The Light Side Of Life

The pull to be in the garden is so strong now that spring is really here that it's hard to find time to write my book blog. However,the rain of the last few days gave me time to hunt out the next lot of books. Although sitting down to read them was not in the plan, I had forgotten how readable and inspiring was “My Rock Garden”, a book which a friend found at a sale years ago and dropped in to me on her way home, one of those kindnesses that are never forgotten for their spontaneous generosity. Reginald Farrer wrote this book, and my copy is from The Garden Book Club, London 1942, when a lot of gardeners had other things on their mind. No doubt it cheered many a person who was wondering if he would ever enjoy growing flowers again.

I had a little Brownie 127 camera when I was very young, and when the children were growing up we had a little Halina. But I was never really a photographer, for lack of both time and money. Things changed in the years since 2000. Digital cameras arrived, and at the same time, people began throwing out their old film cameras as well as film, often out-of-date; many found their way to charity shops and I brought them home. When we got our first computer, the bundle that came with it included a Kodak digital camera. It had a viewfinder but no lcd screen and I hadn't a clue how to use it. Around the same time I found a Halina 3000 in the Oxfam charity shop attached to the recycling centre, and at a library sale the next day I found 'The Amateur Photographer Handbook', published by Hamlyn in 1987. It's a very thick, smallish-sized hardback, with lots of text and drawn illustrations, as well as, naturally enough, photographs, although they are not many for the size of the book. Since then I have never looked back. I found that the way to learn how to take pictures is a combination of reading and doing, and for the active part of the adventure, the Halina 3000 is a wonderful camera. It has an uncoupled light meter on top with a little pointer to a number, and you set the speed and aperture so that the same number appears in a little box on the camera, then you take your photo. If you change the shutter speed, for instance to take a faster-moving object, you will have to change the aperture setting in order to get the same number again in the box, and this is how you suddenly realise what it's all about. Of course, you may have known all that already, but I didn't. Then, once I started to read about light meters, shutter speeds and apertures, everything became clear. If you start your picture-taking life with a modern digital point-and-shoot it is a different learning experience, but ultimately, both film and digital cameras work on the same principles. More sophisticated cameras, both digital and film, have coupled light meters, and the camera chooses the shutter speed and aperture, but with one of those I wouldn't have learnt the function of the camera settings.

I bought the next photography book, 'The Instant Picture Camera Handbook' by Michael Langford, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1980, to go with an instant camera I found in the same Oxfam shop. Although one might think that digital photography is 'instant photography', this is just not true. When I take pictures with a digital camera they lie a long time on the computer, and I hardly ever feel moved enough to print them. My Fujifilm Instax camera gives me the print immediately, without the need for printer or ink. Granted there is the cost of the film but you can get good deals online. Polaroid film disappeared around 2008 except in hugely expensive buy-it-nows on E-Bay, but there is a new company called the Impossible Project making it now for the old Polaroid cameras, and Fujifilm for many years have been making peel-apart type film FP100C and the like for the old Polaroid Land cameras. I however find Fujifilm Instax is all I need. The Impossible Project film is very expensive, also it is not all that stable yet, so results are often unpredictable. If you are interested in just taking out a camera for fun, I recommend the Instax range of cameras. Also remember that Instax film won't fit Polaroid cameras nor will the new Polaroid type film fit the Instax cameras. Go to www.flickr.com and put Instax in the search box and you will get an idea of how good these photos can be.

There are many many books on photography of all types, film, instant film and digital. I have found that the fancier the book and the more packed with photos it is, the less you can learn from it, at least at the very beginning. Just learn what shutter speeds are about, why you might need to change the aperture, how to take pictures in different lighting conditions, things like that, and you will soon have it all. On photography forums you will find all kinds of lofty conversations about lenses and refraction and parallax and so forth and it may mean nothing to you; believe me, you don't need it, just a simple camera even with very few manual controls, and with practice the ability to compose a shot will become second nature, and you're away.

Two companionable books that are worth keeping on your shelf are both Oxford publications, one from Oxford University Press, 'The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose', edited by Frank Muir, my copy published in 2002, the other from the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 'The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes', edited by James Sutherland, and dated 1975. The former is a very thick paperback, in lovely condition, and I honestly cannot remember where I got it, while the latter is a hardcover book about half the size of the other, and I see it came from a library sale and is besmirched with the dregs of torn-off labels, 'withdrawn from stock' stamps and lumps of now redundant brown paste.

