Marvellous mural

In my last post from my trip to Hawke's Bay, I thought I would share these photos with you of a mural by the esplanade.

Gisborne boasts quite a few murals, usually with a historic focus and featuring steam trains, men in overalls and ladies in bonnets. This one is quite different, as you can see.

There are individual tiles painted with children's faces. These are fantastic! They were painted by the children of a local school and there are some pretty weird looking pupils if we assume that these are self-portraits. Some are blue or yellow with crazy teeth and wild hair.

It reminds me of a recording I have of Joyce Grenfell 'doing' George, Don't Do That'.


"And this is my friend Caroline, and Caroline is painting such a lovely red picture, aren't you, Caroline? I wonder what it is? Perhaps it's a lovely sunset, is it? Or a big red orange? It's a picture of Mummy! For a moment I thought it was a big red orange, but now you tell me, I can see it is a picture of Mummy. Aren't you going to give her any nose? No nose. It's so interesting the way they see things..."

I always wondered what it was that the irrepressible George was doing. I assumed he was picking his nose, but I have heard other suggestions that are generally far less pleasant.

If anyone has any (not obscene - there is a good taste blocker on this site) suggestions as to what George is up to, please share them.

I'd also be keen to know if anyone has any further information on this mural. Perhaps you know someone who provided one of the paintings - perhaps you are someone who provided one of the paintings. I'd love to hear from you.

As I was playing with the camera settings, I'll leave you with a final picture of the mural in a swirl.

Hidden Treasures

The Simple to Sumptuous exhibition at the National Library Gallery had a plethora of books spanning the disciplines of art, literature, communications, economics and sociology. This collection of books ranges from the elaborate to the simple. Once again it inspired me to poetry as I wondered would you judge a book by its cover; well, would you?


There is a book written on Shackleton's expedition to Antrarctica, bound in 1908 in wooden boards from packing cases of whatever came to hand - in this case it was a crate of beans. It is hardly a glamorous binding for the writings about and drawings of one of the most fragile ecosystems on the planet.


Another is a work by Dante Gabrielle Rossetti - his ballads and sonnets are bound with a cover from 1881. The beige silk cloth with mesh of gold thread is oversewn with flowers and leaves in imitation of the Rossetti designed cover of the standard edition. When Rossetti's wife died from overuse of laudanum, he buried the poems he had been working on in her coffin.


Years later he tried to recall them, but found he couldn't - his own mind was addled with chloral hydrate by now - and so the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, to which he belonged, encouraged him to dig them up and publish them: love sonnets from beyond the grave.

Tiny devotional books of the Tudor and Stuart period with canvas bindings, were embroidered with gold and silver thread, and bound with a common lower board so the volumes are upside down to each other, facing opposite directions. They are fragile now due to overuse and are practically falling apart - they have become dilapidated or looted for their thread.

In a glut of excess, the bookbinders Sangorski and Sutcliffe of London were famous for their use of coloured leathers, gold and semi-precious stones. They created The Great Omar, which was a version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. It took two years of continuous work to make and featured 1,500 separate pieces of leather, 1,050 jewels and heavy gold tooling.

It was lost on the sinking of the Titanic. A copy was made, but this was destroyed in World War II during the Blitz. With no disrespect to the great Omar Khayyam and his fantastic living in the moment philosophy ('A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou'), the story of this cover may be as great as its contents and demands to be told.

Hidden Treasures

1.

What’s in the box?
Tales of adventure; feats of heroism;
Sheaves of botanical images
And mystical wisps of ethereal light
From the ends of the earth

Crates of beans
Natural fibre to fuel expeditions
At the end of an era
And feed the soul with half-told truths
Now frozen in time.

2.

Tenderly traced in threads of gold
Flowers and leaves burst from beige silk
The mesh shot with dreams made flesh
Through post-coital lovers and chloral hydrate.

Tendrils weaving through clods of earth
Buried with flowing tresses.
The rotting notebook of a painter poet;
Renaissance through Brotherhood.

