Books and Kittens

My cat, Pansy, had a kitten the day before my 18th birthday in November. She is almost four weeks old now.

She was interested in the laptop...

and wouldn't stay still for the camera!

I have been reading and old copy of Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley which my great aunt gave me along with other old classics.

Captain James Ninnis

  Mansion House 1800s 

In January my family is going to a family reunion on Kawau Island for all the decedents of Captain James Ninnis who is my great great great great great grandfather! Yes five greats! He is Dads greatX4 grandfather. My family is quite into family history and family trees. It's quite interesting too.

Mansion House Captain present day

   James Ninnis was born in 1809 in Cornwall. He came to live in New Zealand to work in copper mines he built Mansion House on Kawau Island where the reunion is to be held. He and his wife Johanna, had 14 children, 11 of which were girls. My family descends from his second eldest daughter, Elizabeth.

  I have a copy of a poem Captain Ninnis wrote for his daughters writing a verse for each one. This is the verse about Elizabeth my great great great great grandmother:

Libbie- one of the best, of earth's treasures,

Of excellence combined, no one out-measures,

So dearly beloved, by sisters and brothers,

Her example might well be copied by others.

   I also have a copy of a photo of Captain Ninnis and his 11 daughters which was taken about 1863! There is not much family resemblance between them. Elizabeth is the second from left standing. She is the only one not looking but looks up to her right with a pleasant expression on her face. She must have been a nice person to know.

A glimpse through the Glass

I wrote this when I was feeling so young and inexperienced after reading a book on collected poems from all the great writers. One poem by  Langston Hughes called 'Little Old Letter'. It was about a letter that he had received in the mail that had obviously brought bad news. It ends:

'Just a pencil and paper,

             You don't need no gun not knife

                                                                 A little old letter 

 Can take a persons's life '

I read it among the others while looking for inspiration but I found that I had no experiences to write of no great thoughts to tell, only the little old ones that others have thought a thousand times before me. I was feeling very small.

A book of poems
Lay on my desk
Until I gave my hand and read
My head told my heart it was lead

I was old; old was wise
Experience was mine
Then the lines came quickly
I read, they did not shout at me

But they robed me, these words
Of my experience
And the poem ended, like sleet
Youth came back to me bittersweet

I wrote another one soon after, with me poems come in twos or threes and all at once. :)

This is inspired by my FicSwap story which is a fairy tale.

A sheet of clear glass
Crystal-kike in clarity

Through it the eyes pass
From barren, bold austerity
To each golden rainbow coloured shape

The air appeared clean and fresh and bright
Blue rippled the water in its wake

There was no haze to dim the eye
But yet a veil lowered tween me and the dream
And the glass grew dim as from a sigh

And there you have it! Please feel free to critique, I need all the advise I can get, be merciless!! 

Wouldn't you love to have a room like this! 

It's a beautiful painting though I don't usually like this style. It's as if the painter was trying to express that the great wide ocean is his room. It is meaningful and intriguing because it doesn't have a stated meaning, the viewer can take his own interpretation of it for himself.

Secret Garden on Violin... 08/08/08 = Ben Chan's 26th B-Day!

I have a Violin!!!

   I have not written a new post for a while, longer than I thought. I have been busy working for my neighbour Annie with her horses and I had my 18th birthday on Monday. On Sunday we went sailing in my brothers boat and I lost my glasses overboard! Oh well, headaches for two weeks until my new ones come.

Star

But the best bit, and what is meant to be the main theme of this post, is that I got a violin for my birthday!! I have for a while thought about starting the violin, but only very recently had I decided to really play it. I was encouraged by the fiddle players in the band at the ceili we go to every month (that's Irish dancing which is similar to country dancing). I announced at the dinner table one night "I have decided I want to learn the violin!" I didn't know until my birthday, but Mum rang up Nan that very night and told her that that is what I would like for my birthday, and she went and bought one immediately, a very good one too. Nan is always encouraging her grandchildren to play instruments she taught us to play the recorder and some on the piano. So she is very glad I want to learn.
  I have tried playing it but I couldn't even get a sound out of it! But I think it is because I didn't rosin the bow properly. I have been looking at tutorials on YouTube and there are lots of helpful videos there. I will also be able to learn off Annie who my give me lessons in exchange for working with her horses. She has been playing most of her life and used to play in a band.

