Sewing and all that (not and A to Z post)

Thanks to the lovely women at the Stitched Up crafty cooperative in Chorlton I finally got my sewing machine serviced; I had taken it apart to try and mess with the tension, and while I had not made it any worse I had not fixed it either. Monkey and I paid a visit to Leons down Barlow Moor Road where I found some lovely pink and green tie dyed/batiked fabric. Yesterday morning I finally got around to sewing up the pieces that I had cut out several weeks ago. This top is created with Burda pattern 6731. I mixed and matched a bit, making the shortest length but using the short cap sleeves and using the contrast fabric to make the bias neck edging as well as the side panels (the nice lady at Leons gave the me extra half a yard to the end of the roll).

It came together in about three hours, it is really simple construction and the slip stitching the neckline took longer than most everything else. All in all I am really pleased with it. Next up ... home made knickers!

C is for Convergence

Today's painting for my A to Z was the original inspiration for my theme; this is Convergence by Jackson Pollock, a painter nicknamed 'Jack the Dripper' by Time magazine because of his style of dripping and throwing paint onto the canvas. As his career progressed he began numbering rather than naming his pictures, to stop people trying to interpret them as something figurative, they are not pictures *of* anything.

Jackson Pollock webpage

We recently did a jigsaw puzzle of this painting and enjoyed very much the time spent examining it in minute detail. You come to appreciate the interaction of the controlled and the random; the colours, the quantities and the direction of application are controlled, but the interactions of the colours and the exact way they land are not. I became quite fascinated by the process, wondering if he created it all at once, or let some colours dry before adding more, and wishing I could see it in real life to examine the texture which does not come across at all in a photograph.
Totally coincidentally, yesterday morning I came across this fabulous website, where you can create your own action painting masterpiece; simply swirl your mouse and click to change colour.

(Linking back to the A to Z Challenge)

When Breath Becomes Air (not an A to Z post)

'When Breath Becomes Air' by Paul Kalanithi was yet another recommendation from Brainpickings; sometimes I think I should stop following it because I can't keep up with all the interesting stuff, but it does extend my reading into non-fiction that I didn't use to read much of.

This book is the life and death of a neurosurgeon who seems to have spent his life contemplating the nature of death and what it means to be alive, so while it is his own story it is also a recounting of some things he has learned along the way. He blends the story of his own illness with the story of his academic pursuits and interests that eventually led him to leave literature and study medicine. It is very much about becoming a doctor, and how he learned to treat his patients as people rather than illnesses. As he writes you can but wish for every medical person you might encounter to be so dedicated to caring and single minded in their pursuit of excellence. As a brain surgeon he seems intensely aware of how his work has the ability to not only save, but to irrevocably change, his patients lives. 

"While all doctors treat diseases, neurosurgeons work in the crucible of identity: every operation on the brain is, by necessity, a manipulation of the substance of our selves, and every conversation with a patient undergoing brain surgery cannot help but confront this fact. In addition, to the patient and the family, the brain surgery is usually the most dramatic event they have ever faced, and, as such, has the impact of any major life event. At those critical junctures, the question is not simply whether to live or die but what kind of life is worth living. Would you trade your ability - or your mother's - to talk for a few extra months of mute life? The expansion of your visual blind spot in exchange for eliminating the small possibility of a fatal brain haemorrhage? Your right hand's function to stop seizures? How much neurologic suffering would you let your child endure before saying that death is preferable? Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurological problem forces the patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?" (p.71)

His cancer forces him into the position of patient and so his own existence thus becomes an extension of his search to understand what makes us human and what makes life meaningful; in having to readjust his view of what he could achieve in his life he is forced to evaluate what is really valuable to him:

"One chapter of my life seemed to have ended; perhaps the whole book was closing. Instead of being the pastoral figure aiding a life transition, I found myself the sheep, lost and confused. It felt less like an epiphany - a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters - and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward.
...
The lung cancer diagnosis was confirmed. My carefully planned and hard-won future no longer existed. Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit. Here we were, finally face-to-face, and yet nothing about it seemed recognisable. Standing at the crossroads where I should have been able to see and follow the footprints of the countless patients I had treated over the years, I saw instead only a blank, a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert, as if a sandstorm had erased all trace of familiarity." (p.120-1)

Paul finds his own answer to the meaningful life question; the answer is not *the* answer, it is just his answer. He is not trying to tell anyone what they should do, just that they should find it for themselves, which is what makes this book so thought provoking. The urgency of terminal illness must focus the mind, where the rest of us flounder around with all the time in the world to consider the endless possibilities of life. Happy floundering. 

B is for Birth of Venus

I am going to try and offer up a variety of styles and eras for my art A to Z, and so having started with something very modern I am going to go back several hundred years to bring you The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, painted some time in the 1480s. There is lots of interesting stuff on the wiki page about the style and the meaning of the elements of the painting, but really what's not to love, with all the flowing hair and flower strewing angels (oh look, angels again, they get everywhere).