3.

Miniature acts of devotion for Tudors and Stuarts
Where Transubstantiation means death
In the wrong hands.

Thumb-worn and dog-eared; His Masters Voice is
Closeted in confessional, dancing dos-a-dos,
Sleeping head to toe.

Pillaged for their precious thread; dilapidated and
Abandoned to the ravages of times
Fragile as faith.

4.

Jewels and stones may break my bones
But words will live forever.
Beneath the waves or blitzed cities
Rumours of hidden treasure.

Forget the gold, coloured leather,
Years of continuous strife;
Just be happy for this moment,
For this moment is your life.

Enclosure

Continuing the theme of the last post about the Simple to Sumptuous exhibition, I've been writing more poems.

This one was inspired by the fine examples of leather-bounds volumes. Leather was the most popular binding until the nineteenth century with domestic farm animals being used for every purpose available. The leather was treated with salt to produce a creamy white colour, very popular in Germany, whereas vellum was treated with lime.

The raised bands are due to the thick leather being sewn, and the corner pieces and raised studs are to protect the leather from rough surfaces. In many instances the dyed leather with a simple border framing the open space caused the primary ornament to become the natural grain and texture of the leather.

All of this got me thinking about the Enclosure Acts between 1750 and 1860, during which 21% of common land in England was enclosed by the landowners. Farmers moved to urban areas and began taking labouring jobs for wages. Marxist economists believe that this was the beginning of the proletariat and capitalist social relations.

Which naturally led me to think about George Orwell and his famous last lines of Animal Farm; "The creatures outside looked from pig to man and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." And so I wrote the following:

Enclosure

Domestic farm animals:
Calf; pig; sheep –
Thoroughly used for meat to eat
And hide to hide
The words of wisdom
Or otherwise
Contained within.

Treated with salt
To preserve and render
Tough but tender,
The creamy white hue is
Popular for palimpsests,
Kept from rough surfaces
By raised bands and studs.

Natural grain and texture
Is the primary ornament.
The simple border encloses
An open space,
Valuable to owners of
Domestic farm animals
Without the common

Drifting to town from forbidden acres
The country folk become
The man on the street, while
Landowners make laws with learning.
Noses in books they are
Hard to tell apart;
Clean and clever animals.

Simple to Sumptuous: Clasp

A couple of months ago I went to an exhibition at the National Library gallery called Simple to Sumptuous, which was a collection of book bindings from the Alexander Turnbull Library, ranging from 1400 to the present.

The function of a bookbinding is simply to hold the book together; to protect the pages from wear and tear. They are basic but practical – things of great beauty and collectors’ items in their own right. This exhibition featured many examples from around the world, including Europe, Japan and Antarctica.

The books are just gorgeous, and even the language used to describe them is rich and evocative: ‘decorative end leaves and pastedown on cream watered silk with gold-tooled turn-ins; red goatskin gold tooled and on-lain in black; endleaves of pale blue watered silk; velvet lined oak case’. It was inspiring enough to move me to poetry.

The first verse relates to the clasps and straps to keep the wood from warping and the vellum pages flat. The strap sewn to the top cover indicates that the book comes from Germany or the Low Countries; if sewn to the bottom cover it originates from England or France.

To secure knowledge, many books were kept in chained libraries with a chain passing through the clasp; there is an example of one of these clasps harbouring a miniature in a book covered in brown goatskin, edged in brass with gilt text edges.

Clasp

Knowledge is power
But a little is dangerous
So it must be rationed.
There are checks and balances;
Keys and locks

Surround her face
In a miniature oval,
Clasping the spine tightly.
Her smile is serene as she
Guards her secrets.

Beneath layers of glass
Protected and displayed
Her image is eternal;
Impossible to analyse as a
Thought in words.

Postcard from Gisborne

It was a glorious morning in Gisborne when I went for a wander around the streets and found a really great cafe for breakfast. Next to a secondhand bookshop, Cafe Ruba is fantastic - great coffee and an excellent bagel served with smoked salmon scrambled eggs.

