All About Wallpaper

Saturday blog #176 is all about wallpaper. Wow....can life get any more exciting?

I used to have a work colleague of Scottish descent who was fond of saying, in all sorts of contexts: "There are two types of people in the world..." e.g. those who are always happy to stand a round of drinks and those who never put their hand in their pocket; or those who can handle a car and those who should never be allowed behind a wheel. His was a binary perspective and he was clearly suited to working in I.T.

I might steal from his view of the world for a moment and say: there are two types of people - those who enjoy decorating and those who detest it; or even: there are two types of decorators - those who remove all the old paper and paint before redecorating and those who just slap another layer on top of the one(s) already there.

Does anyone remember the old comic song 'Father Papered The Parlour'? I think it originated in Edwardian Music Hall some time before the First World War but has been reinvented several times since. It runs to (far too) many verses but it begins:

   Our parlour wanted papering
   And Pa says it was a waste
   To call the paper-hangers in
   And so he made some paste
   He got some rolls of paper
   A ladder and a brush
   And with me Mother's nightgown on
   At it he made a rush

   When Father papered the parlour
   You couldn't see Pa for paste
   Dabbing it here and dabbing it there
   There was paste and paper everywhere
   Mother was stuck to the ceiling
   And the kids were stuck to the floor
   You never saw such a bloomin' family
   So stuck up before...

and so on through a catalogue of errors, my favourite of which as a kid was:

   The pattern was 'blue roses'
   With its leaves red, white and brown
   He'd stuck it wrong way up
   And now we all walk upside down
   And when he trimmed the edging
   Off the paper with the shears
   The cat got underneath it
   And Dad cut off both its ears

Do people even have parlours anymore?

I must say when it comes to paper-hanging, I'm a strip it back, fill the cracks, sand it down, prep it properly and repaper it carefully kind of guy. It takes longer but it looks better and - equally important - it feels better having done a proper job of it. And yes, I enjoy decorating...which is just as well, because I've been working on three rooms in parallel over the last month (not all in my own house).

When I was researching for that Oscar Wilde blog a couple of weeks ago I came across a quote of his regarding wallpaper. As he lay destitute and close to the end in a dingy Parisian hotel room, Oscar, ever the aesthete, with typical gallows humour is reputed to have said: "This wallpaper will be the death of me. One of us will have to go." The wallpaper outlived him.

This is the point where the blog takes a more serious turn - wallpaper as literal and metaphorical litmus. I'm very conscious of the fact that I have choice in the matter of whether to decorate my dwelling-space or not, and if I do, to deck it out according to my/our taste. Wilde was  not so fortunate. Nor are the millions who live in rented or temporary accommodation over whose interior décor they either have no say or cannot afford the luxury of spending scant funds on such niceties. They have to coexist with their wallpaper, love it or loathe it; and loathe it they often do. If they won't just ignore it (as background whose familiarity makes it almost unnoticed) then it can assume oppressive proportions, symbolic of their disenfranchised status.

Poor Oscar was a case in point, but a far more compelling illustration can be found in the novella 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by a contemporary of Wilde's, the American proto-feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Her gothic vignette was published in 1892. If you've been watching the TV adaptation of 'The Woman In White' and have found the treatment of women in that story disturbing, Gilman's account - based on her own experience - of powerless entrapment, isolation and the gradual slide of an intelligent woman into madness in a room of yellow wallpaper is both brilliantly conveyed and deeply harrowing. (Available in all good book shops.)


Wallpaper as domestic archaeology - peeling to reveal

I prefer walls to be papered, even if that is with embossed paper designed to be painted over. I like the added texture and variety that wallpaper provides, in contrast to flat, painted walls. (I guess there are two types of people in the world....)

It seems that I've been hanging wallpaper since I was in my late teens, everything from woodchip via paisley flock and William Morris prints to the chic wallpapers that adorn the house on the strand today. Of course, the fact that many rooms are rarely true (most corner angles are never 90 degrees, many ceiling lines and skirting lines are not parallel)  can be annoying; as can the tendency of some papers to stretch, shrink or tear. The only facet I really struggle with is papering a ceiling. It can be done (and has been) by one person wielding a couple of long-handled brooms and swearing copiously, but it is easier with two pairs of hands. On the whole I think I do a decent job of it and shan't be calling the paper-hangers in any time soon.

Thanks for reading. Enjoy the May Bank Holiday and keep hanging in there, S ;-)

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Metaphysical - metaphorically speaking.

