deliberate failure

Yesterday while I was not around in the house I depended on my other half to let in the plumber to deal with (hopefully) the final adjustments to the disastrous plumbing and to make the bathroom usable on the eve of the house having extra people in it and more demands on our only working bathroom; but he failed to let the plumber in. Now this may have been a genuine mistake ... or was it deliberate? Was it a deliberate refusal to have a man/professional in the house to do a skilfull job because it's a challenge to male pride? Whilst I can't seriously accuse him of this kind of paranoid suspicion, nonetheless my justification is my father's behaviour which was the same: if my mother called someone in to get something done my father would give them hell, and her as well for "wasting money" when he could do it himself. My father did most things around the house until eventually it looked entirely botched from top to bottom. Our house is beginning to acquire this hallmark. I used to do a lot of DIY but I have run out of energy; I physically can't do the things I would once have tackled and my other half is just no good at them, he doesn't have a natural facility with materials and spaces. Over the years I have really come to not trust any DIY job being done by him; I have learnt to silently adjust things after he has "finished" - or there are ones I can do nothing about, like the ethernet cable that was strung across the bathtub and out of the window for two years, snipping it would have put paid to work communications; every time I dried myself and swung the towel over my shoulders it would snag on the cable. Doing anything together is beyond awful because I am not allowed to say anything, even pointing out the unsafeness of how he usually organises ladders. This is an epic area of domestic tragedy that runs and runs. As possibly also the water that continues to leak in the bathroom; I've no confidence that we can all use the bathroom over xmas without it leaking.

decorous

Having put aside all ambition to be employed for the time being either gainfully or in a creative capacity, I essayed some renovation and decoration in the home, long, long overdue, judging by the slut's lace in every nook.
I "did" the bathroom and felt reasonably satisfied with the effort; even though the plumbing is antediluvian it managed to pretend to be a real bathroom.  Then I turned my attention on the kitchen, likewise grotty and outmoded but at least cleaned up and ready to receive visitors willing to be distracted by xmas decorations.  I re-papered the corner of the wall that had shreds hanging off it since October '09 since the flooding from the bathroom, painted the ceiling, including the umpteenth layer over where the orange juice exploded..  I began the process of cutting fabric for draught excluding curtains ... then the stain appeared on the ceiling ... and another ... and some more.  An inspection of the floor under the bathtub upstairs revealed that water seepage was so extreme that not only the floor but the entire outer wall were soaked, really drenched to the heart of the mortar with pebbles falling out of the pebble dash.  So I had to rip out the entire bath facing, lining, disarray the shelves and ... I'm exactly back to where I started:
Having put aside all ambition to be employed for the time being either gainfully or in a creative capacity ...
The nub of the failure here is not the deteriorating plumbing but stubborn wills battling in a failing marriage with neither party willing to invest money in a house that will quite soon cease to be a home.

community art?

who coined that phrase?
and why do it? for the love of  it? mostly for money ...
somewhere lost in the mists of idealism I remember wanting to do art FOR people ... and have achieved many projects that I know left people thrilled with what they made but overall, I really couldn't give a toss - what community?

You know when your bush needs trimming ...

You know when your bush needs trimming when someone knocks at the door and offers to do it, as happened on Saturday; I declined and immediately regretted it, thinking of the hours of getting twigs in my face and of the mess of clearing up which is often worse than the task itself.

Well, the embarrassment of the unsolicited knock at the door combined with a sunny autumn day after a wet Bonfire Night, got me going: ten minutes into cutting down the laurel bush separating us from the neighbour, I chewed through the Alligator cable and shorted all the fuses.  Forty minutes later I was back in business after rewiring the cutter with its shortened cable, that is after going to the shops to buy new fuses, of which there were naturally none in the house.  Some hours of dirty work later and with the onset of dusk the chainsaw dislodged and Alligator had to be taken into the garage and I had to discover its entire construction to access the chain positioning and, for some reason, one securing nut was fractionally larger than the other, hence one fitted neatly into the ring spanner and the other didn't and I chewed off the corners ... grrrrrr

With darkness approaching I sawed the last few branches but retreated before it was too dark to see as I value my fingers and eyes.

