Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Dear old England ... trying to arrange car insurance for next week and discovering all the obstacles that have been created if you live abroad, don't have a UK licence, etc. And car rental isn't much easier - and costs an arm and a leg.

Dear old England ... where hospitals rearrange operations at the last minute and throw all your plans awry.

If you're around the St Pancras area 9am on Sunday morning let me know.

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Starting to teach 'Heart of Darkness' (how many times now?) and a colleague lends me 'Deconstruction in a Nutshell' a series of conversations with Jacques Derrida. Years ago these kinds of coincidences were commonplace - today I found that funny tingling down the spine again.

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Radio 4 early morning while shaving: the bee problem. Due to the bad weather bees are suffering. The expert explains the effect of a large raindrop on the bee's flight. Sudden sense of Deleuzeian becoming.

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"So I think we have to read them again and again and I feel that, however old I am, I am on the threshold of reading Plato and Aristotle. I love them and I feel I have to start again and again and again. It is a task which is in front of me, before me." (Derrida, The Villanova Roundtable, p.9)


This kind of statement cheers me enormously.

2 comments:

walrus said...

"It begins the moment you set foot ashore, the moment you step off the boat's gangway. The heart suddenly, yet vaguely, sinks. It is no lurch of fear. Quite the contrary. It is as if the life-urge failed, and the heart dimly sank."
-- DH Lawrence, "Dull London" (1928)

Sorry to hear about your father -- & sorry not to be in the vicinity . . .

My father had heart trouble -- he had stents inserted into his arteries about 6 months ago & has made a full recovery. But you're right - they cancelled the op a couple of times before he went in . . .

" . . . And the sense of abject futility in it all only deepens the sense of abject dulness, so all there is to do is to go away." (DHL again)

W.

belgianwaffle said...

Yes - that pretty much sums it up - although when I first came to Belgium I'd get off the Eurostar in Waterloo with a sense of excitement and expectation. What's happened to Britain? Or me, for that matter?

As for stents - that was the initial option but he needs more work done than that. Obviously next week is going to be tough. However, everyone says the op. can help enormously and St Goerge's seems to be the place to go.

Posts between Sunday and Sunday are likely to be infrequent.

OK - back to the chalk face.

The C.

April Fool?