The rain today was the razor blades slashing the eyelid variety. Relentless when it fell. It’s not the variation I like, too vicious and biting. But the wind I love, the combination of the terrific bluster with that rain. Kind of a West Coast roar or rumble. One that’s grand to look out the window at. But something of an assault to move among.
A good chat with two people who like DM Fraser today among other topics. Satisfying indeed.
Les soirs we are utilizing multiple hot water bottles and I am very glad we have two couches to contain the readers. My boyo polished off five hundred pages this evening and then turned to me hoping for the third book — another 250 — that sadly we don’t possess. Who says boys don’t read?!!
My violin is utterly out of tune —
Between 1am and 3am the weather network said it would snow/rain. Bump! Weather excitement! Except how can it snow at 6 degrees above? I just turned to investigate this via the snow probability calculator and it gave me the following response to inputting the figures 6 degrees with 93 per cent humidity.
Melting Air Temperature is: 0.4°C
It will snow in hell before it does here…
Received a lovely note this week from an unexpected source (thanks M) at the end of a brutal day standing in check out line around 9pm. It was a beautiful note that gave me pause and I had pause into which to pour the pause at that precise moment since my shopping accomplice had disappeared off to investigate a video game.
It reminded me how letters used to come and often the reply would begin with detailing what a person was doing when they received your letter. Not uncommonly it would be I was only thinking about you when your letter arrived, or your letter arrived on a day that blah blah. So the moment of landing would be imprinted and returned back to the sender. Also when letters crossed this was detailed. Our letters must have crossed
With email, letters can reach us in every spot we stand practically, there’s little delay or interruption and we are seconds rather than days away from each other as correspondents. This also means a note can arrive to the precise second that it could be uplifting or comforting to a person and it’s incredible when that occurs unexpectedly and it’s someone you haven’t spoken to for a long while.
Elvis a dilemma
The I love Elvis tee-shirt is a bit over the top. You know it will cause people who love Elvis to talk Elvis with you and since you don’t love Elvis what are you going to say?
I could say, the truth, that I found it and liked the shape of the arms and the goofy pink heart and purple letters.
That isn’t going to cut it for people who actually love Elvis.
Well I could offer the only Elvis story I have, you know the one about the woman who worked in the newsagents in Las Vegas, the dancing and the horses out the back.
No one who loves Elvis wants to hear about horses out the back.
She did say he was a gentleman.
Nah. Won’t cut it. They’re tired of the gentleman talk.
I could say I saved Elvis from the landfill.
Nah.
What do you suggest then?
Wear the tee shirt inside out. Loving Elvis is not something you can fake.
Today’s variety of sunshine is in the “definitely not the dining room light dimmer switch” category. It’s full on pixels. Leaves bright mustard a la Blackpool illuminations.
Did I mention that my favourite weather forecaster ever is filmmaker/artist/woodwork maestro David Lynch? His weather forecasts are sporadic, atmospheric and he has a lovely gravelly delivery, but he only forecasts/reports LA weather. I wish he’d set up a channel and weather station and go international.
Dream machine iii
So …. as we say in Hiberno… from my question yesterday about whether a reading of a particularly particular prose might produce the same flickering as Gysin’s invented Dream Machine I had an incidental experience.
The evening unwound with a three hour reading of Sandor Ferenczi’s Clinical Diary — luvly bit of light Sat night reading (!). Rather than requested entranced flickering I found myself thrust into a more potent variety. I read the word matricide early on and it induced the feeling of being repeatedly dropped off the back off a moving train and from then on, whilst it was certainly deeply engaging and entrancing, it was consistently like bouncing along an iron railroad on a bungee cord.
Rather than the flicker of light through a tree, it was a full faced open-mouthed wolf snarling between the trees.
And it reminded me never to wish for any such thing again from prose. Such an experience might be better sought in a vat of gin! It’s why we have psychedelic drugs!
But on a last note: it’s Beckett’s How it is? that was the text that didn’t come to mind when I was trying to think of them yesterday.
Rhotic 2.11
Why did I ever get up from the floor at all?