Exhibition of French Paintings in Taipei

I'm looking forward to seeing works by the Barbizon painter Jean-Francois Millet currently on exhibition at the National Museum of History in Taipei. This show is a big event as it brings many important French paintings to Taiwan for the very first time; it also includes several of Millet's best known pictures. Millet's is a special brand of realism, and his images of peasant workers are unmistakeable. He also produced some remarkable landscapes, including this one, which has a visionary quality of light which reminds me of the English Romantic Samuel Palmer.

One of the most well-known poems by the American Edwin Markham (1852-1940) is a response to Millet's 'The Man with the Hoe' ('L'homme à la houe'), pictured above. Below I have included just the first stanza, in which Markham sees the worn-out man as an insult to God. In the two remaining stanzas the poet warns of dire future consequences if such people continue to be allowed to suffer. Millet on the other hand, always said he was not a socialist and claimed he had no political motivations, though his image was interpreted as a political statement when it was first exhibited.

The Man with the Hoe

God made man in His own image, in the image of God made He him.—GENESIS

BOWED by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?
Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power.
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the Dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And marked their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the stretch of Hell to its last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with censure of the world’s blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More fraught with menace to the universe.

___________________________________________

For my Friend

The very first thing I did after taking a nap today was to look at Tim's blog. And then this happened, and quite quickly - it is just what happened - and it's for you Tim.

Nostalgia - tunnel in the gardens -
forest of
antipodean roots
where red and black
converse. Straits made apart
yet vertebrae on each side alike
a dive 'snip'
and 'snap' - brock
is still there.

______________________________________________________________

RAT

One morning last month I arrived at work to see something odd lying on the wooden floor of the lobby area outside our offices. At first, against the morning light, I thought I was looking at a large leaf. Then I thought it was a surprisingly rat-shaped leaf. A moment later I realised it actually was a rat. A colleague disposed of the corpse; but the bloody trail it had left on the floor remained for almost two weeks. I could not bring myself to clean up the mess and therefore saw a kind of bloody clockface every time I left or entered my office, and replayed in my mind a moving image of the rat pointlessly dragging itself in three decreasing circles before making a last gasp lunge away. I’d be grateful of any comments on these three experiments…

One

Yellowing leaf like
our fertilized rat’s last act
Klein in red not blue


Two

Stem, leaf, crisp profile
are shoulder, pelvis tail eyes
a rat’s pose. Repose.
Chin resting on a clot shelf
minute marker of demise.


Three

Where reversed from dust we might expect
rat’s trace to be direct and lean,
our shared floors are waxed to sheen
and we upon the light reflect.
Today three spirals and a thrust,
tokens of his urge, his lust,
his oily tracks a darkened flight
which once were red and fresh and bright.

By eating without fear or pause,
from concise executed claws
fertilizer from our pots
his life was set summative test:
gagging lurching, scratching west,
he spasmed, spewing ruddy clots.


Many thanks to Tim for all the encouragement!

A Tasty Challenge

Last weekend the unexpected but very welcome gift from our neighbours of a large bag of home-grown carrots, added to the bag we had bought a few days earlier, posed us a problem: what does a family of three do to reclaim a refrigerator replete with reddish roots?

Solution One

Solution Two


In the end we opted for solution two - a cake which has several advantages:

One, it's super-easy to make; just stir up all the ingredients in a bowl and cook - even a simple table-top oven like ours will do the job; two, it tastes great; and three, it contains carrots.

Here's the recipe. We didn't bother with the topping - in Taiwan cream cheese is scarcer than hen's teeth. Thanks Delia!

Posting Feedback

Many apologies to anyone who has tried to post feedback; I have now opened the filter to allow comments from any reader.

Cowboy Honey (Tate and Lyle)

Overture

I’m a travelling man, don’t tie me down
What storms, what battles did he sing?
I love my women, sometimes they love me
A tale so strong might melt the rocks as well
but I was got someday I still don’t know how

I said oh my God what’s your name
my name’s Lyle
The hero loves as well as you
I looked at her and she looked at me
ever gentle ever smiling and I looked back and she looked back
Cupid strew your path with flowers out together for a walk
her eyes were bright just like the stars
Godlike is the form he bears.


This fellow said stranger, why don’t you just go on home
forsake this land
and I said man that’s where I’m headed to tonight

I walked on through the door and she just smiled, resolved
Faithless man thy course pursue
I’ll stay
No, no away. Thy darkness, guest, is no trouble in my breast take
your boots and walk out of my life
She just smiled man. Ooh I was got I can’t figure out where it went
why don’t I just sing Cupid melt her give me back my paradise.


I ‘wrote’ this just for fun after several weeks of being unable to get the sweet phrase ‘Tate and Lyle’ out of my head. It’s a kind of ‘test crash’ between a pickup loaded with ‘Country’ and a horse-drawn wagon piled with ‘English Opera’.
It's possible that I’m subconsciously nostalgic for the ‘Cowboy Honey’ of my childhood. Perhaps it reveals my opinion of opera/country music. In any case, I was keen to see the outcome of the collision on the women involved. And it seems they have been able to overcome a certain amount of the classical and Nashville expectation they had previously been facing. On the other hand, our hero's fate seems to have become embedded in italics.

