a small green elephant

I am writing a piece about Dickens for here (with help from fathers Nabokov and John Carey) but it isn’t done yet so this week is more of a scrap book diary and I will pop to the Dickens museum this week as doing a reading at the Freud museum( so excited to commune with his begonias and Goddess figurines.) I heard the kitchen at the Dickens museum is fun and by the looks of it the museum doesn’t shy away from toilets this is a great little piece on Victorian plumbing including the fact fish and eels sometimes came through the pipes in the system’s early days. The article points out, as John Carey does in Violent Effigies, that Dickens was obsessed with cleanliness in his daily life, but he simply basks in filth in his novels, you can tell he delights in it while also being disgusted. More on that soon!

I just still remember visiting charleston house and the bathroom being roped off so you can’t properly see the lav so many famous bottoms graced which says everything you need to know about contemporary Britain’s relationship to and idealisation of the Bloomsbury group, all polyamory and vases of flowers, nothing of Lytton Strachey’s digestive terrors or piles.

I bought Richard Ellmann’s biography of Yeats. His daughter, the novelist Lucy Ellmann lives in Edinburgh and the only time I have felt a frisson of literary glamour in Scotland was selling her a bottle of wine when I worked in a wineshop. This paragraph captures how hilariously unbearable Yeats sounds. It can be forgiven in him, because of the poetry and because he is dead. I am reading the bio to learn about his new age folksy beliefs.

My dollhouse is a rip off Triang dollhouse, which are very suburban looking English dollhouses from the 30s-60s. My friend Jenny, an artist got me on to them. She is part of an exhibition with her children at the Burgh House (London) from march 11-29

I had to cut a dollhouse carpet I found because it was of the wrong scale ( there are two main scales of dollhouse and dollhouse furniture, 1/12 and 1/16) just as the Welsh dresser I have is the wrong scale for this dollhouse, Triangs tend to be smaller than the dollhouses I grew up with, like the ones are tinier here I think on the whole than in Canada though they don’t look it at first glance, you actually don’t really notice it until you try to shove a bit of furniture in. The rug has a glorious shabbiness to it now, thanks to my left hand scissor cutting. The mice (technically rats but..) I got in Japan, I was intent on buying a wooden mouse in Japan because of the one in The Children of Green Knowe, also I love the domestic anarchy of Hunca Munca and I don’t like human dolls in dollhouses, they don’t belong! I’ve also vaguely imitated my room at large- a red radio, Staffordshire and Wedgwood, an armchair. I have lots of seashells and interesting coins to decorate the walls with, but I need to paint the wall first because I am not fond of the pee yellow. I want to find a ‘small green elephant’ in honour of Yeats being unbearable now too and for people to know my dollhouse is wicked.

I am snobbish of those DIY ‘Parisian shop’ or ‘Japanese house’ kits you see on amazon. I think the innards of a dollhouse have to be slowly accumulated from disparate places to be satisfying but any sort of miniature house is a balm to the housing crisis so I shouldn’t be snobbish. This dollhouse doesn’t have a staircase which is unnerving, the creatures and furniture rely on the large hand of an unknown universe to move them around. A staircase is the most satisfying part of a dollhouse, like a spine and gives them their odd sense of life. I will see if I can somehow add one to it. Stairs are abit weird if you think about them too much. I start walking weird if I think about them when I climb or descend them. The house I grew up in had a twisted one painted turqouise, you know the ones with a ‘round the bend’ bit where the steps look like children’s coffins. Extra horrible to fall down. I used to draw stairs like this as a child, do all children?

the stairs in old Georgian buildings in Edinburgh make me queasy, really high up and sometimes the old stone steps are kind of worn away on the spot where most people step so they look like they are melting. I had a boyfriend who lived in the attic of a Georgian building and every time I had to ascend I imagined potted plants, cats, dogs, babies, plates, falling down its horrid shaft.

I have a living room for radio listening, a sewing room upstairs and will do a kitchen and bathroom

Fairy paintings

I slagged off Edwin Landseer the other week for his just awful dog and stag paintings, in fact I audibly insult ‘Monarch of the Glen’ whenever I walked by it in the National Galleries of Scotland ‘What slosh is Monarch of the Glen!’ I try my very very best always to be nice to other people in person wherever I am but sorry art doesn’t get the same treatment!! I mean, Landseer is a man who painted a piece titled Alpine Mastiffs Reanimating a Distressed Traveller

but I was reading about Victorian fairy paintings recently ( sidetracking me from neanderthals and Egypt but getting me on to Yeats) and in one of the books I got from the library there is a rather great one by him inspired by A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The eerie rabbits beside the perfectly muscular tiny man who must lift pebbles all day. The leering fairy faces and the fact Bottom looks like a donkey’s head plopped on a human corpse. His one good painting.Though I don’t like to think of Landseer butchering a donkey just for it the kind of equally cruel and sentimental behaviour expected of a Victorian person.

A great artist of the fairy genre is John Anster Fitzgerald ‘Fairy Fitzgerald’ who did these fantastical dream scenes, when all the little goblins and fairies creep up on you in the night.

I want a baby that looks like that!

The Entomologist’s Dream by Edmund Dulac is lovely too you can view it here on the Victoria Albert Museum website

This by Nathalie Olah is very good on the Peter Mandelson photo spread in The Times and the pointed use of a Beryl Cook painting.

I am not getting on with William Golding’s The Inheritors but I will preserver. He very much emphasises the toplessness of the neanderthals women, like they clutch their breasts whenever something happens.