Grennan Castle subsides into its pasturage.

The road from Ballyduff to Thomastown in County Kilkenny, runs along the valley of the River Nore, past Grennan Castle , now  a picturesque ruin, the roof top grass as lush as any meadow. The castle's proud position is undeterred by the loss of carved lintels and window arches by vandals, its moat  a remote memory in the ground and  Cromwell's two day siege in 1650, of which he wrote of declaring after two days the enemy, left, agreeing 'never to again bear arms against England'. It can't only be in retrospect that that would be a hard thing to believe.

Sixties Dandelion Yellow at Tanpopo

There was something about the way this young woman's hair framed her face, that reminded me of a a character in an Ishiguro novel, a kind of demure resoluteness. But perhaps this a bit of wistful retro-fitting, a kind of post-hoc intertextuality bought on by finishing Ishiguro's short story collection 'Nocturnes'. After being so smitten with 'Never Let Me Go' this felt like Ishiguro going through the motions, stuck in a room of people he had no sympathy for, like cooking with slightly rotten vegetables, no good can come of it.

Owlish Viewpoint in the Blue Mountains

Spheroidal weathering, water wear, torsions of time and place, have given this outcrop, just below the ridge before Leura Falls, this owlish face creating a wide-eyed observer of valley.

A Metaphor for Analysis

At first it seemed obvious which one of these two parties had it together, who was the counsel and who the counselled, but then the more I consider each position, the more ambiguous it becomes.

Two Motifs for Urban Loneliness

Why does the railway line curving away in the distance to nothing read as lonely?  Perhaps it's the vision paradoxical endpoint, you believe it keeps going but your eyes tell you something else. Another contestant in Cliches of Urban Loneliness game is the desultory street fire. The Hanoians are good at these, the one below giving off a nasty wavering smoke, most likely some parts formaldehyde and worst from burning particle board. The immediate locale here doubling, and then some,  as footpath and garage, and of course the ubiquitous parking lot.

Built to Cast

Pure treasure, candelabras that celebrate and create a shadow garden of birds, flickering in the candlelight through trees that oscillate mildly.

A Chekovian Moment in Hanoi's Military Museum

There is something eerily elegant about this French pistol, suspended as if floating in time, in the Military Museum in Hanoi.  In one way it can be seen as a  potted history lesson - a French 'pistole' captured by a Vietnamese man used to fight the Chinese and Japanese. And in  fulfillment of Chekhov's principle, if you bring a gun into a country it becomes a theatre of war.

Politic Reqest to Maintain Political Awareness in Hoi Anefuse

Travelling around Vietnam one is conscious that one's political opinions may not always be the best thing to shout out about but this polite note in a historic 'tube' house in Hoi An insists that we maintain our view. The arrows above it, just out of frame, broadmindedly offer both the left and the right as ways of seeing.

Ceiling Charming, Restaurant Flawed.

Lemon Grass Restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City, with its charming ceiling of umbrellas, is well rated in a couple of guide books and obviously gets a lot of tourists sent on from nearby hotels. The food is just decent but  if it was in Sydney I would consider it seriously under-flavoured. So by local standards the chefs must have done some serious dumbing down to get this kind of nondescript taste from the zingy local produce and cuisine.

By contrast the very ordinary laminex tables of the chain Pho 24 promise nothing in particularly but succeed brilliantly at delivering fresh herbful bowls of steaming Pho Ga and Pho Bo on the double at a pittance. The springs rolls are terrific and the whole thing is delivered with cheerful good humour. Make a beeline, make two beelines!

Garcia Marquez wearing One Hundred Years of Solitude

Continuing in my pursuit of rendering my favourite authors, or photographs, or both together, in broad strokes of Prussian Blue this redo is based on a wonderful photo of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Marquez makes a little hat, a kind of half-way house, out of One Hundred Years of Solitude, at once alluding in its proximity to the source of the 'Cien Anos' genesis, and perhaps suggesting that, best seller that it is, it goes quite some way in providing a roof over Marquez's head.

Andrea Levy's Small Island

Last week I finished Andrea Levy's Small Island, a compulsive read, sometimes bleak, more often funny, it illuminates, mostly in a kind watery grey light, a pivot point when the British Empire comes 'home' to roost. The central characters Hortense, Gilbert, Queenie, and a mostly off-stage Bernard have a nearly Shakespearean feel to them, their own soliloquies, their inner chatter areall  great revealers of  plot and character. Gilbert at times might be the grave digger in Hamlet, an irascible and noble clown, Hortense a kind of unrelenting Jamaican version of Elizabeth Bennett, not in her circumstance but in her high handedness, while Queenie is an enigma, an English rose who becomes too literally a metaphor for the Mother Land. Levy's ear for the vernacular is wonderful, the sense of place vividly cinematic.
The Prussian blue redo of a photo of Andrea Levy doesn't do her justice, which is a pity, as the perversity of what goes by as 'justice''  is a central themes in Small Island.
Coda: I stayed up far too late and watched the BBC version on DVD, really well done, but read the book first!

Three Scenes from Cafe L' Usine in Saigon

 L'usine on Le Loi Street in Ho Chi Minh City  is just right for mid-morning coffee,  good espresso is hard to find in HCMC, though ordinary coffee shops are everywhere. L'usine iis all shabby industrial chic, perfect for that caught between two time zones feel of Ho Chi Minh City, part next week waiting to be completed and part 1930's Old Saigon. All it really needs is Graeme Green to appear, looking slightly perplexed in a crumpled linen suit.

Postcard from Hanoi - How Did the Chicken Cross The Road?

A few minutes trying to draw the 8.00am traffic as it dashes  along Thy Truonghiet Street in the French District of Hanoi, reveals something about the ratio of motorbikes to bicycles. Heavens knows I would prefer to try catching the more sedately moving bicycle, so if anything my observation and recording bias would be with them, but even so the ratio of twelve motorbikes to one bicycle in this small sample.
But that chicken question, anything crossing the road in Hanoi will feel like they are in a game of chicken, though the process is worse in contemplation than in the doing, where one has to concentrate on the task at foot, leaving no extra capacity to fret.

Fashion Victims or Bag Ladies?

  Who could resist taking a photo quick snap of these plasticated mannequins, three still carrying on duty as normal, the fourth seemingly felled by the despair of wearing a large white plastic bag as a fashion statement. There is something about these long white  plastic robes, that  teeters oddly between the ecclesiastical and the mannequin-icidal.  Bags not wearing these!