my laptop is on its last legs. . .

. . .but while it had a brief respite. . . . . .I noticed that someone somewhere has been looking for a Rob Ryan font. . . (you recall, dear reader, how much I admire the work of Mr Rob)so I wandered around the internet to see if such a thing existsand it does!

<--- very happy

I hope your day is full of simple pleasures

(-:

XXX

returning to one of my favourite subjects

rock paper scissors so I was thinking about inukshuk tiny ones made from the smallest pebbles in a rock pool and HUGE ONES made from enormous slabs of granite; and then I was thinking about the LARGEST PAIR OF SCISSORS in the world - a thought which naturally lead to my thinking about the smallest pair of scissors. . . and then, settling for what one can create with a medium sized small pair: I think I've shared the art of Aoyama Hina with you before (I know I've shared Rob Ryan). . .

and now I've just discovered someone else equally as talented with a pair of scissors. . . Annie Vought

none of which has anything to do with what I've been up to this afternoon, but there you go!

perspective

I must have read many books in the past five years

Gormley

The Time Traveller's Wife, for example - even tho it was published in 2003, I'm not sure if I read it straight away; The Vintner's Luck - 2000; The Five People You Meet In Heaven - 2003; The Lovely Bones - 2002; Astonishing Splashes of Colour (2004) and Flights of the Human Mind (2006); She's Come Undone - as far back as 1992 and I Know This Much Is True (1998); to name but barely a few. . .
.

Serra

I've reread lots of work by Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Bruce Chatwin and have found new authors such as Nicole Krauss (The History of Love) and Stefan Merrill Block (The Story of Forgetting)

Hepworth

(and I've lived thru - despite my best attempts - many changes in my life, and altho I started writing my "book" when I was happy, in 2004, perhaps I am now back on a more even keel than I was in 2005. . .)

Goldsworthy

(yesterday I looked thru the words that I had been beginning to assemble - it was like remembering baby photos but seeing an adolescent)

Ryan

back in 2004 I was only just beginning my love affair with Hepworth altho I was already engrossed in the artists of The Newlyn School; I'd seen many works by Andy Goldsworthy and Richard Long, but was only just becoming familiar with that of Antony Gormley - hadn't heard of Richard Serra

Minton

.
I hadn't seen an illustration by John Minton, didn't know the wonder that is the art work of Rob Ryan, was still to come across the words of Carol Ann Duffy, but I was already in love with the poetry of Kathleen Raine, for I had owned a book of hers since 1983. . .
.
however it wasn't until 2007 that I was to come across the following:
.

Shells

Reaching down arm-deep into bright water
I gathered on white sand under waves
Shells, drifted up on beaches where I alone
Inhabit a finite world of years and days.
I reached my arm down a myriad years
To gather treasure from the yester-milliennial sea-floor,
Held in my fingers forms shaped on the day of creation.

Building their beauty in three dimensions
Over which the world recedes away from us,
And in the fourth, that takes away ourselves
From moment to moment and from year to year
From first to last they remain in their continuous present.
The helix revolves like a timeless thought,
Instantaneous from apex to rim
Like a dance whose figure is limpet or murex, cowrie or golden winkle.

They sleep on the ocean floor like humming-tops
Whose music is the mother-of-pearl octave of the rainbow,
Harmonious shells that whisper forever in our ears,
The world that you inhabit has not yet been created.

Kathleen Raine

(rereading the prologue of my "book" reminds me of the above, possibly my favourite piece by Raine. . . and yet I'd written my prologue before I'd read her poem)(remember this)

wanna play?

here's how:
think and choose (either "rock", "paper" or "scissors")
(I suspect you probably knew this)
and then type it in the comment box. . .

. . .without looking at the comment above. . .

. . .then look at the comment above. . .

. . .and see who won!

weather report

(he's just too good not to have more of)

ROB RYAN

whilst on holiday

I did some reading

and can recommend to you, dear reader, one sad but beautiful: The Story of Forgetting by Stefan Merrill Block (a book so fascinating and absorbing that I read it cover-to-cover* in one single day, only putting it down for a couple of visits to the power room - I even took it outside with me and scrunched up and huddled over it in the rain so the pages wouldn't get wet when I needed a nicotine hit) (it was raining that day, you see, so I stayed inside the whole day and only went out for the odd fag) (*the actual cover illustration of which reminded me of Rob Ryan) (up arrow); and one, quite delightful: The Same Earth by Kei Miller. . .