We keep a visitors' book, and ask our friends to write a note in it when they come to stay. This is from Lucy, included with her permission because it's honest and a little bit of town history:
"...We came up to see E and Steve and stay with them for the first time, but we also came to take a little peek into my ancestory. My Gran grew up in the Station Hotel where we had a beverage or two [on Saturday night] and my dad spent his early years growing up on North Parade, a terraced street that my great grandad built. Being proud of my family I was probably biased in my opinion of Whitley Bay, which I feel is a beautiful seaside town in need of sympathetic regeneration to bring it back to the busy resort I visited as a child..."
E and I are incomers. Another twenty years and we still won't be local. But we already feel a similar mix of pride and sadness when we show the town off.
It's fading on our watch. But the true value of it all is the community held by and holding the town, and Lucy and Pat reminded us of that at the weekend, both by their enthusiasm for the history, and by their company. Thank you, both of you. It's been great to get to know you better. And to learn the rules of meshi-mishi (sp?). Rematch!
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
919 - Sloth Man
Dug this up in a stack of papers I was sorting.
Sloth Man is hanging from a surveillance camera down by the Spanish City Dome when a heinous crime takes place beneath. What will he do? To be continued...
[Click for larger image.]
Monday, 26 January 2009
Friday, 23 January 2009
921 - Purely Mischief Making
Shirley Hughes, Up and Up (Bodley Head, 1979)
Does anyone else think the crotchety scientist from this fabulous picture book, about a little girl who eats a chocolate egg and finds she is able to fly, looks just a tiny bit like Richard Dawkins? (Who I think is wonderful, by the way.)
922 - On Love [Working note 3]
Everything can be described in terms both of its acme and its opposite. Pick your opposite.
White is an overload of colour, and a negation of black; the removal of pigment from a white light, or the switching of that light on.
Love is a selfless giving, which promises, thereby, self-fulfilment. Therefore its pursuit is pure selfishness and selflessness both.
So the Love Meme possesses two contradictory definitions. Both are in themselves satisfactory: together they create a tension which can only be resolved by appealing to the experience or event of love. This is what it is, because it is what it is.
There's something about intention in the examples I give, perhaps because intention is about a viewpoint. It depends where you are looking from as to whether the interrogation light illuminates or blinds. And only an objective viewpoint allows for light, defendant and inquisitor in clear and co-equal display.
I guess there are two equal and opposite ways to achieve objectivity. The first is to step outside the experience: to become an observer. The second is to so step in that one becomes embodied in each aspect of the experience. One feels the fulfilment of love and also its full expense.
Perhaps the rhetorics of science and religion represent, in this way, a deliberate shuttling to and fro between objective and subjective experience of life (this is, I think, what Mary Midgley is articulating in her book Science and Poetry). They start from opposite poles, and it is not that they meet halfway, so much that each learns to describe itself, both in its own terms, and in the terms of its opposite.
White is an overload of colour, and a negation of black; the removal of pigment from a white light, or the switching of that light on.
Love is a selfless giving, which promises, thereby, self-fulfilment. Therefore its pursuit is pure selfishness and selflessness both.
So the Love Meme possesses two contradictory definitions. Both are in themselves satisfactory: together they create a tension which can only be resolved by appealing to the experience or event of love. This is what it is, because it is what it is.
There's something about intention in the examples I give, perhaps because intention is about a viewpoint. It depends where you are looking from as to whether the interrogation light illuminates or blinds. And only an objective viewpoint allows for light, defendant and inquisitor in clear and co-equal display.
I guess there are two equal and opposite ways to achieve objectivity. The first is to step outside the experience: to become an observer. The second is to so step in that one becomes embodied in each aspect of the experience. One feels the fulfilment of love and also its full expense.
Perhaps the rhetorics of science and religion represent, in this way, a deliberate shuttling to and fro between objective and subjective experience of life (this is, I think, what Mary Midgley is articulating in her book Science and Poetry). They start from opposite poles, and it is not that they meet halfway, so much that each learns to describe itself, both in its own terms, and in the terms of its opposite.
Thursday, 22 January 2009
923 - On Slumdog, Seven Stories, Aidan Chambers and the Stuff of Life
Leaving the Tyneside after watching Slumdog Millionaire, E and I bumped into Elizabeth Hammill and her husband, who also know a good story when they see one. Elizabeth was, with Mary Briggs, a co-founder of Seven Stories, The Centre for Children's Books (a great article about which, by author Adele Geras, is here).
I was fortunate enough to work for Seven Stories for four years, after qualifying as a librarian, and before going self-employed as Artist, Explorer and General Wastrell. It's one of several cultural jewels in Newcastle's Ouseburn Valley.
