Again, again

To you, who never begged me vows or verse,
My gift shall be my absence

I know. I know. Still.

And worthy to be remembered...

On a wall in the Old North Church in Boston:

THIS TABLET
IN MEMORY OF
THOMAS JOHNSTON
OF BRATTLESTREET
BOSTON
------------ * ------------
BUILDER OF THE ORGAN
IN THIS CHURCH
And worthy to be remembered
as an engraver
and heraldic painter
+
He died May 8, 1767
at the age of 59 years

Camino de Santiago

Pictures of pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela.

I was joking at first when I said that what I wanted to do after my bond ended was the Spanish Pilgrimage, but it seems like a good way to transit from one stage of life to another (assuming that I do move on to another stage after the bond), and the routes seem to be full of true pilgrims and tourists, so they must still be walkable.

The Witches of Eastwick

There are witches in a little backwater suburban town in Rhode Island and they are women whose husbands have divorced them. Three witches, of course. Discovered their powers upon leaving their husbands/their husbands leaving them. Sleeping with random men in the town - mainly married men who are bored with their wives. Struggling to earn a living (only divorced women work). Looking for the next love affair, for whatever will make their lives that little less dreary. A dark stranger moves into the empty mansion, holds sabbats, holds sexual ceremonies (or rather, gives them a place to hold their own), energises them. You can see how this is going to develop. But it's Updike and so very clever, very funny - though it sounds like it's written from a woman's perspective but (I think) with details that a man would find sexy. The reader is made complicit in the casual, spiteful, malicious magic that is practised - and there's quite a good deal of it, and all of it distinctly feminine, or at least female; the dark stranger is the least convincing main character in the book. And of course full of unattractive suburban sex.

And then I realise how terribly self-centred and -absorbed I am

A 14-year-old Indian girl won the fight to have her two-year marriage to a teenage boy annulled and to go back to school.

[well, because]

You tell yourself they are the choices you make. And in some way they are the choices you make. "A creature part willing, part consenting, part chosen for."

Grace

I came home and found a couple of prints and a letter waiting for me. Both photographs of a desk - one with a laptop playing Wilco (How to fight loneliness) and a crucifix behind, and the other a laptop displaying the buff, hairy torso of a male bodybuilder with a photo of Virginia Woolf's profile propped up on top of the laptop. Evidently I can't describe photographs. But they were amazing, and all the more so for being unexpected. Thank you - and all the sanity that reason and circumstance allow to you too.

Franzen

Jonathan Franzen quotes from a letter written to him by Don DeLillo in his (Franzen's) Harper's essay (retitled "Why Bother?" in his collection, How to be alone):

The novel is whatever novelists are doing at a given time. If we're not doing the big social novel fifteen years from now, it'll probably mean our sensibilities have changed in ways that make such work less compelling to us - we won't stop because the market dried up. The writer leads, he doesn't follow. The dynamic lives in the writer's mind, not in the size of the audience. And if the social novel lives, but only barely, surviving in the cracks and ruts of the culture, maybe it will be taken more seriously, as an endangered spectacle. A reduced context but a more intense one.

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

...

Postscript: If serious reading dwindles to near nothingness, it will probably mean that the thing we're talking about when we use the word 'identity' has reached an end.

I think I've located my discomfort with this collection of essays - reading them is a bit like having a college conversation all over again. Admittedly a more articulate, thoughtful and sophisticated conversation than I ever had in college, but with much the same ideals and anger. Which I've more or less lost by the wayside, for better or worse.

Today

we had lunch at Brewerkz, where Su-Lin conclusively decided she didn't like beef. Next time we share mains and appetisers (Su-Lin, do you like nachos?) and a jug of beer?

Egotism And Spiritual Pride

Sayers in a letter to her parents in 1921:

"I can't get the work I want, nor the money I want, nor consequently, the clothes I want, nor the holiday I want, nor the man I want!! And then people tell me of girls who are oppressed and embarrassed by the possession of an income of 300 pounds a year, and feel that they ought not to have it and ought to be doing slum work and being useful to society. I call that pure egotism and spiritual pride. How thankfully would you or I support life under a load of similar embarrassments."

