Thanksgiving on South Bank

Just a quick post to let people at home know that we had a festive time of it on Scott Street.  A "loose bird" turkey, stuffing sent by Jessica's mom from the states, Gabby's mashed potatoes, parsnips, Brussels sprouts, various juices, various pies, and eight pints of draft cider were consumed.  All over York today, in the picture postcard snow, Yorkshire men and women wished us a happy Thanksgiving, but having Thanksgiving with such a lovely group of people was the real blessing.

Sloe Time in Yorkshire

Looking for a break, and needing to visit the library on campus, I took a modest bike ride out into the country southwest of York yesterday.  The weather was grey, cool and misty but not actually wet.  I thought I could ride out as far as Sutton on Derwent (about 7 miles from York) and then loop around to the bike path coming in from Selby, directly south of the city.  Along the way, I could visit a few old monuments, and I could let the information my computer has been spitting at me soak in a bit, maybe to the point of making sense.

The countryside around York is slightly rolling to flat and at this time of year it is green with winter wheat or other cover crops contrasting with the dark browns of soil, wet leafless hedges and tree trunks.  The architecture of the villages is shown to particular advantage in wet misty weather, the darkened brick and stone setting off delightfully the brightly painted wood trim.

"Class II historic structure"  An elegant bridge over the Derwent

Approaching Sutton upon Derwent, I crossed the river on an ancient single lane stone bridge.  There aren't a lot of bridges across the Derwent in this part of Yorkshire, so I suspect that this was an important one in days gone by.   The bridge is first recorded there in 1396; earlier than that, there's mention of a ferry.

Sutton upon Derwent, Saint Michael's Church.  Three distinct
architectural styles are represented here.

From the bridge, through the mists, I could make out the Saxon style tower of the church in Sutton which surprised me because I hadn't noticed a church recorded on my OS map.  But there is indeed a very fine church, set on a hill overlooking the river, with architectural elements dating from Norman (13th c) and perpendicular (15th c) periods.  The various periods are blended here as they are in so many English parish churches resulting in an architecture, harmonious in itself, that could never be built in one time alone.  The aging, the age, the ages are essential.

Sloes

Back on the road home, I came across some hedgerows lush with sloes, a tiny variety of plum.  They're too astringent to eat directly off their thorny branches, but the English have learned  over the centuries to pick them after the first frost and soak them along with sugar in gin or vodka for six to twelve months, producing a sweet concoction called sloe gin.  So I stopped and picked a saddlebag full.  They're now resting comfortably at the bottom of a jar, relinquishing, I hope, whatever of the landscape and summer of 2010 they were able to capture, into a liter of vodka.  But I'll have to wait.  You can't hurry sloe gin any more than you can hurry the building of an English parish church.

I returned home tired and refreshed.  I'd ridden about 25 miles in two and a half hours.  I'd had a few ideas about my work that I never could have had sitting in front of the laptop, and I had the beginnings of next summer's sloe gin.  My computer had, in the meantime, performed many billions of calculations.  Good for an afternoon of analysis and reflection.  Slow time.

Artist's Copy: Jana Anderson

A small digital image on the internet!

Picasso once said that, “Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.” While I agree with the intent of this statement that a true artist is inspired by the work of others and makes it their own, making copies after famous artists has been a common practice throughout the history of art. I have done this in the Minneapolis Institute of Art, but being in these European museums I feel closer to the history, culture, and landscape that inspired many of the artists.

The works of art I’ve studied and admire are right here in front of me at places such as the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and National Gallery. Actually sitting before pieces of art by famous artists such as Blake, Turner, Constable, and Picasso, I feel like I can get to know them in more detail – how the artist worked, what the color palette looks like in person, and I can actually experience the size and power of each piece. Some of the paintings are provocative and ever changing in ways one could never discover by viewing a small digital image on the Internet. They were meant to be experienced. They were meant to be looked at. I could spend days in these London museums and keep discovering new things about these works of art. They grow and change with the viewer, and I feel privileged to be one of the thousands of visitors to pass through and take the time to truly look.

Since I'm visiting these museums as a tourist, I feel obligated to experience everything.  Taking it all in at an appropriate pace is impossible, but I find myself rushing through to see as much as I can. When I did take a little extra time to sit in front of some of these works of art and make copies, both my eyes and mind slowed down and I was able to more carefully observe holistically.  Although I felt like a rushed tourist in London, I did make a copy of a Turner drawing and one of a Picasso painting.  It would probably be stimulating to take more than half an hour to do this, but even with the quick sketches I did, I feel like I've begun to really know these works of art. I think art history is half reading history and half looking at and taking in the power of an image. At times, observation might be worth even more than half. It allows for an understanding of art through the eyes of the artist, not the eyes of the art historian or researcher.

Copy or Thievery?

