The Great Unknown

Wimbledon tickets arrived safely :-) Yet another treaty outing in place...

I'm off this evening to a live recording of the BBC's I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue. I first listened to the (slightly loopy) panel show in Grand Haven many moons ago; to get to see it live is a big treat.

My camera's finally recharged, so photos of everyday life shall resume shortly. In the meantime, here's one my brother prepared earlier. It was my second last night in Baltimore: before heading in for dinner at The Glebe, we nipped in the gardens to glimpse the irises before their all-too-brief flowering faded. Glorious colour.



Of all the events people have organised for Aung San Suu Kyi’s 65th birthday tomorrow, my favourite is the NLD Youth Members' planting of 20,000 trees in townships across her country. As a symbolic act, it resonates on oodles of levels, but for me, it's as a gesture to future generations that packs a punch. The foresight, the long-view it takes to plant these little saplings through the troubled land, in forests and on barren hilltops, where they will help to restore life; the willpower and sense of trust, that what the saplings represent will reach fruition, even if it is beyond our lifetime's reach. And to those future generations, those trees will say 'We believed'.

Have a great weekend, all X

Mapping out your space

Yesterday whirled by in the British Library. I was able to get my Reader's Pass renewed (yippee), so I shall base myself in there two or three days a week. That done, off I went on a guided tour of their 'Magnificent Maps' exhibition, whose basic premise is that maps were only hijacked by geography in recent centuries; they were wielded to denote power and disseminate propoganda.

Fab, eclectic choice of maps, well laid out, and the curator kept us joining the dots across centuries. The medieval world maps are a personal favourite, featuring the known world, stretching across to the Garden of Eden and filled with all the wonderful creatures that populate faroff oceans and lands (such as the upsidedowney Mandrake Man, left).

Leaving the BL and returning to regular city street traffic was a jolt: I'm still adjusting to the sheer number of people here, and the different etiquette of interaction.

The kitties however, are in seventh heaven. Koi carp to play with, oodles of buzzing flying creatures to chase through the garden, myriad places to lounge. They're living in their own map of wonders.

Bedtime reading

Quick pre-bedtime post: I just wanted to draw attention, for those who enjoy reading and listening, to a couple of podcasts-

- the New Yorker fiction podcast features writers (the likes of Roddy Doyle, Richard Ford, Junot Diaz, Orhan Pamuk) who read aloud a short story from the archives of the New Yorker (the likes of John McGahern, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, William Trevor) - something that's resonated with them. Fab mix of reading, discussion, interesting perspectives.

- and of course, there is the BBC's World Book Club, featuring...well, just about everyone, fielding questions from around the world: Umberto Eco, John Irving, Toni Morrison, James Ellroy, Annie Proulx, Edna O'Brien, Armistead Maupin - you name it!

As for me, I'm off to bed, to read in paper form - I have fewer than 200 pages left in Wolf Hall!

Yuletide Cheer

Managing to make a dent in my To Do list... I still haven't read a single Christmas dinnerey recipe, but in the meantime, I reckon it's time this New Orleans version of 'Oh Holy Night' got an airing. I probably mentioned in last year [invisible pause while I go and look - aha!]. So it's explained back here. A simply sumptuous arrangement.



[and in case the embed function doesn't make it all the way to facebook, the link is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khSml43oKJQ]

Reading that post from last December, I had totally forgotten about Straight No Chaser - off to listen to them now. Ho ho ho :-)

TED: Ideas worth spreading

There's been lots of e-talk this week about TED talks. Every few months I explore their site, and watch different short talks about a specific theme, or else cobble together an eclectic mix of speakers.

For me this week, it was about learning and creativity - Ken Robinson, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amy Tan (and I've just clicked on the tag 'inspiring' and can see a whole other afternoon of thoughtful listening right there!). Anyhoo, well worth a look.

And in other news, West Cork remains somewhere between soggy and flooded. Hailstones today made for a bracing, refreshing change. Kitties are loving this thing called Roaring Fire, and somehow have avoided the singed whisker look. Thus far.

Full to the brim

Early start le matin, so this post will be superer-quicker than yesterday's.

