Cairn

Cairn Cromer April 2005

N and I spent three and a half hours on the Beach on Saturday - my mission to build a cairn. well build a cairn we did -well me mostly and N helped colloect some of the rocks. It's amazing how long it takes.

It's all been done before!

What do you know was browsing the web and came across a lesson plan for "recycled poetry" http://www.imakenews.com/eletra/mod_print_view.cfm?this_id=101058&u=psla
It's very hard these days to have an original idea. Whatever you think of if you look hard enough you will find that it's been done before. Does this make your idea less valid though? If you came up with it by yourself following your own explorations and ideas. It has often been the case that people in different parts of the world have come up with the same original idea at around the same time. Is this because of a collective consciousness? or is it that when an idea is ready to be born it is born of many minds at the same time? It's an interesting question, sceptics might say that there are no original ideas left and that everything (music, art, writing) has all been done before - I don't know the answer, but I do know that I'm going to keep following my ideas whether they turn ot to be original or not.

Recycled poetry

I was playing around with the Guardian review cuttin odd sentences or parts of sentences that I found attractive, then I started putting them together and realised that I could make a kind of poetry. A bit like when you use those magnetic poetry kits that were all the rage a few years ago. But this was with bits of sentences taken from completely different articles...

In doing this I discovered two things
1) Glossy magazines (even Sunday ones) are hard to get good snippets from, in fact I didn't get one in the end they all came from the Saturday review.
2)I could not find much that was meaningful in any of it! I got barely a hundred words from the whole supplement.

here are two of them - the best one is incorporated into some art so I won't print it here!

Remind Me

examination of the
manifold selves that make up
individuals
testify to the stupendous ingenu-
ity of the creator.
all love leaves
the 90 minute groove:
The simplicity
of statement persists
Irreverence carries him
the same as the tree,
pleasingly provocative.

the death of public figures

absence of interest
might be achieved,
in the abyss alongside those
he lives with,
the simplicity
tablecloth blows up,
soldiers vanish,
into a
massed display of religiosity.

Sims versus reality

Always felt a bit disdainful of games like the Sims until D created a little sim version of us. It is strange how compelling it is. You want them to do the things that you would do in real life and get alarmingly attached to their happiness and wellbeing (or lack of it!). I found myself feeling upset when they were upset or ill. The Sim version of me ended up tonight by eating bad food with flies on and giving herself food poisoning which meant that she had to miss the first day at her new job (something to do with politics).

We have yet to work out how to get D to do yoga and how to fit all the things in that you need to do before bedtime and in the morning. Time goes strangely fast in Sim City. I did gain some creativity by painting alovely picture though!

what we really need.....fibonacci numbers....

I went with my friend Babs to a shop called the range today. What can I say about the range... well for a start it is in one of those horrible out of town shopping complexes, the sort you can only go to if you have a car (or a friend with a car!). It has the obligatory supermarket and the obligatory FatDonalds. The supermarket and the cashpoint is so far from the other shops that you find yourself driving from one carpark to another (how sad is that?). You wouldn't want to walk round there anyway - the scenery is not exactly beautiful even when it is not pouring with rain. Acres of tarmac punctuated by trolley bays and the odd paving slab. Very big, very flat and full of cars...mmmmm mmm.

Anyway the Range is the kind of superstore where you go to buy one thing and come out with something completely different, and on the way you find twenty things that you absolutely need but had forgotton about until you saw them. It is also the kind of store that has a myth perpetuated about it (who knows where it started?) that it has loads of good stuff and all that good stuff is far cheaper than you can buy it anywhere else. Well for weeks I had been slowing buying into this myth...I have been drip fed it by friend after friend...oh you must go to the Range...they have a great selection of art materials...their canvases and frames are sooo cheap...etc etc. Imagine my disappointment when I discover it's just the same as any other big store...and no cheaper. I still saw lots of stuff I really needed! Although I did manage to stop myself buying too much. It's all stuff you think you need but never get around to buying...well probably you never get around to buying it because YOU DON'T NEED IT!!!!!!

Well I have to confess I did buy three really useful things...
1. A DELUXE LITTER TRAY (COLOUR PALE LILAC).....why I hear you cry...well for making felt in of course!
2. A square of black felt for 29p....why.....to make a new nose for my son's cuddly sea otter!
3. A small green glittery lined notebook...why...just because I could......

And what of fibonacci numbers?
Well that's another story entirely and it all started with the making of a wall out of a metal grid that has plastic and fabric woven into it in spiral shapes. This morning I started thinking about spirals and their meaning. I knew that spirals are often attributed with spritual significance. In some celtic mythology the spiral symbolises the continuity of life and spiritual growth. I started looking at spirals and their meaning on the Internet and quite soon came across Fibonacci and his numbers
'The Fibonacci sequence exhibits a certain numerical pattern which originated as the answer to an exercise in the first ever high school algebra text. This pattern turned out to have an interest and importance far beyond what its creator imagined. It can be used to model or describe an amazing variety of phenomena, in mathematics and science, art and nature. The mathematical ideas the Fibonacci sequence leads to, such as the golden ratio, spirals and self- similar curves, have long been appreciated for their charm and beauty, but no one can really explain why they are echoed so clearly in the world of art and nature.'
Will probably write some more about this another day as it is time for bed now!!!