Tuesday, February 27

 
THE WINTER CALENDAR






The winter calendar, as you can see, invites brevity. The yellow witch-hazel is blooming and the reddish pink imperial crown bush, Viburnum Bod. ‘Dawn’, has bloomed since December, that’s about it. Not much about which to write anywhere. The garden looks beautiful all covered in snow, of course, but otherwise, the advantages of it are negligible, I’d say. Garden correspondents in particular have more fun in the spring. Our local garden columnist has suggested all kinds of winter activities to fill his weekly space - like admiring the naked crowns of the trees - but he is sublimating, I think, while, heroically, earning an honest buck at the same time.


# posted by Country Dweller @ 6:09 PM 0 comments

Thursday, February 22

 
WINTER LAIR





I have just read an old study of the concept of happiness by Thomas de Quincey in a Danish collection of English Essays (Hasselbalchs Kultur-bibliotek, nr. 11, 1941).
It is not that I share whole-heartedly the old master’s view of the cold season, although I do appreciate its advantages, but his elaborate conjuring up of a picture of a particularly happy evening at this time of the year, I thought would go well with the winter photographs for the calendar.
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THE CONCEPT OF HAPPINESS
AT THE BACK OF BEYOND 1832

“Imagine a small house in the country, four-five miles from the nearest village. Make it a very modest dwelling place with room neither for a carriage nor for a horse, merely a small white house surrounded by blooming plants, selected so that they flower, one after the other, all through the spring, summer and autumn. You should not, however, envision the season being any of these; instead you should make it winter at its harshest.
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This is a most important point in the definition of happiness. I will not insist on frost or snow or a wind so hard that you may lean against it as you would lean against a tree. Rain is also acceptable if, mind you, it is raining cats and dogs, or as the English seamen say, canons and marl spars; something like that I must have in order not to feel aggravated by the cost of light and firewood and by not getting my money’s worth. No, let me have a good old Russian winter where you share the right to dispose of your earlobes with the north wind ...
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In the wintertime, you can see both the sunrise and the sunset from the
windows facing south. Its shortest turn yields only six hours of daylight.
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... To save myself the trouble of too much verbal description, I will introduce a painter and instruct him in painting the rest of the picture. Painters do not like small white houses unless they are exceedingly weather-beaten, but as the reader has already understood that it is a winter evening, the painter’s services will only be needed for the inside of the house.
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Paint me a room then, eighteen by twelve feet, and not more than six feet to the ceiling. This, dear reader, in my family we call the salon, but as it is furnished with a double purpose, it is also called the library, because books are the only things in which I am richer than my neighbours. I own about 5000 volumes, acquired gradually since I was eighteen years old.
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Therefore, Mr Painter, place as many books as you possibly can in this room. Let it be crammed, and paint also a blazing fireplace and some plain and modest furniture among which a tea table should support, if you know how to paint such a thing, symbolically or otherwise, an eternal tea pot, eternal a parte ante and a parte post, as tea must be served all through the evening and well into the night...” ............Freely reproduced from Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions (1822).
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The linings of winter lairs in the country should, also in my view, thicken with the degree of their exposure and isolation. A neighbour of mine agreed with some relief that the stuffed bookcase on the end wall adds at least a couple of degrees of warmth to the house in the cold season. On his first visit here, he commented uneasily on the size of the bookcase, so I thought I’d reassure him of my good sense by pointing to its insulating property. It’s not that it matters. The old cast-iron wood oven could keep a much larger house nicely warm even in hard cold, but I don’t like to be considered an oddball in the neighbourhood. Also, there is this annoyance at the casual reference to a book you have not read that does not invite perkiness in these matters. It may not be the obvious concern for a bookman, but in my experience it is a sensible consideration all the same.

