Hamentash Yumble's chiaroscuro drip method.

For week two of the Art Course, Lucien Jung invites Hamentash Yumble to talk about his chiaroscuro drip method. Yumble’s latest exhibition at Borgonzo’s Gallery in New Bond Street has attracted great attention from the overseas art buying clientele, and he feels obliged to dress the part. He now buys shirts at Ermenegildo Zegna, and shoes from Etro. There are invitations for his work to be exhibited in Singapore, Dubai and Maynooth. He gives a full résumé of his career to the assembled art students (including Prigentia Colswain who is overwhelmed by his long, thin, bony physique). Sister Veracitude presses him to reveal more about his drip technique, and he offers to run a workshop at his metallic Shoreditch studio.

Lines on Tintern Abbey

Sometime at the start of 1300, "midway along the road" Dante was lost in a dark forest. To survive this ordeal, he had to visit the three realms of the afterlife, accompanied by Virgil who suggested that first they stock up at the local Aldi. Eight centuries and a bit later at Vevgeny Huxtable's Art Studio in a Hove mews, Lucien Jung is supervising the ten week art course. Kugarita Zinfandel is painting a rural landscape in which, inexplicably, a leopard, a she-wolf and a lion are lurking in the woods beyond a ruined Gothic castle. Sister Veracitude is also painting, but her images are more abstract. Her water-colour portrait of a mid-century Archbishop of Canterbury looks like a monkfish.

Freudian Oneiromancy

In 1877 Grapella’s great-grandfather unearthed  a bronze sculpture of a liver dating from 100 BC, near the town of Piacenza in northern Italy. The Etruscans were well known for the practice of divining by the entrails of sheep and this sculpture was thought to be an artefact of Roman haruspicy. Even today amongst Grepella’s extended family there is a fortune-telling Falgir called Sapsule Colswain. She is now talking to Frab Lotus, and trying to convince him that Freud was merely a latter-day Oneiromancer, and that better results can be obtained from Extispicy. To demonstrate her point she has purchased a sheep and is now examining its entrails (Hepatoscopy). Frab nods politely, and wonders how he can get rid of her.

Canto Seven

The train is delayed and Lazarus Colswain, on his way back to Ampney Crucis, is waiting at the station, his copy of Dante’s Inferno open on his knee. He is not, at this moment, concentrating on reading, but instead idly watches the crowds of intending passengers swirling in front of the procrastinating departure boards.  He notices in particular the interaction between two elderly ladies, who are vying for the attention of a much younger man who attempts to ignore them. Eventually the train is scheduled to depart from Platform Four. Lazarus looks down at the open page and reads: Ahi giustizia di Dio! tante chi stipa nove travaglie e pene quant’ io viddi? e perché nostra colpa sì ne scipa?

The gnomic poetry of Theognis of Megara

The largest moon in the Solar System is Ganymede, the seventh moon of Jupiter, notable for its many pits.  Ganymede is the only moon in the Solar System known to possess a magnetosphere. It was named after the divine hero (the most beautiful of mortals) from Troy, who according to Homeric legend had a bit of a fling with Zeus after the horny god abducted him with an eagle (Mrs Zeus was a tad put out). Eventually Ganymede was granted eternal youth and became a life director of Pepsi Cola.  Felix Karlosoroff is much taken with this tale when he hears it from his astronomer brother Indrek , and he creates an exotic multichromatic triptych silk-screen print of the story.

The Vibes of Bysshe

The young Kimrock is again writing love poetry, and is blithely unaware of how bad it is. Generally the recipient, Prigentia Colswain, is delighted. Sadly today’s poem is (badly) plagiarised from ‘Music, when soft voices die’ by Percy Shelley, and retains references which remind the girl of overdosing on boiled sweets flavoured with the scent of palma violets when she was a child. But worse is to follow, for Kimrock has decided to set his plaintive doggerel to music, and starts serenading his love at six o’clock in the morning. Prigentia stirs. Through the haze of cinematic dreams she hears the minstrel’s tune, recognises the voice and murmurs to herself ‘Love itself shall slumber on’, and goes back to sleep.

Hunting the Highbrow (in Horseguards Parade?)