A friend&family-filled day; the great Kitten Adoption Plan seems to be going... well, according to plan (see above). And Editors in the Olympia were fantastic. They'd clearly put a lot into the stagecraft side of things: from the running order to the lighting, all aspects were well-considered, and phenomenally entertaining. Could have watched them forever :-)

Okay, sleep before my expedition to the land of artists. Nighty night x

Faceted day

What a treaty day!

So, it started in Clon, with the Fabulous Baking Lady (and as I type, I am tucking into an entire cake of melt-in-your-mouth shortbread). It had been months since we caught up, so we chatted over a variety of coffees in two of Clon's coffee shops (it's only polite to spread our business around).

Then on to Cork, where among my wanderings, I explored the street where my mother grew up. The site where her family grocery store stood is now a shopping centre, but a good bit of the street survives. One building was in a half-demolished state, exposing three storeys of the house's walls, with their last tattered traces of once having been a home. The area was filled with resonances as I meandered, but they were elusive, like little glimpses of fireflies that vanish as you focus on them.

And then the afternoon whirled on: lovely meal with a friend who's down from Dublin, and off to the library on the Grand Parade to meet old friends, and make new ones, and to hear the writer Petina Gappah interviewed by Ann Luttrell (both pictured below). It was part of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Festival. The session was a great mix: funny and poignant and engaging, and it fed conversations among our little group in its aftermath.



One of the striking moments was when Petina was asked when she writes, as in, how she structures her writing around her life and work in Geneva. "I get up at 4.30am."

I'm sorry?

"Then I write for a couple of hours, until I get my son up..." and then make breakfast, school drop-off, work (she's a lawyer, and not like a Devil's Advocate lawyer, but one that works for the good, on a global scale), school pick-up, make dinner. Then she reads in the evening.

So, I sat with my friend - also a writer - and we waited for the Big Bone-Idle Lazy Hand of Shame to appear in mid-air, and quiver slightly as it scanned the room, locking irrevocably on to us.

All in all, a day to treasure :-)

Davy Byrne's Irish Writing Award

Quick post, before I settle down for the remainder of the evening...

So, I nipped up to Dublin today for the announcement of the Davy Byrnes short story award, hosted ever so graciously in and by Davy Byrnes. Six fantastic writers were shortlisted , and earlier this evening, after three lovely speeches, Claire Keegan was awarded the prize for her story Foster.

Richard Ford, who judged the competition from the longlist of 30 stories (drawn from over 800 entries), gave the following citation on Claire's story:

A child’s rapt and eloquent vision of life-in-tumult between two families. In lifting a homely rural life to our moral notice, the story exhibits a patient attention to life’s vast consequence and finality, and does so through a lavish, discriminating appetite for language and its profound capacity to return us to life renewed.

So, well done to all the shortlisted, and to Claire for her winning story. I've read one of the stories so far - Kathleen Murray's Storm Glass, which is closely-woven and haunting and just plain fab. So, super-special congratulations to Kathleen for both the story and the short-listing - superb job!! The plan is that Stinging Fly will bring out an anthology featuring the shortlisted and winning stories this summer; one to look forward to :-) And well done to Declan Meade (editor of Stinging Fly) for spearheading, managing, and delivering the whole competition from beginning to end. An epic task. I suspect he's deserving of a significant break right about now...

As you can imagine, there was toasting galore this evening, and catching up with friends old and new. And bizarrely, the village of Baltimore was the subject of much conversation (Bushe's Bar, Glenans, Chez Youen, yadda yadda...)

Tomorrow will be another travel-heavy day - just saying this up front, in case the next entry is a smidge bleary, or non-existent, or features misspellings...

The fiddle fair

What a fabulous weekend!

No-one witnessed an actual end to any particular session - the music may have changed venues and locations, styles and players, but it never stopped. Baltimore had a superb atmosphere, with sessions starting up all over the place, organically, as strangers sat down together around a table and brought out their instruments, a few words enough to figure out their areas of intersection.

I love the apparent effortlessness to these kinds of music, and also the care with which the musicians listen to each other, allowing space for a player to improvise away on the tune, before they give a nod and the others pick up their fiddles or squeeze-boxes or spoons, ready to be recalled in. I forgot my camera on both Friday and Saturday, but Sunday I was prepared. And boy oh boy, it was colourful!