I am so excited! I want to begin playing at once, I shall have allot of practice to do and I am afraid my family may become slightly distracted in the next few weeks, months, years......

The Sun Before a Storm

Why shine you so bright

Above clouds of the deepest blue

(So dark as to be black)

Coming to cover you.

You yet brighten my room,

Faintly I feel

Warmth from your rays

Though close now was that peal

Thunder darkens the air

The old bull dog cowers

But you are still shining 

Not yet taken by showers

Is it bravery? Do you laugh

The storm to scorn? But oh,

Your face is fading now

And hides from us, wet, below.

 ***

In faded old daylight

I wrote in pencil, black and white.

What colour will you be 

To the world as a tree

is to me?

On Writing Poetry, Robert Frost

   "A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it and comes to nothing. It finds its thought or makes its thought. I suppose it finds it lying around with others not so much to its purpose in a more or less full mind. That's why it oftener comes to nothing in youth before experience has filled the mind with thoughts. It may be a big big emotion then and yet finds nothing it can embody in. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. Let's say again: A poem particularly must not begin with thought first."-Robert Frost


   "I have never been good at revising. I always thought I made things worse by recasting and retouching. I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none. When I saw more than one possible way of saying a thing I knew I was fumbling and turned from writing. If I ever fussed a poem into shape I hated and distrusted it afterward. The great and pleasant memories are of poems that were single strokes ( one stroke to the poem) carried through. I won't say I haven't learned with the years something of the tinker's art. I'm surprised to find sometimes how I have just missed the word. It wasn't that I was groping for my meaning. I had that clear enough and I had thought I had said the word for it. But I hadn't said within a row of apple trees of it. "-Robert Frost


    "In literature it is our business to give people the thing that will make them say, "Oh yes I know what you mean." It is never to tell them something they dont know, but something they know and hadnt thought of saying. It must be something they recognize." Frost Letter to John Barlett

 

On Robert Frost

In researching for an essay on Robert Frost and Walt Whitman's poems I found this article Robert Frost On Writing. Part dealt with how Robert Frost used tones and every day speech in his poems. I have been interested in the way we we speak and intonation lately by listening to people communicating. Here are some quotes:

'A proper understanding of intonation, the sense of the speaking voice, opened up to Frost endless possibilities for poetic effects. At the furthest extreme, intonation alone could carry meaning, quite divorced from particular words. Frost was fond of citing the example of listening to the rise and fall of voices behind closed doors or just out of earshot, where individual words could not be discerned, yet meaning, emotion, and dramatic interaction could all be intuited. Similarly, he had a Celtic delight in listening to the limited vocabulary of hearty curses and the infinite variety of meanings they could convey, depending solely "on the tones of saying it and the situations." But intonations conveyed most when they occurred most naturally, as interdependent with the actual words, when the voice itself could add connotative to denotative meaning.' 

I too like to listen to people taking just out of clear hearing distance.  And this is what I myself was trying to say a couple of posts ago.

"Take, for instance, the expression 'oh.' The American poets use it in practically one tone, that of grandeur: 'Oh Soul!' 'Oh Hills! ' - 'Oh Anything! ' That's the way they go. But think of what 'oh' is really capable: the 'oh' of scorn, the 'oh' of amusement, the 'oh' of surprise, the 'oh' of doubt - and there are many more." 

I liked this quote especially (the emphasis is mine).

 'Art consists not in creating new variations (for that would place the artist outside nature) but in listening for tones that have not been stereotyped by literary expression, in collecting and arranging. Appreciation rests in recognition, not discovery.'

 One of my favorite poems of Frost's is Nothing Gold Can Stay:

My brother, Peter, took the photo of the sunset at a beach near us.

Robert Frost: Lovers' Quarrel With the World (clip)

From a Corner of My Room

I took some photos tonight:
My cat Cappie was a bit scared of the camera. His real name is Captain Courageous, but the opposite is true. He is scared of people he doesn't know particularly little children and adults. But he is my boy! He climbs up the tree outside my window each morning to say hello and where's breakfast. He is loosing his winter coat for summer at the moment, but in the winter he is stunning in his great fur ruff.

