On Gorecki's 'Three Pieces in Old Style'

Building swelling notes,

Gentle discordant constraint

With excursions

Bursting into pure

Unrestrained spine tingling joy.

A final flourishing,

Belated bass

Exuberant see-sawing

Hipswaying rhythm;  

Giddy chords giggling

Persistent pleasure dancing.

Final consuming crescendo

Over too quick,  

Breathless bass

Slow languidity snaking

Through warm vitulic wood; 

Constant sad strings eking out sound

Pitch changing mood switching

Arabesquing bows

Depth resolving, resolved.

Bowing bass

A word sketch of the 3 parts. A beautiful piece, thank you City of London Sinfonia - and their bass player.

Me and bees

Gentle hum
A traffic of bees
Sweet silence

Greening shoots
Bright like suns
But nectar free

Endless blue
A swirling of bees
Dizzying heights

Golden smears
A frenzy of bees
Frantic foraging

Quiet haze
The city is distant
Just me and bees


For the Museum of London bees (Spring 2012). I hope their colony gets stronger.

And then someone responded to my word of the day 'bugonia' on 29 Oct 2012 and I giggled:

Ruminating in fields of mines
Hazardous to the herd
Blissfull grazing grass

The cow explodes

A swarm of yellow and black
Bee gone with you
Be gone with ya
Bugonia

'We Need To Talk': Conversations and KM

Barriers to communication

My first post was about jargon, which is a very effective barrier to communication within an organisation. In this post I want to discuss the importance of face to face communication. If knowledge management is all about capturing the personal experiences of people, then I would suggest that one good way of extracting it is through human interaction – that is to say an old fashioned conversation. But first we need to overcome some problems.

Virtual Distrust?

Electronic methods of communication (inclusive of emails, texts, DMs, any other social media, LinkedIn etc, blog messages) are necessary in a global business environment. When used effectively to link people around the globe, you wonder how we managed without them.

'Jarring Jargon and Squirrel Initiatives': Making sense of KM language

This is the first in a series of blog postings which I hope will explore knowledge management (KM) from a practical no nonsense point of view. I begin with the language barrier.

Library and information professionals have been doing the ‘information thing’ for years but frankly not making enough noise about our skills. So when your organisation demands implementation of a knowledge management strategy based on information they obtained from conferences, journal articles, consultants, and because ‘everyone else is doing it’, we must take the lead and become the link between theory and practice.

We may not be KM theory experts but our practical skills, knowledge of the organisation and accompanying culture/values and mental flexibility means we are ideally placed to help them make sense of the information world. As it has been said, ‘the only thing that matters in the workplace is how it works in practice’.[1]

On Turner's 'Rain, Steam, and Speed' (1844)

Amongst the insipidity of ships, sunsets,
Empty skies, and atmospheric beaches
A screaming black train hurtles
Across a bridge headlong into view.

The gentle mist mingles with the daubs of steam
Overpowered natural water obscure the light
The river vapours rising from dark depths
To enshroud the transformed landscape

Muted bird calls and whispering grasses all
Sounds dampened; making way for clamour
Metallic hammering modern rhythm
Filling the valley with repeated echoing futures

A new tang filling the senses, excited quivering
Sweet sulphur assaulting country nostrils
Leaving lives breathless for the modern way
Scattering all before, Vulcan's relentless demon

Rain, Steam and Speed at the National Gallery

Challenges

 
Frenetic challenging intense
A room of competing voices
Leaving mind numbly racing
Ideas demanding attention

Yes I'll deal with you later

Fragrant beguiling twilight
A day easing by the scents
Making sense of a change in pace
Ideas forming through anticipation
 
Yes these thoughts suit me fine

Fanciful meaningful philosophy
Contrasting connections with  glee
Scribbling still enjoying the thrill
Preferring the challenge of something new 

Exuberant and Orgiastic: Wyndham Lewis and his 'Kermesse'

This is a follow on from the Modernism posting and is also inspired by the current exhibition at Tate Britain on Picasso (and I may even have the Damien Hirst retrospective in mind too). It concerns an anti establishment figure from the British avant-garde. Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a controversial cosmopolitan figure, frequently at loggerheads with fellow artists, friends, critics, gallery owners, patrons and the public. What I wanted to focus on here was the decoration of London’s so called first modern night club and the creation of his influential Kermesse in 1912.

He recognised the potential of any kind of publicity very early on in his artistic and career. Though his background and education was already unconventional he cultivated an exotic appearance, with the writer Ford Maddox Ford describing his appearance in 1909 as Russian, Polish or Spanish, looking ‘every inch the genius’, ‘tall, swarthy…with romantically disordered hair, wearing a long black coat buttoned up to his chin’. Hemingway described him as ‘the nastiest man he has ever seen, looked like a frog and had the eyes of a frustrated rapist’.

Everything Wyndham Lewis said and did was designed to fight against the conservative reaction against modern radical art, Robert Chapman writes ‘Augustus John in Chiaroscuro presents Lewis as a wild mysterious figure, playing the part of an incarnate Loki, bearing the news and sowing discord with it’. Indeed, ‘harsh, sardonic and hard hitting, Lewis and his associates struck out against one and all and everyone they considered atrophied and outworn, not sparing the Cubists, Futurists or Expressionists from the ‘blast’’. His odd behaviours, sexual liaisons, uncompromising and confrontational attitude and his determination to blast the artistic and literary establishment in London guaranteed public interest and press controversy.