Wikimedia commons

(Linking back to the A to Z Challenge)

My Name is Lucy Barton (not an A to Z post)

Having read 'Olive Kitteridge' long ago in the early days of this blog I looked forward to getting 'My Name is Lucy Barton' by Elizabeth Strout from the library. In it we have a woman nearly as enigmatic as Olive, not the eponymous Lucy but her mother, who sits, unassuming, in the corner of her hospital room and doesn't give much away. Hospitals definitely have an otherworldly feeling, as if you have stepped temporarily out of your life. This feeling is exacerbated for Lucy by the arrival of her long estranged mother, who sits and chats as if they spent time like this together every week. Certain topic remain untouched, but you sense that their distance has been physical rather than emotional, Lucy left home and the lack of contact has been disinterest rather than anger; the mother seems to feel shame for the poverty of Lucy's childhood, but Lucy does not appear to blame her or resent it. 

The book is made up of layers of remembrance, the story being told by a much older Lucy, recalling these few days spent with her mother, but also their talk is all remembrance of the people and places of her childhood even further in the past, with hardly a mention of her husband and daughters waiting at home. It is quite an intense portrait of a mother/daughter relationship, but one that I recognised; whatever the passage of time you always want your mum when you feel vulnerable, and as a mum you inevitably want to offer support and comfort. Although Lucy is quite seriously ill there is no drama as such and it is all quite ordinary, though the events appear to become something of a turning point for Lucy. I read it very quickly, just allowing myself to become absorbed in their quiet, reclusive world.

This little quote, utterly out of context, was the only thing I noted down. It captures something of the life that Lucy had, that she left, and maybe why she left, but I am not sure:

"Right after I found out about my college admission, I showed my high school English teacher a story I had written. I can remember very little of it, but I remember this: He had circled the word 'cheap.' The sentence was something like 'The woman wore a cheap dress.' Don't use that word, he said, it is not nice and it is not accurate. I don't know if he said that exactly - but he had circled the word and gently told me something about it that was not nice or good, and I have remembered that always." (p.125)

The book is on the Women's Fiction Prize longlist, and I predict will make the shortlist because she is such a well respected writer. 

A is for Angel

The annual Blogging from A to Z Challenge is upon us, and partaking with over 1700 other bloggers I am planning to try and post every day in April (bar Sundays). Partly inspired by our recent experience with Jackson Pollock, at the last minute I have decided on art as my theme. This is going to take a little more research than I had planned, but then it's not a challenge if you don't have to put some effort in. I am not sure I have twenty six favourite works of art corresponding to the letters of the alphabet so we are just going to have to wing it.

Up first is The Angel of the North, by the renown sculptor Antony Gormley, and brought to you via the A1M at Gateshead, which, in my opinion, offers the best way to view this particular work of art, though I confess I have never been up close, so maybe that is something to do next time we go and visit the boys. Usually I don't pay much attention until we are coming past Team Valley when you are quite close but when we were up there recently I noticed it from much further away and realised how sharply it stood out on the brow of the hill and was silhouetted against the evening sky. The site really allows it to dominate the local landscape and despite early opponents it has since become a regional icon.

Wikimedia Commons

(Linking back to the A to Z Challenge)

The Boy Who Kicked Pigs

Ok, I had forgotten all about this one, Monkey and I read it a couple of months ago, but I am reviewing it here for the Weirdathon, because, I mean, what kind of a title is 'The Boy Who Kicked Pigs'! And it's by Tom Baker, and who doesn't love Tom Baker, he always was my favourite Dr Who. 

This books pretty much does what it says on the tin; it is about a really unpleasant boy called Robert Caligari, who begins with hatred of his sister's piggy bank, and an insatiable desire to kick it, a habit that leads to all sorts of insane consequences. 

Here he is, looking quite diabolic:

 Here is the flying bacon butty, the cause of the abrupt ending of his pig kicking days: "Robert flew over the church wall hot in the same trajectory as the mugged butty. He fell headlong into what felt like a scalding pond of stinging nettles. A neglected grave carrying the name Cheesemans and suggesting, rather improbably, that the aforesaid Cheesemans were merely sleeping, nestled in the nettles where the kidnapped and abused butty had landed." (p.35)

After reading about the shark lynching incident Robert finds other ways to let out his increasing hatred of the human race: "With quite amazing cheerfulness he called out sweetly but clearly to old Mr Grice, 'All clear, Mr Grice.' The old man smiled for the last time as he thanked Robert for his kindness, and slipped him a pound for his trouble. And so Mr Grice stepped under the roaring TIR forty-tonner. The brakes shrieked as the driver did his best and hit the 'dead man's handle.' People screamed and rushed forward. Robert got there first." (p.47)

Then what starts out as an attempt to upset a poor unsuspecting horse rider with a bow and arrow turns into a major catastrophe: "The woman clung on and did her best to calm the shocked creature. The cyclists, heads down and legs whirling, went past the woman on the horse and they noticed nothing. The poor woman must have been very scared to be up there on a rearing horse and on the motorway bridge too. And she had reason to be scared. The horse leapt up and sideways and trying to get away from the arrow in its arse, it jumped off the motorway bridge and fell down on to the south-bound carriageway below." (p.69)

You will be pleased to hear that he gets his just deserts, but I won't spoil the end because it is far more gruesome than you could imagine, making this story most unsuitable for younger children.