psu

Hello, all — very nice to be back, but I had a really wonderful working-break at PSU. It was so lovely to chat with colleagues whose research and writing I’ve long admired, but never met. And it was particularly nice to meet Sean and Tina, who were incredibly kind and hospitable. As well as being the sort of academic who bowls one over with all-round smartness, energy, and good humour, Sean is also a connoisseur of fine ale, and introduced me to the delights of Stone IPA, which, in all its floral-citrus-y-hoppiness is my new favourite American beer.

I was very taken with the PSU campus at State College. Militant pedestrian that I am, I found it really well-designed for getting about on foot, and it has a truly beautiful setting in the landscape of Central Pennsylvania (particularly glorious at this time of year with the leaves beginning to turn). The campus is also full of wildlife: the smell of a skunk and the sight of a chipmunk occasioned much ludicrous excitement, and I was very intrigued by the lions which are to be seen everywhere at PSU. . .

(paw-cleaning)

. . . but the creatures I was most thrilled to spot were the birds which had appeared on someone’s sweater. . .

I’ve ‘known’ Heather online for a few years now, and it was such fun to meet her: she is sharp as a whistle, a superlative knitter, and is perhaps the only blogger whose writing about knitting regularly makes me laugh out loud (recall, for example, her skillful incorporation of the Mother Theresa bun into a post about the forest canopy shawl). The other patrons of the bookstore/cafe in which I met her last week may have been disturbed by our animated discussion about the sheer pointlessness of Alain de Botton, raucous laughter (from me), and mutual yarn hysteria. On the subject of which, Heather treated me to a delicious skein of the legendary socks that rock, and my new favourite shawl (the work of her own deft hands — details here)

Other PSU crafty highlights included meeting Garrison Gunter (I seriously covet the couch upon which Garrison is pictured, upholstered with fabric he designed and printed at Philadelphia’s fabric workshop. The very nifty pattern repeat is built around motifs suggestive of his own Hawaiian background). . . .

. . . And the art of Willie Cole in the Palmer Museum (a wonderfully curated collection at the heart of the State College campus).

Look closely at Cole’s amazing Harlem Rose: each petal is a shoe, and the flower is formed from the combined footwear of many women. The shoes still carry the ghosts of the owners’ feet inside them, and many are worn beyond wearing. Cole makes worn-out shoes bloom together in a gorgeous celebration of the ordinary acts and material lives of women — working women, walking women . . .

. . . and finally, while I’m on the subject of walking women — how was my talk about those of the eighteenth-century? Well, the feedback seemed positive, and the lecture elicited a few laughs from the audience, which I reckon is always a good sign. I proudly wore Heather’s shawl to accompany the frock, and confess to a certain amount of (quiet) hubris about my inclusion in the Weis seminar series. Its a really fabulous programme, and I wish I could be around for some of the other talks and roundtables which are taking place in association with it later this year (thanks, once again, to Sean). And if any of you are remotely interested in my lecture, or indeed any of the other great talks in the Weis “Moments of Change” series, you can actually download them from itunes. Just click here and open itunes at the prompt. (Warning: I do go on a bit).

ex terra lucem

I returned to Lancashire for the weekend, and went for a walk with my mum and dad.
We parked the car near the colliery gates. . .

. . .and we made our way over the landscape which covers the site of the mine. The trees thinned and the ground rose up before us.

Then this appeared, luminous among the weeds and rushes.

We went to get a better view.

Those of you who live in Lancashire, or who have been watching Channel 4’s Big Art Project will know that this is Dream, the arresting and very beautiful piece of public sculpture commissioned from Catalan artist, Jaume Plensa. Mining has been at the heart of St Helens for four hundred years until 1991, when Sutton Manor Colliery closed. A group of ex-miners nominated the colliery as the site of a new landmark work of art: a piece that they felt should not merely be commemorative or contemplative, but forward looking and inspirational. After conversations with the local community, Plensa designed a piece that is suggestive both of the “dream of light when you are working in darkness” and the old Victorian motto of the town, “ex terra lucem” (out of the earth comes light). The finished sculpture was unveiled on May 31st, and quietly sits above the landscape of Sutton Manor Community Forest, the focal point of a space that is emphatically for public use.

Dream is a child in sleep, her features smoothed away. But there’s a promise about her too that is more than a little discomfiting. Those eyelids might well flicker into life. What will she see if her eyes open? Will she rise up further from the earth?