The first book I have wandered through, picking here and there, but I always finish my session with it by reading one of my favourite pieces of writing of all time, James Thurber's 'The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty'. It is amazing that this short story was made into a long film, but to me one of its major virtues is its compactness; another is that it actually makes me laugh, something that few things in life do, and in particular those which are manifestly intended to do so. Frank O'Connor's 'My First Confession' also figures in this book, another gem which if for some reason you have not encountered before, I bid you to seek out as soon as possible, You will be reading this book forever, and will probably find it a little amusing at least, even if, like me, you do not seem to share the commoner type sense of humour.

The Oxford Book Of Literary Anecdotes' is a collection of writings too, and is satisfying in a different way. It is full of the doings of famous writers, as commented on by their contemporaries. They are the sort of stories that can freely be written now that their subjects are dead, which they most certainly are, since the book starts with the Venerable Bede (673 - 735) and ends with Dylan Thomas (1914 - 1953). Well, in truth it starts with someone called Caedmon (670), of whom I have never heard, and in the end I have to be honest about it.

Now I hope you will excuse me if I go back to Reginald Farrer, and all those little plants which he considered to be personalities in their own right, at the same time recalling my old friend who so generously gave the book to me. But first, I think, a cup of tea is in order. Goodnight all.

Green Hope

The sun is shining and the sky is blue; the first swallows have arrived and the world is, as Verga said, green with hope. These are the things of life that are real. There are books which go well with this new world, this mother universe outside the artificiality of economic systems; any attempt to grab and stash the fruits of these works results in empty fists. These are the writings which convert words miraculously into joys, joys far more concrete than the flimsy solids of the materialistic world.

One of the great free joys is to learn even a little of a new language. In that way you can visit the hearts, minds and spirits of another nation without any of the hassle which is part of physically going there. That is how I found Giovanni Verga's short story 'Pane Nero', with the words which enhance my thoughts now that spring is here: “La primavera cominciava a spuntare dappertutto, nelle siepi di fichidindia, nelle macchie della viottola, fra i sassi sul tetto dei casolari, verde come la speranza;.... “ The story is in 'Tutte le novelle' Volume Primo (Part One), and my copy was published in 1996 by Anoldo Mondadori Editore in Milan. I am not fluent in Italian, but I have managed to read and embrace those words.

                                                        





Herbs For Health And Cookery' by Claire Loewenfeld and Philippa Back, published by Pan Books Ltd. London, in 1965, is a book I have owned for a long time. It is a book about the goodness of herbs, and how to use them both in cooking and in healing. The herbs are described and then recipes for using them in salads, herbal teas, washes and compresses are given in plenty. Above is the recipe for Cheese Soufflé and a Bread and Cheese Pie.

 While I have the cookery books open, I found a great recipe in the Amish Country Cookbook, Volume 1, which was published by Bethel Publishing, Elkhart, Indiana, U.S.A., and edited by Bob and Sue Miller. The book consists of pages and pages of recipes submitted by Amish cooks and gathered by Das Dutchman Essenhaus. This book is a truly wonderful resource, rescued from the recycling centre.                                                                

“ Cocoa Drop Cookies (Unbaked)

Boil together 5 minutes:

2 c. (cups) white sugar
1/2 c. cocoa
1/2 c. milk
1/2 c. butter
1 t. (teaspoon) vanilla

Mix well with 3 c. Quick oats. Drop by spoonfuls on waxed paper and cool.

(Edna Mae Schmucker (Dishwasher)

Now that isn't going to take up too much time to make for your brood. The names of the contributors and their vocations are almost as fascinating as the recipes themselves.

I mentioned before that gardening is one of the joys of my life. It doesn't really matter which gardening book you take up at this time of the year, almost any one will feed your habit while it's dark outside. Royton E. Heath wrote “Miniature Rock Gardening in troughs and pans”, published by W.H. & L. Collingridge Ltd. London in 1957. If you grow any of the plants he recommends in this you can be sure they will be very small. Even more wonderfully, he shows you how to construct the troughs in which to grow them. Having said this, I myself use a miscellany of old fish boxes, very large tubs and old sinks to grow mine. These miniature plants are magic. The other day I found myself gazing in wonder at Anemone lippiensis, which lives underground for a large part of the year. It had emerged in a matter of days, little golden-yellow bowls smaller than the tip of your little finger, lying on green lacy beds of leaves; they are for all the world like miniature peonies. One whole garden of treasures like these can be sited just outside a back door, to be enjoyed no matter what the weather, and every day something new appears.