In the wintertime, I visit some of the ‘Dutch’ book sales in Copenhagen. Most of the content of the cabinet collection in the photograph, I’ve found on sales during the years. Just recently, I was happy to find Boswell’s Life of Dr Johnson in a fine illustrated four-volume edition from 1856. Various stamps and notes on the endpapers showed that originally, it had been sold by Leighton, Son and Hodge in Shoe Lane, London. At some stage on its voyage, it had rested in the bookshop of Stassin et Xavier in 22, Rue de la Banque, probably in Paris, before it ended up in Copenhagen at the turn of the last century, where it had been sold by two anonymous booksellers, first for sixty kroner (about seven euros), later for two hundred. One hundred-and-fifty years after their printing, I picked up the four small volumes for the change in my pocket. On closer examination, I could see and feel that the last two volumes had never been opened. The virginity of the smell of the fine chalk-white paper was simply intoxicating and, lodged deep in its fibres, the crisp roman letter was a complete, almost tactile, joy to read. The violet, elaborately decorated paper bindings with hardly any signs of wear hold numerous fine engravings of various London locations, some landscapes, and quite a few portraits, and they also include more peculiar items such as an inserted facsimile of a ‘Round Robin’, a sailor’s invention for sharing the blame for an uprising. The books have kept me well entertained through many evenings, I might tell my good neighbour, making sure to add, keeping up appearances, that it is much cheaper than his TV subscription.
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SURFING THE LIBRARY
Navigare necesse est
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Writing the garden calendar, I’ve tried,
occasionally, to share the joy of surfing the
library as one may enjoy surfing the Internet.
The intercommunication between books
is obvious to dedicated readers, of course,
but it may also be subtle and intricate,
significant mainly in a personal perspective,
like the breaking of a wave to a surfer:
4DOWNPOURS AND PEPYS (Samuel Pepys,
Paul Auster, Italo Svevo, Chateaubriand)
4MYSTERIOUS PILE (Caldwell and Thomason,
Francesco Colonna, Pasquale Vilari, Girolamo
Savonarola, Philippe de Commines)
4EYES WIDE OPEN AND THE MIND RELAXED BUT ATTENTIVE (Raymond Chandler, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Irwin Shaw, miss Mutch and Ben Hur, 1860, Third Edition)
4ALMOST LIKE A SHOWER (Antonia S. Byatt, Literary Theory, Kurt Vonnegut)
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If you would rather have a closer look at some of the books in the section of older classics and know the name of the authors and the titles of the books, please use this link for a close-up photograph of 4TWO SHELVES (third and fourth shelf in the second row) with mainly English, French and German editions from 1860-1930.
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Perhaps you have another question on your mind. Quite often, when people see the bookcases for the first time, they ask, some in disbelief, others with a hint of disapproval: - Have you read all those books?
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What can I say? I feel depleted if I have less than three thousand books close at hand. They embody the history of my reading and my aspirations, and they keep the memory of the good times spent in their company vivid and fresh. They are like walls of voices speaking from all corners of the world, their motivation, clarity and pitch perfectly preserved through the ages with each one weighing every word against the unique counterbalance of its origin.
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However, having had ample time to ponder the question, the polite answer, I believe, is: - No, I haven’t read them all... yet.

# posted by Country Dweller @ 3:34 PM 3 comments

Wednesday, January 31

 
A DIALOGUE
WITH MOTHER EARTH


I have just learned that Liza Kirsten Kuyucu’s book En dialog med Moder Jords bevidsthed has been placed on the Internet. When the book was about to be published, Mrs Kuyucu called me, asking if she could use one of my old wheel drawings for the cover, because it meant a great deal to her. Happy to oblige, I just asked to get a copy of the book, but somehow it never reached me, so I read it for the first time a couple of days ago.

It is interesting how very different experiences may find expression in the same image, I think. I made the wheel drawings many years ago after having studied natural growth patterns, for example the beautiful twelve fold symmetrical pattern of the chlorophyll molecule—composed of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and magnesium—which is like that of a daisy and found in most plants. By re-enacting the genesis of the patterns, I thought that I got a better understanding of the geometric principles involved. It certainly gave me a sense of the attraction of the simple functions of small numbers. Some basic forms seem to exist a priori, as abstract, geometric relationships.


NUMERICAL LANDSCAPING
Boxing the compass in 3D
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..Trioland, 2003
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I came across an interview with Daniel Tammet in The Guardian Unlimited. Tammet is known for his uncanny ability to learn new languages very quickly and, not least, for being able to do extreme mental calculus as certain gifted ‘savants’, but apparently without suffering the debilitating mental side-effects that usually accompany such skills.

