A Commonplace Book. So That’s What It’s Called.

I was visiting Cawdor Castle, Scotland, two years ago (once again) and I bought a book titled Thistle in Aspic – Leaves From the Commonplace Book of Hugh Cawdor by the dowager countess. First of all, if you’re ever in that neck of the woods, you should visit the place. Gardens are great and the castle itself is really interesting. The late earl, 6th in the row, Hugh wrote interesting and pretty different introductory texts for each room. That in itself is, I think, a pretty good reason for a visit: it’s not often you see giggling and laughing visitors in such places. But the main point for mentioning Cawdor is the title of that book: until I saw it in the castle bookshop, I had no idea that the books I had been keeping were called commonplace books and that they had hundreds of years of history. You can read more about that here, in Quinn McDonald’s blog, where we have been talking about it too. She took the time and the look into the history and kindly put together a post about it. Thanks!

My first commonplace book was inspired by the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where Indy & co. race after the Holy Grail with the help of Indy’s father’s journal into which he has compressed all he knows about the Grail. That was well before The English Patient which also features a commonplace book (you could say that the books is one of the characters) and is often mentioned as an source that popularised commonplace books. But the third Indy came first, that’s all I’m saying, and I wanted to have something as cool as that. So I got myself a journal, covered it in leather and got on with it. I put everything in it, just as I should: poems, thoughts, quotes, cartoons I cut out of papers, news articles, and pictures of all kind. Here’s a spread containing the opening lines of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead:

The next one was a slightly larger one, once again with leather covers, but the paper quality was slightly poorer. I made sure the third one came with better paper. I meant to make leather covers for it too, but never did. Who knows why.

The left page is a cartoon from a newspaper. The character (a self portrait of the cartoonist) says: ‘Eternity will always exists in the endless chain of universes. That’s why non-existence can never exist… There is only is and with it the life repeating eternally in all its glory… All that was told by liverwort!’ In my first commonplace book I have written down short Buddhist anecdote where a flower is used in a similar meaning. On the right is a short article titled ‘The Horses Were Missed by the Whole Village,’ a story about warhorses and how they came back home after the second world war. Sadly I have failed to write down the date for that article, but it must be sometime in October 2001 I think.

And then there is this interesting poem/song in that same book:

I have written under it ‘An English folk song “older than everyone thinks…” ‘. I know I got it from a book that dealt with English folk traditions but which one. Would be so interesting to know more. What do the numbers in it symbolise? I get the seven (the Big Dipper, obviously) but what about the others?

The latest one is more like a scrapbook as I have put  much more effort in the layouts etc. but I’ll write a special post about that some other time. But there’s a small treat still left. My first commonplace books ends with this page. The newspaper add says: ‘For sale Cats: Charming, gelded and vaccinated kittens without a home. Call…’ and then, under it: ‘A white, of assignment age, BRITISH boy. Registered. Affordable.’ Oh, dear. I hope every caller read the title…

Spring Arrived Last Tuesday Around 3 pm

I intended to write about commonplace books on my next post – as discussed on Quinn’s blog – but ach, well. I guess I’ll do it on the next one because spring arrived last Tuesday while I was out of town. Really. I kid you not. This is what the landscape looked like on the previous Sunday:

The photo is a bit too dark as I took on my mobile phone which doesn’t have the best of cameras, but is was a dull day: clouds hanging low and it was raining for the first time this year. There was snow all around which is a bit unusual for this time of the year. The thermal spring – you can see the definition for Finland here in English – was late this year as the temperatures during the night stayed wall below freezing until last weekend. That’s why the snow lasted for so long and why the migratory birds where nowhere to be seen.

Last Tuesday I drove the 250 km to Jyväskylä for the day. I left in the morning and returned to home around 10 pm. It was a warm and sunny day in Jyväskylä but I didn’t think much of it as the town lies in the Central Finland where the seasons follow a slightly different rhythm than here closer to the coast. And it was dark as I arrived back home so I didn’t pay much attention to the snow situation though, as an afterthought, that it was dark should have meant something.

It hit me the next morning when I went out to get the morning paper: where the heck has all the snow gone? It was practically all gone over night. Tuesday morning – late winter, Wednesday morning – spring. The same scene from our daily walk with the dog now looked like this:

(It’s composite panorama. That’s why the perspective is a bit wonky.)

The only snow left are the wet patches left in the shaded ditches and by woods and buildings; The ditch on the right, eastern side of the road gets much more direct sun than the left, western side one. Everywhere else, gone.

And the wind is warm, even the gale that has been blowing since last night. And the birds are here: the swans, cranes, skylarks and the Northern Lapwings. It’s officially spring now.

Designer Dress Code

Last month I attended this seminar on contemporary museum architecture in Kiasma, Helsinki. I entered the theater where they hold these kinds of functions about 10 minutes before the first presentation and most of the seats were already taken. My jaw dropped when I saw the audience. Never seen anything like it before. It seemed everyone was wearing black, grey, browns or muted whites (only as an complementary colour, not as the main one, mind you). There were suits. And elegantly wrapped scarfs. Knitted stuff. And reading glasses pushed up on one’s head.

I had a bright red hoodie. And faded jeans.

Dear me. Talk about being underdressed.

