On William Morris

I’ve become interested lately in the writings of William Morris, more famous now for his graphic designs, but quite an engaging thinker and theorist. Morris was prolific as a writer, craftsman, designer, painter, and typographer. His work in the ‘decorative arts’ included book design, calligraphy, furniture, paintings, drawings, stained glass, tapestries, textiles, and wallpapers. He was a founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, and was also involved in the Socialist movement.  You can read more about him here.  His work resonated with the hippies in the 60s and 70s, and the revival of lost crafts (my mother still has earthen kitchenware from this period), and I think now it might well resonate again with our renewed interest in ethical and organic means of production, and in design. I can see Morris relishing a Saturday morning spent at the farmers’ market, and perhaps a Saturday afternoon browsing design sites like Apartment Therapy or Dwell.

This fragment seems to sum up his philosophy neatly: “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labour.”

Stewart / Colbert Rally

 I’m a huge fan of Jon Stewart and his counterpart Stephen Colbert, and I think what they do is tremendously important. In response to Glenn Beck’s Rally to Restore Honour, Stewart and Colbert hosted their own Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear) on the mall in Washington on 30 October, and drew a crowd of around two hundred thousand people. Looking at the pictures and quotes (here), I am touched and inspired by this mass demonstration of friendliness and whimsy. The mock protest was punctuated with costumes and signs that ranged from the political:

Your friendly neighbourhood Muslim 

Hands off our death panels!

How many people have checked 'Atlas Shrugged' out of the public library without realizing the irony?

to the nerdy:

Eschew obfuscation!

Plurals don’t need apostrophes

What do we want? Moderation!
When do we want it? In a reasonable time frame!

to the satirical:

I’m mildly irritated and I’m going to keep taking it.

Don’t believe everything you think

God hates Fox!

God hates figs! (Mark 11:12-14)

to the absurd:

Bears are people too

This sign intentionally left blank

What’s your zombie plan?

(My favourite)  End Road Work

In response to fear and anger, this rally smacked of gentle mockery and intellectual generosity.  One might expect only the hot-headed and single-minded to rally in these numbers; it was refreshing to find the rational, the nerdy, the ironically self-aware, the comically bemused gathered to a crescendo that was really a collective humourous shrug. Only Jon Stewart could have pulled that off. But he was pulling at (a different) ‘real America’, and up it came in reassuring plenitude. 

a wind has blown the rain away

No poem on Friday as I was languishing in bed. As it's raining here (and everywhere else I gather), I unearthered this rainy poem by ee cummings. I think it does similar things to what Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty” does. I hope you're enjoying the rain as much as I am! 

a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand.  I think i too have known
autumn too long            

           (and what have you to say,
wind wind wind—did you love somebody
and have you the petal of somewhere in your heart
pinched from dumb summer?
                                          O crazy daddy
of death dance cruelly for us and start

the last leaf whirling in the final brain
of air!)Let us as we have seen see
doom’s integration………a wind has blown the rain

away and the leaves and the sky and the
trees stand:
             the trees stand.  The trees,
suddenly wait against the moon’s face.

Lost in Austen

I kind of fell into re-reading Mansfield Park this past week - I always mean to leave the Austens be for a while so as to enjoy them all the more after a break, but somehow they always find their way onto my bedside table or that spot beside my breakfast plate, clamouring (as I fondly suppose) to be read.

MP is one I enjoy more each time I read it. Interestingly, there are no particularly likeable characters in this one. Fanny and Edmund themselves are not especially appealing; Fanny is too shrinking and Edmund too grave. Someone has pointed out that Mary Crawford is not so very different from Elizabeth Bennet, but Austen is in such a different frame of mind when creating Fanny and Mary that Mary's wit and worldliness come across as serious faults of temper. 

I think the pleasure in this novel is the fineness of the moral sensibilities involved, and how vividly offences against true morality are depicted. Rife selfishness, ambition, greed, lust, jealousy, tyranny and oppression are all masked by the tranquillity and refinement of an English country house. The vices which grow unchecked and gradually break through this skin to the final exposure and disgrace of three of the protagonists are allowed to breed beneath this surface while outward decorum is preserved; they are felt only in Fanny’s consciousness and expressed only through her unspoken disapprobation. But worse than these is the relationship between Mrs Norris and Fanny, a real instance of one being exerting power cruelly and gratuitously over another. Indeed Mrs Norris, though petty and trifling in the scope of her mischief, is one of the worst characters to be found in English literature.

All things counter, original, spare, strange

I like this poem “Snow” by Louis Macneice, an Irish contemporary of Auden and Stephen Spender.

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

I like the idea that the world is “incorrigibly plural.” Our minds tend to be reductive; we try to manage our experience by draining out the colour and complexity, sifting, sorting, simplifying. But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. They are more generous than we.

I liked this poem, but I don't think its idea is fully embodied in it - there's no sense in the words and lines themselves of that breathless realisation of things being various. In contrast, Hopkins’ poem “Pied Beauty” is full of the dazzle and irregularity he praises.

GLORY be to God for dappled things— 
  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 
    For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 
  Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;         
    And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 
 
All things counter, original, spare, strange; 
  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 
    With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:         
                  Praise him.