He describes his sense of small numbers very emotionally, though. The number one he is drawn to for its brightness whereas "two is kind of like a movement, right to left, kind of like a drifting. Five is a clap of thunder or the sound of a wave hitting a rock. Six is actually the number I find hardest to experience. It's like a hole, or a chasm. Number nine is the biggest number. It's very tall. It can be intimidating."

The above composition of classic patterns might convey a sense, if only a faint one, of Daniel Tammet’s numerical landscapes, although we differ greatly in our relationship with small numbers. I rarely do mental arithmetic and never just for the fun of it. Perhaps that is why I like very small numbers in graphic functions. Three, four and six in particular. They are very obliging numbers, I think. Five is more awkward to deal with. It seems to be an edgy kind of number, like seven, at least when using only a compass and a straight ruler.
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g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g g

# posted by Country Dweller @ 5:34 PM
 
FOR ART'S SAKE
and for the sake
of country pastimes





Many of the referrals to the winter calendar are aimed at the Trioland print, the site meter shows.

I suppose the mentioning of D.T. in connection to its inclusion has much to do with it. Just to make sure, I have added a couple of spirolaterals from a recent series here, to see if they attract as many visitors as the Trioland composite. If the interest is in the prints more than in the interview, I might even add an exhibition of my geometrical graphics to the winter calendar.

It could do with some additional content, I think, and geometrical art may find an audience among the visitors to a garden calendar in the wintertime. The sympathetic observer may even view them as an extension of the field of the classical botanical watercolour, which has developed greatly over time and still has a place in contemporary art.

MOST .PLANTS .SEEM .TO .MAKE .SENSE .in some odd way as do most geometrical patterns - round ones more evidently to a gardener perhaps - in the way they embody various sets of rules of engagement with nature and space. The investigation of these rules as well as the search for new ways of breaking them, to me, offer nice breaks from the dealings with those harder and much more complicated patterns of life, which we call facts.
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Spirolateral Diffractions, 2009
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TO BREAK A RULE BY MAKING A POINT IN THE CALENDAR,
I'd say: .THE PICTURE IS NOT A FACT. - at least
the question is still up for DISCUSSION. Some gardeners
may think of 'BOTANICAL GEOMETRY' as so many
waves on the water and would rather have square tiles
for their garden paths. Be it as it may...

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# posted by Country Dweller @ 4:47 PM
 
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..My Single Tile
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..The Alhambra Baths
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 ..My Bath
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# posted by Country Dweller @ 4:33 PM

Monday, January 29

 
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G E O M E T R I C A L g A R T g W I N T E R g E X H I B I T I O N g 2 0 0 9
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3D Tessellations / Cubiform 3-6






3D Tessellation / Cubiform 4 B

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TRIOLAND TILE
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3D Tessellation / Triocore 5






3D Tessellation / Triocore 7

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# posted by Country Dweller @ 4:31 PM 1 comments
 
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One of the things I enjoy most about the view from the house is that it
is without time markers. The plants in the garden have been natives of
the area for centuries just as the stakes on the drying ground have been
standing there - or some like them - since the time of Canute.
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# posted by Country Dweller @ 3:20 PM

Sunday, January 28

 
SEASONAL TAPESTRIES
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3D Tessellations / CircBones 1st Run
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# posted by Country Dweller @ 9:33 PM
 
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3D Tessellation / CircBones 2nd Run
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# posted by Country Dweller @ 8:10 PM
 
MATRIX RUN
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Tessellation / CircBones Cover
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# posted by Country Dweller @ 4:30 PM

Thursday, October 19

 
SHORTER DAYS
LONGER POEMS


The number of accidental visitors who stay for a while reading the garden calendar has been declining after I’ve ceased making entries in the Summer Calendar. Although the weather is quite mild for the season and the garden is still green, the leaves of the old apple tree have begun falling and the pear trees are turning red. The sun sets at six and is gone for fourteen hours already. Hardly something with which to enliven a cottage garden calendar or to inspire an autumn sequel.

