Camera obscura

While in Grahamstown, I took some of my family to the Observatory Museum. Its Victorian camera obscura is the only one of its type in the southern hemisphere and one of only two in the world (the other being in Edinburgh).

A camera obscura is an optical device which predates the camera. The name originates in Latin and refers to a darkened room: camera means “vaulted chamber or room” and obscura means “dark”.

The museum was originally a nineteenth century jeweller’s shop and family home. The original owner and designer of this unusual building, Henry Carter Galpin, was a successful watchmaker and jeweller who constructed the camera obscura in 1882. He was interested in natural history, music, mechanics, astronomy and optics. The museum also includes a Meridian Room where Galpin could ascertain the precise time of local noon (14 minutes behind South African standard time) and a Telescope Room which contains the telescope which was originally installed in the rooftop observatory.

We climbed up a long and very narrow spiral staircase in the highest tower to reach the camera obscura. It works through a system of lenses and a mirror in a revolving turret in its roof and projects a panorama of the city onto a concave viewing surface in the darkened observation room beneath.

It’s fascinating and our guide was knowledgeable and friendly (though the building itself looks in need of maintenance).

This photograph of the image in the camera obscura is not as clear as the image itself. And had it been a sunnier day the image would have been even sharper.

Once locals would set their watches by the time on the clock tower but the clock is no longer working and these days each clock face seems to show a different time..!

You can find out more about the Observatory Museum at http://www.grahamstown.co.za and on Wikipedia.

Back in Bathurst Street

I can’t remember the last time I was in Grahamstown but I went back last week – just for a day – a very cold and windy day..!

But I got a photo of the same view of Bathurst Street that I sketched as an art student years ago.

It was so familiar but of course it’s changed. The building on the corner had been damaged in a fire and had to be restored, and (looking back at my sketch) I noticed the lamp post is gone. And I don’t think that red letterbox was there before – I didn’t include it in my sketch anyway.


But Birch's, the outfitters I'd sat outside sketching, was still there, selling menswear, school uniforms and university robes (for the last 148 years!).

And it was great to see that row of buildings on Bathurst Street still looking clean and bright, and in pretty good condition. And to go back...

Bathurst Street

Birch's

You can see my sketch here: http://daydreamdraggingfeet.blogspot.com/2012/05/down-bathurst-street.html

Just a t-shirt away

When I lived in Japan I collected a whole bunch of t-shirts with Japanese-English printed on them. 

I especially love the ones that are grammatically correct but have little – or no – meaning at all. And the spelling mistakes are quite endearing.

Wearing these shirts and hoodies reminds me that Japan is sometimes just a t-shirt away...

Larger than life

Ben Okri won the Booker Prize for Fiction for his novel The Famished Road in 1991.

Looking back at the shortlist for that year, I was surprised to discover another of my favourite novels of the Nineties on the list of novels that never made it to the shortlist: Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.

But I loved Ben Okri’s story of Azaro, the “spirit child”. Reviewing the novel in the Sunday Times, Angela Carter said: “Azaro’s scary, awesome, hallucinated childhood is a piece of sustained invention that turns out to be glorious...” At around 500 pages, it seems to be a novel readers love or hate – are captivated and can’t put it down or remain unmoved and simply can’t get through it.

The “famished road” of the title is metaphorical and suggests an African nation’s imminent independence and the chaotic and often destructive social, political and technological changes already underway.

It has been diversely characterised as postmodern, post-colonial and magical realist – a label Okri has always rejected. He has said that he draws on realism and philosophy, and traditional African storytelling and beliefs.

These are from a series of illustrations of characters from the novel. I wanted to capture something of their startling and unsettling power, as well as how vividly they came across to me reading the novel.

The first two characters are quite minor. They’re the king’s bodyguards. The king of the spirit world is described as “a great cat with a red beard and eyes of greenish sapphire”. The dashiki  (one of the names for the loose shirt or robe men traditionally wear in West African countries) and kufi (one of the names for the round cap) that the men wear are not very accurate and many of the fabrics are actually far more detailed and beautiful than I’ve imagined. Like many of my sketches at the time, and perhaps suitable to a “fantasy” novel, these weren’t done in a realistic, but in a naive style.

And this is Madame Koto and the boxer who Azaro’s dad takes on. The very heavy and larger than life Madame Koto almost makes the boxer appear skinny. The local bar owner, Madame Koto introduces electricity to the community. She is generous but vain, powerful and increasingly corrupt.

You can read more about Ben Okri's writing at: http://literature.britishcouncil.org and http://www.thenewcanon.com (and on Wikipedia). Or you can pick up the novel...

So arb

arb (ärb)

adj.

South African English Slang
1. Based on or subject to personal whims, impulses or caprice: “That was such an arb thing to say.”

2. Having little or no application or relevance

3. Having no specific purpose or objective
v. arbed, arbing, arbs
1. To wander about aimlessly: “I just arbed around the mall all day.”

[From Standard English arbitrary]

A friend recently reminded me that before everything was “totally random”, it was “so arb”. I’d forgotten how often we used the word “arb” as teens and university students.

So Nineties, I thought, and so local. I hadn’t thought that it might be South African English slang – or, perhaps more specifically, “White South African English” slang. But I spotted the word in a post on a local blog dating back to 2005 so I guess it’s still arbing around Cape Town with young urban middle class English-speaking South Africans – of all colours in post-Apartheid South Africa.

With a little help from: http://brainwavez-watman.blogspot.com and http://www.thefreedictionary.com