I'm Back ...

There's no headache this morning!  It feels so unbelievably good.  I found this area in my neck at 5am ... because it was stiff and sore, so I rubbed and stretched it for a while and voila ... I woke with no pain.

Meanwhile everything continues to happen here.  My huge ring-binder folder, the one I use for my book-writing course, is full of assignments and we're only halfway through.  It's been beyond excellent having to work out things like defining your book's genre, imagining how it will look - ideally.  Hardcover or soft, photographs, text, binding-style, after learning about different options for bindings.

Creating a vision board, a mind map, a set of core values for the book and the process.  Listening to published author interviews, learning all that Christine Mason Miller knows from her publishing successes.  Writing a synopsis and so much more.

It's intense and although we only work with Christine for 6 weeks, the material remains available to us for 6 months.  This course is all about fitting a book in around real life and all the distractions that most people live with ... which is so realistic for a creature like me.

Last night I began trying to select books for the journey next week.  I love reading at night in Genova.  I'm still not an electronic book reader-type, although the Belgian bloke is working on me.  My camera gear makes me a little sad about the extra weight I can't really carry in books but read I must. 

I have Kay Cooke's 2 poetry books on my desk, and 2 of Ren Powell's too.  I'm thinking they would be a great study while I'm out wandering.  Gert found me another Claire Messud book, secondhand, and I picked up Christos Tsiolkas's book, Dead Europe while in France but I think that one might be a little bit darker than I expect.  Let's see it.

There's all that but then I adore La Feltrinelli's in Genova.  It's one of my favourite bookshops out here in the world.  The English selection isn't huge but it's good.  Really good.  Last time I didn't allow myself to go in.  This time, we'll see ...

Anyway, enough of that.  I'm behind with my photo-editing.  I was lucky enough to wander over to Brussels last weekend, to photograph my lovely colour therapist friend, Marcia's, beautiful family.  I need to get on to that now that my head has stopped aching.

They are a truly, madly, deeply exquisite family and I so love photographing them.  It took most of the day but it wasn't just about photography, there was also a delicious cooked lunch after the picnic captured below.

That Post Where I Chitchat ...

Lately, I've had a low level buzzing going on in my head, probably caused by a whole lot of must-do's, and it's just not conducive to any kind of work flow.  But you know that already.

I've come here to blog a few times but deleted after just a paragraph or two.  There was no fire, no words came.

Tonight, it's 25 celsius as I write this ... almost 10pm, still quite light outside, with swallows whistling up and down the street like crazy out-of-control children.  I know summer's coming when the swallows return.  I do love them.

Here in Belgium, our team of three have been hard at work on our A New Way of Seeing - Photography Retreats project, fine-tuning and preparing.  It just keeps developing in ways that excite and delight us.  It's hard work but we're having fun.  It's a big old dream coming true.

Next week I'll be back in Genova, and will spend two nights at Lake Como before returning home but more on that once I'm there.  Then there's Norway in August and a photography workshop that I'm so looking forward to there.

Which reminds me ... I met the loveliest woman on the train between Genova and Milan last time I was there.  Her name was Patrizia, I think, she lives in Denmark.  I didn't have any business cards left but she wrote her email address on a scrap of paper and I did the same.  We talked for most of those 2 hours on that train and I did so enjoy her company.  Unfortunately I lost the scrap of paper somewhere between Milan and home.

Patrizia, if you did manage to hang on to my details and do read my blog, I would love to hear from you.

As for today ... I biked over to the Russian tailor.  Dank u wel to Lucy for letting me know about him.  My beautiful shawl, purchased in Genova, needed some of its fringe cut.  It's a little bit long and perhaps a little bit too red on the ends too. 

Dimitrii was lovely.  I explained that I had a history of cutting things that shouldn't be cut and needed him to be doing this thing for me.  Actually mostly it's been my hair that I've cut (and regretted cutting) but it was enough to make me terrified of ruining the shawl if I shortened the tassels myself. 

Actually, I  had my hair in the 'about to be cut' position the other night but couldn't find scissors. It's  really long at the moment, and rather warm here in Antwerp.  To explain, I've had a lifetime of going to hairdressers who talk me into letting them cut my hair short and really, I hate it short.  But once I'm in their chair, I'm weakened by promises of end-result glamour.  Mostly they lie...

So I pick that beautiful shawl up on Saturday and then, I shall wear it whenever possible. I think it will be just right for evenings out.

