scheme seemed made for the subject. 

The Man 
He enjoyed great celebrity in the Parisian belle epoque, was a society surgeon, a world-renowned pioneer of gynaecology, and an equally notorious womaniser... " a man of prodigious abilities and flagrant infidelities".. very handsome, well connected and very serious in his profession.  (He visited Glasgow to see Lister to see the work he was doing in relation to surgical asepsis.)


"Pozzi lived a life among a vivid circle of artists and libertines, including the irrepressible aesthete Count Robert de Montesquiou, (known by his friend Marcel Proust as 'the professor of beauty'), his sometime enemy the wolfish scandal-monger, writer and duellist Jean Lorrain, and a revolving cast of friends and sparring partners including the free-loving Bernhardt and Oscar Wilde, Sargent and James MacNeill Whistler."

The Book
Basically, it is a collection of stories with lots of parenthetical asides which I quite enjoyed. I also had to look up a few words which certainly opened my eyes to the more unusual aspects of French life, e.g. duels, marriage arrangements, which were part of 'normal' life and which perplex the non-French! 

Julian Barnes gives examples of French writers, artists, 'dandies' at that time who crossed back and forth between Paris and London at the end of the 19th Century, those who were aspiring to be English and vice-versa.  Think of Oscar Wilde (although he is not English).  Pozzi moved in these circles, was 'everywhere'.

Link to Guardian article by Tim Adams is. here.

The Surgeon:
Pozzi’s career takes off during the surgical innovation that followed the relatively recent discoveries of anaesthesia (1840s) and antisepsis (1860s) particularly in the field of gynaecology. He was widely admired by patients and colleagues in his own time.

Laparotomy operation at the Broca hospital, Paris, 1901. Prof. Pozzi is standing forefront, on the right of patient.


* * * * * * * ** and while we are here * * * * * * * * * 



The Diva and the Doctor God: Letters from Sarah Bernhardt to Doctor Samuel Pozzi by Caroline de Costa and Francesca Miller,  Xlibris, Corp. (28 Oct. 2010)

Summary of this book:

The great French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) conducted an affair with her doctor, gynecologist Samuel Pozzi (1846-1918) in the decade before he married. They remained friends, and she always called him her Docteur Dieu (doctor god).
The handsome physician was a leading light in French gynecology and in the Paris arts community.
At first happy, Pozzi’s marriage degenerated into coldness, but his wife would not grant him a divorce. He then established a long-standing, public relationship with Emma Fischhof. During the Dreyfus affair, which unmasked the horror of entrenched anti-Semitism in France, physician and actress both fought against the ill treatment of the Jewish officer.
In 1915 and at Sarah’s insistence, Pozzi amputated her painful leg. Three years later, he was shot and killed by a disgruntled and delusional patient who blamed him for a minor illness.



Tuesday 17 March 2020

BOOK ABOUT SEA POWER AND MARITIME CULTURE

The TLS [May 10, 2019 page 27] had a most interesting article about this book.


Seapower States

Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World
by Andrew Lambert, Yale University Press, 2018.

The book:   Seapower States by Andrew Lambert


The Times Literary Supplement article (written by Edward N Luttwak) is here:

The TLS article:    TLS article on Seapower States book by Andrew Lambert


Basically:

Supremacy at sea was not necessarily about all about battles... supremacy "conceded ocean by ocean"... "building maritime alliances".

He talks about 'naval powers' (e.g. land locked countries which have a navy*)  and 'sea powers' e.g. Athens, Carthage, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and Britain,

He concludes that sea power was, and still is*, a question of maritime culture.  

He demonstrates how creating maritime identities made these states more dynamic, open, and inclusive than their lumbering continental rivals. He talks  about how their identities as 'seapowers' informed their actions and enabled them to achieve success disproportionate to their size.

*  United States and China are modern naval powers, rather than seapowers... a most interesting way to look at these countries today.













Monday 16 March 2020

READING PLAN 1 - THE NUANCES OF JAPANESE CULTURE

A TLS article [NOVEMBER 1, 2019, PAGE 24] talks about 2 books which I plan to read (and/or get for Ishie, A Great Reader, as she is very interested in all things Japanese):

[1] Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn, ed. Paul Murray, Penguin.




[2] Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn edited by Andrei Codrescu, Princeton University Press.



This book is "A collection of twenty-eight ... stories, inspired by Japanese folk tales and written by renowned Western expatriate Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904).  [He] was one of the nineteenth century's best-known writers, his name celebrated alongside those of Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. Born in Greece and raised in Ireland, Hearn was a true prodigy and world traveler. He worked as a reporter in Cincinnati, New Orleans, and the West Indies before heading to Japan in 1890 on a commission from Harper's. There, he married a Japanese woman from a samurai family, changed his name to Koizumi Yakumo, and became a Japanese subject. An avid collector of traditional Japanese tales, legends, and myths, Hearn taught literature and wrote his own tales for both Japanese and Western audiences. 

* * * * * * * 

This is the article written by Damian Flanagan on the TLS website:
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/nightmare-touches-japan/

He talks about these 2 books and starts out stating: 

"In the penultimate James Bond novel, You Only Live Twice (1964), just before 007 slays his nemesis Blofeld in a “Castle of Death” in Japan, the criminal mastermind explains to Bond the term “kirisute gomen”: the samurai right to peremptorily lop off the heads of lower orders for perceived insults. Bond hisses, “Spare me the Lafcadio Hearn, Blofeld”. It was no throwaway line by Ian Fleming, who spends the entire novel channelling his own inner Lafcadio Hearn by explaining, at great length, the nuances of Japanese culture to Western readers."

The rest is the story of this author's life and is fascinating! Hearn is a writer who drew on his background experiences in much the same way as, say, Patrick MacGill   (He wrote Children of the Dead End which is an autobiographical novel which roams from the tenant farms of Ireland to Scotland where he got work as a navvy [labourer] when they were building the Kinlochleven dam.)

"Hearn wandered London aimlessly and was soon persuaded to emigrate to America and seek the assistance of a family relative in Cincinnati, who gave him only the most modest help. Hearn’s tramp-like existence of casual work and rough sleeping continued until he landed a job at a local newspaper and began to attract attention as a talented reporter of lurid murder cases. Venturing into the African American sections of town, he demonstrated a keen interest in a vibrant black culture little written about in the white press."






Sunday 15 March 2020

QUARANATINI 1

With news items like this



it seems like we are in for the long haul ...