So it turned into two days' of work and totally at the mercy of the weather - one weekend lost, not to speak of the damage to my back and hands ...

Artist: Years Around The Sun lyrics

Title: Failing At Art
Set your heart at ease or it will hold you under
Set your heart at ease and your soul
We got to believe in last chances we can't count on the world today
We'll listen to the radio and sing to the songs we hate
And we have been on the road all day
And we are still on the road tonight
And we'll listen to the radio as we stare in the Devil's eyes
We'll sift through the ashes the embers burn bright
Collect all we stole vanish in the night
We'll sleep with the masses, but stay out of sight
We stole our wages
Send "Failing At Art" ringtone to your mobile http://ace.jamster.co.uk/c_red_v2_dyn/?pid=19&artist=Years+Around+The+Sun&title=Failing+At+Art&tduid=38fe5d1e5e3779d144bf7f73c5da64ef&affId=1568252

It is with regret

Dear Anna-Marya,
Re: Christmas Temp.
Thank you for attending the interview for the above position, it was good to meet you.
It is with regret that we have decided not to offer you a position with Waterstone's at the present time.
Although we were impressed with your skills and abilities, we have seen candidates who more closely match our requirements.
May we thank you for your continued interest in Waterstone's and wish you every success for the future.
Yours sincerely,
Branch Manager
HEMEL HEMPSTEAD Marlowes

nadir

So maybe yesterday was another turning point: another job refusal (and for a crappy one at that, poorly paid and temporary), over the 'phone this time.  I was able to say 'thanks for letting me know' with sanguinity and considered that a moment of moving on had arrived.  Yesterday I had two conversations that centred on not exerting energies where effort was wasted.  Applying for jobs has become a waste of energy; I can easily dispose of 3-4 hours a day, opening e-mails from job-sites, filling in application forms and writing letters of application.  In 18 months of trying, I have had three and a half interviews; I say a 'half' because I cancelled one as it was for an internship and I really had to take myself to task not to go down that route, I had already made the decision that on no account would I do unpaid work.  The current trend for this is a scandalous exploitation of skilled labour invariably of little or no benefit to the participant.  My energies will be better bestowed creatively  ...

o one one one one o

what a terrible Samhain - barely a visitor - almost totally a failure despite baking and decorating

Scheiterhaufen

a little dance of semantics: my mother threatened me often with ending up on the 'Scheiterhaufen' and I thought it meant being part of a heap of failure, which was pretty well also her meaning.  I didn't realise until much later that it actually means a funeral pyre such as that used for burning witches.
In celebration of Hallowe'en I am baking a Scheiterhaufen which is also applecake.
my apple trees have performed so vigorously this year that I am threatened with complete failure to deal with the produce and we are eating apple with everything; nature's plenty, my challenge.

failure of failure

http://www.severalpursuits.org/?page_id=78
I submitted this blog as work dealing with failure but failed to get it included
I therefore submit this failure to the symposium for consideration

Pascal Bruckner

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/09/tyranny-of-guilt
political correctness not in our own interest

case note

the sun is shining
I am in a cafe in Brighton
I have a baguette of bacon and brie
it is delicious and biting into it suffuses with pleasure, the bread is fresh
and in my mind I feel utter terror, complete fear of the total downfall of society, terror at what my children (or even I) will experience and witness in the time yet to be
where does this fear come from? absorbed from the endless media orchestrated rhetoric of times of terror(ism) or is it post-memory? I don't know when my parents ever felt secure; the sense of 'needing to move at any moment' permeated every action, defined the way we lived.  I think it was the actor Sanjeev Bhaskar who I heard describing the 'suitcase on top of the wardrobe'; this is exactly where our suitcases were stored.  Just in case ...

Falling off the Face of the Earth

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-07-08-hankiss-en.html

do I just suffer from a national characteristic?

Dear Compatriot

I wonder whether I qualify?

