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gilgai

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All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

— from “Pied Beauty”, Gerard Manley Hopkins

#Gerard Manley Hopkins
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fathoming

PETROGLYPH dune amplifier — a Basque code: coloured flags, burning straw — whale piano — did the other animals make it transparent? — shallow and getting shallower

THE OOOO-ERS Eden — close, but no touching — swimmerets — the first thing with faces, being only faces — between thing and kin — again, numerousness — holy shiver — dry dreams — augenblick

BLUE MUSEUM whales inside out — whales with knees — forewarning: scantling — a body without a voice and a voice without a body — past outside of memory — sand

CHARISMA dreams, being screen-coloured — faking solitude — cold, hard numbers — the agony of loving the disappearing — endlings — the less we see, the more aura it has — a half-head dream

SOUNDING first, signal interference — two voices in one bowhead — blue whales drop three white keys on a piano — voices with no origin — aurora — soft mountains

KITSCH INTERIOR out-of-placeness — spiralling — horse latitudes — middleness — the gyre is invisible — its skin is changed — white flag — the things afloat that will never sink — dumped desire — and hope

SCANTLING egg and eye — kraken, owl — their heads, being too small to nourish their tails — Virginia Woolf reports he is constantly seen — whales: are they islands? — the swarm, the squirm, the sucker, the spiral — self as circus

—Words & phrases drawn from chapter headings & summaries in Rebecca Giggs, Fathoms: the world in the whale (Scribe, 2020)

#fathoming#Rebecca Giggs#whales#Fathoms
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000   At volcanic mud baths . . . an old stained piano   [1] 000   Once a certain idea of landscape . . . of the scenery   [2]

000   Drag pianos out onto the streets . . . they fall to pieces   [3] 000   Until about 1770 pianos were . . . uncertain in status   [4]

000   We made our plans this way . . . not being able to do it   [5] 000   An orchestra was founded . . . five foreign languages   [6]

000   scribbled on pieces of paper . . . sometimes in less than thirty minutes   [7] 000   In matters of translation . . . the equivalent of infidelities   [8]

— Selected extracts from Sophy Roberts’ source notes, in The Lost Pianos of Siberia: In Search of Russia’s Remarkable Survivors. Uncorrected proof copy (London: Doubleday, 2019)

1. Elim Denidoff, A Shooting Trip to Kamchatka (London: Rowland Ward, 1904) 2. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Fontana Press, 1996) 3. Vladimer Mayakovsky, 'Battle-order to the Army of Art' in Vladimer Mayakovsky and Other Poems, trans. James Womack (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2016) 4. Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) 5. John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal (London: Penguin, 2001) 6. Janet M. Hartley, Siberia:  A History of the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) 7. Bruno Monsaingeon, Sviatoslov Richter: Notebooks and Conversations, trans. Stewart Spencer (London: Faber & Faber, 2001) 8. Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Final Years, 1861-1886 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)

#Sophy Roberts#lost pianos#Siberia
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In a Melbourne street, a T-Model Ford truck precedes a procession of horse drawn wagons piled up with old pianos, which are on their way to West Melbourne Swamp to be burnt. At the swamp a man plays a piano on top of a pile of the old pianos, before they are doused with kerosene and set on fire. 

Still image from ‘A Collection of Worn Out Pianos Committed to the Flames at West Melbourne Swamp’, newsreel, c. 1915. National Film & Sound Archive of Australia,  Title No. 76719. Reproduced in David Sorning, The Blue Lake: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp (Brunswick, Victoria: Scribe Publications, 2018).

#bonfire#lost pianos#West Melbourne#badlands#David Sorning
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