Growing fruit is something you can do for almost nothing too. The best way may be to find a good variety of apple or pear in a nursery, but you can also grow all kinds of fruit plants from pips and stones, and eventually they will flower and bear fruit. Of course a certain sort of gardener will enjoy telling you that either they will not flower at all, or the fruit they bear, if you should be so lucky, will not be up to much. A week ago I looked at a tub where I am growing a red-leaved apple tree, grown from a pip on a whim about seven years ago, and I saw to my excitement that it has little clusters of buds. It wasn't a question of patience, for there is always too much going on in a garden to sit around waiting for things to happen; those seven or so years have flown, and now my little tree is about to flower. What joy! If you want to read a very good and easy to read book on growing fruit trees, “Growing Fruit” by Roy Genders is one of the very best. Roy Genders is a name to look out for no matter what the garden subject, by the way. This book is in The World Of The Garden series, edited by Alan Gemmell, and I see now that it is actually a Teach Yourself Book by Hodder and Stoughton, published in 1979, which I hadn't noticed before, since I bought it at a school sale many years ago.

Collins Tree Guide, published by HarperColllins in 2004, written by Owen Johnson and illustrated by David More, will lead you to another source of happiness. We are surrounded by trees, but many of us do not know their names, except perhaps the commonest, such as Oak, Sycamore, Holly...it adds to the pleasure of walking in the countryside to know the names of its trees, those creatures great and small without which all life on earth would be unsustainable, and who give to us every living breath we take. It seems a courtesy after that to learn what they are called.

How about a little book just to look through, to calm the spirits, to enjoy just for itself? 'Japanese Style', by Suzanne Slesin, Stafford Cliff, and Daniel Rozensztroch, with photographs by Gilles De Chabaneix, published by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, New York 1994, is a small, colourful book of pictures from Japan, showing Japanese style indoors and out. I don't know why this little work, showing empty rooms and snatches of courtyards should be calming, but it is. Sometimes the pictures are taken through a partly-open door, sometimes they are merely of a hallway or a length of carpet, an open doorway to the outside or a window frame; it reminds me of what you see as a very young child, not knowing for sure what it is, but because you are confined to your cot or seat or wherever until someone deigns to move you, you gaze at the same view, pondering. This too is a magic book. Found with joy at the recycling centre.

From Amazon I bought 'The Haiku Anthology', edited by Cor Van Den Heuvel, and published by W.W. Norton & Co., New York and London, in 1999. On the cover it says ' Over 800 Of The Best English Language Haiku And Related Works' . It is just simply a beautiful book, one to carry with you when you know you are going to have to wait somewhere; it is full of verbal snapshots; the meaning I get from one of these little poems may not be the same as the one you get; it doesn't matter; what I think of the flying swallow I see and what you think of it need not be the same; that is just another joy of life for which there is no payment to be made. The name Haiku has come from the Japanese, and I know these poems are far from their origins. It doesn't matter.

Here are two:

“A plastic rose
rides the old car's antenna -
spring morning”                                             
                                 by Elizabeth Searle Lamb
                                                               

“She's running for office -

for the first time
my neighbour waves.”
                                               by Alexis Rotella

I love them all. Of course, some more than others.

That dear friend I lost last year introduced me to Haiku. Such a gift lasts forever.

O Ireland, My Country !

I found Ivan Illich's 'Deschooling Society' in the recycling centre. Published by Calder & Boyars, London in 1971, this copy had a footmark on the cover and the pages were quite marked, but it looked interestng and I brought it home.  Because it is quite an old book now, many of Illich's ideas have been superseded by today's technology. One example is his suggestion that rather than spend huge sums of money on television stations, a state should supply tape recorders and endless tapes and allow them to be borrowed at will by those who wished to learn and discuss. Obviously the possession of a computer, software and an internet connection is an improvement on this idea. Among his criticisms of the school systems which to his mind are the same the world over is that he feels they have a one size fits all mentality which produces education as it were in bundles, to be disseminated by teachers who all had followed the same road through education and are passing this unimaginative system on to their students; there is no creativity, the curricula are enforced, and students and teachers have to comply. He proposes that in fact the main function of formal schools is to create labour for the market and consumers for the goods in this same market. The practitiioners of skills cannot not pass them on unless they have the requisite teachers' qualifications.
Illich (dead since 2002) discusses many new ideas of his in this book He feels that schools, which need a vast financial investment on the part of a state, cater mainly for the better off in society. The sums poured into education, paying teachers, providing buildings and their necessary utilities, benefit the better off more than those who are disadvantaged. The disadvantaged often drop out of school for reasons to do with being needed to earn for the family, or because they cannot afford the hidden costs of schooling, or because they are alienated anyway from the whole system, or for any number of related reasons. . So even if the money invested purports to be equally for them as much as for others, they gain little from it.