I really got the camera out to take a photo of a drawing it did of my sister when she was about 13 about 20 years ago.!.

 

 Then I did a photo shoot of my butterfly wind chime.
I am so sorry about the pictures on the side they won't stay right side up!

 I think I could use some of them for a background for something.

The Tone of Our Voice

  Last night as I was falling asleep I began to think of the way we express our meanings by the tone of our voice and how when writing it is a challenge to convey a certain tone. ( because at night is the time I think)

  I came to be thinking that thought because that day I had asked my little brother to wash the dishes so that I could make dinner, only I was trying to do it in a way that would not offend him, as he at 14 can be touchy and teenagery if you get him the wrong way. I was trying to say 'please' in a way that was not too pleading or too commanding but just friendly (I have found that friendly is the best way to approach him with a request). 

  And then I thought of how many ways you can say 'please' or any other way for that matter. And then, again, (because I have been writing a novel, just for the fun of it) I thought how limited writers are when they try to convey how their characters speak a work, a sentence, and how that character generally speaks all the time. I we had a different symbol for each intonation of each word it could make writing easier. But them I thought again and concluded that that would take all the art and allot of skill out of writing so really it is well enough how it is.

And this was just a thought that began and has ended.

........

I have recently come  to know of the regency artist Sir Thomas Lawrence from the many blog post of him now because of the opening of the new exhibition of his paintings in England. The ones above and below are two of my favorite of his works. He was a self taught portrait painter more about him here.

 Queen Charlotte 1744-1818

Better quality detail which I love!

Jane Austen Heroines

"Austen is not against social conventions. In fact, she’s fairly conservative. But she’s conservative in the deepest and best way."

This is from an article I have just read about how Jane Austen films underestimate her characters as she really portrays them in her books. I agree with the article, I have always found that in allot of Austen movies the heroines are portrayed as feminists and 'rebel against the oppressive circumstances and rigid social conventions in which she has been placed'. I have always thought of this as inevitable in a movie where modern trends and issues must predominate and the public must be catered to. But read this article and you may understand more of what I'm trying to say:Austen Films Underestimate Her Heroines

FicSwap 2010

  I have only just found out about this event and I think it is a great idea.  

Have a look on Wickfield.

Teach Me

Teach me the song of the trickling brook      
Bursting her banks, tumbling from her nook
 
Teach me to sing neath the sigh of the willow
Whose weeping shades the silent meadow 

Teach me the rustle of the leafs on an oak
Where birds made their nests as the spring awoke

Teach me to bear the joys and sorrows
As summer greens 'come golden tomorrows

Teach me to trace in the lines of a leaf
The beauty of  life's perfect belief

And then I shall know love

A Vintage Wedding

(I have my first follower! Thank you Melee!)

I have been scanning old photos into the computer for my Nans 80th birthday early next year. Among them were some of her wedding photos and I thought I would share them here. The dress is so beautiful!

I never meet my grandfather, he died when dad was just a child.

 Just married!

 My aunt, Nan, and Dad. Wasn't he a cutie!

Claude Monet

   It must be a rather good thing that we were made to be able avoid things which we do not admire, because then we remove ourselves from that thing and consequently can prevent ourselves becoming something we do not like. It is true that how we are brought up and and the people around us lend something to our character, but they do not entirely make us who we are. We make choices every day and each one no matter how small has an affect on ourselves.
   I do not mean to make this an essay on what makes us ourselves, for then I would have many other aspects to consider, I just wanted to share a thought. It is so apparent in my own life, I who am so different from the people around me. I used to almost hate who I was and try and blame things on others, but now I am so glad, glad, glad that I am me and that God did it with a purpose in mind.

   I wrote this in the middle of the night a few days ago with such a feeling of content and joy:
I have nothing to be unthankful for. I am so blessed, I have everything I ever wanted and more. Why is my life so happy and peaceful while so many others must live in sorrow. Perhaps is a training ground for some hardship ahead in my life, but I can look forwards to that with joy for as he cares for me now he will never forsake me.

   I have been reading about famous artists and there works. It is very interesting to learn of their lives and and their art. I am at the moment reading about Claude Monet. He has some very beautiful and inspiring works.
I have been just reading now part of his autobiography which I expected to a bit dry as everything I had been reading just before that was beginning to bore me with facts, but this was really interesting and I got drawn into it. I will finish reading it when I have posted this.

