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Yes, believe it or not ... today marks our 15th wedding anniversary. Well, well. Crystal, I believe. 

Last night we went for a celebratory pizza, the four of us, at the very same restaurant of the evening before 15 years ago. That hadn't been the original intention (another place was booked up) but funny how things work out. 

I make a card (as always) of which this seems a fitting inner fold. George Clooney or Buster Keaton, who'd it be? 

A Book Beginning What And Ending Away arrived today - there it was lying on my desk having been thoughtfully carried up from Reception by Francis the concierge. Like Christmas in May.

It's a forbiddingly thick wad of a tome (Coolidge-isms are contagious). God knows if I'll ever read it in its entirety. Or maybe that's not the way: rather emulate CC's own habits of skimming, waiting for a word to catch & then riding the energy wave until the board flips.

Tom Orange writes about 'woodshedding' - a word (& concept) I feel I really should have come across before. As such, a monastic-style self-imposed seclusion by a jazz musician to explore their instrument & develop their chops. This book, then, is the product of Coolidge's own explorations - specular, speculate, specularum - deep down in the language cave.

"... since 1997 he has lived in Petaluma, California, with his wife Susan and a celestial library." (inside flap)

Imagine.

"Jean-Luc Godard has a solution to Europe's financial crisis. It's as simple and ingenious as one would expect from the man who, with all the young guns of the Nouvelle Vague, freed cinema from its studio straitjacket in the 1960s. "The Greeks gave us logic. We owe them for that. It was Aristotle who came up with the big 'therefore'. As in, 'You don't love me any more, therefore . . . ' Or, 'I found you in bed with another man, therefore . . . ' We use this word millions of times, to make our most important decisions. It's about time we started paying for it.

If every time we use the word therefore, we have to pay 10 euros to Greece, the crisis will be over in one day, and the Greeks will not have to sell the Parthenon to the Germans. We have the technology to track down all those therefores on Google. We can even bill people by iPhone. Every time Angela Merkel tells the Greeks we lent you all this money, therefore you must pay us back with interest, she must therefore first pay them their royalties."

(Article on Jean-Luc Godard in The Guardian 12 July 2011)

...


"That Greece calls in its long term (2,000 years plus) cultural debts: i.e. upon every literary, philosophic & artistic work that the world has used, enjoyed, purloined, destroyed. Everything, in short, that has contributed to the much vaunted world 'civilization'. & to go one step further, why not impose a linguistic levy: all Greek words which are employed in other languages on a daily basis either directly or etymologically derived - 'democracy' for starters - are subject to a nominal 'fee' (let's say 99 cents for the Eurozone following the iTunes download principle). That should mount up ..."

(Belgianwaffle, 22 February 2012)

...

Having watched 'Une Femme Est Une Femme' yesterday (oh-gosh-almighty-brillo-fab) imagine my surprise surfing for up-to-date interviews with J-L G & finding his solution to the Greek debt crisis.

Location:J-L G & I

raining here,

& you?