Addio Pippo

March 3 saw the passing of Giuseppe di Stefano at the age of 86; he died in Milan after lying in a coma for three months. The celebrated tenor, known to his friends and fans as Pippo, and whose voice has been described as sounding 'like every great Italian voice rolled into one', had returned to Italy after being savagely attacked by unknown assailants at his home in Kenya.

By the time I discovered opera in the early 1980s, Di Stefano's art was already well into its decline - I never saw him perform, I got to know his work through his recordings, especially those he made with the soprano Maria Callas during the 1950s. His was the first Italian tenor voice I really fell in love with, and it has remained my favourite since.

Born in Sicily in 1921, Pippo's southern roots are said by many to have been the source of his spontaneity and passion. Some afficionados claim that he, like Mario del Monaco, was not the most subtle of tenors. However, he possessed a truly lovely voice: his tone has been described as 'velvety' and his pianissimos, especially in the higher register, were superb. He sang every note with commitment, and though for some this was a fault, I can tolerate occasional lapses in taste as a tradeoff for sheer Italianate authenticity and beauty of sound.

Di Stefano began his career during the 1940s in the Italian and French lyric repertoire, moving on to more dramatic roles in Verdi and the verismo of Puccini as his voice matured in the fifties. His 1953 recording of Tosca with Callas and Gobbi has always been at the top of any checklist of recordings of that opera, and his 1956 La Boheme, conducted by Votto is also justly famous. Nevertheless, he was also powerful in the bel canto repertoire of Donizetti and Bellini. His duets with Callas in Bellini's I Puritani, are for me, unforgettable.

Pippo finally retired from the stage in 1992, almost twenty years later than he probably should have done, but his influence has been great. Pavarotti cited him as his idol both as a singer and as a man, and perhaps there can be no finer compliment.

I have linked to recordings of Di Stefano in Verdi, Donizetti and Puccini

black line redline

You might like to read and listen to Ruth Padel's response to Bridget Riley and her work here . You can listen to extracts from interviews with Riley herself here.

14 March - A friend has just sent me this slinky eye/slinkyise poem - a fun sound link.

that 'surprising' one and this kind of 'normal' one

My initial reaction to the news that a large area of Britain had just experienced a 5.3 magnitude earthquake was one of relief that the human damage appears to be limited to one man suffering a broken pelvis, and the physical devastation merely the tumbling to earth of a few chimney pots. The reports have brought back memories of an evening in December 1989 when I experienced my own first earthquake, in Taipei; and I have no doubt that those folks 'back home' who felt today's quake will remember it twenty years from now.

Recalling 'my' earthquake in a 'when + simple past + past continuous' framework perhaps betrays my career as an EFL teacher as well as the impact it made on my senses, but I just can't resist the urge... When the earthquake hit I was talking to my students. In fact, I had just finished teaching a lesson when I got the distinct sense that the ten-storey building in which I stood was built on very wet sand and the toddler offspring of some giant or ogre was stamping out a mega-strop into it. With the blood rapidly draining from my head, and no doubt a tremor in my voice to match the occasion, I asked my students "What should we do?"

The first response came from an otherwise eminently sensible and intelligent young man. His answer?

"Just enjoy it!"

Alas, it was not advice I was able to follow on that first occasion, and perhaps those woken in the middle of the night by the UK quake didn't quite find a way to appreciate their quake as it happened. And I imagine many of them are, even as I write, telling each other just how much they didn't appreciate it.
Nevertheless, since Britain's quakes mercifully appear to be of the 'chimbley-wobbley' rather than the city-felling variety, my suggestion for the next one - perhaps due in 2033? - is, of course

"Just enjoy it!"

that one

Hualien isn’t big, though it can sometimes seem so, linked as it is to Ji-An to the south and, heading north, to the string of villages which make up Hsin-Cheng. Since Hualien is a low-rise city, the boundaries between it and its close neighbours are not all that obvious. It’s good to get a feel for where one is, so we were happy to head south for a couple of miles on Thursday night to the centre of Ji-An to join the traditional celebrations for lantern festival, the end of the two-week New Year period.

Thronged with people, the two temples and the night market which connects them were alive with noise and colour. Both temples and a large stage were brightly lit and hung with hundreds of yellow lanterns. The whole area was almost rattling with the racket of recorded music, public announcements, the calls of food vendors and the crashes and pops of the fireworks going off directly overhead.

There were plenty of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ too. Not just for the fireworks, but also over the launching of traditional paper lanterns. This was the first time I had seen this activity at close hand – the writing of wishes on the surprisingly flimsy paper, the lighting of the fuel-soaked pad, and the patient wait for the lantern to fill with warm air. Perhaps the wishes being sent skyward were what gave each lantern its individual character; I noticed that the more athletic among them headed rapidly, and almost vertically up into the darkness. Others – perhaps those bearing the weight-loss sentiments so frequently heard at the end of New Year – lolled and lurched to a rising-falling vocal accompaniment from the crowd. These insisted on crinkling themselves up against the prickly eaves and gables of the temple gateway and roofs before sloping off, seemingly wishing they could hang around longer among the bright lights, happy faces and contented stomachs of the celebrations below.

this one

My first post is a naughty one. Why? Because I am supposed to have something to say, but I don't at present; I just wanted to get this blog up and get started.