Sunday highlights were Les Violons du Rigodon in the Glebe Gardens, which was music and theatre; in addition to regular violins, it also featured violins of the teeny-tiny variety, and also recycled instruments, made from oil cans, Werther's Original tins etc. Splendid, joyful, beautiful performance.



And walking back from the concert, the strains of a waltz still playing over in our ears, we turned into the sunshiney square, which was filled with music, and friends, and friends playing music.



*And* as if all that wasn't treaty enough, I got to catch up with family. Simply superb weekend.

Tuneful things

So there I was this morning, sipping coffee and listening to Leonard Cohen Live at the Beacon Theatre - recorded in February this year. I realised I'd never mentioned that it was available to download free; but when I double-checked links for posting, it turned out the free-ness was 'for a limited period only'. Sigh.

So before the e-music landscape shifts again, a couple of music-ey things: although it can no longer stream the Cohen concert, NPR Music has a fine archive of concerts, interviews & studio sessions, from Indigo Girls to Bell X1, Yo-Yo Ma to Lou Reed. Well worth exploring.

And there's Paul McCartney's concert last week at Coachella, largely a tribute to Linda on the 11th anniversary of her death. With a set-list of 35 songs, it sounds like it was quite a gig.

And from that night, here's 'Something', on ukulele (for the first half).



:-)

Is Anybody Listening?

Once upon a time, schoolchildren in Pomona, California were reading The Great Gatsby and they got talking about the American Dream. And it turned out, they had a bunch to say on the subject. And out of their conversations, they made an 8-minute video - Is Anybody Listening? - which offered poignant, arresting perspectives of young adults facing drastic economic change.



Is Anybody Listening? began to resonate (news report on its spread here) and eventually made its way to their president, who responded "I am listening", and then visited the area and met the kids.

Great to see the aftermath of Obama's visit; the kids look so darned happy: "We can do anything. We can change everything!"

:-)

Great Teachers

There was a Primary School Head I worked with in Devon - fabulous woman, who once called a halt in the middle of Assembly, got everyone to their feet, and taught them how to tango. Apart from having great fun, the school excelled on all the government-ey tick lists that schools live and die by these days.

And in Assembly, when the kids weren't dancing or singing, they would be sitting listening: she had this way of commanding the entire hall, asking everyong if they had their 'listening ears' on - and she'd make this gesture, as though she was slipping on magic invisible ears (as opposed to, you know, ordinary invisible ears...) - and a zillion kids would imitate her, and listen carefully with their magic ears.

So I've been thinking about listening today. When someone's speaking - relating an experience, or telling a story - about what kind of commentary the internal monologue comes up with. I remember reading something by Thich Nhat Hanh years back: about how often, our version of listening is actually just a process of comparison. Someone says something and we line it up by our own opinions, and if it's a match we consider it to be 'true' and if it's different then clearly 'false'. And I read on, thinking his conclusion might be to be less judgemental or more accepting, but his point was this: if that's how we listen, then whether the statement is 'true' or 'false' is irrelevant; if that is how we listen, we learn nothing.

And a decade later, I'm still getting the hang of those listening ears.

Have a great weekend, folks :-)

D is for delightful / And try and keep your trousers on...

Today's been all about catching up on music: news of a guest spot by Elvis Costello (reverent pause) led me to Fall Out Boy; and I've been breaking in the latest from Interpol, Editors, Arcade Fire, Glasvegas and The Ting Tings. And of course, Arctic Monkeys, with their delightfully playful lyrics.

And in other news: there's a pub quiz on tonight - a perfect opportunity for me to discover what's been happening locally and globally. And a friend has just texted for me to come out and appreciate the phenomenal sunset - the sky is filled with pinks & lilacs... very purdy. Off I go :-)

Serendipitous Learning

I was reading some of Thoreau's cool quotes yesterday - you know the type of thing, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life... and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Very DPS.

I thought, I should read more about that guy; and I also thought that he'd make an ideal subject for In Our Time. And lo and behold, as I'm refreshing my podcasts, Melvyn's latest programme was on all things Thoreau. Off to listen now...

And on an entirely different note, congratulations to Dial2Do for their MoMo Peer Awards Nomination. Fingers crossed for the 26th & Barcelona!! Exciting :-)