There’s the usual trouble with keeping track of time in late October when the clocks are turned back an hour. This year, I can stay in Calvesgarden for a couple of days, getting accustomed to the deplorable interference with the calendar. Pope Gregory XIII would turn in his tomb if he knew. The amount of energy saved is negligible, I’m sure, compared to the disturbance caused by the rustling about with the heavenly bodies. Either way, darkness falls like a rock now.

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# posted by Country Dweller @ 11:42 PM 2 comments

Tuesday, October 10

 
THE BEST NOVELS OF ALL TIME
AND A COUPLE MORE


I couldn’t help smiling—for several reasons—when I came across Time’s list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. It’s close to being a list of the greatest novels that have been reviewed in Time over the years.

Besides the period issue, there’s also the question of place. Apparently, a remarkable number of American novelists have been writing great novels in the last century compared to the rest of the world’s writers of English. It brought back the memory of the size of the Hudson River in Saul Steinberg's funny poster, View of the World from 9th Avenue (1976). About as big as the Pacific Ocean.

Another reason for my amusement was the fact that I’ve read about a third of the titles on the list, which is quite good going for an alien, I think, compared to the reversed situation of the editors of the list. Although I haven't shared Richard Lacayo’s “laying bare the process and the pain behind stacking up the 100 novels,” I think it’s safe to say that Americans don’t seem to read much fiction besides their own or have very long memories.

When I read Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, for example, I soon recognized, much to my delight, the voice of the dear Abbot Jérôme Coignard from one of my favourite novels, Anatole France’s La Rôtisserie de la reine Pédauque from 1892 (At the Sign of the Reine Pédauque). The similarity, to me, was so striking that the small novel by Wilder appeared to be no more than a very nice pastiche. Still, Wilder made the top 100, not France, who wrote only in French. For a good copy in English, I'd recommend The Bodley Head Library Edition in crown 8vo from the early twenties or the illustrated edition with photogravures by Frank C. Papé from the late twenties.

My interest in the listings has to do with the book notes in Calvesgarden Calendar. I think it’s more interesting to read about books you have read than to read about books you haven’t read, and here you can see some of the books English readers are likely to know.

TIME TO BE IN EARNEST
A fragment of autobiography

It’s not often, in my experience, that you share the literary taste of a person enough to follow up on his or hers recommendations without some support. I can think of only one literary observer whose suggestions I’ve always enjoyed following.

In her fine one-year diary, Time to be in Earnest (2000), P.D. James recommends, besides the oeuvres of Nancy Mitford and P.G. Wodehouse (her favourite bedtime reading), a handful of books from the year before the diary’s publishing, all of which, to me, were exiting reads.

“It’s been a particularly good year for biographies,” she writes, having come to enjoy them “far more than fiction,” and she mentions Claire Tomalin’s “Jane Austen: a Life” and Jenny Uglow’s “Hogarth: a Life and a World.”

She recommends two new novels, “An Instance of the Fingerpost” by Iain Pears, “a fictional tour de force set in Oxford in the 1660s, which combines erudition with mystery,” and Ian McEwan’s “Enduring Love”, “especially the first chapter,” both of which are well researched and very well written, I think.

Speaking of enduring love, I've pondered on her semi-detached observation in the diary that “it’s interesting how often unintelligent, even stupid, women manage their emotional lives more satisfactorily than do their cleverer sisters.” I'm not sure this is the case. I've never thought of stupidity as an asset in anything. Mrs James' husband came back from the Second World War with his mind broken, and since his death in the early sixties, she has managed on her own.

# posted by Country Dweller @ 5:05 PM 5 comments

Tuesday, October 3

 
紀伊國屋書店
The very first referral from a Japanese search engine came from Kinokuniya BookWeb. Using just the English title of Paul Auster’s new novel, it received 36.000 hits already. I asked for the book at my bookseller’s in Copenhagen, when the Danish edition, Rejser i Scriptoriet, came out in the spring, but they said the English edition was not expected to come out before early October. I am happy to be reminded of it just in time. I have always enjoyed reading his books. (Read more ... and more)

ggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

# posted by Country Dweller @ 7:06 PM 0 comments

Monday, October 2

 
EXTENDING THE CALENDAR
by adding two new links in the sidebar


I've rearranged Calvesgarden Calendar, adding two links in the sidebar for extra picture space and the occasional note, which strays too far from the subject of the garden calendar to make sense. They have been moved to this site. Its setup is meant to be more accommodating to posts of various lengths. Postings in a garden calendar should be brief and descriptive, I think, not argumentative. Notes can be anything.

