Sunday, July 09, 2006

inter alia

There are Hassan Massoudy postcards! I saw a copy of the "religion of love" one in the British Museum - it didn't have the bottom swirls and looked like billowing blue-black sails. The British Museum translation was slightly different (and superior): "I follow the religion of love: whatever way love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith."

Other postcards I have:
- Two bold, black strokes (rather like a swan) depicting the letter 'k'
- A fantastic collage entitled "Narkissos" and containing a little bit of all the world
- A row of cadets at the Virginia Military Institute, sporting identical crew-cuts and grey shirts, reading Howl, with their caps and notebooks laid out neatly in front of them
- Drawings of fossils.

This weekend I read, among other things, Caddy Ever After (using the first person singular doesn't work very well, but still a satisfying book) and Joan Didion's heartbreaking The Year of Magical Thinking, in which she talks about the sudden death of her husband and illness of her daughter - part personal memoir, part detached investigation into the aspects of grief (because we are taught, when confronted with the new or the harrowing, to read up, to go to the literature).