The Art of Mandur فن مندور

The man who works in pottery is called fakharani (after the word fokhkhar, meaning pottery). An experienced fakharani knows what shapes are in demand and in which season. He must be able to produce the shape of jars used during birth celebrations, the incense burner over which the mother has to step in subu, the celebration held on the seventh day after the birth of a baby. He can fashion jars that look like horses and roosters. And he can make fruit basins embellished with human faces. Fakharanis often keep the secrets of the trade in the family. To be a fakharani you have to come from a pottery making family. If you remember the old drinking jar, called zir, you’ll see that it has a conic bottom, which means that to keep it upright it has to sit on a metal contraption that is circular at the top. The design allows for better cooling and cleansing of the water, and has been also used by the Greeks and the Romans.
The artist Mohammad Mandur, who works mainly in pottery, says that pottery aesthetics improved remarkably in Roman times, and that Coptic monks modified the motifs to suit their beliefs, as did the Muslims later on. Mandur is a great admirer of Fatimid pottery, especially the pieces given a metallic glaze. He says that pieces that came from the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods were of exquisite quality, but things began to deteriorate under the Ottomans.

Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) by Franz Kafka: Good, Softcover, $4,997.00 at Alibris Marketplace

Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) by Franz Kafka: Good, Softcover, $4,997.00 at Alibris Marketplace

The booksellers love books

Alas, second-hand bookshops are closing daily, driven out of business by the combination of a general decline in reading, the internet and that most characteristic of all modern British institutions, the charity shop. Booksellers tell me that 90 per cent of their overheads arise from their shops, and 90 per cent of their sales from the internet. Except for the true antiquarian dealers, whose customers are aficionados of the first state and the misprint on page 287, second-hand bookshops make less and less economic sense.

Second-hand booksellers are not in it for the money, of course: it is probably easier to make a good living on social security. The booksellers love books, though not necessarily their purchasers, and in their way are learned men. When they have been in the trade for many years they know everything about books except, possibly, their content. Possessed of astonishing memories, they say things like “I haven’t seen another copy since 1978”. Some of them seem destined to be mummified among their books like the silverfish, and probably cannot conceive of a better way to die.

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Chava (Eva) Samuel (1901-1989), the great mother of Israeli ceramics

A ceramic relief by artist Chava Samuel was found recently during the renovation of Independence Hall on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, the historic building where David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. The relief had been concealed behind a board for decades.

The piece had presumably been installed in the entrance to the hall in the fall of 1948. The relief features a seven-branched menorah and a Hebrew inscription: "In this building the establishment of the State of Israel was declared on the 5th of Iyyar 5708, 14.5.48."
Samuel, who was born in Essen, Germany in 1904, was one of the pioneers of Israeli ceramics. She came to Israel in 1934 and opened the first ceramics studio of its kind in the Jewish community of Jerusalem. She later opened a workshop in Rishon Letzion as well.
A number of her works were installed in public buildings. These include Zodiac Relief at the Kesem Cinema in Tel Aviv, where the first sessions of the Israeli Knesset were held, and ceramic walls in a number of locations, including one in the Yad Lebanim memorial in Rishon Letzion and another in the cellar of the Carmel Mizrahi winery in the same city, as well as one in the community center of Moshav Sitria. Samuel died in 1989.
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Outstretched to the future

I grew up in a converted white clapboard church in the center of a small New England town to a family of artists and anthropologists. One side nurtured artistic creation, while the other explored, among other things, the function of art in society. My interest in clay is an intersection of these two sides, art and its function, both holy and humble. For three years, I apprenticed in the workshops of North Carolina potters Matt Jones and Mark Hewitt. Their work combines traditions, from the Anglo-Oriental school of Leach, Hamada, and Cardew to the folk pottery of the south-eastern United States and many places between. In their workshops I learned to love these simple pots; adorned or bare, quiet and strong, they make their place comfortably at the table or hearth and speak to the thousands of years of pots before them.
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Fish@... in Saloniki

Feel Earth

What it Means to Throw Clay and feel Earth Come Alive

There is life in this clay as I wedge before day, when morning is just but a gleam

Its life’s hard to feel, when it’s not on a wheel, but my fingers are gentle and clean

So any heartbeat, that lies in the deep, is like waves that crash on the shore

And as I, wedge my clay, in the dawn before day, I will help this life to grow more

Slump in my chair, and brush back my hair, before lifting the first ball to me

A five-pound no more, but size is no chore, for a master with hands that can see

And its smack on the bat is loud as a crack, hunch over the faint little heart

With a sponge in my grip the water turns to slip, a push of the wheel now I start

At once it’s alive, it beating will thrive, I can feel my own heart speed the wheel

Off-center a bit, but its life has been lit, it’s alive and it moves with my feel

So I dive with the earth, and help to give birth, to a pot which this clay will now form

Be proud where you end, I tell my dear friend, but it trembles and shakes with reform

The clay moves not you, my words whisper true, as the form writhes in my grip

I cast up and down, the slip forms a crown, on its head which comes off in a strip

As my hands move in, its beating grows din, to center this clay is the devil

But I remember my phrase, and my hand does not raise, ‘til it’s round and perfectly level

My hands go to center, my fingertips enter, and I open the clay to a torus

I can tell that it’s scared with its insides so flared, my fingers move together in chorus

Sing now my dear! I implore you drop fear, my hands guide your way as you rise

Your form grows with majesty as you spin in front of me, you breathe ‘neath my hands with your cries

But suddenly I stop as you reach your full top, and I place my hands on your base

I listen and feel with the spins of the wheel, but I realize some thing’s out of place

For deep in your wall an air pocket’s small, a death wish for pots of all size

You don’t feel it that much, but it hurts when I touch, I fear this will be your demise

And it pains me so, when the wheel does slow, and gaze at your fabulous lines

You were princely, a king, your figure could sing, yet none of your grace undermines

The dawn crept near when I shed a tear, and pulled out a long coiled thread

Around fingers of life, I wrapped thread like a knife, and cut you from the bat so you’re dead

Severed and broken, your body a token, of clay that could breathe and laugh

And I look at the thread which claimed you instead, and sighing I cut you in half

There in your wall, I see a bubble, that’s all, what brought you down from your top

Cannot be, it’s not fair, I feel the despair, as I throw your two halves in the slop

But dawn has a way, of clearing dismay, and as the sun rose so did I

I felt through my feet, a breathing in beat, coming from the earth and the sky

It breathed both in time, to clay’s heart and mine, and I saw myself split like the pot

But my breathing lived on, though my body was gone, for the heart and the soul don’t get caught

The sunlight now broke from cracking night’s cloak, like gold ships from the sea I saw light

The majesty I saw put in contrast the flaw, in the pot thrown at dawn after night

Yes the form it was great, but that did not make, the clay who it was ‘neath my hands

It was beating and breath, not cause of death, which defined my dear friend in my plans

So again let us throw! I shout all aglow, We will make such a form never seen!

Clay on the bat, loud as a crack, I drip you in water ‘till you gleam

And this time I touch, not one beat as such, but the breath of the earth and the sky

I pull and there’s life, give beauty with knife, I’m a potter, with clay I can fly

Pottery and Titanic