Saturday night in the world, in winter
is an astonishing piece by DM Fraser. The finest piece I’ve read thus far about this city. Not a street name in sight. Yet all the discombobulation inside and outside the window and that walks along with you somedays. And weather, excellent meditation on winter and momentary surrender.
Snow being something you look out at here, in my experience, tho’ now we are beginning to dress for it.
Mr Fraser foxtrotted me away from Bataille. Lovely to be stunned on a Sunday night foray to the stacks. It’s a story I’d like to learn by heart and call up when crossing at the traffic lights.
poolish
Hello Kitty flip flops belonging to seventy year old feet.
Stomach scar on pale flesh that was too low to be open heart surgery.
Two female in their late seventies high five each other on recognition in the shower.
Aquafit, an undefeatable nation that once bounced in the shallow end, has morphed to rule the entire pool.
Aquafit: Resting place for house music rejected by aerobics.
No lifejacket if you are more than 90 pounds.
Industrial noise protection ear plugs worn to keep water out of ears while swimming.
What is the definition of swim continuously?
What if you cannot swim continuously?
Are you swimming intermittently?
Can continuous swimming be policed or is it based on an honour breathing system?
The strange thing about flooding is the never ending feeling it will always be back. It may receed, but somehow there’s the promise of return. A reminder of something. I’m here.
I was playing with this image in a futuristic story that I wrote earlier this year called Four Upping. That water would, will continue to rise.
Must get back to it. Stories tend to receed similiarly after flooding the brain or getting beaten back. Yet they tend to call again at odd moments.
This is a story I would like to create on the new Bookriff software.
Astonishing flood footage from Cork, Clare, Galway. Incl. paintings being lifted from gallery @ UCC in frantic bid to save them. Note the attempt to open the main road but basically trying to drown the farmers houses near by. Jesus. Automobiles over folk.
http://www.rte.ie/news/primetime/
wind
Wind rural. I have Wind urban but it’s currently missing in bluster and will join its windy sister forthwith
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVFU-rbu328&hl=en_GB&fs=1&]
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I’ve had to place myself on a strict Bataille diet. I’ve had to limit the Monsieur to un chapitre per journee towards the end of the journee otherwise I spend the entire journee wandering in his words. And there are a couple of other pressing priorities such as feeding the chickens and learning to write Ruby computer code or shoes code (or building v simple graphic apps in Shoes with Ruby language), whichever it is the Puffin and I are learning, thanks to the mighty Sarah Mei and her inspired ideas and instructions.
Our weather channel with literary forecasts continues to grow over at youtube.com. View all 8 forecasts and counting speculation here
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Day two with Georges (Bataille) has proved mighty fruitful. We’ve covered piety, obsession with death, bull fighting, Charles, Robert, Catholicism, split second and steady and lasting obligation, mothers, nerves, odious utterance, transgression… et en plus.
It’s rather like the most sitting down with the most comprehensive menu ever handed to you and finding endless first choices and be able to afford to choose every one of them.
Pastoral
This piece got me brain thumping. In relation to how the Pastoral might be played with …. and juggled or inverted.
Jonathan Raban in NYRB on Dorothea Lange
Pastoral, Empson wrote, was a “puzzling form” and a “queer business” in which highly educated and well-heeled poets from the city idealized the lives of the poorest people in the land. It implied “a beautiful relation between the rich and poor” by making “simple people express strong feelings…in learned and fashionable language.” From 1935 onward, no one would read Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar or follow Shakespeare’s complicated double plots without being aware of the class tensions and ambiguities between the cultivated author and his low-born subjects.