I think one must stick to the theme of a weblog or the visitors will pass by for something more coherent. It’s complicated enough as it is to navigate the high seas of the web. By just writing about the seasons of a small garden on the south coast of Zealand, I hope to make it easier for visitors to decide if they want to stay. The weather is important to garden folks, so I’ve left in the weather reports and have even considered acquiring a rain gauge and a barometer to make them more precise. They wouldn’t have been of much help this summer with the lion-eyed sun glaring down at us from a cloudless sky every day, but they might yield a little excitement later on for those of the readers who are into that sort of thing.


FLUTTERING LACE

A friend suggested that I’d report some bird spotting on the weblog. Calvesgarden is situated on several migration routes and surrounded by large bird sanctuaries. It therefore seems an obvious thing to do when not much else is happening around here. However, as much as I love birds as a species, their song, flight—most everything about them, actually—I don’t much care to watch for them. I can tell a gull from a duck and a swallow from a starling, even a swan from a goose, but I don’t get much closer than that. Scores of amateur ornithologists are scanning our area all year round and organising their sightings on the Internet, so the matter is in able hands as it is.

Visiting the garden, birds often reveal something of an attitude, I think, which, combined with a pronounced nervous disposition, makes them rather overwhelming, in particular when a couple of thousand of them decide to make a stopover in the old apple and pear trees at the same time. The sight of the flocks and the noise they make when they move in unison is remarkable. They’re like huge pieces of fluttering black lace sounding as enormous sails flapping in the wind. By disturbing a flock of birds in a big tree, you’ll learn that they can also litter in unison. They would add too much tension to the calendar if they were overly exposed, I think, which is contrary to its purpose of bringing peace and understanding to the world.

This is what I like to read myself. Peaceable, uncomplicated weblogs where people write about their daily lives and the places they live. What seems to be quite ordinary on one side of the planet can appear highly exotic on the other side. Food, housing, family, work, diversions. Any old turn will do. Mountain climbing? Tourism? No, thanks. Mountains look much the same to me. Turist sites, too. Most of the interesting things in life happen every day, I think.


# posted by Country Dweller @ 12:38 AM 0 comments

Sunday, October 1

 
THE PLEASURES OF A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
Celebrating seniority with a meme.




Although I’m not all clear about the rules of meme making, I thought I would make one anyway, because those I’ve seen so far are not really intended for older folks, I think. As much as you still look forward to things when you get on in years, you also begin hoping for less of the same thing. A young man may appear conceited if being too fussy about what he wants to do, whereas an older man can get away with missing out on quite a number of things without anybody taking offence. Therefore, in this meme, you simply note

THE TEN THINGS YOU MOST ENJOY NOT DOING

(1) I very much enjoy everything about not driving a car. (2) I like the whole process of not shopping for clothes, just making sure I’m not mistaken for a homeless person. (3) I enjoy not eating manufactured foods almost as much as (4) I enjoy not watching TV. (5) I’m happy not to know the result of any professional game, (6) am absolutely thrilled not to see or hear commercial messages and (7) glad not to sit through violent or vulgar performances of all sorts. (8) I thoroughly enjoy not reading offensive or badly printed books and (9) not having modern art hanging on the walls. (10) Just recently, I’ve taken great pleasure in not going on a chartered holiday.

I DRAW THE LINE at Lev Tolstoy’s
rejection of listening to the first presto
of Beethoven’s Kreutzersonaten in the
company of women in décolletage.

He was in his sixties when he wrote the
highly moral story with the same title,
warning his readers of the dangers of
falling madly in love when under its spell.

Old men have such an easy time being
virtuous, I think. They seem to have
forgotten... well, quite a number of things.
Luckily, I’m not that old.
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GO TO THE SPRING CALENDAR

GO TO THE SUMMER CALENDAR

# posted by Country Dweller @ 5:37 PM 0 comments