I think I need to offer a little explanation of my dilemma this week, dear reader.  Every three months or so, the Dead Good bloggers are asked to contribute themes for the blog and these are then compiled into a list of weekly prompts to inspire the writer.  I tend to just look at the theme for the week a few days before. Oops!  What a mistake that was this week.  The theme is 'Let's get metaphysical' and I have a confession to make... until I looked it up in the dictionary today, I didn't have a clue what 'metaphysical' meant.

Now far be it from me to cast aspersions but perhaps some of you don't know either, so lets start with a definition from the OED. 

metaphysics /noun/  the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of existence, truth and knowledge. 

So that's as clear as mud but at least my own knowledge tells me that metaphysical is an adjective.  So what can else can I discover? Ah - apparently there were a group of poets, all writing in 17th century England, who were dubbed - wait for it ...metaphysical poets. They explored the nature of the world and human life using imagery that was deemed 'surprising' at that time.  These poets were John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Andrew Marvell and Richard Crashaw. I hate to admit that I have not read any of their work.

I tried a short cut.  Apparently, esteem for Metaphysical poetry never stood higher than in the 1930s and ’40s, largely because of T.S. Eliot’s influential essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921), a review of Herbert J.C. Grierson’s anthology Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century. This is a very influential essay, especially if you are interested in either metaphysical poetry or 20th century literary criticism.  It seems that in Elliot's view, these poets wrote with 'wit' and 'metaphysical conceit'.

And so I had to check and guess what? In literature, a conceit is 'an extended metaphor with a complex logic that governs a poetic passage or entire poem'.  By juxtaposing, usurping and manipulating images and ideas in surprising ways, a conceit invites the reader into a more sophisticated understanding of an object of comparison.

At last - I am getting somewhere. I do know what an extended metaphor looks like and I know that in poetry, like the grape and the grain, they are better not mixed. I also know what an extended metaphor feels like. Try this one on for size.
 

Lost Glove,  

I lost a glove today my love,

of deepest purple hue:

A favoured and most treasured part

of something almost new.
 

No comfort in its warmth to put

a smile upon my lips:

To keep the bitter wind from biting

at my fingertips.

I ventured out and checked my steps

in vain attempt to trace

the other half: Unite the pair,

to fill the gaping space.
 

The single sits and pleads to me,

Its calling ever sweet.

Solitary: Separate:

A glory incomplete.
 

No mate will ever touch its palm,

caress it tenderly.

No one will hold its hand or

link its fingers lovingly.
 

For solo it will stay.

A sad and fading memory,

Abandoned and apart.
Alone.
And grieving desperately.  
 

 

Thanks for reading. Adele

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Stardate: -716000

Would it make too much mess if I picked apart a sentence?  The theme this week is 'space' and I can't think the word without it being pestered by its fellows, ':' and 'the final frontier'. 

It's quite economic, as sentences go.  And it's a metaphor.  It reminds me of the way Sir David Attenborough describes locations in his voiceovers: The Sahara: a vast swathe of scorching earth.  Or Antarctica: the planet's ice box.  Something like that.  But the Star Trek quote is more evocative than that.

Being an American TV series which started in 1966, Star Trek was riding on the tailcoats of the great Westerns.  Bonanza was the top rating TV series that year, and had been for the two years before.  It was also the year that The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly was released in US cinemas. 

The American Frontier, that push westwards, since the 17th century, of Americans as they spread across the continent, was still fresh in the imagination.  New territories, ie farmland as yet unclaimed, became almost impossible to find after the 1890s.  By the 1960s the Americans were reminiscing fondly about the days of outlaws, goldrushes and, before the truth of the Trail of Tears was widely known, their dominance over the American Indians.

In 1966, the US space programme was also at the forefront of imaginations.  They had yet to walk on the moon, but the Project Gemini took astronauts into space for longer and longer periods and Project Apollo was costing the modern equivalent of $205billion with the aim of putting the first men on the moon.  Three years later, it would succeed.

Roddenberry's intentions behind the TV series are crystal clear in those first four words.  He saw space as the new Wild West and Americans as THE human race.  In the future, he imagined, John Wayne would ride through the stars, an outlaw captain writing the rules and disobeying authority, finding love on every planet and outsmarting every menace. 

This concludes my examination of that short metaphor.  And it goes to show just how much cultural punch you can pack into a few carefully chosen words.  Poetry: cultured concentrated.

Captain James T Kirk

John Wayne

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Purpureus Pannus

There is a tendency to assume that poetry is a patch of expensively dyed purple cloth, significantly different to the plain shades of everyday language. However, it is this falsehood which sees many new poets (and even those of experience) create work which fails the poet, the poem and the reader. Therefore, I thought I'd examine some of the 'techniques' which, if used excessively and without caution, could cause your poetry to become a little bit too purple.