Dear Anna

Three Rivers District CouncilThree Rivers HouseNorthwayRickmansworthHerts WD3 1RLTel: (01923) 776611Fax: (01923) 896119DX: 38271 Rickmansworth
My Ref :Your Ref :Date :Contact :Tel No :Email Add :Department : ADO/UIArts Development Officer22 October 2010Charlotte Masters01923 776611charlotte.masters@threerivers.gov.ukLeisure and Community Services
Dear Anna
Temporary Part-Time Community Arts Development Officer - Interviews
Thank you very much for showing an interest in our Community Arts Development Officer post here in Three Rivers and spending the time with us at your interview. We had a very strong field, in terms of experience of prospective candidates and on this occasion you were not successful in gaining the position.
The panel appreciates the time you put into undertaking the various tasks and for preparing and presenting your presentation.
If you would like any feedback on the day please do not hesitate to contact me.
I wish you all the best and success with your future career.
Yours sincerely,
Charlotte Masters
Active Communities Officer

feeling successful

Both my parents had an unassailable conviction in their own success and , in a way, this was indisputable: they, both of them in different ways, quite literally had nothing when they came to Britain.  Whatever they came to possess in the way of a house and a lifestyle, albeit a skin-of-the-teeth one, was theirs.  They owed no-one.  They never borrowed.  They dutifully paid off their mortgage.  Therefore what they had was acquired in a direct cause and effect relationship. 
For me they had ambition, and, in their terms, I failed constantly, and continue to do so to this day.  No matter how successful any individual venture of mine, most of what I have done has existed outside the direct capitalist model of investment and return.  It is uncountable in financial return.  I've put more in than taken out, ergo negative returns, ergo failure.

Tinsel and Twinkle

Hi Anna-Marya,
Thankyou so much for taking the time to submit your work.
There's been some really interesting pieces submitted and it was a difficult choice, however we have now made a final decision and unfortunately your work has not been selected for the exhibition.
Many thanks and best wishes for the future,
Tinsel and Twinkle

Twisted Thread

Dear Anna,
Thank you very much indeed for responding to our announcement about Anna's impending departure on maternity leave and our consequent hunt to find temporary cover.
We were trying something new in contacting our visitors to alert them to this vacancy and what we have had confirmed is that we welcome some amazingly talented, enthusiastic people to our shows!
Quite simply, we have been inundated with offers of assistance and we are extremely grateful to everyone who responded. However, I am afraid we did feel that there were others who were perhaps better suited to this particular role. Nevertheless, thank you again for your interest.
With kind regards
Andrew J M Salmon
Managing Director
Creative Exhibitions Limited
www.twistedthread.com

still with me

I got around to clearing the garage this past week, glad to have managed it between precipitation and the onset of frosty autumn.  The garage is still full of relics from my father's life, his goods and I, his chattel.  This is a picture of his patent screw storage shelf.  He was good that way, my father, inventive.  The lids are screwed to the plank and the jars could be unscrewed as required.  Simple.  It hung around my garden, fell over a few times, the jars broke, the screws rusted.  It had to go.  Sorry, father.  Of course he knew and I cut my hand.

nostalgie de pays

I was wandering away from the local chemists this morning and found an old Ricola sweet in my pocket, slightly macerated but still suckable, a comfort for ear ache.  I remember my mother being much taken with a TV advert for this herbal sweet - a man on a Swiss alp shouts "Ricola"  and it reverberates across the mountains; it impressed my mother enough for her to think of buying Ricola.  And in small ways like this my mother (and my father) would reveal glimpses of a nostalgie de pays under the surface of adaptation to being British - ah yes, they were British, not English.

The Aesthetics of Failure

http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/casconetext.html

prosthesis

In London yesterday at the Welcome Collection, looking at the collection of prosthetic limbs, I was put in mind of my godfather (he of the white glove).  He died in 1976, leaving me £100, quite a large sum at the time, and a fortune saved from his meagre income.  I was not able to enjoy this small windfall; my parents decided it would substitute their parental contribution to my maintenance at university that year; I had just started at Leeds. 

