Jamie: I really truly madly deeply passionately remarkably deliciously juicily love you.

Nina: (pouncing) Deeply! Deeply! You passed on deeply! Which was your word, which means that you couldn't have meant it. You're a fraud. You're probably a figment of my imagination ...

(Minghella, Truly Madly Deeply)

... and earlier ...

Algernon* (very rapidly): Cecily, ever since I first looked upon your wonderful and incomparable beauty, I have dared to love you wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly.

Cecily: I don't think you should tell me that you love me wildly, passionately, devotedly, hopelessly. Hopelessly doesn't seem to make much sense, does it?

(Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest)

__

* at this point in the play pretending to be the fictional Ernest

This afternoon watch Blockheads (Laurel & Hardy) with E.. She laughs like the proverbial drain. Thank God for funny bone genes.

*

Not snow exactly this morning but the same general effect.

*

Dinner: roast lamb with Grenaille potatoes in olive oil, garlic, rosemary and sea salt.

*

Watch the first 15 minutes of Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley. Thinking of ways of relating it to his earlier Truly, Madly, Deeply. Maybe a fruitless exercise.

*

Yesterday, wreck my right back tyre reversing into a kerb. Today, reaching for a book, I wrench the foot off the armchair in the dining room. As A. says to K.: "your husband's having a problem with the ground".

*

The Jam and Sound Affects. An album I never knowingly listened to 'at the time'. Now I hear it with fresh ears. Weller's lament for a 'lost' England seems ever more pertinent. That's entertainment ...

*

47 looms on Friday. Sounds so grown up. & yet -

*

"Big pieces of the world break off" (Philip Whalen)

Earlier this week I catch half a headline with the words "POTTER STAR IN ...". Immediately my mind's searching for his name ... finally: Michael Gambon. Needless to say, it's not Dennis Potter but Harry Potter that's meant - going to show how out of touch I am.

*

Notice stuck to a changing room locker at the pool - HORS SERVICE - with the English translation - OUT OF WORK. Someone more methodical than I would have collected such ephemera over the past 14 years and spun them into a column for one of the Sunday newspapers. (A suggestive mistranslation, though).

*

Watch the J.H. Prynne video Ron S. linked the other day. The first time I hear the voice and see the famous orange tie. A strange disconnect between the violence of the texts and his oh-so-Cambridge elegance of manner during the introduction.

*

Dream of frantically searching for a destination in the London Underground - Dempton, something like that. Later in the day it occurs to me that an analyst would probably suggest 'r-e-d-e-m-p-t-i-o-n'. From what, though?

*

Striking silhouettes of trees this morning on the white wall opposite the Mediatheque as I go in to return some CDs. Coming out I reach for my phone to take the picture - but the angle of the sun has changed (of course) and the silhouettes have gone.

*

Doorbell. My presence is required.

"Let's try what we can do new with wire. Give it a new shape, what can we do with matches, ... with matchboxes in a project. And then, later, I introduced the study of paper, what [sic] was at the time considered a wrapping material." (Josef Albers)

The Big News yesterday was the girls' school being evacuated due to a gas leak. Both Le Soir and De Standaard run articles in today's editions. In one photo you can see L & E - they're so pleased. Questions remain as to how it happened: human error by one if the team working on the roads or inaccurate diagrams of the gas pipe system?

*

Finish The Talented Mr Ripley in one day - an afternoon and an evening to be precise. Thoroughly enjoyable. It's fascinating to see Highsmith manipulate the detective genre into a vehicle for self-fashioning. I'm going to find the Minghella film version.

*

E's confusion of "telescope" for " horoscope". Inspired, in a way.

*

Bogged down in coursework rereadings - seeing the same errors repeated despite numerous revisions. Like trying to microwave week old pasta.

*

50,000 km service for the car. As usual I find myself bluffing my way through the questions at the desk - it's not the French, simply my ignorance of most aspects of car maintenance.

*
Already behind on the Joyce.

*

Teach a class on the first page and a half of Mrs Dalloway. Talk about the importance of hinges and waves. Forms of articulation and becoming. Also her use of idiom and graphic expression - how a phrase such as "work cut out" protrudes and breaks the comforting realism of simple description. Having looked at Nuvoletta's drowning last week, there's a fitting (if grim) logic moving on to Woolf.

Busy week.

"Create connections, if possible between everything in the world"

Turning the pages - slowly - of this one.

"Schwitters also spoke of "applied fragments of space" with which abstract painting often "leaps right up into space from the plane."" (from the essay 'Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage' by Isabel Schulz)

Will you walk into my wavetrap? said the spiter to the shy.

Come, smooth of my slate, to the beat of my blosh.

*

Is it in the now woodwordings of our sweet plantation where the branchings then will singingsing tomorrows gone and yesters outcome as satadays aftermoon lex leap smiles on the twelvemonthsminding?

*

Also Spuke Zerothruster

*

With sobs for his job, with tears for his toil, with horror for his squalor but with pep for his perdition, lo, the boor plieth as the laird hireth him.

*

Ace, deuce, tricks, quarts, quims. Mumtiplay of course and carry to their whole number. While on the other hand, traduced by their comedy nominator to the loaferst terms for their aloquent parts, sexes, suppers, oglers, novels and dice.