When we were there, there were lots of people. Everyone spent time looking at the sculpture, and everyone seemed to want to touch it. Kids ran about, adults posed for photographs, lay on their backs in the sun, ate picnics. Several hundred thousand people have apparently already visited Dream since its unveiling on May 31st, and I’m very pleased to have been one of them. Local feeling about the sculpture is incredibly positive, though there have been a few sadly predictable complaints that Dream does not dominate the landscape enough to be seen from the motorway. There’s not much you can say to someone whose test of whether something is a landmark or not is its visibility from the M62, but why not actually stop your car, get out, and take a look? Why not walk the less than half a mile up over the old pit, through this great landscape that the forestry commission have now transformed? Why not sit on the steps around the base of Plensa’s Dream, and look back down on the amazing space of the North West all around you?

Dream stands twenty metres high but is not in the least monumental. It wears its status as a piece of public art quite lightly. The child’s face, the closed eyes, mean that there is an intimacy about it and the space in which it sits. This intimacy, and the way the work speaks back to the landscape of St Helens, means that the piece will not just be an end in itself, but will become the occasion of other dreams for this landscape. All good.

seeing the light in a station bar*

(Newcastle Central)

Tom and I were talking about station bars the other day and discovered that as teenagers, living many miles apart in Stretford and Rochdale, we both liked to hang around the one at Manchester Victoria. This had, before it fell victim to nailed-down chairs and the homogenising effects of Travellers Fayre (shudder), a marvellous, atmospheric and (to our teenage selves) immensely exotic interior: all stucco, coloured glass, and plush upholstery. (I’ve not been there for quite some time, so have no idea of its more recent fate). Anyway, our conversation turned on how station bars form a particular genre of British pub: how they are purportedly spaces of transition, of waiting, and therefore never a destination in themselves. But then we changed our minds and decided, that precisely because of their liminal status (being the place you go to before you get to where you were going; neither one place or another) station bars really are distinct destinations: in-between spaces, half-way places, purgatories of refreshment.

(Halfway hoose)

It then occurred to me that, largely because of my own transitional existence between two cities, I am a regular in two great examples of the genre: The Centurion in Newcastle Central and The Halfway House, just a stone’s throw from Edinburgh Waverley. Both serve a good range of ales (always a bonus); both are superlative station bars, and they both celebrate their particular in-between-ness in very different ways. The Centurion does so in a manner entirely in keeping with its surroundings in the grand Victorian sweep of John Dobson’s Newcastle Central station.

(The bar at The Centurion)

The bar pumps, which happily dispense a swift half of Rivet Catcher or Old Kiln Ale to me after a long day’s teaching, nestle behind glorious late nineteenth-century columns decorated in this stately and very excessive manner. Some of the tiles are exuberantly suggestive of fin-de-siecle train travel along the East Coast mainline: of steam, sunrise, and the view crossing the Tweed near Berwick:

The Centurion sits in what was, in the 1890s, the station’s first-class lounge. But, by the 1960s, it was frequented not by well-heeled passengers but disgruntled prisoners, after it was transformed into holding cells for the British Transport Police. British Rail then apparently did their best to destroy the tiles with a bucketload of paint, before the interior was finally restored to its former glory in 2000. Now The Centurion’s fabulous interior and fine ales can once again be enjoyed by travellers through the station, as well as all the good folk of the toon, (including a well-known group of knitters).

(Dear man who also likes The Centurion’s interior: thankyou for being in my picture)

The Centurion’s real showpiece has to be this mural which displays for North-bound travellers their promised destination: all dappled braes and rocky shores, green and gold and . . . rhododendrons. After looking at it many times, I think the landscape must be meant to suggest a view across Loch Lomond from the East shore (which of course became a popular tourist destination in the 1800s, largely because of train travel). It’s such a luridly late-Victorian highland fantasy, and I absolutely love it.

The interior of The Halfway House (HWH) also celebrates trains and transition, but in a rather different way.

While The Centurion is the epitome of opulence, with its high ceilings, elaborate decor, and luxurious surroundings, the Halfway House is all about being snug. This is the smallest and cosiest pub in Edinburgh. Within seconds of your train arriving, you can step out of Waverley Station, walk a few steps up Fleshmarket Close, and be in the welcoming interior of the HWH, enjoying a very reasonably priced lunch of hot stovies or cullen skink, and (oh joy of joys) a well-kept pint of Bitter and Twisted.

(HWH bar)

The pub is stuffed with railway paraphernalia, chief among which are posters and postcards celebrating the destinations one might reach on the old LNER.