Complicated Words:

Poetry isn't about replacing ordinary words with those that are more extraordinary, complex or lengthy, yet with a quick right click or a flick through a thesaurus this dangerous and misguided edit is fairly easy to implement.

Adjective & Adverb Strings:

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with adjectives and adverbs, but rather the risk is encountered when they are either used excessively or in a string. Poetry is about being concise, thus to have a string of four adjectives or adverbs - which fail to offer more than the singular modifier - is superfluous, and potentially a step towards making your poem wordy, even purple. For example,

His strong, pungent, heady scent...

           

The swan eased quietly, nervously and slowly through the water...

Purple Substitutions:

This tends to occur through a fear that normal is boring, unimaginative and not poetic enough, thus prompting the poet to substitute for a word or phrase that sounds less common. However, the problems arise when a) the substitution has been made so frequently by others it has almost achieved the status of cliché, or  b) because the substitution is too obscure and thus results in distracting or confusing your reader. An example of each would be:

a) 'red' becomes 'crimson blood'

b) 'heart' becomes 'abrasive organ pumps'

            (from a poem recently published in Maire Claire by Kristen Stewart)

Figurative Overkill:

Before my Creative Writing MA I used to do this excessively. I would place similes and metaphors wherever I could fit them, and yet with each one added the meaning and purpose within my poems was diluted rather than strengthened. I finally realised that one well-placed, well-timed simile / metaphor could illuminate a poem far better than ten -  that less can be more striking and surprising than more.

*          *          *

To illustrate my overall point I have 'purpled up' William Carlos Williams' poem This Is Just To Say (well-known for its brevity).

   

This Is Just To Say

I have devoured greedily

the blushing purple plums

that were residing in

the arctic Eskimo drawer  

and which

 you were probably

 saving patiently

 for morning's first meal

Forgive me, absolve me

they were divinely delicious

so seductively sweet

and so cold like winter

Thank you for reading,

Lara 

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Dragons' Den

by Ashley Lister


This week’s theme is dragons which allows me to say that I get very annoyed with the TV show Dragons’ Den.

Stay with me a moment here. This does relate to writing and poetry. But it’ll be a circuitous route getting there.

Dragons’ Den doesn’t just annoy me because it promotes an ethos of capitalist greed. Admittedly, I don’t like capitalism. The idea of cultivating a Thatcherite ideal of ‘avarice over altruism’ makes me nauseous.

But that’s not the reason why the show annoys me.

I admit that I don’t care for the interrogation style format, or the fact that so many members of the regular panel on the show seem to think that it’s acceptable to call people liars, stupid, foolish or deluded. This name-calling is indicative of a mentality that suggests each panellist considers themselves to be the Simon Cowell of entrepreneurship – a distressingly bleak mindset in and of itself.
But, again, that is not the real reason why the show annoys me.

Dragons’ Den annoys me because the narrator consistently describes the obscenely rich businessmen on the programme as ‘dragons.’

Honestly - they’re not.

They’re not dragons in a mythological sense, a figurative sense or a literal sense.
Dragons are mythological creatures. Dragons are notorious for being dangerous and brilliant and exciting and wonderful. The whole concept of the dragon is a metaphor for a darkly attractive force that is powerful, splendid and almost unconquerable.
Does that really sound like an appropriate description for a handful of narcissistic business owners who are motivated solely by the goal of personal profit?

I say ‘narcissistic’ because they’re all sitting in front of TV cameras, looking freshly groomed and brimming with expressions of smug self-satisfaction. They stroke their fingers over compensating piles of money and could not look more self-satisfied if they were smoking post-coital cigarettes.

And I say ‘business owners’ because the adjectival phrase ‘greedy twunts’ is potentially libellous.

I don’t have a problem with all of the title. The word DEN fits because of its other connotations. You can have a den of iniquity or a den of thieves or a dirty den. With those connotations I can see the word DEN being appropriate for all the regular ‘business owners’ who appear on the programme.

But the word ‘dragon’ just doesn’t seem to fit

As writers, each time we select a word, we have to be specific in our choice. We pick the word that’s most appropriate for the circumstances – the word that will convey our exact meaning to a reader or audience.

I’m about to start writing a story that contains a dragon and you can rest assured, the creature will be dangerous and brilliant and exciting and wonderful. The dragon will be a metaphor for a darkly attractive force that is powerful, splendid and almost unconquerable.

It won’t be some smug ‘business owner’ greedily protecting its own wealth.

That sort of dragon would just be annoying.

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