Every Sunday Gustaf McSweeney takes his Irish Wolfhound, Scruffa, for a long walk across the South Downs at Telscombe. He stops when he reaches the ridge and looks back across the valley. Years ago this was the back of beyond for Londoners, now the majority of the rural inhabitants are urban migrants.  Vanessa Bell's sister used to take this route, as she thought through the pressured ideas that would eventually emerge from her pen, only to be edited and re-edited. By contrast McSweeney's mind is purposefully blank (he practices Mindfulness as he walks).  The question is, who will tell him that Scruffa died twenty years ago, and that on the end of the lead he is dragging a stuffed toy?

Electrophoretic Separation

Lucien Jung is planning the next Educational Symposium at the Old Chapel Arts Centre. The theme is "Anomolous Scientific and Cultural Developments of the 1970's and 1980's". This was the period when electrophoretic separation techniques led to the establishment of Proteomics, so Jung has invited the biochemist Vector Grimble to give his notorious presentation on 2D electrophoresis. Vector's mother Sevalanz (who is currently in Gundelfingen) mentions this to Leporello Swinson who agrees to talk at the symposium on Nono's Spatial Music of 1976. The third strand of the Symposium (Grunge Lyrics and the Gender Question in Verb Declension) will be delivered by Milton Ridley. The presenters (other than Swinson) meet to coordinate timings at the Never a True Word pub. 

Antisceptic shock absorbers no doubt

It is well known amongst fans of the Persian King, Cyrus, that he was  exceedingly skilled in horsemanship. Some even say that he invented the scythed chariot, which was described by the Greek general Xenophon (430−354 BC), an eyewitness at the battle of Cunaxa. He wrote that these chariots "had thin scythes extending at an angle from the axles and also under the driver's seat". Serated bronze blades like this for chariot wheels have been excavated from Chou-era pre-imperial Chinese sites, so perhaps the attribution to Cyrus is erroneous. Malvolio Claxendell, who is still preparing his concordance of Da Vinci's inventions, is certainly a so-called 'Cyrus sceptic', and he explains this loudly to the customers of the Local Coffee House.  

Catherine de Medici's Revenge

The valuable brass ornament made for Diane de Poitiers (the one that Mandible Winkworth bought at Zangwill's Bazaar then donated to Lanzarotte's church Jumble Sale last year) has re-appeared. It was bought by Stella Sopling (tall companion of the ascetic Telemachus) who is showing it to Huxtable, as they sip Ahmed's Tantric Iftar at Moudi's Emporium. Ahmed thinks it looks familiar.  When Huxtable picks it up to examine it for inscriptions, he accidentally drops it.  The parchment roll slips out, but no-one notices, and later it is swept up by Yamima who now works full time at Moudi’s. She picks it up. It is a Sotherby’s authentication that the ornament is worth £45000. She slips the parchment into her pocket.

...che mi fu tolta; e 'l modo ancor m'offende

The unexpected arrival of Lazarus Colswain, Prigentia’s father, causes pandemonium in the street. Grapella (his ex) refuses to talk to him, but unfortunately it is she who opens the door.  She takes one look at him, and leaves him (on the threshold) to the mercies of her cleaner, Magritude Feather, who has over the past three years absorbed the wrath that Grapella has poured out in full shpoch. She puts the poor man in his place, so that when he leaves (with his metaphorical tail between his legs) it is with great relief. Despite this Magritude sends a text message to Prigentia, who rushes to meet Lazarus at the Local Coffee House where he is sitting despondently reading Dante’s Inferno.

Pirkei Avot (Fathers from Essex)

There is considerable excitement around town as the news spreads of the imminent return of Mandible Winkworth. Yevgeny Huxtable is prepared to let bygones be bygones and even buys a copy of 'Ancient Eccentrics' which he presents to the young eccentric Kimrock, who takes it with him as he yomps across Palmeira Downs in a mind-clearing exercise. At Bulmer-on-Caburn, Kimrock takes out his harmonica and composes a folk song in honour of Tigranes the Great which he calls 'By the Waters of Ulysses'.  Quoting a Chinese translation of Pirkei Avot (猶太聖傳•民刑卷•先賢篇), he sings ‘Love work, and despise official positions, and do not become too acquainted with the governing power.’ 

