July 4, 2010
The scent that remains with me from my recent time in Paris is that of the urinal.
The stench of piddle overwhelmed The Seine.
It was in the corner of the RER B train.
So pungent you could practically taste it in the 32 degree roasting air.
A Mexican pensioner, fresh from the Camino del very long walk place in Spain, consulted me on it before hitching his garter up to the Palais Royal.
July 4, 2010
Just did a fairly patchy reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay: Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century, which I came across while searching my files for a Sontag essay. Anyway parts of it intersected nicely with my ruminating on space, and strangely, somewhat irrelevantly but why ever the heck not, the question plagued me afterwards as to why terraced housing never took off or even showed up in Vancouver? Why did houses insist on detachment?
I know from Paris arcades to terraced houses, the mind does its scotch-hop.
July 4, 2010
A common sight, becoming crowded mind you by the “ghost estate”, across rural Ireland is the “pile of stones”. The pile of stones are original two room houses either abandoned or fallen into absolute disrepair in a field, or beside a more sizeable newer maison, or failing that, used only for the storage of turf, or farming related gear.
The houses consisted of two rooms only with a fireplace at each end. There were usually no bathrooms (these would have been added). What’s interesting about them is/was the one floor, two room approach. They’re utilitarian on many levels include the containment of heat, or generating of heat (not an easy undertaking believe me). Undoubtably people would dismiss them as an example of the limitations of poverty, but within that very restriction practical things were addressed. Overcrowding wasn’t one of them obviously, but perhaps the demarcation between inside and outside and the interaction between those two lives and provision of one for the other.
I was watching a Prime Time piece on the right to cut turf and something of a war is errupting that further underscores the rural/urban divide in Ireland. The Green lobby argue for preservation of the remaining bogs, the other side remain militant over the continued right to cut turf.
My ma switched to an oil fired range in her kitchen some years ago, while yes there was immediate heat, the price of oil soared and the fumes of the range were, on the last inhale, dreadful. I regretted her dismissing the previous solid fuel range, which needed some pretty serious repair because the smoke was overpowering. The oil fired range refused to work during the worst of this year’s winter there and she was without heat (and water) for some three weeks waiting on a man to come and fix it in perishing cold temperatures of -12. Whatever of the solid fuel seal being gone, at least she could have fired in a few sods and got some heat from it. I don’t entirely see how this “turf war” will pan out. You’ve such a reliance on the turf in that part of the country for heat, and what exactly is the worst of the two evils: continue to destroy the bog or fund oil fueled invasions of foreign countries.
The irony isn’t lost on the matter that this now is an urban/rural quandary, since when I lived in Dublin we were all burning Bord na Mona briquettes!
At this point we should be able to generate a solid fuel from the other waste we create. No government seems willing to tackle the plastic monopoly. Produce etc is fired into plastic and the plastic is fired into the landfill and that equation remains a daft one.
July 4, 2010
On the topic of public space it occurred to me that a hospital emergency room is also public space, occupied religiously by the pubic and having the public move through it. Yet for all our public space the main hospital ER in the city really is quite a squashed affair. I was watching the staff squeeze by each other, share screens and make ample use of that space all night, but why is it contracted into such tightness?
There’s a house in the neighbourhood significantly smaller than those around it, it sits rather like a dolls house between and below the gutters of its neighbours. It’s a dotey affair. It struck me as kind of ridiculous that people inhabit these much bigger houses when the doll’s house would meet most peoples needs. Yet housing as a private enterprise is so concerned with expansion, tax breaks for renovation, add another layer, extend, expand, rather unsustainable as an urban model.
Due to some restrictions they faced, friends built their dwelling around a series of garden sheds. (The walls were enhanced for insulation with a sheet of plastic, thick wadge of polystyrene, another sheet of plastic and plywood) When you are inside you’d have no idea they are sheds, it’s only when step away up the garden that you can see they are simply garden sheds. I don’t know if they’d stand a hundred years, but were cosy and adequate.
July 4, 2010
“He (Joyce) acted on the brazen assumption that his book would not defer to the current taste of the public but serve to invent a new sort of reader, someone who after that experience might choose to live in a different way. He wanted to free people from all kinds of constriction, among them the curse of passive readership. ”
“Although Ulysses is a book of privacies and subjectivities, an astounding number of its scenes are set in public space – libraries, museums, bars, cemeteries and most of all the streets. Its characters enjoy the possibilities afforded by those streets for random, unexpected meetings. ” Ulysses and Us. Declan Kiberd
July 3, 2010
Last night I had a v curious test at the hospital where they inject dye into your vein (blood) and fire you into a tunnel simultaneously. What follows is a surge of heat from the top of your head to the other end — a zippo lighter effect!
Technology and tests are often passive. Put your arms out, take a picture, squash body part into square and don’t move. This one was active! There was something sporty in the instruction we’re injecting the dye now spurt, spurt, spurt and then slide, whirr tunnel and SURGE — did a small arrow just pass through me?
Hospitals are a crossroads where in the morphine mid song you meet your fellow humans on a parallel platform covered in the same standard issue hot blanket. The man beside me at the tunnel intersection had lost the use of his hands after waking one night to sudden onset numbness below his shoulders. Another man had temporarily lost the use of his hands because he was rolling drunk, abusive and post a pub brawl the RCMP had to handcuff him to the bed so his injuries could be treated.
Today thanks to the great medical care and their various infusions I am significantly improved.
July 2, 2010
“La moitié de l’année, les heures de liberté sont dans la nuit. Mais tous les matins, c’est la hantise du retard.
Départ à la nuit noire. Course jusqu’à la station. Trajet aveugle et chaotique au sein d’une foule serrée et moite. Plongée dans le métro tiède. Interminable couloir de correspondance. Portillon automatique. Entassement dans les wagons surchargés. Second trajet en autobus. Le travail est une délivrance. Le soir, on remet ça : deux heures, trois heures, quatre heures de trajet chaque jour.
Cette eau grise ne remue que les matins et les soirs. Le gros de la troupe au front du travail, l’arrière tient. Le pays à ses heures de marée basse.”
Extrait (voix sur) de L’amour existe par Maurice Pialat.
July 2, 2010
Vomiting trains..
“The train wound in curves along the narrow pass; he could see the front carriages and the labouring engine vomiting great masses of brown, black and greenish smoke, that floated away.” The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann.
July 2, 2010
Beans II
I have gone and replanted beans. This is a very daft thing to do, but I feel a call to battle with these slugs who have danced all over my beanog dream.
Unfortunately I have planted beans in a haphazard have-at-you- manner and will never be able to locate them until they show themselves, when no doubt the slugs to shall raise their pokey swords in the mushy night.