notebook

Copies of old watercolours found in Hastings Old Town. (Above: by me; Below: by Maria)

brief hist / IS - Better Than Language review

My review of the 2011 UK Poetry Anthology Better Than Language, which gradually emerged from within one of the posts below (they tend to go on spluttering like Darwinian ponds long after initial publication), has now achieved enough fixity to be relocated to
Intercapillary Space.

card by Ebs

Tree - length of tree lichen, Usnea species.
Leaves - spikelets of Cyperus species, probably Pale Galingale (Cyperus eragrostis).

specimens of the literature of Sweden - jamjars

SYLT
BLÅBÄR

Ingredienser: Socker, blåbär, förtjockningsmedel: pektin, syra: citronsyra. Fruktmängd 45g per 100g sylt. Sockerhalt 62g / 100g.

Also translated into 15 other languages. The English translation is "blueberries", but that's inaccurate (though a literal rendering of the Swedish name). The fresh fruit which is sold in the UK as blueberry is one of a number of North American species, such as Vaccinium cyanococcus (American blueberry). This, on the other hand is the European species Vaccinium myrtillus, which as a wild plant is usually called Bilberry or Whortleberry. It is very common in Sweden and is an important ingredient in Swedish cuisine - the right to pick bilberries everywhere (except from nature reserves and private gardens) is encoded in law.



Bilberries are difficult to cultivate, so all gathering is from the wild and is manual, using a bilberry fork, which looks a bit like a metal dustpan with extended tines; you use it to comb through the small shrubs and pop off the berries into a rear compartment with a raised lip. Significant manual labour is involved in the 45g of fruit in this jar. Though all country-dwellers pick bilberries for their own use, it's unusual for Swedes to pick for industry, they aren't usually in the economic bracket that is attracted by this sort of work and besides have neither the refined skills of a pieceworker nor habituation to long, repetitive labour. The gatherers were formerly Poles, now more often Lithuanians and Russians. The pickers live out in the forest, moving from site to site. When I was there in July, just before the season began, the fleet of shiny new campervans drawn up by the road in Bispgården looked very impressive. The chief crops in our area are successively cloudberries, bilberries and lingonberries.

Finnish: "mustikka". French "myrtilles", as per the Latin name. Portuguese: "uva do monte" (mountain grape).

In Swedish "bär" (berry) is the same in singular and plural, like English "sheep". Is this because it was rare to want to talk about a singlet of these things? (a farmer will always specify a ewe, tup, lamb etc.)

"Sylt" (jam) : apparently first recorded in 1755 and related to "salt" (i.e. an analogous method of preserving food?).


SYLT
KRUSBÄR

Ingredienser: Socker, krusbär, förtjockningsmedel: pektin, syra: citronsyra. Fruktmängd 45g per 100g sylt. Sockerhalt 62g / 100g.

This one is gooseberry jam.

The dictionaries suppose that "gooseberry" is derived from Fr. "groseille" which is derived from an old German word "krausbeere", which, of course, also connects to Sw. "krusbär". That's all quite persuasive, but not the original meaning of "kraus" which they suggest is "crisp" (Latin name Ribes uva-crispa alludes to this).

If any berry could be described as crisp then gooseberry would be a good choice, but "kraus" in modern German (and "krusig" in modern Swedish) means "crisp" in a very specific sense, i.e. "crisped" like the leaves of parsley or "frizzy" like hair. (e.g. kruståtel = Wavy Hair-grass (Deschampsia flexuosa), kruskål = Curly Kale, krushårig = frizzy-haired)

So I suppose the name originally referred not to the texture of the berry but to the funny little hair-like projections on its surface.

brylcreem tea

the street is jumping & I'm desperate
I'm going all out with constant noise

Hole in her stocking and she keeps on rocking

I'm in the shop looking in the old cages,
steel pen behind the ear, I'm flattening
out an old, crumpled newspaper, kneeling on it.

Phoebe with younger sister Cora
at Liverpool
eve of world tour

lady with "Gib", an anaconda

Michaelmas term

I don't like things too fast.
It's starting
No it's stopping again, like the drink.
Early afternoon sherbet

to summer and the pines
gael maisie and the rat

It was that pissed-off look in the lane:
no-one was good enough.
It was a secret message,
it made you good enough for me.

But you could have had mine.

And there was the
big floppy book, E-K.
I tried to look up someone
but this bird has flown

as I roast in my sunset