Illich, in a development of his ideas, talks about roads, particularly in rural areas of so-called developing countries, and argues that they are not for the majority of the citizenry, but rather for the possessors of fast cars, or for lorries to ferry consumer goods to those areas which could be quite self-sufficient. He says lower speeds, and mechanical 'donkeys' would suit these populations far better and make their lives much easier. In other words, people can travel slowly but surely where they need to go. Another important point he makes is that such mechanical donkeys would be of necessity cheap to purchase and easy and cheap to repair, thus obliterating the need for another skill group to fix them, and giving independence to their owners. You may wonder what this has to do with deschooling society, but his point is that producing goods that only an esoteric group can maintain or repair is another way of institutionalising such knowledge too. Nowadays, looking at new motor cars with their complicated computers, no small deal financially or in terms of repair for their owners, (who can of course afford any maintenance or repairs needed anyway), we have to concede the point to Illich.

Personally I think that senior schools as we know them are in their last innings. Access to the internet and the web has made them redundant. Students are much maturer nowadays and would be well able to access their own learning from home, decide what and how to study, and as a result, be much better prepared for higher education. I'll bet that a grant to every secondary school age student to purchase a computer and towards the cost of broadband would cost the state a lot less money than the endless amount which is needed to maintain schools. Even the provision of a panel of mentors or advisors, accessible by phone or online for such students, would not come near the cost of providing the outmoded senior school system. All that is needed is one drop-in centre per area, where students can call in person if they wish, including a coffee shop for socialisation purposes and for participation in clubs catering for different interests. A laboratory attached to the centre, with a supervisor, would cater for practical experiments necessary for science courses. If you learn one thing from Ivan Illich's book, it is that nothing is set in stone. Every system can be changed for a better one.


I'm not one for ghost stories or conspiracy theories. But you know the shocked feeling you get when you open a newspaper and see someone you know has hit the headlines for some undesirable reason or other? You know that feeling? Well, that's what I felt when I came across Greg Palast's 'The Best Democracy Money Can Buy' on the recycling centre's shelf. Published by Robinson, London, in 2002, the first chapter was very interesting, describing a scenario we all know about now, the 'disappearing' of Texan Democrat voters, mainly black, off the voting register at the time when George Bush Junior lost an election which brought him into the White House, to paraphrase Palast. No surprises there, then. But it was the chapter entitled '   Sell The Lexus, Burn The Olive Tree' which shocked me, as I read the first pages and recognised a portrait of Ireland, my country, in disguise perhaps, but definitely Ireland. Oh, she was called Argentina and Bolivia and Ecuador, but it was Ireland, I recognised her immediately, and I recognised the Grim Reaper at her back. Our Taoiseach is right when he says we partied as a nation during the boom years, on money we didn't own. Anyone who doesn't see that is in denial. Also in denial are the many thousands who voted for 'that other party' during those same years. We took the sweets at the school gates, not recognising them for the drugs they were, and we were hooked. Okay, there's a lot of “Who we, Whiteman?” going around, and yes, there was always a particular party in those countries as well as our own that let down the drawbridge, but howsoever, it happened, and in their usual way, the World Bank, the IMF and the ECB (so much for Europe) walked in and insisted we pay the pushers. Palast describes the steps which then occur, including mass privatisation and selling off of a country's resources, wage cuts, cuts in public spending, the breaking of labour contracts and , overturning of minimum wage agreements and so forth, and how it's all in the cause of 'Globalization'. Which basically means, “What's yours is mine and what's mine's my own”. History repeats itself....the Trojan Horse with its unseen passengers got inside our gates....and it is going to be a hell of a job to get them out again. If you can face it, read this book. And, if you decide then that you want to read more of Greg Palast, here's his website: http://www.gregpalast.com/ 

O Ireland, my country !

While you're at it and if you really want to be scared, you could take a look at this too:

http://www.indymedia.ie/article/185?search_text=teachers unless of course you are already a GATS expert.

Did you notice the proliferation of books on cake making recently, and the endless newspaper articles on cupcakes – one well-known Irish author, Marian Keyes, saying that making cupcakes cured her depression?   'Any one can Bake' is an unusual one from the recycling centre, published in 1929 by Royal Baking Powder Co., U.S.A. I wonder who treasured this book and how it made its appearance on the recycling shelves? I myself can manage to bake quite well, and sustained my family on the results all the years they were growing up. What is particularly appealing about this book is that the cakes are all drawn and coloured by hand rather than photographed. I'm not sure why I like this, but I do. They have the honest and irregular shapes that mine used to have, maybe that's the reason. But all these cupcakes, during a recession and at a time that we have lost our economic sovereignty, why do I keep thinking of Marie Antoinette?