Work in Progress

Of the 120+ photographs I had selected as candidates for the "two-squares" treatment (see the previous post Calendar Time), I noticed that quite a few of those that didn't quite work did look rather better when cropped into the whole semi-panoramic space defined by those two adjacent squares. Given the likelihood that I may put some sort of book together, it occurred to me that the two formats would sit happily alongside each other in a complementary way, perhaps even with the addition of some regular single squares, in order to enliven what would otherwise be the monotony of endless examples of the same pattern. We'll see: it's a work in progress, as they say. In the end, all I was doing originally was looking for a way to fill a calendar... 

Incidentally, those last two are actually from yet another "work in progress", in which I have been revisiting the idea of "mysterious barricades", something I first used in a little Blurb book of monochrome film photographs back in 2009 (and which I put onto Issuu as a flip book earlier this year). I explained the allusion in the book's title like this:

This series of photographs takes its name from a short keyboard piece by François Couperin (1669-1733), Les Barricades Mistérieuses. A recording by Angela Hewitt has been described as "a beautiful, undulating meditation on cycles of fifths and chord changes in B flat". No one knows what the title refers to, but I am by no means the first to borrow it, and it will resonate with anyone who has, at some time in their life, felt the frustration of unseen barriers, or encountered inexplicable or apparently pointless obstacles.

As I also had to confess, I actually first came across and appropriated that title after reading a description of the Couperin piece in William Wharton's novel Last Lovers. Bach excepted, Baroque keyboard music is quite low on my list of enthusiasms. As Sir Thomas Beecham is alleged to have remarked, the harpsichord does tend to sound like "two skeletons copulating on a tin roof". An odd comparison, really – "dancing" would surely be more apt, if less provocative? – but I suppose his multiple wives and lovers might have thought it perfectly appropriate. "Yes, that allegro vivace was thrilling, but let's make the second movement molto adagio, eh, maestro?"

William Wharton, I should say, was a very fine writer indeed whose work seems to have vanished from view. His first novel Birdy was once well-known, not least because of the film made of it by Alan Parker in 1984 and starring a very young Nicolas Cage, but if you're looking for something new to read I'd urge you to try Dad or A Midnight Clear: both outstanding books in my reckoning, FWIW.

In fact, I'm now going to do what I said I was going to do the first time I mentioned Wharton, i.e. dig them out and re-read them myself. Although finding them may well take longer than reading them... Meanwhile, here's some music: