Goulandris Foundation Digital Cultural Periodical

Issue 4 now available online (in Greek).

Includes an interview with film-director Costa Gavras, and an article on modern Greek art.

Dorset, Marine Conservation Zones

Not all proposed areas accepted

BBC News:

"Three areas off the Dorset coastline have been designated as Marine Conservation Zones (MCZ) by the government. The decision was welcomed by Dorset Wildlife Trust, despite its three other proposed sites not being accepted".

Those areas accepted " included Poole Rocks in Poole Bay, Chesil beach, with Stennis Ledges, and an area south of Weymouth Bay in Dorset. The designation is applied to areas considered important to conserving rare or threatened habitats and promoting biodiversity in coastal areas".

J. M. Whistler, Blues with Gold and Silver

Whistler at Old Battersea Bridge, with the blues

Blue and Silver, Chelsea

I Cover the Waterfront (John Lee Hooker blues; YouTube)

I Cover the Waterfront (Billie Holiday, YouTube)

and Whistler down in Dorset-

The Little Forge, Lyme Regis

The Blacksmith (Samuel Govier, Broad Street, Lyme Regis)

On Whistler (pdf)

On "The Walk", Plinius

An interesting posting and embedded video extract (someLANDSCAPES)

All This Can Happen, a new film by Siobhan Davies and David Hinton

On Hamstone, Purbeck Marble and Portland Stone (J C Powys, Wood and Stone)

John Cowper Powys, in his early novel "Wood and Stone" (1915, dedicated to Thomas Hardy) writes about Ham Hill, near Montacute, Somerset ("Leo's Hill", near "Nevilton") and Hamstone and compares it with rival stones from Purbeck and Portland:

"What especially separates the Stone of Leo's Hill from its various local rivals, is its chameleon-like power of taking tone and colour from every element it touches. While Purbeck marble, for instance, must always remain the same dark, opaque, slippery thing it was when it left its Dorset coast; while Portland stone can do nothing but grow gloomier and gloomier, in its ashen-grey moroseness, under the weight of the London fogs; the tawny progeny of this tyrant of the western vales becomes amber-streaked when it restricts the play of fountains, orange-tinted when it protects herbaceous borders, and rich as a petrified sunset when it drinks the evening light from the mellow front of a Cathedral Tower".

On Ham Hill itself, from the beginning of Chapter One:

"Midway between Glastonbury and Bridport, at the point where the eastern plains of Somersetshire merge into the western valleys of Dorsetshire, stands a prominent and noticeable hill; a hill resembling the figure of a crouching lion".

See also, posting on John Cooper Powys and the English Landscape

Jane and Cassandra Austen in Dorset; Genteel "Grockles" in Lyme Regis and Weymouth

 Thomas Girtin, Lyme Regis, c. 1797

Apart from descriptions of Lyme, the Dorset watering-place (and its social life) in the novel Persuasion, we have Jane Austen's letter to her elder sister Cassandra, written at Lyme, Friday, September 14, 1804.

Jane gives some hints of her private (and somewhat snobbish) impressions of Lyme, and has this to say about Weymouth (referring to Cassandra's account):

"Weymouth is altogether a shocking place, I perceive, without recommendation of any kind, and worthy only of being frequented by the inhabitants of Gloucester. I am really very glad that we did not go there, and that Henry and Eliza saw nothing in it to make them feel differently".

Thomas Girtin, The Harbour, Weymouth, c 1798

Lyme Regis, 1844

Hydromania (detail), George Cruickshank, 1819
 (after Captain Frederick Marryat's sketch):

Jane Austen, about Lyme:

"I continue quite well; in proof of which I have bathed again this morning....The bathing was so delightful this morning and Molly so pressing with me to enjoy myself that I believe I staid in rather too long..."

*******

"We are quite settled in our Lodgings...The servants behave very well, and make no difficulties, tho' nothing can exceed the inconvenience of the offices, except the general dirtiness of the house and furniture and all its inhabitants."

Of some other people she writes that they are "bold queer-looking people, just fit to be quality at Lyme".

She walks with a Miss Armstrong for an hour on the Cobb: "she is very converseable in a common way; I do not perceive wit or genius, but she has sense and some degree of taste, and her manners are very engaging".

From Jane Austen and Lyme Regis, 1944

See also, Memoir of Jane Austen, by James Edward Austen-Leigh

Images of Jane Austen (including two by Cassandra Austen)

Jane Austen and the Seaside

See also (not Dorset), Sanditon- Creating a Seaside Resort

John Fowles on Grockles:

Update, The Times, November 7, 2014. Gabriella Swerling is trying to give a new definition for the word "grockle":

"A derogatory term for outsiders who buy up property and increase house prices". I think not.

" Granny's Teeth"