But I am ashamed that he even remembered me: I would not visit because I was appalled by the prosthetic leg he left propped against the furniture in his tiny room in a house in Cromwell Street.  The house was filled with displaced Central Eastern European aristocracy, countesses and dukes of imaginary kingdoms.  My godfather, Lajos Kultsar, and his wife, Olga, were born under Hapsburg rule into refined homes and hoped to enjoy a life of privelege; they came to England as displaced persons and put their knowledge of etiquette and cooking to use as hotel staff. 

This picture is taken in Spring 1944 around the time the Nazis moved into Hungarian territory and engaged the Royal Hungarian Gendarmerie to carry out their plans, which they apparently did with gusto.  Why? In the belief that a German victory would restore the lost territory of 1921.  It's easy to look on this as misguided from the perspective of 2010 but yet it is still an ulcerating wound in the Hungarian psyche.  

My godfather  was long-time chair of the Mindszenty centre in London when that still existed.  He didn't lose his leg fighting; he got a bloodclot in the late 60's, and amputation was the simplest cure for difficult conditions for poor people.  In other photos I have of him, he bears a striking resemblance to Max Beckmann, especially with the cigarette in hand, carrying off the urbane elegance that characterised the early C20th.

My godparents were the nearest thing to extended family that I experienced.  Olga, my godmother, was my mother's last really close female friend, a mother figure she needed.  After Olga died of cervical cancer aged 46 my mother's last pretence at domestic nomality failed.

delighted to be acknowledged

Unfortunately your application for the internship position was unsuccessful.
However, we will keep your details on file and will contact you if any other opportunities arise that we feel maybe of interest to you.
Regards
__________________________
University of Bedfordshire

Gehören Minarette zur Religionsfreiheit?

Die Volksinitiative «Gegen den Bau von Minaretten » ist im Juli 2008 eingereicht worden. Sie will neue Minarette in der Schweiz umfassend und ausnahmslos verbieten. Das Initiativkomitee argumentiert, das Minarett als Bauwerk habe keinen religiösen Charakter, sondern sei ein Symbol jenes religiöspolitischen Machtanspruchs, der Verfassung und Rechtsordnung der Schweiz widerspreche. Ein Minarettverbot tangiere die Religionsfreiheit nicht, sagen die Initianten, die im Parlament von der Schweizerischen Volkspartei unterstützt wurden. Die andern grossen Parteien und der Bundesrat lehnen die Initiative ab. Sie stehe im Widerspruch zu zahlreichen in der Bundesverfassung verankerten Grundwerten der Schweiz – so zum Prinzip der Rechtsgleichheit, der Glaubens- und Gewissensfreiheit, der Eigentumsgarantie, dem Verhältnismässigkeitsprinzip und dem Gebot der Beachtung des Völkerrechts. Zudem sei ein solches Verbot ein unverhältnismässiger Eingriff in die kantonalen Kompetenzen. Die lokalen Behörden seien am besten in der Lage, Minarette zu bewilligen oder zu verbieten, und zwar auf Grundlage der geltenden Bau- und Raumplanungsgesetze. Der Nationalrat verwarf die Initiative mit 132 zu 51 Stimmen, der Ständerat mit 39 zu 3.

my best birthday

http://www.hse.gov.uk/news/buncefield/index.htm

void

a particularly fine night with stars clearly shining, an alien night, no moving lights, only one high flying plane? satellite? tumbling through the emptiness of Ursa Major

political blockheads

http://forgacsoltkult.blog.hu/

to be honest I have absolutely no desire to be a library assistant but this has become a matter of honour, having now made (how many?) applications; I will carry on persisting; I have begun to enjoy failing at this

THe Happiest Days of Your Life

failed artist

http://www.katorlegaz.com/commentary/failed_artists.php

Friends unReunited

Here's a funny phenomenon: joining Friends Reunited out of curiousity or idle vanity ... friends you were at school with have done the same thing ... but all are holding back coyly, not submitting photographs.  Who wants to broadcast the spreading waistline and moderate career profile that summarises being over 50?

individual failure

I'm curious about the era in which personal success or failure were engendered as attributes.  It seems to me that the existence of the modern ego is very recent.

