Kitten Update: in fine fettle.

2.25 kg & 2.05 kg. Teeth coming at the appointed time.

Everything's sleek & purry.

It's just like going through having babies all over again.

Belgium Day here - which means most things are closed but not (thankfully) the pool.

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La Meteo: clammy & wet. Armpit weather.

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Insanely, a day spent tidying.

I go through a cupboard and dust off so many blank notebooks it leaves me feeling a) embarrassed, b) utterly worthless, c) ridiculously profligate.

Question: who - in their right mind - would buy so many?
Answer: an Eternal Optimist.

The Tantalizing Promise of Writing.

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This said, the sheer process of sorting through old files - that's actual card & plastic ones - unearthing aborted projects, scraps of paper with forgotten scribbles, notebooks with the first few pages filled, lists of To Dos ... is oddly therapeutic. Stirring things up from the silt of years gone by. The same principle as composting, I suppose.

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My black cat/is in the living room
with a motorbike

I seed it
I sawed it

apple bleeding

(When, where... why ... did I write this?)

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Tomorrow we're back to what passes for 'normal' in this house.

So, no more excuses.

We went for lunch in a little village called Thizy. Menu (11 euros a head) lentils & lardons as a first course, rabbit as the main, a plate of cheese to finish off. Coffee. Views out over the Burgundian countryside. Simple & stunning. And to round it off, just before leaving ...





Fans of Keith Waldrop will know why this delivers such a buzz.

This post is going out to braindownpour ...

Thanks for your link. I'd like to respond but would prefer e-mail (you'll find details on my Profile). 

(The video is astonishing). 

Congratulations to all of you who spotted the * secret message * embedded in the last post.

Back today from not-so-sunny-but-still-jolly-nice France where the morning baguette is just that bit more crusty and the cheese toothsome & cholesterol unfriendly.

Major highlights to come.

Congratulations, too, to any of my A2 students who drop by this Blog. On balance I'd say these were a good set of results - with some pleasant surprises!

Portrait (William Burroughs)

Belated follow-up to my Carol Watts post - Niedecker's over-writing and transformation of the platitudes of a fortnight-to-a-page calendar:

"The calendar itself is under siege. She teases the mnemonic device by linking her non-sequitur and baffling lines to the predictable chronology of a calendar. Earlier in 1934 she had written to Harriet Monroe about her desire to "discredit all journal method everywhere...." "

(cf. Penberthy, http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/niedecker/calendar.html)

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More strawberries.

Writ 1-4

I'd been toying with the idea of doing something with old tram & rail tickets. A few hours this afternoon gave me a chance to start playing around. Here are the results. Terribly slow on the uptake, it really hadn't occurred to me before the homophonic possibilities of the Flemish "Rit" and "Ritten". Thus travel and writing really do coincide ...

Favourite Lines from Niedecker

 

there is a dee round silence

in the sound

 

‘Mourning Dove’

 

this going without tea holds a hope of tasting it

 

‘Promise of Brilliant Funerals’

 

But that was before the library burned

 

‘Progression (I)’

 

As one Somnambulist to another

our sleep could be more perfect

 

(II)

 

opera is an oversight

on the part of the Milky Way

 

(III)

 

Last lines being sentimental

 

I must possess myself, get back to pure duration

 

Stop quietly in print the one available weather

 

(IV)

 

A touch of moon?

 

Gaspaciousness enmillions

dread-centric introspectres

(V)

 

and nothing

less to lift plants from the habits of their whorls

 

Someone has said: rapid lighted pimperly advanced

 

Memory is blue in the head?

 

Move on from brown laterals of the same day, ascertain oneself

center of climatic being

 

dusking the nounal

 

(VI)

 

I must have been washed in listenably across the landscape

 

For the emotion of fall has its seat in the acoustic gland

 

It’s what comes of looking way back on the upper right

shelf of the lower left cupboard

 

(VII)

 

To jesticulate in the rainacular or novembrood

in the sunconscious

 

They pop practical in a greyfold, bibbler and dub –

one atmosnoric pressure for the thick of us

 

(VIII)

Niedecker - reading into the 'For Paul' poems and thinking what must have fuelled the writing despite all efforts to keep the biographical Self out of the picture (poems ostensibly 'addressed' to Zukofsky's legitimate son after Niedecker herself had aborted the child she was to have with LZ).

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Ed Baker's correspondence with Cid Corman in a series of web files - a tip off from Ed himself:

Yes, also, quiet is good. Don’t overstate. Let a certain bareness enrich the whole. Let the sun enter. The contingencies others provide inevitably. Space in which to breathe – or from which. Another (empty) center. (Corman to Baker)

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Ikea - to buy a mattress and a basic table top. There's a fire alarm and so I spend half an hour out in the car park with everyone else wondering what's going on.

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Begin a new notebook - the larger one has gone stale and is proving too cumbersome; the smaller black one has become too precious (i.e. self conscious). I need something to flex the muscles in, not caring. Easier said than done, of course.

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Someone sends me pictures of their three dogs on the bed. Is this Junk mail? A Blog follower showing solidarity with the kitten pics?

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I write to Geof Huth. His post on Nico Vassilakis - coming after a week of my plundering his Blogs for various leads and ideas - makes me think I really ought to make contact. It's so difficult, though, to strike the right note in an e-mail between a friendly nod and weirdo intrusion.

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The swing two gardens away makes a noise like a mule being strangled. It's hard to believe no one else's nerves are being set on edge.

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One strawberry - red and slightly damaged - from the plants we just stuck in the ground a month or so ago. Evidence that Nature finds a way against all odds.

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Looks like we're in for a hot & sunny week.