In London I made copies after famous works of art, but I think the act of study and observation that comes from this is valuable despite Picasso’s harsh words. However, my experience of these works of art were brand new to me, and ultimately, I view the sketches that came out of this as recording my own experience of the work as opposed to copying it. Upon coming back to York after this exhilarating weekend, I’ve continued working on drawings of the Minster, and I’ve found that while drawing this building I take a similar approach of observation and careful study as when doing copies of Picasso or Turner. The careful observation that occurs when taking in a masterpiece is the same approach whether the masterpiece is a work of art, architecture, or an existing landscape or figure from life. In every genre I am trying to record what I see and how I experience the world. Picasso may classify this is stealing, but whatever you want to call it, I do agree that this defines true art. Pure copying doesn’t require thought or reflection, but “stealing” or in other words, inspiration, combines observation, reflection, and personal experience to produce something truly creative. The “copies” I did fit the definition of an artist’s impression of a visual experience. So by this idea, even my quickly done sketch after Picasso was an original record of an experience as opposed to a direct copy. In this way, maybe my “copies” don’t make me a bad artist by Picasso’s standards, but rather one artist inspired by another’s work.

More observations and reflections on the York experience by Jana are available on her own blog, found here.

York in November

Taken at 3pm GMT.

At noon yesterday, our shadows stretched almost out of sight down the street in the weak sunshine.  The sun at that time was 16 degrees above the horizon.  At the solstice, the sun at noon will be less than 12 degrees above the horizon.  This makes for very beautiful light, rare light, light imbued with atmosphere. Today, walking around York was like walking around inside a late painting by Turner.

Inside the Top of the Chapter House

Chapterhouse Roof Walkway

 The first tour of the York Minster consisted of examining the inside of the church including the nave, choir room, windows, architecture, and crypt. The second tour of the Minster was mainly focused on learning about window conservation by visiting the glazier’s studio. Both tours were excellent, and what I learned from them truly helped me appreciate all that I learned on the third. This tour was fascinating: we saw the Stoneyard and carver’s studio, and, most impressively, we  got to go up inside the unique roof of the Chapter House. 
 To get to the roof, we had to ascend a narrow spiral staircase.  At the top of this, we passed through the world’s tiniest door and emerged onto the ledge of the chapter house roof. It was raining, the fence around the roof only came up to about knee height, and the wind was blowing strongly, yet despite all that, being on the roof was more magnificent than frightening.  Carefully, we made our way inside where we were met by a labyrinth of wooden beams stretching higher up than we could see. Honestly, the beams didn’t appear to be in any particular order or place, just a mess of wood jutting in different directions, and it seemed only by sheer luck that the roof was holding together. 

600 year old oak trusswork: looking straight up!

 Our tour guides explained to us that this was not the case; the placement of the beams, their angles, thickness, etc. was incredibly strategic and displayed incredible engineering fortitude on the part of its medieval designers. Seeing this complicated engineering amazed me, it wouldn’t seem possible without today’s technology to erect such a huge and complex structure, but here it was, standing for centuries, created without computers, without cranes, without even nails, and I think it is that fact that made the roof such a marvel. The chapter house roof is truly a tribute to man’s ingenuity, even with little, we are able to do so much. To be able to see the original design of the roof in all its glory, up close and personal, as opposed to just seeing a recreation of a statue or a window from afar, is remarkable. It is for these reasons that the third tour of the Minster really did take my breath away.  


--Jessica Churchill

Chapter House from outside. Scaffold levels are
at least 10 feet apart.  We went inside the roof.

From the inside looking up.  We were above this.

English, Again

While in London, we watched from the Globe's pit the story, delivered in Shakespearean English, of Henry IV, his son Hal and cousin Hotspur. The language was coming to us from across five centuries,
but, with well acted drama to back it up, it arrived in our ears with much of the power and nuance it had when it was written. In Richard II, the preceding history play, Thomas Mowbray and Henry Bolingbroke (who became Henry IV) are both banished from England, Mowbray for life. He reacts with these heartbreaking words:

The language I have learn'd these forty years,
My native English, now I must forego:
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
Or like a cunning instrument cased up,
Or, being open, put into his hands
That knows no touch to tune the harmony:
Within my mouth you have engaol'd my tongue,
Doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips;
And dull unfeeling barren ignorance
Is made my gaoler to attend on me.

Notice that he doesn't worry about missing the food or the weather!  Mowbray died in Venice of the plague, presumably unable to speak Italian to his doctor, the following year.

This quote always comes back to me when, as now, I'm in France, trying to carry on in French with people I admire and love.  It's as if I'm playing an out of tune piano, or a piano where the keys correspond to different notes from what I'm used to.  Not that there isn't plenty of music in French; I just have trouble playing it.  I'm not terrible at it; short automatic phrases come easily and new ones can be learned with practice, but to think and reveal new thoughts through speech at the same time, well, that's currently beyond me, and thus I seem, in darker moments, condemned to "dull unfeeling barren ignorance."  On the bright side, I'm made aware of what a gift it is to have a native language that I can use to express my thoughts as I think them, in the English speaking world, despite the many dialectical variations therein.