Though the HWH is meant to be a stop-off point, a waiting room, a resting place between places, I am most fond of it because for me it is my final destination (and not purgatorial at all). I frequently meet Tom in there for a pint at the end of the working week, and I look forward to that pint immensely. Cheers.

Where are your favourite station bars?

*apologies to Nick Drake

spinning further

(Several Hamiltons. By George Romney)

I so enjoyed the discussion on the last post, I thought I’d continue the theme. Above you see a few more of Romney’s Hamiltons. I think you can see how Kirsty’s point — about the essential kinkiness of the spinning portrait — is reinforced in most of these paintings of Hamilton. So much of her is about performance, and certainly the most persuasive way of reading her famous ‘attitudes’ (in which she embodied the essential characters of classical and eighteenth-century heroines for an assembled audience of connoisseurs) is as a form of elegant striptease. She would start off upright, as the repellent figure of Medea, but end up on the floor as a Bacchante, in a sort of sprawling disarray. Anyway, the more I look at her spinning portrait the more entirely about fantasy and artifice it becomes.

(here she is again)

Hamilton is not spinning in a cosy domestic interior, but in the artist’s studio. She is depicted against a generic leafy backdrop, a woodland and a hillside with the suggestion of a cottage in which her labours might more appropriately take place. This is spinning at one remove from itself: it is spinning on a stage. And the frank exchange of glances between the spinner and the watcher — the use of her work as an opportunity to display for us her wrists and hands — suggests an awareness of herself as a confection. The way that this portrait produces its own fantasy of the spinning woman is interesting to consider in the light of those fabulous, luminous French genre paintings that Rhian mentioned. All of these images seem to call up questions about what it means to watch women performing activities (spinning, knitting, crochet) that are not just laborious, but contemplative. The women are not idle (and therefore they are not sexually dissolute) but still: their minds are not entirely on their work. Though their hands are busy all of them are clearly thinking about . . . a something else. And these images feed the nineteenth-century viewer’s fantasies (about feminine industry, performance, desire, whatever) by positioning them where they think they know what that something else might be.

Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson

Not entirely unrelated, and as (I hope) a sort of treat for you American spinners, I here reproduce Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson’s song The American Spinning Wheel. I doubt you’ll have seen it before, and I hope you like it. This song appears in several of Fergusson’s manuscripts and is included in one of her commonplace books (that I’ve been editing). Unlike Hamilton, Fergusson was herself a practiced spinner — of fleece and of flax — and was well-aware of the political implications of producing American homespun. She engaged in her own revolutionary performance in the winter of 1777, when the linen thread she spun on her wheel at Graeme Park was sent to be woven into cloth to clothe the American prisoners of war then held in British-occupied Philadelphia. Fergusson wrote the song for the people of Horsham (close to her contested estate) and in her headnote says it is: “to be sung at a country spinning frolic, written in the late war when it was the custom for the young people to collect to help to spin and then in the evening be joined by the lads of the neighborhood and have a little hop.”

Fergusson is so much in my head at the moment, that if I start talking about her — her economic and political position; what it meant for her to spin, or indeed to write this song — I’m afraid I’ll never shut up. So I leave it up to you spinners to make of it what you will.

The American Spinning Wheel

1
Since Fate has assigned us these rural abodes,
Remote both from fortune and honor’s high roads;
Let us cheerfully pass through life’s innocent dale,
Nor look up to the mountain since fix’d in the vale.
When storms rage the fiercest, and mighty trees fall;
The low shrub is sheltered which clings to the wall.
Let our wheels and our reels go merrily round,
While health, peace, and virtue amongst us are found.

2
Though the great deem us little, and do us despise;
Let them know it is wise to make little suffice.
In this we will teach them, though ever so great;
It is always true wisdom to yield to your fate.
For though King or Congress stand to carry the day;
We farmers and spinners at last must obey.
Let our wheels and our reels go merrily round,
While health, peace, and virtue amongst us are found.

3
Our flax has it’s beauties, an elegant green;
When it shoots from the earth it enamels the scene.
When moistened and broken in filaments fine,
Our maidens they draw out the flexible line;
Some fine as a cobweb, while others more coarse,
To wear but on work days for substance and force.
Then the wheels and our reels go merrily round,
While health, peace, and virtue among us are found.

4
Since all here assembled to card and spin;
Come girls, lets be nimble and quickly begin,
To help neighbor Friendly, and when we have done,
The boys they shall join us at close of the sun.
Perhaps our brisk partners may lead us through life,
And the dance of the night end in husband and wife.
Let our wheels and our reels go merrily round,
While health, peace, and virtue amongst us are found.

Graeme Park, 1782