*

It follows that, if the two antesedents be bissyclitties and the three comeseekwenchers trundletrikes, then, Aysha Lalipat behidden on the footplate, Big Whiggler restant upsittuponable ...

*

Arthurgink's hussies and Everguin's men.

*

As Rhombulus and Rhebus went building rhomes one day.

*

I cain but are you able? Amicably nod. Gu it! So let's seth off betwain us.

*

so prim, and pick upon his ten ordinailed ungles, trying to undo with his teeth the knots made by his tongue, retelling humself by the math hour, long as he's brood, a reel of funnish ficts apout a shee ...

*

Benjermine Funkling

*

in what niched of time is Shee or where in the rose world trysting, that was the belle of La Chapelle, shapely Liselle, and the peg-of-my-heart of all the tompull or on whose limbs-to-lave her semicupiose eyes now kindling themselves are brightning ....

*

as though he, a notoriety, a foist edition, were a wrigular writher neonovene babe!

*

an you could peep inside the cerebralised saucepan of this eer illwinded goodfornobody, you would see in his house of thoughtsam (was you, that is, decontaminated enough to look discarnate) what a jetsam litterage of convolvuli of times lost or strayed, of lands derelict and of tongues laggin too, longa yamsayore, not only that but, search lighting, beached, bashed and beaushelled a la Mer pharahead into faturity, your own convolvulis pickninning capman would real to jazztfancy the novo takin place of what stale words whilom were woven with and fitted fairly featly for, so; and equally so, the crame of the whole faustian fustian, whether your launer's lightsome or your soulard's schwearmood, it is that, whenas the swiftshut scareyss of our pupilteachertaut duplex will hark back to lark to you symibellically that, though a day be as dense as a decade, no mouth has the might to set a mearbound to the march of a landsmaul, in half a sylb, helf a solb, holf a salb onward the beast of boredom, common sense, lurking gyrographically down inside his loose Eating S.S. collar is gogoing of whisth to you sternly how - Plutonic loveliaks twinnt Platonic yearlings - you must, how, in undivided reawlity draw the line somewhawre)

*

(and in truth, as a poor soul is between shift and shift ere the death he has lived through becomes the life he is to die into ...

*

our dappled yeye here, mine's prsbyoperian, shill and wall) we see the copyngink strayed line AL

___

(resumed reading through Finnegans Wake at the rate of one page each day on 1 January 2011 )

2:50 pm / through a downstairs window a plane (a.) flies from right to left a thin white line while a cloud (b.) also moves from right to left its shape and mass shifting while the bare twigs and stems of a tree (c.) shake in the afternoon breeze. A composition of movements, relative distances and speeds. And within minutes simply the stems remain against pure blue sky. Nothing out of the ordinary. And thus astonishing.

*

Flyleaf from I-Formation Book 1 by Anne Gorrick

*

Page from the booklet accompanying The Electric Harpsichord (Catherine Christer Hennix). I won't even pretend to explain what this means - best, perhaps, to read it as a form of poetry. And listen to the CD, of course.

"The choosing of a word/might be its use, the only poem."

('The Sun Also Fizzles')

*

Image from the essay 'Out in the Field' by Bertrand Denzler and Jean-Luc Guinnoet in the volume Blocks of Consciousness (eds. Brian Marley and Mark Wastell).

*

"The computer is usually seen as a solely beneficial invention, which liberates human fantasy and facilitates efficient design work. I wish to express my serious concern in this respect, at least considering the current role of the computer in the design process. Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as model-making put the designer into a haptic contact with the object or space. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modelled by our bodies. We are inside and outside of the object at the same time. Creative work calls for a bodily and mental identification, empathy and compassion. ('Introduction', p.12-13)

Copy of 'Beautiful Shadow' arrives (biography of Patricia Highsmith) with dog-eared pages, creased spine, a bookmark of a retriever puppy between pp 440-441. You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes to realise this isn't a 'new' copy as stated. In addition, the copy of 'The Talented Mr Ripley' has a tear from the front cover down the edge to page 33. Bullet damage? I wonder.

"If you knew the books a man wanted, you knew the man" it states (p10) quoting Highsmith.

"There are no uncoloured objects."

(Kurt Schwitters)

fig. 3

corporat

fig. 2

aardvarkhive

bande a Part ...

Arvo Part quotation comes - apparently - from the to-be-broadcast interview on BBC Radio 3 Music Matters Saturday 15 January. So make a note ...

(Posting this while listening on headphones to a Dutch radio programme devoted to Catherine Christer Hennix. I've just ordered her CD The Electric Harpsichord. Regulars to the blog will understand that the cover alone makes this a must. Wow.

http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/hennix_cc/Hennix-CC_Dutch-National-Radio_2005.mp3)

"One and one makes - one"

Arvo Part, at a loss for inspiration, went outside into the snow one morning and asked the cleaner: "What should a composer do?" "Well, he should love every note," was the reply. "No professor had ever told me something like that," Part said, and this single sentence crystallised his thinking.

(i)

Start as you mean to go on.

Here's a new add/edition to the fullcrumb series - more details on the Sticky Pages site.