A small vase of fragrant flowers (possibly jasmine; I'm not very good with my flora) and a bottle of water appeared on the table as if by magic.

Folk greet the morning here, discussing the world on the chairs outside. Boys in school uniform sit at a large table well-stocked with glossy magazines and sip coffee with a nonchalance that belies their years.

Baking tempts from behind the glass cabinets. The service is friendly, smiling, welcoming, prompt and adroit. I was impressed.

Gisborne is home to one of the largest carved meeting houses in New Zealand. Te Poho-O-Rawiri Marae is a beautiful building.

It is surrounded by beautiful green hills, bush and countryside. The red and white wooden embellishments to the building stand out in a powerful manner. The marae has hosted many people and many matters have been discussed here. Another great place for a meeting.

Close to the marae sits a Presbyterian church - at least I assume it is Presyterian due to the blue and white colouring. I don't know how long either of these buildings have been here or how well they coexist, but I like to think of them sitting side by side with the guardians or gods of each watching over their people and welcoming in all those who wish to enter.

Capturing Captain Cook

It wasn't exactly a pilgrimmage, but when I was in Gisborne, I found myself drawn to the Captain Cook monuments. The landing monument is quite understated and in the midst of the industrial docks. It seems oddly fitting.

I felt quite melancholy as I went for a drive and came across a second Cook monument on top of Kaiti Hill with the harbour laid out behind him.

Dusk was falling so the light was interesting and I played with the camera settings to get some spooky photographs.

The one on the right is my version of 'The World

Turned Upside Down'

The next day I went for a run along the beach and saw the statue in honour of Young Nick who first spotted land from Cook's ship. His hand is outstretched in a yearning manner and the sun lit him up as he reached out to land.

It began to rain but it was warm and still, and there was a rainbow. I saw the prism of filtered rays ignite Young Nick's Head and I felt a long way from Dover. A small fish was glistening above high tide, so I shunted him back to the sea and watched him shimmy away in the waves.

Captain Cook is again standing sentinel on the waterfront, again looking inland while Young Nick looks out to sea. This seems the wrong way round to me.

I took the photo on the left with the shadow of a telegraph pole because I thought it resembled a cross or a ship's mast and I liked the composition as it nestled between the statue and the tree.

I know that some people consider him persona non grata and blame him for all the evils of colonialism, but his navigational feats are indubitably magnificent and I do think he is a hero, albeit from a bygone era.

Books read in August

The following are short reviews of the books that I read in August. The marks I have given them in the brackets are out of five.

Landings – Jenny Pattrick (3.3)
Having written so successfully about the West Coast mining settlements, Jenny Pattrick turns her hand to the folk up the Whanganui River at the turn of the twentieth century.

She begins by describing the people who live there; the Maori families and farmers; the Chinese market gardener trying to eek a living from the soil; the people trying to make a profit from the timber industry; the former convicts escaping their past life; the nuns who run their peaceful convent; the hoteliers at Pipiriki and the day trippers in search of refined serenity. There are good folk and there are hell-raisers and their stories proceed to interconnect like the tributaries of the mighty river.

Each chapter begins with an advertisement or an article from the paper, extolling the virtues of the land available to buy, the houseboat, the homestead and the river itself, described as New Zealand’s Rhine. There are also admonishments against the evils of drink and the infiltration of the Chinese. These are swiftly followed by the author’s own descriptive prose which brings the river of a hundred years ago to life. One of the big issues is the dichotomy between progress and preserving the rights of the people who have lived on this land for all their lives.

Jenny Pattrick gives each character a voice, and writes their passages in different tones and tenses. She makes the issues personal, fleshing out the dry bones of history and writing a novel with characters it is easy to care about.

