Painted shoes

(1) We're at a shoe shop in the Heeren, which sells rather cute hand-painted shoes. My sister likes the white ones with splashes of paint, which look like something Jackson Pollock would have done if he had used the whitewashed Panda(?) schoolgirl shoes we used to wear for a canvas. I like the ones in shades of red with an orange line running down. The Rothko ones? my sister says. - They're not bad.

(2) Later, mulling over the shoes -

Me: But what would I do with red shoes?
She: Wear them!
Me: But nothing would match them.
She: Well you know how I have these crimson silk Adidas sneakers I really like?
Me: Yeah?
She: And all my clothes are purple or green?
Me: Uh-huh.
She: I never wear the sneakers because they clash with my clothes.
Me: Right.
She: But I think you should get the red shoes! All your clothes are black or blue. You can wear them with jeans.

(3) Back at the shoe shop. She gets the Jackson Pollock shoes; I get, at her instigation, an entirely different pair. This time they look like something Roy Lichenstein (the guy who did the 40-foot cartoons? Is that the right name?) might have done on a bad day.

Me: You know what you are? You're a multiplier effect!
She: Yes!

list

Well this is your lasting legacy, that I sneak off from the Singapore delegation to queue in the rain for a Rilo Kiley/Modest Mouse show, neither of which I knew when with you but would not have found if not for you. And the Shins and the White Stripes and my obsession with Jeff Tweedy (though not the new album, which I cannot bring myself to like in its entirety), and Frank O'Hara and James Merrill and Wallace Stevens's The Man with the Blue Guitar, Woody Allen and Christopher Guest and the Coen brothers, and even Marianne Moore's poem on the Brooklyn Dodgers - if it all came to nothing but a handful of poems and songs, wouldn't it have been worth it anyway?

Rilo Kiley

Am listening to The Execution Of All Things with a pleasant feeling of serendipity. Always meant to check out the album but never got round to it and then I walked into the Shepherd's Bush Empire for the Modest Mouse/Bright Eyes show (Bright Eyes I can take or leave, but Modest Mouse! In London! And a damn good show too) and thought hey that's a good opening band and then found out it was Rilo Kiley! So I got the album after the show and it is pretty good.

I often ask for recommendations, but sometimes it's even better to find these things yourself, isn't it? In such moments all the pieces of the world come together.

London

I think I fell in love with London all over again this time. Not Oxford - I'm not sure I ever did fall out of love with it - went to visit my sister on Sunday and got there a little earlier and walked up New College Lane in the cool morning light assailed by memory - but I had forgotten how much I owe England.

...I knew that, if I fell out of this love or if it fell away from under me, the vistas which it had opened would still be there and the wind which had come up would not die down.

More later. London was my interregnum. Guess it's time to work now?

Falling

"This explains perhaps why I have never steered myself much. An American friend once said to me rebukingly: 'You never seem to make any positive choice; you just let things happen to you.' But the things that happen to one often seem better than the things one chooses. Even in writing poetry, which is something I did early choose to do, the few poems or passages which I find wear well have something of accident about them (the poems I did not intend to write) or, to put it more pretentiously, seem 'given'. So Magilligan Strand was like falling in love. For such occasions the word 'falling' is right; one does not step into love any more than one steps asleep - or awake. For awake, like asleep, is what one falls, and to keep falling awake seems to me the salt of life much more than existentialist defiance. We cannot of course live by Keats's Negative Sensibility alone, we must all, in E. M. Forster's phrase, use 'telegrams and anger'; all the same what I feel makes life worth living is not the clever scores but the surrenders - it may be to the life-quickening urge of an air-raid, to nonsense talked by one's friends, to a girl on top of the Empire State building, to the silence of a ruined Byzantine church, to woods, or weirs, or to heat dancing on a gravelled path, to music, drink or the smell of turf smoke, to the first view of the Atlantic or to the curve of a strand which seems to stretch to nowhere or everywhere and to ages before and after the combustion engine which defiled it."

- Louis MacNeice, "Landscapes of Childhood and Youth" (pages from an unwritten book).

Interregnum

"The chimes chimed and I left Cornell, had more than a month left to fill in. Marking time but not killing it. Once I had wanted to kill time but not any more. Because I was in love and because I knew that, if I fell out of this love or if it fell away from under me, the vistas which it had opened would still be there and the wind which had come up would not die down."

- from Louis MacNeice's The Strings are False.

Which I found in London! Somewhere on Charing Cross. I had forgotten I was looking for the book, which makes it all the better.

