Report from the Love Books Launch of Isobel Dixon’s The Tempest Prognosticator

by Amanda on Nov 1st, 2011

Below we bring you a second report from the launch of The Tempest Prognosticator by Isobel Dixon at Melville’s Love Books. You can read our original coverage of the event online here.

Katrien Potgieter reflects on the “classy and intimate” affair:

The affair was classy and intimate, with Love Books’ owner and old varsity friend of Dixon’s, Kate Rogan, opening the evening’s events after 60 minutes of live whale song (appropriately and purposefully chosen, I was soon to discover).

Having Dixon present to read from her own work was quite something, as the literary agent from Cambridge has been busy promoting South African writers in London and selling rights all over the world. She started by stating that the tricky title serves to lure the unsuspecting reader into an all-too-familiar world, one that many modern urbanites might have started to drift away from. In this world, nature’s inhabitants and artistic representatives come together as Dixon cleverly and carefully draws on personal and intertextual webs of reference to tell all sorts of revelatory and celebratory tales. As any tale starts with a solid and captivating beginning, our introduction into the a collection must be centred on the question: what or who is a ‘tempest prognosticator’? By asking this question, we are doing exactly what Dixon wants us to; we are engaging with her text in an immediate and personal manner, right from the start. I was interested to find that a tempest prognosticator is a 19th century invention by George Merryweather, in which leeches are used in a barometer to warn of approaching stormy weather. The Leech Barometer (as it was also known) worked on the principle that 12 leeches, kept in glass jars inside the device, became agitated by approaching stormy weather and would attempt to climb out of the jars, triggering a small hammer, which would, in turn, strike a bell. The likelihood of a storm was indicated by the number of times the bell was struck. The title also refers to a poem in which Dixon performs her seemingly effortless craft of overlapping and intersecting modes of being. The natural and the social, the familiar and the strange, the real and the surreal all become interwoven into a rich textual fabric that is complex and compelling, yet striking and simple. This, I would venture to say, is one of the most striking features of Dixon’s writing.