Here’s a link to a bunch of Michele Bernstein’s pieces translated from Potlatch and Situationist International including a critique on Marienbad in 1962.

I wish Not Bored, who translated them, would also undertake a translation of the impossible to find La Nuit novel Bernstein wrote and upload it in the interests of town planning (take your pick ou) and public reading service.

Just went for a little field trip in the -5 (which feels like minus 9) arctic outflow warning and it wasn’t too bad.

But I was wearing ski-ing clothes in anticipation of the arctic encounter and my mind was full of warm thoughts about penguins and their supreme intellect.

There’s a bit of a wind out there alright.

This is a major cold weather event for us. Even tho’ by Edmonton standards it’s tropical.

Sweet baby Jesus….

“It was always women who were publishing Joyce…” Sylvia Beach (Self Portrait)

(“My bewk will never come out” Joyce to Sylvia)

486

486 people committed suicide in Ireland in 2010 and 2011. (possibly higher than this number)

RTE Frontline have sensibly done a programme/discussion to address what Ireland can do to tackle mental health problems.

Phyllis MacNamara so brave and articulate to tell her husband’s story. Very poignant her insights, especially on anxiety. I hope they listen to her. (“Nobody knew what to do, there isn’t any place in the system…”)

I had a beautiful walk last night and learnt that even those who wear snow boots take a tumble. A new addition to my tradition of falling over! Tho’ this tumble had the dignity to relate to a weather event. I was exiting the petrol station with my packet of chocolate buttons in hand ($5, they’re imported from Birmingham), it was snowing and all was peaceful and delightful til Whamble! down on my arse, the buttons took flight in an incredible arc into the air and flew two petrol pumps over.

Weirdly no one remotely noticed, so I was able to scramble up and over to them sans molto embarrassment. They were retrieved and with a bit of a batter to the kidney I took my snowboots onward.

I have to say the walk before the tumble was so beautiful and quiet it was worth falling over. I was stunned at how redundant cars are once everyone is asleep and had the whole road to myself, the snow was coming down, turning or rolling nearly in the light of the lamp posts and floating down to me. Perfection.  I had to keep stopping to admire it. You can see the photo of one such stoppage below.

On trying to find La Nuit

The companion volume, La nuit (Buchet-Chastel, 1961), is long out of print and has not been reissued or translated.

mainly I walk

“No,” Gilles said, “I walk, mainly I walk.”

All The King’s Horses par Michèle Bernstein

Traduction par John Kelsey. (Semiotext(e))

It sounds like snow.

There’s a sound with snow even before it begins.

Muffled.

*

Probably our most significant weather event of the season has passed me by unnoticed because I have been so consumed with my book and work. A sorry forecaster indeed.

The other day a woman gave me impending news of the weather and the cold drop. Unheard of! I am always ahead on the weather. Except I’m not. Now I am officially behind.

But I have managed to triumph in the area of cooking omelettes.  Thanks to Jamie Oliver’s how to cook an omelette section and amid a chorus of cynicism from the small male, who has finally, 3 successful omelettes later, conceded it’s a triumph.

Alas he’s requesting I cook omelettes at completely unGodly hours.

*