My first introduction to the work of the late Santi Bose was at a gallery in Manila called Sining Kamalig. That’s where I saw the Blue Room. I begged my parents to give me the painting for my seventeenth birthday.
A few years later — surprise, surprise! — they bought the companion painting, the White Room, for me. I brought both paintings to California with me. They are among my most treasured possessions.
mixed media, early Santi Bose. Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday
Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday.
Self is in a nostalgic mood this rainy, gloomy Sunday in northern California.
Posting for Travel with Intent’s One-Word Sunday. The theme is SKYLINE.
Here’s Southbank by the Thames. Took these pictures leaving Shakespeare’s Globe after a play. The bridge is the old Blackfriars.
This chapter is fascinating, simply fascinating. According to Rachman, both David Cameron and Boris Johnson expected Yes Leave to lose. When it won instead, David Cameron resigned that very day, and the path for Johnson to become prime minister was suddenly wide open. That was the moment when, according to Steve Bannon, who was managing Trump’s campaign, he “knew” Trump would win. Nigele Farage was the first foreign politician to meet with Trump after his improbable victory.
The Boris Johnson/Donald Trump synchronicity:
Self remembers attending a talk about Trump’s dementia (That was the actual topic: Trump’s dementia, it was printed in the conference programme and everything, har har har). Who knew that Trump’s dementia would turn into accusations of “Joe’s dementia” the following year! The talk took place in a 12th century church in the picturesque Cornwall seaside town of Fowey. It was May 2019.
The speaker said he didn’t think England would go the authoritarian route because “England has the BBC; America has Fox News.” The bashing went so hard that, after the presentation, an English couple next to self felt compelled to apologize for all the “bad things” the speaker had said about Trump. Self said: “Don’t apologize. I agree with him!” Only a few months later, in August 2019, Johnson would “prorogue parliament . . . to prevent it from getting in the way of Brexit.” And the rest is history!
Unfortunately for Johnson, the same day that Britain left the EU (end of January 2020) was also the “day that Britain announced its first case of coronavirus.” And Johnson’s rhetoric could not get around this new reality. Both Trump and Johnson mis-handled their respective country’s national response to the virus.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Self visited Northern Ireland for the first time in April. She spent a month in an artists retreat called River Mill. The other residents were teachers, writers, photographers, film-makers. A few were from Belfast, others from England, and yet others from Dublin. What joy to be with fellow artists after three years of pandemic lockdown. We all promised to keep in touch.
In the evenings, we had dinner together, then gathered in the living room to watch Derry Girls.
Posting for Travel with Intent’s Six-Word Saturday.
From Cee Neuner:
Here are two photos from self’s archives. The one with the spider was taken during Halloween. The second picture was taken at the Chester Beatty Museum in Dublin Castle. (Those are self’s sneakers, lol)
She didn’t retouch these pictures, they simply turned out that way.
Down the end of a long, book-lined corridor in the Main House of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, there is a chair, a table, and a Christmas cactus!
Posting for Cee Neuner’s Flower of the Day.
In preparing to keep a journal he was giving himself a task, and his temperament and training meant he was going to take the task seriously . . . even if he had no idea what he might achieve, he appears to have seen himself as a man who might do something in the world. Without his enthusiasm for himself, the Diary would hardly have begun to take shape as it did.
He was a passionate reader and cared for good writing. He had already tried his hand as a novelist and discovered a flair for reporting history in the making. Like many others, Pepys started off wanting to write something without quite knowing what it was, and the Diary could be a way of finding out. He may have seen it as a source book for something grander to be undertaken later. The high drama of the world in which he had grown up, the still continuing conflict between republic and monarchy, the heroic figures set against one another, paralleled the conflicts of the ancient world he had studied in classical texts. And principally, there was his curiosity about himself, which made him see his own mental and physical nature as not merely a legitimate but a valuable and glorious subject for exploration.
— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin, p. 79
Claire Tomalin, wow. Just wow.
This is a re-read. The first time she read it, she was on her way to Berlin to give a reading. She had it on her lap the whole flight, but it turned out her seatmate was a young Finnish architect who was going home after making a bid on behalf of his architectural firm for a building in Beijing. He ended up explaining Berlin to her, making little drawings on her notebook: here’s the Brandenburg gate, here’s Oranienstrasse, this street has the best Turkish food, etc.
She remembered being amazed, not just by Berlin, but by the book. Who knows why she decided to re-read it now (motives will be examined, later, in her journal, lol). She didn’t expect her re-read to evoke the same spark of excitement that it did on first read, 15 years (!) ago, but for some reason the above passage read really fresh.
(To be continued)
Diagonals are leading lines and self loves them. She loves the way they draw the eye. P.A. Moed elaborates on this challenge on her blog, pulling from a wide variety of images, including M. C. Escher!
For this challenge, self decided to use this trio of photos she took at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in November. The hills across Lake Annaghmakerrig have always fascinated her. Could it be the trees, or could it be the diagonals?
Fell back a little bit on Walking Squares, but am back now. Thank you to Becky at Life of B for hosting this challenge. November has been a lot of fun, looking through archives and at other people’s Walking Squares.
Self was fortunate enough to spend time the entire month of April writing in Northern Ireland, at River Mill, near Downpatrick. One of her fellow writers, Anna, a mystery writer from Dublin, asked if self wanted to go with her to a beach nearby. Self agreed, and that is how these pictures came to be.
We arrived at Rossglass Beach at the perfect time, just before sunset. The only other people on the beach were a group of teen-agers who decided to strip down and jump into the water. The mysterious mountains in the distance are the Mountains of Mourne. There is only one word for that setting: MAGICAL.
Kanlaon 