My head must be clearing though.  I excavated my desk today, its drawers, the cupboard and all storage boxes within reach.  It's all rather beautiful again.  My typewriter has a permanent place but it's an interesting creature.  It has a European keyboard, with the A, M, and other important keys not in the place I prefer them to be.  I make mistakes.  I have a bottle Pritt Fluid.  One needs to really hit the keys.  After a typewriter session, the computer keyboard feels plush and luxurious.  The delete key is heaven.

I have begun packing the cords, cables, and equipment required for out there on the road.  A small pilot's bag is slowly filling with 'other' plugs for the slightly different Italian sockets.  The USB modem is  there.  The card reader, the tripod, the sunhoods for the lenses, and etc.  On Wednesday I will become my other self, the one known as Sherpa Di. 

The biggest news though ... Miss 9 will wake as Miss 10 in the morning.  We are so full of thanksgiving when it comes to that little person.  Today she presented me with a great big hand-made book of her paintings and text.  'Voor Di' is there on the cover.  It's something I'll treasure.  Her art works are stunning. She insisted on reading it to me tonight, translating it as she went.  We finished our most recent book series last night and so it was timely.

I think I may have prattled on a little but I wanted to catch up some.  I've missed blogging.  Actually, I have missed being able to access my mind and write coherently.  Here's to the headache being gone on the morrow and to lucid thought returning. 

Failing that, then I shall just have to wait for Italia to work its usual magic on me.

The photograph ... found in a beautiful village in France.

Home ...

You know, if the truth were known I have a perfect passion for the island where I was born. Well, in the early morning there I always remember feeling that this little island has dipped back into the dark blue sea during the night only to rise again at gleam of day, all hung with bright spangles and glittering drops . . . I tried to catch that moment . . . I tried to lift that mist from my people and let them be seen and then to hide them again.

Katherine Mansfield, Writer.

I am returning to Genova in July and already my head has begun to fill with what I would like to achieve while there this time.  That city brings me alive in a way that no other place has so far.  Perhaps Istanbul came close but Genova has everything ... in just the right proportions. It is imperfectly perfect for me.

Genova, once known as La Superba, is an ancient Italian city (at least 2,000 years in the making), nestled in the arms of hills that are topped by ancient fortresses.  And at the feet of the city you have Ligurian Sea. 

The first time I saw that sea tears filled my eyes.  It had been a long time since I had been anyplace where the sea looked like home.  I was out at Nervi, photographing a Genovese family, and suddenly I was overcome by this strange sense of being back in a place that was completely familiar.

I have been thinking about things and have this idea that if you ever leave the country you were born in and move someplace else, far away, then eventually the idea of returning home can become as strange or as foreign as living in another country.

And so you move countries and become 'the other', living amongst people who are 'the other' to you.  But when you go home you realise you have become something else there as well. 

And so my place on the edge of lives and cultures is confirmed, probably for life.   That said, there is something else that happens out here.  I love people.  I love when they invite me into their worlds.  In Istanbul there were Turkish families I adored because they took care of me when I lived alone in their city.  That experience of being a guest, of being invited inside, to be a part of this celebration or that, here in Belgium, in Berlin during those months spent living and working there.  Cairo.  Naples.  France. Italy.   It's those insider journeys that make this lifestyle of mine so very very worthwhile. 

Lately I've been reading a series of biographies and fictions about New Zealand author, Katherine Mansfield ... searching for clues I think.  Something about her story speaks to me.

She left NZ in 1908 aged 20.  By 1923, she was dead from TB but not before she had revolutionised the 20th Century English short story.  She was a part of the English literary scene at the time and yet very much the colonial from the Antipodes. 

Her masterpieces—the long stories ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’—are lovingly detailed recreations of a New Zealand childhood, reports from the fringe—the edge of the world as she felt it to be. She wrote as if she’d stayed. Of course these luminous re-imaginings are lit with the affection and nostalgia of the expatriate. They would not exist without their author’s estrangement from the scenes and places and people she describes. They are set in a New Zealand of the mind, composed at the edge of Mansfield’s memory.

Source: NZ Edge.com

I'm curious about her because I relate to her on so many levels.  I feel like reading her story might tell me more about mine.  I yearn for home.  Adore it, am passionate about it and yet ... could I go back and live there again?  I really don't know anymore. 

Ahhh but all of this when really I came to post a photograph I took at the antiques market in Genova, back in May.

Jeff Daniels, and some of what he is ...

I first noticed him on The Newsroom when the first of this 'Best Scenes' clip flew round the internet.

Fiction ...

Flying home to New Zealand, after 8 years away, I found The Newsroom series on that Singapore Airlines flight BUT I didn't find it until just before landing.  I didn't ask them to circle.  I caught the series eventually.  And being home was good.