Apart from anything else, Seven Stories reawakened in me a love and appreciation for story-making. And not least because it introduced me to the work of Aidan Chambers and his wife, Nancy. Between them they are publisher, editor, librarian, author, teacher - a couple whose passion for Children's Literature has blazed a trail since before 1969. A couple who, as it is beautifully put in Aidan's biography, have been in conversation since they first met.
Aidan hales from just outside Chester-le-Street. His first name resonates the spirituality of Northumberland (three government buildings in Newcastle, including the tax office, have adopted the names of the Northumbrian saints, Aidan, Cuthbert and Bede, for, one can't help thinking, rather more mundane purposes). His own spirituality, addressed in several of his powerful stories for teenagers, is both experimental and experiential, and has not come pre-packaged in buildings, boxes or books. Seven years a monk, he left in 1967 to pursue his vocation as a writer (no contest, he declares).
Writing about his sixth novel, This Is All: The Pillow-Book of Cordelia Kenn (2005), he says that life is about nothing other than love and coming to consciousness (the quote's at the back of the paperback version, which I don't have!). It seems to me that through his writing he has midwived love and consciousness in many a reader - not least E, who quoted Cordelia Kenn on her PhD thesis, and credits this book as giving her, for the first time, the understanding that a novel is much much more than a fast-paced adventure (though at times the book is certainly that, too).
Love and coming to consciousness. A life's work. I can go with that. Steeped as I currently am in questions about reciprocal altruism and the evolution of religious sensibility, this brief insight, that love breeds consciousness, and consciousness, love, offers one wiser man's reflection on the moment at which life transcends game theory, and in so doing allows the transformation of scientific rhetoric from doctrine to poetry.
No monk or saint has offered more.
I was fortunate enough to work for Seven Stories for four years, after qualifying as a librarian, and before going self-employed as Artist, Explorer and General Wastrell. It's one of several cultural jewels in Newcastle's Ouseburn Valley.
Apart from anything else, Seven Stories reawakened in me a love and appreciation for story-making. And not least because it introduced me to the work of Aidan Chambers and his wife, Nancy. Between them they are publisher, editor, librarian, author, teacher - a couple whose passion for Children's Literature has blazed a trail since before 1969. A couple who, as it is beautifully put in Aidan's biography, have been in conversation since they first met.
Aidan hales from just outside Chester-le-Street. His first name resonates the spirituality of Northumberland (three government buildings in Newcastle, including the tax office, have adopted the names of the Northumbrian saints, Aidan, Cuthbert and Bede, for, one can't help thinking, rather more mundane purposes). His own spirituality, addressed in several of his powerful stories for teenagers, is both experimental and experiential, and has not come pre-packaged in buildings, boxes or books. Seven years a monk, he left in 1967 to pursue his vocation as a writer (no contest, he declares).
Writing about his sixth novel, This Is All: The Pillow-Book of Cordelia Kenn (2005), he says that life is about nothing other than love and coming to consciousness (the quote's at the back of the paperback version, which I don't have!). It seems to me that through his writing he has midwived love and consciousness in many a reader - not least E, who quoted Cordelia Kenn on her PhD thesis, and credits this book as giving her, for the first time, the understanding that a novel is much much more than a fast-paced adventure (though at times the book is certainly that, too).
Love and coming to consciousness. A life's work. I can go with that. Steeped as I currently am in questions about reciprocal altruism and the evolution of religious sensibility, this brief insight, that love breeds consciousness, and consciousness, love, offers one wiser man's reflection on the moment at which life transcends game theory, and in so doing allows the transformation of scientific rhetoric from doctrine to poetry.
No monk or saint has offered more.
924 - A Morning in Newcastle
Hunter-Gathered in Newcastle this morning:
2 buttons (large blue coat; smaller blouse (?));
1 ash-silver leaf;
1/2 a folk lyric (I would if I could, my darling boy;/ I would if I could, my darling -/ Sovereigns turn my closer world:/ Your hand on my heart's a far thing/ (Your hand's not worth a farthing.);
1 unsolicited hug on Northumberland Street.
Other stuff too, but these made my day.
2 buttons (large blue coat; smaller blouse (?));
1 ash-silver leaf;
1/2 a folk lyric (I would if I could, my darling boy;/ I would if I could, my darling -/ Sovereigns turn my closer world:/ Your hand on my heart's a far thing/ (Your hand's not worth a farthing.);
1 unsolicited hug on Northumberland Street.
Other stuff too, but these made my day.
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