My Name is Will – Jess Winfield (4)
Jess Winfield is one of the founding members of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, so he knows his stuff. Quotes and allusions scattered throughout the novel will have Shakespearean fans acknowledging them with a wry smile, while there is nothing to trouble the serious scholar. The subtitle is ‘A novel of sex, drugs, and Shakespeare’, and this is one book you most certainly can judge by the cover.

Willie Shakespeare Greenberg, an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz attempts to write a thesis about Shakespeare and the fact that he was a Catholic. The only problem is that he hasn’t done any research, and when his father threatens to cut him off, he becomes a drug runner to earn some funds, delivering an enormous magic mushroom to a mysterious buyer. Meanwhile William Shakespeare, playwright extraordinaire, is struggling to avoid religious persecution while holding down his job as a schoolteacher in Stratford-upon-Avon.

As Willie begins to investigate the religious persecution of the times, it is clear that this was a deadly serious matter. The Shakespearean sections are an intriguing interpretation, including Shakespeare hiding in a priest hole, attending a secret Catholic mass with his parents, and being tortured on the rack. There are some macabre descriptions of priests being hanged, drawn and quartered, which prevent the novel from being all beer and skittles.

In one chapter, the hero becomes them both, drifting in and out of a drug-induced hallucination. Never mind that this is a bad plot ploy – like stepping out of a shower and waking from a Dallas dream – it has taken Willie nearly all novel to work out the parallels that were blatant to us from the beginning. The ‘drugs equals forbidden religion’ line has many flaws, namely that the fear of being discovered as a practicing Catholic can hardly equate to using drugs, although this is the author’s premise.

Eventually Willie decides that he is most impressed by “the timelessness of the characters. The diversity. They’re so recognisable, even to a modern reader. It’s almost as if he was the very first writer to think like a human being.” This becomes the premises of his thesis, although it is far from a new idea. If he is to be forgiven for his unoriginality, it is because he puns in sixteenth century English better than anyone since the great man himself.

On the whole this is a fun romp through Shakespearean England and 1980s undergraduate California that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Voss – Patrick White (4)
This is a wonderfully colourful novel about the death of one era and the dawning of another; when men set off to explore and adventure and women stayed behind to await the triumphant homecoming. Voss leads a troop of disparate men with assorted aims on an expedition across the centre of Australia. Laura Trevelyan is forced to remain behind in Sydney and endure, but Patrick White has brought a strength and dignity to Laura that raises the novel to new heights. She scares men by being intelligent and telling them exactly what she is thinking when they ask.

The men are forced to work together to attempt to survive against the cruelty of nature. The class divisions fall away and the new nation is built on money and beauty. In this land, there is a chance for equality as everything is distilled to its essence in the crucible of the Australian outback. The aborigines are silent spectators of their attempts to conquer rather than co-exist.

The language is beautiful with descriptions that seem reminiscent of George Eliot or Jane Austen; both imperious and sly. Told with wit and humour, it brings humanity to a barren landscape with an ever-present reminder that we are merely passing through.

Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4.5)

The half a yellow sun of the title refers to the Biafran flag, established to represent the new country of Black Africa, a splinter group of Nigeria. The deadly struggle that ensues has repurcussions for the protaganists of this novel.

There is Olanna, a young woman married to Odenigbo, a revolutionary and intellectual. Her twin sister, Kainene, is bitter and cynical and living with a white man, Richard. There are tensions between the sisters, exaccerbated by their partners, but their differences fade into insignificance against the background of history.

Some beautifully poetic passages clash with gruesome depictions of massacres and the politics of idealism contrast with the horrors of civil war. The spectre of colonialism hangs over the novel and the reader is forced to take a stand only to be told that their opinion does not matter unless they are personally involved.

Sibling rivalry, female liberation and coming of age - through Odenigbo's houseboy - are crammed into this novel which strives to tell a story. It is not until the end that we know who's story it is and who is telling it. It is character-driven enough that we do not feel as though we are being preached at, or given a history lecture.

Not all change is good and not all war is civil. There are so many unanswered questions in this complete but oddly unfinished story, that it feels as though the next chapter is still being written.