A day off here and so we go into town to nose around. I find myself upstairs in the children's section of Tropismes in amongst the bande dessines (there's an 'e' acute needed there). I'm following a hunch that this is where some interesting crossovers are happening between word and image - going into much more interesting territory than the ubiquitous Tintin et al.

And I strike lucky - Rebekka Baumann's Lemon Ink. Or, as she seems to prefer lower case: rebekka baumann's lemon ink.

What is it exactly? Part sketchbook, part day-in-the-life of the artist, part poem, part discursion (i.e. a discussion as excursion) upon the idea of lemon yellow. Her use of papers, positive & negative space, sense of line and omission, traced and retraced images ... wow! I had to buy it.

The images here are taken from her site: http://www.rebekkabaumann.com/

Highly recommended.

No, not the Oasis track. One of those films that would only have been possible in the sixties. None the worse for that, of course.

Joseph Cornell as Peeping Tom with patchouli.

It's raining. Pouring. The plan was for us all to go for a walk but discretion is the better part of valour (or something like that). So in the end I was the only one to struggle out against the elements. Half an hour later, my boots, coat and jeans are drying down in the basement.

Went swimming this morning - at least I got as far as the car park which was suspiciously - significantly - empty. Closed. One of the very few days of the year. I drove up to the woods and went for a jog-run-walk. Then sat watching the leaves fall onto the ponds. Right now it seems important to make such efforts.

It's meant to be pretty lousy weather for the coming week. I'll be crossing over to England early on Wednesday staying on until Sunday. Simply being there will probably be a help.

The challenge these days is to find periods in which to settle. Various things keep nagging away in the background. Plus work starts next door tomorrow - which entails yet more sorting, chucking, lugging, arranging. So not so much a holiday then rather a different type of activity.

And I trod on one of the cats.

And while we're in the mood - here's David Jones. (One for The Walrus of course!)

"... the bards of an earlier Wales referred to themselves as 'carpenters of song'. Carpentry suggests a fitting together and as you know the English word 'artist' means, at root, someone concerned with a fitting of some sort ... Perhaps all we can say is that the 'carpentries of song' in whatever medium, or by whomsoever joinered, must be anathemata of one sort or another." ('Autobiographical Talk', collected in Epoch and Artist, pp 30-31)

Rene Hague's Press, 1930

The printing press ... the making of The Book as Object ... labour and function combined with decoration imperial and occult. A Wellsian Time Machine? An ark or other ritualistic apparatus? A desiring-machine (is that a fleece or dirty rag depending from the coffer, how exactly do energies transfer to the page ... )? And as with so much of Jones' pictures (and poetry for that matter) a showing forth and a showing through. Time and space - layers of semi-transparency.

How little attention I've given his work in the past. Much to address here.

... and talking about Zappa ... I've just raced through this - John Adams' auto(music)biography. I had it beside me at lunchtime on Friday and I'm sure it was mistaken for some born-again tract. A title like that plus Adams' fresh-faced grin - well, you could be fooled into thinking I'd seen The Light.

It's quite illuminating about Adams' compositional methods and reading (a nice anecdote of him asking Ginsberg for Burroughs' address). Adams is pretty tough on Boulez (accusations of arid prescriptivism) and cautiously complimentary about FZ (one might even risk 'condescending' at times ...). I'm less convinced of my Adams-Zappa association the more of I hear of his music - but who cares? Each has his own musical world and I'm not taking sides.

"We composers often are at a loss to explain how we made something ... I suspect that most composers work in a stste of semi-trance, a creative state that is precariously balanced between conscious, logical decision-making and the unknowable instinctual workings of the freely associating brain. I have a deep respect for my own subconscious apparatus, for the part of me that is unknowable ...