Lost in Translation

Augustus had the city of Albi when, to Latin wrote. When I wrote to the English game. Voltaire was surprised to this day, who wrote the book about the French. Voltaire wrote a booklet, Candidus, than Leonard Bernstein adapted, as in the music. Bernstein wrote the history of western music in "Romeo and Julia, set in Verona, Mantua, a city not far from the artist, the art of beautiful Andrea Mantegna. Carmen is a native of Mantua, Virgil's three-day, in the middle of the lake. Augustus had the city of Albi when, in this confidence of his attempts to interpret it, the Latins, but when he tries to eat the syntax breaks  in power, and he fell among Google Translate.

Homer and Shakespeare

Samuel Quinine has received ten copies of the latest volume in the 'Ancient Eccentrics' series by Mandible Winkworth. It is called "Sea to sea Armenia" (in Armenian: Ծովից ծով Հայաստան: Tsovits tsov Hayastan) which is a popular expression used to refer to the Kingdom of Armenia at the time of Tigranes the Great (140 – 55 BC) who extended the country from the Caspian to the Mediterranean.  In his True History, the satirist Lucian insisted that the most famous Greek poet was a Babylonian called Tigranes, who assumed the name Homer when taken "hostage" by the Greeks. It is absolutely untrue that Homer was Shakespeare's Uncle. Although he has been traveling recently, Winkworth is due to return to Seven Dials soon.

Tossed and blown

Augustus Albi, renowned dyslexic teacher of Creaive Thuikning, is intrigued that his new interest in Latin miraculously causes him no spelling problems. Amongst the dog-eared works of the ancient writer he reads a secret document 'Ambulare cum spe in corde tuo, et solus non ambulat.’ With that in mind he plans a long rural walk near Liverpool to raise money for Stilten's Nordic Cultural Emancipation Trust. He will follow a pre-Roman track that Prigentia assures him is on an arterial ley line that leads to the forgotten remains of a stone circle hidden in primordial woodlands. Samuel Quinine donates several predecimal ordnance survey maps and a military compass, and Yevgen Huxtable gives him an old pair of hiker's anti-blister boots.

Soul Music

19th century convicts were allowed to stop on their way to the scaffold and pray for their souls in front of a statue of the Madonna known as the Refugium Peccatorum, a title used for a painting by the Turin-based painter Luigi Crosio, whose daughter Carola in 1887 married the Italian mathematician and teacher of infinitesimal calculus, Giuseppe Peano.  He introduced modern symbols for union and intersection into set theory, and the standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named after him. He believed that  to encourage mathematical knowledge one had to speak in Latin. Augustus Albi, who has problems with English, thinks this is an excellent idea (excellens cuius ideam). However Peano died of a heart attack in 1931.

The fourth gender

Whilst Felix Karlosoroff  (moody but creative silk-screen-printer) and Frab Lotus – (Reikarial Therapist and part-owner of Zangwill’s Bazaar of Curiosities) are  pragmatic about their sexuality, their friend, Milton Ridley is an avid proponent of Queer Political Theory.  He is currently writing a dissertation on Gender and Grammatical Syntax. Whilst drawing up a concordance of the gender of various nouns in different  Indo-European languages, he discovered a secret papal document from the 15th century that advocates a fourth grammatical gender, namely the ‘seraphic’ gender for nouns such as ‘calculus’, ‘granite’ and ‘non-Island whisky’.

Tonight Ridley is giving a public talk about 'Seraphic options in the twenty-first century' to the  Literary Circle at the Never a True Word Pub in Seven Dials.

Justification of Voltaireine de Cleyre

Sister Veracitude finds a letter from Herman Helcher concealed in the binding of an antique book on Anarchist Thought that she bought at Zangwill's Bazaar. The letter had been smuggled out of the asylum where Helcher was detained after attempting to assassinate Voltaireine de Cleyre, the American writer and feminist who opposed the state, marriage and the domination of religion over sexuality and women's lives.  In 1895 De Cleyre condemned ideals of beauty that encourage women to distort their bodies. For twenty years she  worked amongst the poor of Philadelphia, living among poor Jewish immigrants where sympathy for anarchist beliefs was common. There, she learned to speak and write in Yiddish. (Rabbi Oud Ramonides translates the letter for Sister Veracitude.)