Covers for Cassette Tapes

Remember how there used to be cassette tapes. You know, the years after LPs and before CDs? I still have a boxful of them but sadly no way to listen to them anymore. Bummer, since I have some interesting stuff there like Ainulindalë, a Middle Earth inspired album by some students from a local high school that specialises in music. Can’t get that on CD. Even the tape required special connections. I used to make covers for those tapes I had copied from LPs and my friends’ CDs before I got a CD-player of my own. Now I have most of them on CD so I have paid my due to the artists.

I kinda had forgotten how well some of the covers turned out. I don’t have the dates on every cover so I put 2013 on those missing original dates.

This one has 1991 on it and I think it might be one of the very first. I have always liked Glen Miller. There’s just something to his big band sound.

A year later. This one is for Jethro Tull‘s Songs from the Woods.

In 1997 I had to make a new tape for car rides since the old one had lost its tune, so to speak.

Yes, I listened Yes. And Rush. And Marillion. And lots of other progressive bands. Still do. I suppose Union in my favourite album by Yes. Just the other day I was eating out with my friends in a really good pizzeria in Oulu and we got talking about progressive rock. Of course someone had to pose the question of what is the opposite of progressive rock. Regressive rock? What would that be?

I know. Lame. But the pizza was so good.

This one is my absolute favourite. I’m not sure when I made it but it must have been somewhere between 1995-1997. The tape had Clannad‘s Legends on the A-side and, for some forgotten reason, stuff from the Voice Squad on the B-side. Guess because both bands are Celtic. Legends is the soundtrack for the 80′s Robin of Sherwood TV-series which I loved as a kid. Surprisingly it wasn’t half as bad as old favourites often turn out to be when you see them years after. And the soundtrack is still so good. You can listen to the theme here. Anyway, the Robin Hood explains Herne the Hunter on the cover.

Haven’t done any covers after that, not since the CDs took over for good. I think I have to see if I can find some of the weird stuff I have on tape in CD or some other modern format. But I fear there will be no more cover art to make.

 

Silent Winter

You know Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring? The one published in 1962 about what pesticides do to the environment and especially to birds? Thankfully the silent spring never came but so far it’s been a silent winter in our backyard. For the last three years there has been even hundreds of birds a day feeding on the grain we have provided, but not so this year. Last winter I filled the feeder even three times a day, now one filling can last for almost a week. What is going on?

There are still quite a few yellowhammers, Emberiza citrinella, around but almost no sparrows at all. That’s strange. Usually there are hundreds in our neighbourhood chirping madly in the hedges but now – nothing. What’s going on? What has happened? My friend living some 50km away says that all she gets in her yard are sparrows but not single yellowhammers. Strange. Where have the sparrows gone? Their numbers have been dwindling, but this is not just a drop in numbers: they have simply disappeared.

The trouble is, yellowhammers don’t like to sit up on the feeder but eat from the ground. Usually the sparrows, which are really, really messy eaters, throw most of the seeds down to the ground where the yellowhammers then feast on them. Now that cycle has been interrupted and yellowhammer that come by find only a little to eat and soon move on. I could put the grain on the ground but it gets quickly covered up if it snows or the wind blows snow over. But I guess that’s what I have to do.

The picture is from last winter and it was much snowier then. We got to do some shoveling almost everyday. This winter has been really easy on our backs.

I just miss the traffic. Hope they will be back next year.

My Heroes: Danny Gregory

About two years ago I was leafing though Amazon (Can you do that, leaf though Amazon.com?) trying to find something that would encourage and reassure my desire to get back into drawing and art. I went though book after book, ordered some – most of which were quite good and inspiring – before I came across Danny Gregory’s Creative License: Giving Yourself Permission to be the Artist You Truly Are. I don’t know if I can say that I have ever read a book that changed me or my perspective, but Creative License certainly was a starting point for the change I’m going through right now. Danny’s style of drawing and writing spoke to me. I especially liked the fact that he accepted that it is hard to return to a practice you have previously judged to be a “not proper career”. His book solidified my determination to draw more and to be serious about it, to give it the time, effort and role I want art to have in my life. It’s been a slow process but I will get there.

I did not get myself a Moleskin – well I did, but I didn’t like the feel nor the colour of the paper. It took awhile to find that perfect, inspiring sketchbook, but eventually I did and I took up the habit to carry it in my bag. The first pages filled up very slowly but I did finish the book last autumn after almost two years. I have a new one now but I try not to put any pressure on filling it up though I definitely would like to draw daily. One day (not someday, mind you) I will.

I mostly draw when I’m away from home. I don’t know why, really. I have all these excuses at home, but while I’m on the road or in a museum they disappear. These I drew last August, the clouds on the train on my way to Helsinki and the two men playing Go in a beautiful, peaceful small park (much like a garden really) in southern Helsinki. I still had a cold and I was about to give a presentation in a conference in a few days, but the weather made me forget my tiredness. It had been raining for days but while traveling south the low-hanging rainclouds turned into magnificent cumuli and sunshine. Thanks to Danny I had the tools to capture them.

The End of the World – As We Know It 2.0

Remember the sign in the sky I saw last month? Well tonight I spotted these two when I went out for our evening stroll with our dog. Again nicely cold outside, -18 degrees of Celsius (-0.4 F, 255.15 K), and diamond dust in the air. This time the circumstances were just right for proper light pillars.

Oh, wait.

There’s more on the north side of the house:

Maybe they’re not light pillars but lights of spaceships! Alien invasion! Occupation! See, there’s one more:

No more Star Trekkin’ for me tonight I think.