 " The subject is of secondary importance to me ; what I want to reproduce is that which is in between the subject and me."--Claude Monet

A Handful of Poetry

I just thought I would share some of my poems which I wrote earlier this year.

The way of the world

Thinking in our reasoned light
No answer blocks our say.
Running from towards the night,
We carry on our way.

In our gloried human right
We worship sun and day,
Spurning thoughts revealing light
And carry on our way.

Heedless in our hopeless height,
The heretics we flay.
Running downwards in the night,
Our golden glory gray.

Through cold fog and blighted sight
We barely see the ray.
Truthful and forgiving light;
We tarry on our way.

I Stopped To Watch the Shadows Dance

I stopped to watch the shadows dance
  One silent autumn day,
The light embraced the sighing boughs,
  Scattering golds of may.

The breeze was soft upon my cheeks
   As feathers to the touch;
It took my scarf in playful grasp
  Unmindful of my clutch.

And now, alive and yet so silent,
  To earth the colours float,
Now empty though with life so full--
  The sea without a boat.

I must move on, don't trust my heart,
  Must go before I break.
Life is just a shadow passing--
  Reflections on a lake.

I'll come tomorrow in the dawn;
  I must not stay tonight.
The sun has gone and so must I,
  I'll come back with the light.

A Piece of me...

   My latest good drawing. It is the biggest I have ever done (A1) and is called A Portrait of a Horse.
You can get a feel of it's size in the photo below of me working on it. I did it for Kate and Tim from Kate's Riding Center where I learned to ride.

Wait on the Lord

   It is so amazing how God works in our lives, the everyday lives of each individual. I sometimes wonder about it and think 'how?' But we can not compare God to anything or anybody because he is all and all and everything. I feel so thankful that he cares for me. There have been so many little instances of him guiding and teaching me in my life. Times when what I wanted to happen or what I wanted did not come about though I had prayed 'ever so hard', and what God had planned all along for me was so much better than anything I had imagined. Even if it was not good from the worlds point of view, in every way it tuns out better for me and I end up happier than if I had got what I had wanted when I wanted it.

   That's another thing--waiting.

  'Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and he shall bring it to pass.' those words from Psalms I have often repeated to myself. They are so beautiful. Everything in God's time in beautiful, and full of joy, when the same thing in my time would have brought pleasure and something of satisfaction for a time but it is not lasting.

   There is me and horses for example: I had always wanted a horse of my own since I was about nine, I longed and dreamed and prayed for a horse of my own. My mother always understood my longing and taught me to wait, she often repeated that scripture that says all good things come to those who wait.

   And I waited--and I have a horse.

   Though for many years I was impatient at times with God for not giving me what I wanted, I waited and hoped and prayed, for I felt it meant allot to me. And as I look back on those years I am glad I never did get a horse until a year or two ago. For when I was younger I was less experienced with horses, and all the while I was waiting I worked one day a week at the riding center where I learnt everything I know of horses just about. Since I have had a horse I don't go there so often, and if I had got a horse many more years ago than I did, I would perhaps have stopped working at the riding center and consequently not know so well how to ride and look after my Tigger.

   And then, if not then why now, if not then why not later? Should it have been better for me not to have been so impatient to have a horse? Would things have tuned out better if I had not even not got a horse? If I hadn't I would still be going to work at the horse farm, and would be allot better rider than I am now. Indeed my whole life would be different! And when I think about it I am glad it turned out as it did. For by association I would have become like any other teenager at the riding center, I would have become a person that I feel thankful I have escaped being.

  My brother works at the riding center I learnt to ride at and when I look at him not I am so thankful I escaped the influence of the people. Oh, they are very nice people, very. But they are of the world while I strive only to be in it. They have all the worldly views that seem so vulgar to me because I am so sheltered; views like being 'in it to win it', and looking out for yourself, and where no one is liked for themselves but for how they make you feel and what they bring you. All those things which arise from natural human feelings but which are these days glorified and made right. They, the world, turn everything around so that good is bad and bad is good, or, in other words, so that there is no such thing as good or bad for they all mean the same thing.

   I makes me feel sick, it repulses me, so that I struggle with prejudice against people I think are just typical of the world and I don't give them personally a fair chance.