Sunrise over the River Adur

Kolya, the young grandson of Samuel Quinine, has discovered the art of graffiti. He is currently scribbling his impression of sunrise over the River Adur. Unfortunately he is doing this on the original manuscript of the prose poem 'De bloem mei en de vlinder' by the Flemish poet Septimal Spanswick. Kolya's grandfather, has discovered that the roots of the poem lie in the medieval literature of the Burgundian Netherlands (Bourgondische Nederlanden in Flemish) an area which covers a number of Imperial and French fiefdoms ruled in personal union by the House of Valois-Burgundy and their Habsburg heirs in the period from 1384 to 1482. (Today that area covers large parts of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and parts of northern France).

De bloem mei en de vlinder

In the world of Samuel Quinine, diligent owner-manager of Yifitsin Print Bookshop, life is research, and research is life. Today he is considering the heritage of the Flemish poet, Septimal Spanswick, who wrote the prose poem 'De bloem mei en de vlinder'. Having published this in 1885, he went on a quest around the world collecting handwritten manuscripts by poets with alliterative names. The resulting Hypertext volume, ‘The Orb is my Oyster, the Globe my Google’ predated the Internet by a century. Samuel Quinine adds this information to his ‘Notes for Today’ and displays it in the shop window.  Meanwhile , his grandson, Kolya, is in the rear of the shop, playing with a silver statue of the Magic Dragon.

Give us a ring (reflections of Valhalla)

Avid readers of this blog will recall that Wolfram Bettel's nephew Leporello Swinson has asked Cortally Bakewell for the address of a possible pen-friend. Bakewell sent him Prigentia's address, and an earnest exchange of letters  has developed between them. When Leporello learns that Prigentia's mother will be visiting Gundelfingen he drops his commitments in Dubrovnik, and returns home to show her and her companions (Emelda and Sevalanz) around the sites of the Roßkopf. The young musician makes a great impression on Grapella Colswain, who decides that (despite the age difference) this beautiful man would be the perfect partner for her daughter. Leporello Swinson however is struck by the beauty of Grapella, and falls for the mother rather than the daughter.

The inheritance of the Margrave of Baden

Emelda Bush, Sevalanz Grimble and Grapella Colswain are planning a long weekend in Bamster (a medieval town near Gundelfingen). They check the place out with Jorvik Stilten who tells them that in 1327 Gundelfingen was sold by Friedrich of Freiburg to Schnewelin Bernlapp, though in 1507, his successor Balthasar von Blumeneck sold it to the Margrave of Baden.  Just north of the town is the "Roßkopfturm", a 115 ft high lattice tower that was built in 1889, and offers a panoramic view of Freiburg. In 2003, four wind turbines were built nearby, and one of these is standing on the section of the mountain belonging to Gundelfingen.  However as they plan Grapella realises that she will need a babysitter for Prigentia.

Continental Drift

Following the success of the latest evening class on Tectonic Plates at the Old Chapel Arts Centre, Samuel Quinine, at Yifitsin Print Bookshop, is stocking up. Browsing through Wegener’s ‘Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane’ he realises that he has found an explanation for the geological underpinnings of Seven Dials, where the chalk downland slope and ridge is capped with the sandy clays of the Woolwich and Reading Beds. He sticks a photocopied extract in his window, but it only attracts Mrs. Grimple who is looking for a new mattress and is unsure of the location of the Woolwich and Reading Beds shop, and Prigentia Colswain who is looking for a book on Electronic Pilates to help young Kimrock’s migraines.

Memex in the rain

Today there is a brief respite in the rain, and as he hurries across Seven Dials, Tom Purdue decides he must plan a break. He pops into Venus de Milo holidays, the travel agency run by Gustaf McSweeney (the retired teacher) and his wife Emelda Bush (who incidentally is a cousin of Vannevar Bush the computer scientist who invented Memex, an early prototype of the Internet). McSweeney is the travel agent who arranges holidays for all those who do not arrange holidays themselves (previous customers include Stanislav Godel). Emelda runs the local folk dance class together with Yevgeny Huxtable. On his way home Tom Purdue wonders whether McSweeney ever takes a holiday, and if so who arranges it for him.