Fed by Birds

Daily Routines is endlessly fascinating for those who work at home sometimes and can't shake off a guilty feeling that sitting in your pyjamas at noon eating a Lion Bar is not the way to Get Things Done. Nonsense! Winston Churchill got things done and his routine is the best of the lot: 7.30am substantial breakfast and working in bed, followed at 11am by rising, bathing and a weak whisky and soda in the study; 1pm three-course lunch with friends, champagne, brandy and cigars. Then a little light work or possibly backgammon, and "at 5pm, after another weak whisky and soda, he went to bed for an hour and a half."

We brush aside the up-before-dawn and 10,000 words-a-day types, and embrace those who mastered a more civilised life, such as Nabokov - Scrabble, butterfly hunts and long naps - or Truman Capote: "I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping."

I mean, whose work would you rather read, Colette - swimming, sex and regular blood transfusions from an attractive young donor - or film critic Roger Ebert - rise at 7, oatmeal, treadmill, cold shower etc. And Joyce Carol Oates's comments - "To me, wasting time isn't in my nature. I find it difficult to understand why people would deliberately waste their time" - make me determined never to read a word she's written. Most importantly, try never to sit next to the highly self-disciplined J.M. Coetzee: "A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once."

Some had more idiosyncratic routines. Auden's method, perhaps not recommended, was to take lots of speed, which he considered a "labor-saving device" in the "mental kitchen". Maybe Gertrude Stein is the one to emulate: "Miss Stein likes to look at rocks and cows in the intervals of her writing... Miss Stein spends much of her time quarrelling with friends."

Pictures from LIFE archive.
See also Writers at Work

Posted by at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It's very difficult to find the perfect perfume: for some reason nearly all modern scents smell of custard. Fed by Birds readers are discerning: they want perfume to transport them somewhere stranger than the inside of a cake shop. Luckily we are here to suggest more exciting olfactory experiences. For instance:

The Scent of a Grandfather
CB I Hate Perfumes - Greenbriar 1968 aims to capture the smell of perfumer Christopher Brosius' grandfather, which is apparently sawdust, leather work gloves, pipe tobacco and axel grease. I've never actually tried it, but I have tried the same label's M. Hulot's Holiday, which really does smell of suntan oil, damp swimming costumes and old suitcases.

Dolls' Tea Party
The Unicorn Spell by Les Nez: this has a distinct plasticky tang combined with grassy notes which is the exact smell of neglected Sindy dolls left in the garden overnight.

Errol Flynn
Creed's Cuir de Russie was created for him. After the first thwack of leather, it's surprisingly flowery.

Jupiter
Caron's Aimez Moi has a totally unearthly scent. There's nothing natural that you can detect in it or compare it to, it's inexplicable - this must be what an alien planet would smell like.

A Clean Robot
Apparently Dans Tes Bras by Frederic Malle is supposed to smell of warm skin, but its combination of metal and washing up liquid if anything suggests the embrace of a fastidious machine.

Posted by at 11:03 AM | Permalink

This may be the best book I've ever come across. Found for 50p in a secondhand bookshop, I knew as soon as I saw the mouse footprints that it must be mine:

This 1937 guide to the "Vertebrates of Britain Wild and Domestic" by Edmund Sandars is full of tiny details of creatures' characteristics, often shown in little pen and ink diagrams. Field mouse tracks:

Cows' digestive systems:

He shows their gait:

Their skeletons:

and illustrates the varieties of the species:

No detail is too small:

Posted by at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

A beautiful stop-motion forerunner of Toy Story by the famous Polish animator Ladislas Starewicz. What's incredible is how much character he manages to get into the toys, especially the tough safe-cracking doll, and the poor little dog hanging up as a car's mascot is full of pathos. This version unlike others on YouTube has the original music - you can see parts 2 and 3 here and here.

Posted by at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

No doubt we'd all like to be members of Oulipo, the group of writers who create their works under various systems of constraint. But then again it's hard work, writing One Hundred Thousand Billion poems or novels based on a Knight's Tour.

This is where the internet can help. Once upon a time you needed a dictionary and a lot of concentration to use the N + 7 technique (where nouns are replaced by the seventh noun after them in the dictionary). But these days you can just cut and paste for hours of literary amusement.

I find the Book of Genesis more relevant somehow after N + 6 is applied:

"In the belt Government created the hell and the economics.
And the economics was without fortune, and void; and dawn was upon the faculty of the deep.
And the Spread of Government moved upon the faculty of the weathers.
And Government said, Let there be line: and there was line...
And Government called the line Dear, and the dawn he called North. And the examination and the motion were the first dear."

Kipling improves too:

"If you can keep your headlamp when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can tub yourself when all mandibles dovetail you,
But make almshouse for their doubting too" etc etc

Ideally, of course, you would copy Oulipo hero Raymond Roussel and invent a machine for reading your works too, and then we could all relax in the garden sipping our lavender gimlets without worrying any more about it.

Recipe for lavender gimlet

Posted by at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)