The Fable of Failure in Modern Art

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1997/summer/barolsky-fable/

drawing

the world surely has enough life studies.
the ability to draw was, in the first instant, the portal to being an artist, a recognition of the ability to see what's there.
but a lifetime and an art degree and immersion in the theoretical have pushed this towards seeing what is not there ...
so drawing in whatever form is about re-connecting

rejection

I regard this as a success: so far it is the only actual letter of rejection I have received in 9 months (interrupted) of job applications.  for the most part I have received few acknowledgments of submission and almost no rejections.  contrary to recommended practice, this makes it impossible to request feedback from 'employers'.

commitment

not managing a daily entry to the blog becomes another stick to beat myself with. (split infinitive - bad grammar, also deserves punishment).
before starting a blog I produced a stack of sketchbooks with random musings - these I think describe the nature of thought: consistent but random, and are, in themselves, a body of work.  it's my belief that, were I to collate their entire content, to organise it, to impose taxonomy, an oeuvre would emerge.  will I ever do this? quien sabe.
a blog is a different model of thought collection.  I might almost resist its linearity, for, in my sketchbooks, I don't start at the beginning and work through to the end.  I might start anywhere and work 'backwards' or 'forwards', amend some previous thought, annotate something else.  the sketchbooks are primarily full of words, though I often doodle in them when listening to a lecture or someone talking; they are the conduit for nervous energy, the scribblings a mirror of another's rhythms of speech, the acknowledgement of my listening, which I do better if my body can do autonomous actions.  I can think better this way as well: whilst walking or gardening. 
my allotment, also, is an expression of mind sketches; sometimes I am aware of others gardening very seriously, digging rectangular beds and planting vegetables in straight rows.  do the vegetables appreciate this regimentation?  I often come to, realising I have been pottering for an hour, transplanting weeds, lobbing snails into the distance.  I have discovered a word, 'pottager', which I think describes the more random appearance of my allotment: a few vegetables here and there and some flowers amongst.

on failing

failure only has presence where there is agency.
to fail is to have attempted something, therefore 'failure' is a contradictory term.  real failure would be never to have attempted anything.  rather 'failure' is being diverted from the intended outcome.

failed conversation

Sometimes in the garden or allotment I think ' my father would have liked that'.  It's a thought based on very scant information.  Just a few times in the last few years of his life my father volunteered information about things he liked: very frilly and pink fuchsias and motorway flyovers.
Just these few details serve to highlight how little I knew about what he thought; and I don't think he ever even asked what I liked.
So this is all part of a conversation that never took place.

on diaries

http://www.artvehicle.com/asides/13?utm_medium=email&utm_source=Emailmarketingsoftware&utm_content=504655551&utm_campaign=Artvehicle48+_+oiluyr&utm_term=OnDiaries

what is failure?

and my son is awarded a 'U' for his History A Level retake, after a year of not being at university, after £500 of private tuition fees, after hours of re-studying; this is all just too painful, especially as it's a lower mark than what he achieved last year.  How is this even possible?
I've had a shot at life and take 'failure' in my stride now, move on, but my son's frustration is much harder to tolerate.

26th February - cranes return to Europe, heralding spring

http://www.flickr.com/photos/40595440@N03/sets/72157623532883958/

6,930,000 other people interested in art. it's a winner

difference

a good day can be locating the car in Sainsburys carpark immediately

welcome to the first frog of spring from the murky depths

this was dull

http://fascists.tribe.net/thread/0564dc7f-e2ce-4f65-9458-b4b164e18d7a

half the day is over

14.47 in the afternoon
still sitting in my pyjamas, contemplating washing hair
have had lunch, consisting of last night's leftovers
but gone back to computer to continue opening e-mails
have half a quilt project cluttering up the kitchen
husband probably not best pleased; has criticised me enough recently, therefore probably storing this one up for later
shall justify presence of carrier bags of children's old underpants by turning out amazingly beautiful quilt
tomorrow maybe
clouds looming
would like to go to allotment