French, or Old French, washed over the British Isles in 1066, stretching and enriching, with time, the languages that were spoken there before into the Middle English we know from Chaucer and the York Plays, the common root of the various Englishes we speak today.  Thus the Old French was subsumed by Old English and visa versa.  In any case French went its way and English went its way and, though you can hear each in the other, you can't understand one purely on the strength of knowing the other.

While William the Conqueror was bringing his language to England, there was another language spoken here in Montpellier: Occitan, Langue D'Oc, the western tongue.  In fact, there were six major dialects of Occitan, the local one being "languedocian."  Languedocian has a vast literature, but it's known and studied less and less since it's one of several local heritage languages for the French, and it's more remote from the current language than Shakespearean English is remote from what we speak.

On the Saint-Chenian label to the left, an Occitan phrase meaning, as well as one of our friends here can make out, "here's hoping that tomorrow we'll all be here."  When we're back in York next week, and let's hope we will be, we'll be together and speaking our own tongue.  We'll miss the magic of the French, but welcome the comfort of the English.  When, in two months, we're back in Minnesota, we'll be missing the magic of English English with its blokes and lorries, but welcoming the comforts of Minnesotan English where pants are pants.  Esper deman serem aqui!  

The English Language

A few weeks ago, Zach wrote, as the first of “Three Things I Have Learned:”

1) Americans speak English better than the English.

I must immediately add a qualifier. We speak English more correctly than some of the English, specifically those from Northern England.

I came here prepared to concede that since it was English, the English had it right and we did not. But after a month of being unable to decipher what bus drivers and waitresses are saying, I have concluded that they are actually speaking it wrong.

I intentionally used the word “better” in the heading in case some of my new English friends wished to disagree. Go ahead, say “better.” Ah ha! Where is the rule that says the double ts are silent? “Be'er.” Listen to people from the Yorkshire talk. If there is a hard consonant in the middle of a word, they often leave it out. Also, I haven't been able to figure out a rule yet, but they seem to drop prepositions from sentences. “Let's go to the cinema” becomes “Let's go cinema.” Besides these things, we simply enunciate better.

Sarah Lewis had a different perspective:

Speaking English

Just because I know how to speak English, it doesn’t mean I know what anyone is saying in England. I have come across a variety of terms, and compiled a few of them here.

First there is the word mingy, or minger. Mingy is used to describe something basically unpleasant or nasty as in the phrase “Brown sauce is Mingy”. Another way to describe something unpleasant is the word rubbish. Rubbish basically means trashy. The trashcan however is called the “bin”.

When calling someone your friend, you have a few options. Mate is one way. Bloke, which I thought English people didn’t actually use, is also used a lot. You can also call someone a lad or lass, depending on the gender. Women are referred to as “birds”. If you’re a female you can also be a duck as in “ducky” or a hen. I have also learned some slang to describe what my generation would call a young male who is generally an ass. Here, these boys are called “Chavs”. You can spot a chav because he is wearing an Addidas sweat suit, has large headphones, and a hat on backwards or to the side. Avoid Chavs at all costs. They are also called scoobies.

Cars also cause some language barriers. They are not turn signals they are indicator lights. If you’re talking about loading up a truck, people will just look at you like your crazy. Instead it’s a boot. Gasoline or Gas doesn’t exist either. Petroleum or Petrol is the proper term.

The words used for clothing is also very entertaining. Tennis shoes are not tennis shoes, they are trainers. It makes sense, because you don’t necessarily use them just while playing tennis. Sweat shirts or long sleeved shirts are “Jumpers”. This makes me giggle because it reminds me of nasty one piece overalls that women in the 80’s wear. Trousers are worn instead of pants, because pants are used to describe underpants. Use caution while talking about a stain on your pants.

So, there is a basic crash “module” in how to speak ENGLISH English. In all honesty it’s best to comply; after all they spoke it first. You may have to ask them to repete themselves twice or five times, but most people don’t mind. Its an interesting and imaginative language, and overall, pretty entertaining.

As is true of Minnesotans loving the Minnesotan accent (even while they make fun of it), people of Yorkshire love to caricature the way they talk, or the way their countrymen, especially rural countrymen, talk.  You'll find below a few of the words Sarah talked about in her piece, as well as the happy disregard for basic enunciation Zach mentioned.  So it's not a caricature, really.  "Os" has all sorts of meanings depending on how it's pronounced.

From http://www.yorkshire-dialect.org/humour/yorkshire_humour.htm

An Os

From Paul Thornton

I was walking down the street t'other day when ah met me mate.

"Hows tha bin"? he asked.

"I feel like an 'os" ses I

"An 'os" ses he

"Aye lad, Champion".

One that I was told back in the day spoke of Scottish butcher standing in his shop with his back to the roaring fire.  A customer comes in and asks: "Is that your Ayreshire bacon?" to which he answers, "No, I'm just a warmin of me hands."