London and assorted observations

(1) I'm flying to London tomorrow for a few days. Study trip. Anybody wants anything? So far I've orders for chocolates, a Hat Full of Sky, other Pratchetts, Cosmopolitan, Mixmag, duty-free alcohol... SMS/email me ok?

(2) I would sleep with Jeff Tweedy's voice any day.

Late-night maggi mee

My brother woke up hungry at 1.30 a.m. (he had slept at 5 the previous evening) so we went down and had maggi mee.

Isn't that such a university thing? Something has come full cycle, but I'm not sure what.

Sexy Scrabble (reprise)

Don't you want a t-shirt that says IMPRIMBADTWIGGY?

I add that I contributed the verb to BADTWIGGY, even if she did afterwards metamorphosise into either a contradiction or a tease (the little slut).

My family and other animals (not quite, but I couldn't resist)

My mom's going to Taiwan with my grandmother to visit her (my mom's) brother and his family. Think it may be the first time she's travelling alone. Well not alone - she'll have my grandmother and my grandmother's maid and then my uncle's family (wife + 2 kids + innumerable dogs) and I think my aunt's mother too and possibly various other relatives - but without any of us. So I watched her pack for a bit tonight, in a strange role reversal, except that she knows exactly what she wants and where the bits go.

The point of all this was. She showed me a Taiwanese note with zhong hua min guo (you know what I mean, even if my pinyin is sadly askew) on it and said that her father named his first four sons for Taiwan: Zhen Zhong, Zhen Hua, Zhen Min, and Zhen Guo. Then came one more son, so he was named Zhen Xin. Was he Taiwanese? I ask in surprise. No, but he hated the Communists and was a strong supporter of the Kuomintang. He has a letter, a something, signed by someone then high up in the KMT thanking him for his help. And he never dared to return to China for fear of being arrested by the Communists.

I'm more or less happy with being rootless and Anglicised but once in a while one wishes - well, to be able to speak Chinese, for a start.

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our heart, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

- Carol Ann Duffy

(Thank you.)

There's a garret in your future

On starving artists - my boss once said the same thing, that he didn't want to give arts groups too much money cause he thought artists produced their best work when poor. Bloody science students.

Glass houses and stones

On the one hand, my colleague finds a printout of Borges's essay, "The Library of Babel", on my desk, and says, this cannot be, there's no such thing as the library of Babel, and who is this Borges? Moment of genuine surprise - surely everyone knows of Borges, even non-faffy people? Well, I say, he's this South American short story writer and essayist...also a poet...very good. Er, and quite famous. My colleague is dubious.

And on the other hand, walking back with my brother today, we pass by someone smoking and my brother says, people who smoke are stupid. He divides smokers into smart and stupid. People who don't start smoking at all - smart. People who do start - stupid. People who start and then stop - smart (well first stupid and then smart). People who start and don't stop - stupid. Well (I say feebly) they get hooked and then they can't help it... He amends his categorisation of the world. People who start smoking and know they should but can't stop - weak. People who start smoking and don't know they should stop - stupid. That's a very harsh moral universe you live in, I say.

Was/Am I that bad? We're awfully judgemental people, aren't we?

Conversation (2)

I am telling you this because a conversation is a journey, and what gives it value is fear. You come to understand travel because you have had conversations, not vice versa. What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning.

- Anne Carson, Plainwater

Conversation (1)

In the city of Burgos lies El Cid himself - beside Ximena he rests in an eternal conversation. Beneath the transept of Burgos Cathedral they have lain since 1921, and before that, in a burial place in the city from the year 1835, and previously, seven hundred years in the monastery of San Pedro outside the city walls. By now, she must know every word he is going to say. Yet she kisses his mouth and the eyes of his face, she kisses his hands, his truth, his marrow. What is the conversation of lovers? Compared with ordinary talk, it is as bread to stones. My heart gets dizzy. It is the most difficult photograph I have tried to take so far: up the scaffolding, hand over hand and out onto the pinnacles they blow, her hair like a red sail as they veer around storks' nests in the wind and clutch wide at the railings, leaning out over the tiny city, its clockwork shadows so crazily far below. One shriek goes flaring and flattening away down the valley. Gone. She kisses him on the shoulder in the Moorish custom. They look at one another. They look into the light. They jump.

There is no question I covet that conversation. There is no question I am someone starving. There is no question I am making this journey to find out what that appetite is. And I see him free of it, as if he had simply crossed to the other side of a bridge, I see desire set free in him like some ray of mysterious light. Now tell me the truth, would you cross that bridge if you came to it? And where, if you made the grave choice to give up bread, would it take you? You see what I fear.

- Anne Carson, Plainwater