Tonight I found out Jeff Daniels sings too.

An Unmoored Life

In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. I’m just as glad they haven’t consulted me about the tiresome details. What they have worked out is this: I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare. When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and sit-ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not. Last night, time and my body decided to take me to the movies. I saw The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which I took very hard. To an unmoored, middle-aged man like myself, it was heart-breaking. That’s all right. I like to have my heart broken.

Kurt Vonnegut, from Kurt Vonnegut - Letters, via brainpickings

An unmoored life ... I think I do a little of that in Genova.  And I'm currently yearning for those two days when I woke around 8am, opened the balcony doors, then climbed back into bed and slept till 11am. 

They were mornings unprecedented and, now, yearned for in these days of not sleeping.  It's been 2am or later two nights in a row, not by choice and with added misery of those early, as usual, starts upon waking.

Today is the day of discussing huge plans.  Then tomorrow is sitting back down with the writing course I put away while the Belgian bloke was on holiday. 

Time flew, or so it seems.

Today is also the day I stop coffee, bread, pasta, potatoes, wine, and all kinds of other things I know don't agree with me.  I shall quite possibly crash into the wall of withdrawal in the days ahead.  My body will thank me eventually but first it will sulk, I'm quite sure about that.

I am so healthy in Italy (except for allergy attacks) and it occured to me that I never eat bread when I'm there.  I drink the very best coffee but I eat minimally.  My body adores me in those times.  I come back to Belgium, the land where one has to think quite hard on how to avoid bread,  and the wheels of Di begin to fall off.

I'm not dieting, I'm only attempting to be a little more conscious of what makes my stomach ache ... what makes me feel ill.  I've been on the run, embarassed, quite mortified, and all of those other things that children of practical folk feel when a wide-range of foods make them feel ill.  Ice cream and jelly were much-loved back in my childhood but honestly they made me feel seedy.  Greed carried me quite far.  I was one of four children and competitiveness may have stalked that table of ours ...

It was the Belgian bloke who enquired about my habit of eating toast after a roast meal.  I told him, a roast makes my stomach hurt, like I'm hungry.  He suggested working out what caused it, the potatoes or the meat, and it's pretty much been all downhill from there.

Conscious eating I guess.  It's bit neurotic for this kiwi girl and yet, I suspect it's what's needed after all these years of using toast and other 'snacks' to deal with the pain caused by everyday meals. There's still a huge sense of embarassment in admitting to known allergies but give me 20 years ... I'll own it all.  Or I will have quietly moved to a better way of eating.

And so it was that I loved Kurt Vonnegut's words ... In an unmoored life like mine, sleep and hunger and work arrange themselves to suit themselves, without consulting me. Those unmoored times are the places and spaces where my body takes over and it does what it pleases with my eating and sleeping.

Perhaps everyone needs a lilttle of that unmoored life, just to know ...

The photo?  From France.

Quotes Loved Lately ... and an early run at a birthday

Homelands don't exist.  It's an invention. 
What does exist is that place where you were happy.
Susana Fortes, from Waiting For Robert Capa.

A sign you are getting better is when you care less what others think of you.
Robert Moore.

Great artists don't have careers, they have lives.

Gregory O'Brien.

It showed her she had to live 'in the gap between what could be said and what really happened'.

Nelly, in The Invisible Woman. 

The writers I know, or whose lives I have read about, have one thing in common:  a stressed childhood.  I don't mean, necessarily, an unhappy one, but children who have been forced into self-awareness early, have had to learn how to watch the grown-ups, assess them, know what they really mean, as distinct from what they say, children who are continually observing everyone - they have the best apprenticeships.

Doris Lessing.

Today was mostly about a birthday, not mine but an early Miss-9-celebrating-10.  Her birthday falls in the school holidays and she has made some precious school friends here in the city.

It was all about water fights and laughter, a toast made with plastic goblets, and gifts that made her swoon.

It was a good day here in the flatlands of Belgium.

Oh, and about this Flemish side of Belgium, the place where I live ... VRT News channels made this.  It so captures the Flemish I know.  They have their serious face ... and then there is this crazy-beautiful side that I sometimes forget about.

On my facebook page I wrote, 'One of the biggest secrets about Belgium is how amusing and wicked the Flemish folk are. VRT-Nieuws is our news channel of choice and it was hilarious (and yet unsurprising) to see them ALL dancing to Happy here. They wear a serious face oftentimes but scratch the surface and ... well, you get a sense of them here. Loved this.'