   But, to return to the original subject, I just feel so thankful that I am who I am. Why God made me who I am, why he is making me turn out so different from my brothers and sisters I do not know, but I know he has a path and a purpose for all of us, and mine is before me.

Quick late update: Earthquake

   There has been an earthquake (7.1 in magnitude) down here in little NZ. It struck Christchurch on Saturday morning early when everyone was at home in bed. The city was damaged badly and many of the older buildings were ruined. But we are so thankful it struck when it did at about 4am because allot of the damage was done to the city center where thousands of people would have been during the day. The prime minister, John Key described it as miraculous that no one was killed.

 

Martin Chuzzlewit

   I am reading Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens at the moment. It is very humerous and the characters are so colourfully disagreeable and selfish! Dickens writes so humorously; the first chapter is devoted to the history of the Chuzzlewit family. He goes on and on insisting on how great the family is and all the while you are becoming convinced that the family must be the most disagreeable in all of England! The first paragraph begins:

      "As no lady or gentleman, with any claims to polite breeding, can possibly sympathise with the Chuzzlewit Family without being first assured of the extreme antiquity of the race, it is a great satisfaction to know that it undoubtedly descended in a direct line from Adam and Eve..." 

    He writes sarcastically and pokes fun at the faults of mankind in general. To me each character seems to represent a whole kind of people rather than just an individual. There's Mr. Pecksniff who is "A moral man.....Some people likened him to a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there: but those were his enemies; the shadows cast by his brightness..."  He is the schemer in the book (not the same as the two others of that name in the book, Jonas and his father who are openly cunning and commend a scheming man), he plots and plans while merely doing his "moral duty". Those kind of characters seem most threatening to the hero/heroine in a book because unknown is more foreboding.

   There seems to be three groups of characters in Charles Dickens' books generally speaking. The hero or heroine is good or has good intentions even if he is a little silly. And this includes the other good people in the book who don't seem to see any bad in anyone except themselves like Mr.Pinch and his sister. They are often a little boring. 

   The villains are always more colourful. there characters are well explored and are geniuses of scheming, but often in the end there very scheming catches them out. Even when there intentions towards the hero is not clear you know that they are not good ones and include getting there own gain at that persons expense. They are quite frightening really! The worst I think are Mr. Carker (the man with the teeth) in Dombey and Son and Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield.

   But the most interesting characters and the funniest are the other people who are not the main people but very necessary all the same. Like Captain Cuttle, Mr. Micawber and his family, and the tootles and Mark Tapley, and many more who all have good intentions even if they aren't always helpful and very understanding.

    I love all the Dickens books that I have read and will go as far as to think that I will equally love the rest when I get a chance to read them. His books are so delicious, you can savor them and get something new out of them in each re-reading!

            

Beginings...

Last night I had so many ideas to start of my new blog with but now my mind is quite blank....
   Nobody knows of this blogs existence yet, so I guess I will just treat it as a diary. I love dairys. I have keept one for several years now and I find it is a great help, something like a councelor when you have no one to talk to. If you think you have a big problem and all the reasons in the world to be unhappy and you try to write about it, it diminishes in size so much that you are left wondering what the problem really is. Unfortunately the opposite also is true. If you have a wonderful idea or thought it dosen't seem so glamerous down on paper.
   Here in New Zealand it is winter, but, although it is raining and windy outside, I can smell spring in the air! The rain is soft and misty, the spring flowers are beginning to bloom, and even the light seems different with the growing length of the days. We don't really have much of a winter here as much as we complain of rain and mud. Some years we have spring flowers blooming while the dying leaves have not yet gone from the trees. This year, and after a very dry summer it has been quite mild as far as rain goes, but it has been very cold, especially in our old house with high ceilings and no insulation in roof or floor.
   Now to explain the name of my blog. First of all I love the poem it is named after, and one of the few I know by heart. My mother used to recite it to me when I was young and so the words have become familiar and so, dear to me. Another reason I chose the title is because I intended my blog to be like the lonesome wanderings of myself. I am rather an introvert, though I can be loud and talkative but only when being funny or talking nonsense. I tend to subconsciously protect my true self from being found out. As mum once said, you loose something of yourself by telling the truth.