By looking back to g*url*hood and looking on to we don’t know what*

Stella Scott

Fat and ice (someone strung this up to feed the beuyds). Days when my circulation stops at the joint of my middle finger; moving  ,        slowly          .

Dorothy Feaver

Stella Scott

Frozen fizz.

Dorothy Feaver

Dusty ♥

A window of wedding cakes in a Turkish bakery, which have been gathering dust for some time (but then, good wedding cake is meant to be able to last for years). Seeing new sights makes me aware that I am carrying a napkin’s worth of dusty fruitcake somewhere on my person.

Dorothy Feaver

Stella Scott

Ways away

Stella Scott

***

Final interrogation, Stasi Prison, Berlin

Dorothy Feaver

You’re the tops.

Matt McLean

__________

Have an idea. Need time with a scalpel.

Matt McLean

__________

Scalpel-in on Stasi wallpaper.

Dorothy Feaver

Yellow belly

Dorothy Feaver

How do you like your eggs in the morning? I like mine with a kiss.

Amy McLeod

The best eggs have swing.

Dorothy Feaver

____________

To Copthorne!:

Phone home…

Dorothy Feaver

Rob Gallagher

Dorothy Feaver

Woman at a Window (1822)

Caspar David Friedrich

Dorothy Feaver

Detail drawn from a quilt made in Northumberland in the 1910s. Maker unknown.

At the end of the 19th century quilting clubs grew in popularity throughout the Northumberland and Durham coalfields as a means for women to earn an income. Customers would pay a small weekly sum to the club and when the full amount was reached, they would be eligible for a completed quilt – made by the collective. Quilt stampers would mark out patterns onto the top layer of fabric for the quilt in blue pencil or chalk.

Dorothy Feaver

Essie B. Pettway (b. 1956). Two-sided quilt: One Patch (stacked squares and rectangles), 1973. Cotton, polyester knit and denim. 88 x 80 in.

Gee’s Bend is a small rural community nestled into a curve in the Alabama River southwest of Selma, Alabama. Founded in antebellum times, it was the site of cotton plantations, primarily the lands of Joseph Gee and his relative Mark Pettway, who bought the Gee estate in 1850. After the Civil War, the freed slaves took the name Pettway, became tenant farmers for the Pettway family, and founded an all-black community nearly isolated from the surrounding world. During the Great Depression, the federal government stepped in to purchase land and homes for the community, bringing strange renown — as an ‘Alabama Africa’ — to this sleepy hamlet.

The town’s women developed a distinctive, bold, and sophisticated quilting style based on traditional American (and African American) quilts, but with a geometric simplicity reminiscent of Amish quilts and modern art. The women of Gee’s Bend passed their skills and aesthetic down through at least six generations to the present.

I went to visit them with my mum, and they (ladies and the quilts) were incredible!

Clem Blakemore

Andrew Gillespie

Peacock flounder’s hormonal camo’s interpretation of misc. patterned surfaces.

Rob Gallagher

Clem Blakemore

STORIES ON THE BACK OF A POSTCARD

words by Elizaveta Butakova / images by Dorothy Feaver

Montparnasse for Baudelaire. Pere Lachaise for Balzac and Sarah Bernhardt. Montmartre for Degas and Dumas. Isola di San Michele for Ezra Pound. Dorotheenstädtischer Friedhof for Hegel and John Heartfield. Cimitero degli Inglesi for Shelley and Keats. Highgate for Karl Marx. Holywell for Walter Pater. Zentralfiredhof for Strauss, Schubert and Schonberg. Cross Bones for prostitutes in their thousands, unnamed, unknown.

Travelling alone allows for a lot of time to think. I prefer to travel by train for just this reason. It also allows for a very particular kind of interaction with fellow passengers. Airplane seats lead to an altogether all-too intimate tone. It has something to do with sitting so close to a person; what with the moulded headrests and enveloping white noise from the fuselage, it makes everything around seem muted and distant. People like to talk about themselves and their personal problems on airplanes.

On sleeper trains, on the other hand, people tell stories. The arrangement of passengers – two facing two, at a respectable distance from one another – encourages a dinner-party atmosphere. It is only possible to hold the attention of the other three if you actually have something to say: an anecdote, an opinion. Not the whispered confessional of the airplane seat. Of course, sometimes, you get a chap who would prefer to sit in silence, pointedly producing a book after the initial exchange of pleasantries; or indeed wielding it as he enters the carriage, as if to ward off unwelcome chatterers from the off. But they usually come around, when they realise that the conversation is far more interesting than their second-rate paperback novel.

And then, there is nothing I find more amusing than seeing someone attempt to read serious literature – or worse, philosophy – in such a situation. After reading the same page of a Penguin edition of Plato’s The Republic four or five times, they spend five or ten minutes pretending to look out of the window before entering into the discussion at hand. Then again, there’s nothing more tiresome than a pompous bore who doesn’t understand the etiquette of such things. For the unwritten rules of social interaction are especially difficult to ignore in a train carriage – much like in a lift, everyone holds themselves at a respectable distance.

Once, on a train ride from Paris to Venice (that was the first time I visited Isola di San Michele, and the whole cemetery adventure began), I was stuck in a first-class coupé with a tight-lipped middle-aged French matriarch and her anaemic son. When I finally got her talking, it turned out she had such a horrid high-pitched laugh that I had to excuse myself and stalk the corridors for an hour or so to calm my nerves. Another unpleasant incident had involved a loud German, rambunctiously recounting how he had once been awoken in a third-class sleeper carriage of the Trans-Siberian Express, by a Mongolian man who slapped his bottom repeatedly and loudly admonished him for some unknown breach of etiquette (even those carriages have their own etiquette).