... A compositional idea may come from any source. The composer's mind is like flypaper, ready at any moment to attract and trap an idea, a single sound or a complex of sounds. It may be the rhythms of a group of people chattering in a restaurant, or the Doppler effect of a passing train, or three notes from someone else's song, be it Mahler's or Otis Redding's. Or an inspiration might arise from half-consciously diddling with some piece of technology. We need to foster and jealously protect the 'what if' mode of creative play, taking delight in moving sounds around just for the pleasure of seeing and hearing what might happen. The point is to maintain a childlike openness, not to foreclose on a possibility because it does not immediately fit your preconceived notions of what the piece you wish to compose ought to sound like." (pp 192-3)

These paragraphs alone are worth the price of admission.

Listening as I type to this - the first CD in the 40th Anniversary box of Henry Cow, The Road (Volumes 1-5). Super stuff: Pre-Teenbeat ... Rapt in a Blanket ... Amygdala ... . I love the optimism of the sound. Cutler's drumming, Frith's guitar parts, the woodwinds, lyrics about ordinary things - an irresistible marriage of precision and ramshackle. Had Zappa been born in England and brought up on mugs of Typhoo tea and tins of beans this would have been his music.

A pretty good 'map' of what's been going on the past week or so.

The rather incongruous 'Kate Bush' bubble is for her 80s album Hounds of Love. I took it out of the Mediatheque on an oh-well-why-not basis. As chance would have it, she quotes Tennyson's 'The Holy Grail' ("Wave after wave, each mightier than the last ... "). I haven't brought myself to listen to the record for - twenty? - years let alone read the sleeve notes. So did some obscure part of me remember this ... ?

Go to The Sticky Pages Press site for details of a new release ...

Check out http://www.reliurevanmol.be/index.htm too ...

These are good, too ...

http://emptysets.wordpress.com/

Two images taken from Francoise Vandenwouwer's blog at - http://carnets-d-imaginaire.over-blog.com/.

Beautiful books - grimoires, miniature odysseys and dream journeys ...

Some months ago I posted a dream in which I found a bookstore with shelf after shelf of small press poetry and home-made editions. Perhaps it's a version (vision?) of heaven. (Another being a busy French brasserie where the angels are waiters dashing through revolving doors carrying seafood platters, cassoulet, steak du patron et frites.)

So it's been a bit like going to Paradise & back - or the suburbs at least - the past two days.

The Marché du Livre de Mariemont - Salon de la petite édition et de la création littéraire.

In other words, a festival of Artist's Books just down the motor way from Brussels. Table after table of the most fascinating works - word-based, image-based, xerox-basic through to luxurious thousand euro limited editions.

Fingers trembling, I'm left with the question: Why do anything else?

The Blog resumes.

I placed an embargo upon posts for more or less a month.

Over the next week or so I'll work on the residue that's accumulated in the notebooks & see what I can do with it.

Working title: (Ana)thema - a nod to David Jones.*

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(The Welsh one - not the guy in The Monkees).

Prejudice is a terrible thing. And I'm guilty of it more times than I'd like to admit.

In this instance, Zappa's widespread contempt for 'minimalism' has led me to dismiss several composers without even bothering to listen to them. And John Adams was one of these.

However, due to Alan (& Robert's) recent recommendations, I've started to explore Adams' oeuvre - and it's well worth it.

So far: Shaker Loops, Grand Pianola Music, Chamber Symphony. Soon to come: Naive and Sentimental Music and the Violin Concerto.

It's generous music - not at all the cloying unimaginative repetitions of you-know-who and the other one.* I go for the jamming together of textures, the 'ill-breeding' Adams has been - it seems - accused of by the Music Establishment. These compositions strike me as painterly. As they unfold in time spaces are created, gestures (those ascending & descending lines), motifs (stabs of brass or shrill woodwind), pulses (tapped percussion suddenly breaking into jazz rhythms). Plus some genuinely weird sounds which appear and disappear - in the Concerto something that sounds like factory pipe being hit - certainly not some Feldman asiatic gong).

In fact - strange as it is to say - I'm reminded of Zappa. The lumpy gravy-ness. The sprawl. The Americanness, I suppose.

And the joke's on me - back in the early 90s I had the chance to have dinner with John Adams when his opera was opening in Brussels. I had "a prior engagement". Silly me.

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* Glass & Nyman - in case you were wondering.