Reasons To Read Dante

From David Coomes' biography of Dorothy Sayers, A Careless Rage for Life, courtesy of the Repository Used Book Collection:

In a remarkable letter to Charles Williams in 1944, having got it into her head that Dante had been a passionate lover, [Dorothy Sayers] wrote of 'the distinguishing marks of True Bedworthiness in the Male', finding these 'to consist in the presence of Three Grand Assumptions':

1. That the primary aim and object of Bed is that a good time should be had by all.

2. That (other things being equal) it is the business of the male to make it so.

3. That he knows his business.

The first Assumption rules out at once all Satyromaniacs, sadists, connoisseurs in rape, egotists, and superstitious believers in female reluctance, as well as Catholic (replenish-the-earth) utilitarians and stockbreeders.

The second Assumption rules out the hasty, the clumsy, the lazy, the inconsiderate, the peremptory, the untimely and (in most cases) the routinier...

The third Assumption rules out the tentative as well as the incompetent and inadequate.

On Follies

Sunday night had lemon-and-butter spaghetti (and raw egg yolk - at which point everyone slowed down in their eating) and chicken with yoghurt and corsican omelette (goat cheese) and raspberry chocolate pavlova with strawberry jam instead and yellow cream (jy: the cream's white in the picture. S: have you not read Laura? Cows give yellow milk in summer and white milk in winter. Ma had to colour the winter milk with a carrot so that her butter would be yellow). It also had the beginning of Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle and ice wine and talk. cp: Tell him about your foolishness. Fay: My foolishness? cp: Your folly. Yish: In a Renaissance garden?

Saturday night had sand and sea and the night wind.

Tea and Thou

Painted on the side of a van:

COFFEE AND ME     NON-DAIRY

One Reason I'll Never Be A Writer

I'm told that there were a couple of brothers (? perhaps it was a single solitary person) working on a novel or script who were penniless and so, for the time it took them to finish their novel (or script), collected free packets of tomato ketchup from fast food restaurants and diluted the ketchup to drink as tomato juice.

I don't think I would have the stomach for that.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

(1) It was not wondrously strange, and it should have been.

(2) Alan Rickman has the most mournful voice ever heard in a cinema.

Huh

Microsoft has reached a deal with Indonesia over the tens of thousands of pirated versions of Windows programmes used in government departments - Indonesia is to pay Microsoft $1 for every computer found using pirated software.

What? Or Why I'll Never Be An Ornithologist

From the BBC: "Migrating birds are unlikely to be seriously affected by offshore wind farms, according to a study. Scientists found that birds simply fly around the farm, or between the turbines; less than 1% are in danger of colliding with the giant structures."

Engineer-ness

[idle conversation on a colleague]

Me: ...he's not that much of an engineer.

[the Deputy Director]: He's entirely an engineer. You can see it a mile away. He exudes engineer-ness.

Me: Oh well, who doesn't here?

DD: You.

Some books

Read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, which is so very anthropological a science fiction book, and a rich and subtle and sensitive (I wish I didn't think in reviewers' adjectives) and entirely complete invention. But I couldn't quite manage to think of her androgynes as androgynes - they all seemed to be men with occasionally feminine characteristics - though whether that's a fault in her language, or the English language as such (where are the feminists?) or me, I'm not sure.

Also read Diana Wynn Jones' The Dark Lord of Derkholm and The Year of the Griffin. She takes an interesting premise to its logical and unexpected conclusion, and it always works. And is funny.

Re-read Anne Carson's The Autobiography of Red like a long drink.

Dipped into William Matthews' selected poems, which I found serendipitously in Harvard. I love finding books I've forgotten I'm looking for. Perhaps I'll find something and put it up here, though his poems aren't so good in isolation from each other.

And am starting on Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch. Perhaps one day we could make a pilgrimage to Calasso and sit at his feet?