I always have something interesting to say. This is because of the nature of my travels. I am a collector – a dying breed. Travel has become so tiresome these days. People are always surprised when I tell them the purpose of my journey – even more surprised than when I tell them that I am only thirty-seven years old. I am one of the lucky ones. I have found my vocation.

Before that, on my travels, I visited cities willy-nilly, scouring travel guides then trying desperately to derive, drinking antoccini or lungi in Italy, manchada in Spain. (Now I avoid milk altogether, and I would thoroughly advise anyone to do the same.) For eight years now I have been touring the cemeteries of Europe. I visit the graves of the gifted – Old Europe’s crème de la crème. Often I am asked, and where shall I be buried? Where indeed. Perhaps I will be cremated, and the ashes scattered somewhere picturesque in the Lake District.  An Englishman’s home is his castle. Or then, Highgate is still open for burials. They buried that Russian chap there recently, the one that died from radioactive poisoning by being stabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella in a Japanese restaurant.  Terrible business, that.

Elizaveta Butakova, 2010

Dust in the air suspended…

Marks the place where a story ended.

Dorothy Feaver

]]> http://www.murdofleur.org/postcards/necrologue/feed 0 http://www.murdofleur.org/postcards/smellies http://www.murdofleur.org/postcards/smellies#comments Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:39:22 +0000 Dorothy http://www.murdofleur.org/?p=5465 ]]> Dorothy and Nat exchange picture post

Red Success: slightly scented.

Dorothy Feaver

The sweet smell or come-hither eyes?

Nat Pimlott

hmmm…

Dorothy Feaver

(both?)

D.F.

the Prince of darkness

Nat Pimlott

for some there is a simple criterion for success

Dorothy Feaver

while others fear failure

Nat Pimlott

Andrew Gillespie

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.

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There, in the howling green of the woods with golf balls cracking intermittently through the upper branches of the trees above her like distant gunshot, Cathy did not scream, but calmly and with no little contempt for her newly awakened ovaries, thrust one peacock velvet glove down inside the waistband of her pants and stood, eyes closed, imagining the browning velvet so close to her and choking back something new in her throat; something between tears and laughter; something that tasted like swimming pool water.

Orlando Whitfield

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What Emma really wanted to do was crawl into the showers and curl up in the corner.  Communal bathrooms didn’t really allow for that. Communal bedrooms didn’t really allow for lying in bed all day but Emma figured that – to a casual passerby – her catharsis would pass as an innocent siesta.

At five she would go on a long walk so that when she got back it might feel like bedtime.  That is when the tears would start rolling, down her shins and spine and the middle of her chest. The door cracked. Emma turned to face the wall.

Amy McLeod

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No. 3, bleaching styrofoam box under fuschias; 6, curlicued table legs on spongecake flags supporting a pair of bonsai; 12, scrunchie like an offset blowhole hoofing a plume of blunt, grunge-blonde curls out wavering as, having tripped on the lip of the decking a box of balled newspaper and vari-patterned ceramics spills and lands obliquely with a granular crunch, a treasured mug kiln-fired in a friend’s teenage art class years back pinwheeling newly handleless along planks spotted with intermittent guano to butt the doorstep and rattle to a stop.

Rob Gallagher

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Lee (as in León) perched on the steps of a fountain, water drooling from lion mouth, and, twisting the lens, spied Jay ahead – snorting with every step downhill, camera thudding against tum. They’re mirror images, people said. Well, Lee had cracked, ran, leaving Jay with a dish of boquerones and hoping the crowd would stare him – snooping bitch – into the ground.

In fact Jay had run out straight after, but cut a left against Lee’s right. The pair drew a figure eight with their footprints around neighbouring squares.

Dorothy Feaver

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Clara Drummond

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Eyes scrupulously fixed on the trough below, Geoff watched the loose arc of his last Pimm’s frothing away between the deodorizers. Like little citric ping-pong balls he thought, or peeled apples. Many were pissworn to mere coins or lozenges. You can’t take it with you!

Checking his fly as he blinked out from under the eaves’ shade, Geoff tried to imagine how much ice creams would cost now, thinking he’d pick up a couple of 99s for the girls on the way back. But patting and uselessly double-patting his pockets, he found no wallet. Had he brought it? Thinking, he squinted into the hash of half-shredded posters stapled on the toilet’s outer wall.

Rob Gallagher

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Life is too short, apparently, to clean out the boot of your car.  It’s not like Keith didn’t get the chance.  He’d been turning down the volume for a while.  His wife, Susan’s mother, had life in her yet but had stubbornly refused to learn to drive; instead of her wedding bands changing hands a car had to be sold.

Susan didn’t look at the dates as she peeled back the dank wads of newspaper that sealed in the spare tyre, just like Susan would have burnt his unwashed pants if they hadn’t already been dealt with – starched and pressed.  They would definitely get more for it if they sold her with it, Susan thought. Six months MOT and diamonds included.

Amy McLeod

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Walls sign, to be fair, is misleading. Cyclists, pedalling against oncoming cloud, are unlikely to notice its spattering of rust, as if from a roadside accident, and occasionally one or two will dismount and approach the old post office, holding phones up for signal. The last postmaster had moved down from Glasgow, all blue sky thinking. Like a string of predecessors, he dreamt of a new life for himself and the place, this time transforming the shop as an online business. Few in the valley have broadband now; no-one did in the 90s.

Dorothy Feaver

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