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collage 9/1/13

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collage 8/1/12

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collage 7/1/13

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"Besides, I dwell not in this study, Non hic sulcos ducimus, non hoc pulvere desudamus / I am not driving a furrow here, this is not my field of labour/, I am but a smatterer, I confess, a stranger, here and there I pulled a flower; I do easily grant, if a rigid censurer should criticize on this which I have writ, he should not find three sole faults, as Scaliger in Terence, but three hundred. So many as he hath done in Cardan's Subtleties, as many notable errors as Gul. Laurembergius, a late professor of Rostock, discovers in that Anatomy of Laurentius, or Barociius the Venetian in Sacroboscus ..." (p33, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621-).

Typing this out you physically feel the distance ... I have no Latin & thus each word is doubly foreign (to the mind and the fingers) and Burton's predilection for ever-unfolding clauses means reading is a form of map reading (a point he himself makes: "And if you vouchsafe to read this treatise, it shall seem no otherwise to thee than the way to an ordinary traveller, sometimes fair, sometimes foul; here champaign there enclosed; barren in one place, better soil in another: by woods, groves, hills, dales, plains, etc. ..."p32). So who, in their right mind, reads this stuff anymore? Anthony Burgess and Borges have gone ... George Steiner perhaps? And so why do I - at approximately 4:45 pm - have the urge to tackle all 1,132 pages of the NYRB paperback edition. A calculated act of absurdity? A deliberate hankering for the recondite? A last desperate flailing of independence of mind before the shades of the prison house begin to close upon the middle-aged boy? Or a thirst for something truly toothsome against the pap of quotidian twitter?

And yet, despite the near on 500 year gap, how immediate much of it feels: Burton's concerns at the decay of learning, the loss of originality, accusations of plagiarism, the flood of second-rate publications, the impossibility of reading even a fraction of what is 'out there' ... sounds familiar? What about that lovely moment of self-deprecation "a smatterer" from someone who's launching a volume of such stupendous proportions and which implies so many hours reading - or, to use his phrase, "breathing libraries". Or did he say that? So many are the citations and attributions you start suffering from a kind of biblio-vertigo - how many of his own words are faint echoes of illustrious predecessors? And who now - or even then - would have the textual mastery to know? Which, I suppose, is the point I am leading up to: the constant litany I hear within contemporary education about turning kids on to the vast data base 'out there' (where exactly? ... good question ... and who does it belong to? ... even better question). As if education was suddenly transformed by the internet and all that Information. As Burton's Anatomy makes clear it was always thus - certainly from the printing press on.  Read in a certain way and you realise Burton is already writing in HTML - put your colophonic finger on any citation, name, simply a word and see where it takes you. However, what does Burton do with this vast array of texts? What does it mean to read Burton - certainly more than those Read-A-Book-In-A-Day techniques of page-scanning and skimming for 'sense'?

So I'm going to persevere ... at 50 pages a day it should take me most of January especially if I cut back on the frittered hours e-grazing (but don't be surprised if the project gets hi-jacked by something else).

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collage 6/1/13

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collage 5/1/13

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... today it comes quickly (I already knew as I finished yesterday more or less what was needed next) ... 

Working at this scale and with such colours and shadings I find I'm becoming hyper-aware of usually overlooked phenomena: the tea stain that is left in a ring around the white tea bowl ... the mottled froth of this morning's capuccino left at the rim of the cup ... the particular quality of grey walls in the damp January Saturday centre of town ... odd how concentration on the small scale opens the eyes wider ... 

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collage 4/1/13

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... another one and a half hour battle with little bits of paper & clumsy thumbs for fingers ... not my style of working at all .... but a good exercise in patience.

Thank God for that. All day I have been humming the first bars of what I know without the slightest hesitation of doubt is a Thelonious Monk tune: dum-dah // duh-dah-dee-dah-dee-dah // duh-dah ... But which?

Epistrophy? Bemsha Swing? Straight No Chaser? ... no ... but it is (appropriately enough) Nutty!

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The arrival of John Wilkinson's collection of prose writings The Lyric Touch over Christmas has sent me back to the poems with renewed vigour & interest - Proud Flesh, in particular. (It had been rereading John James in early December & Wilkinson's essays on the aforementioned which occasioned the purchase). In turn, such are the contrived workings of my mind, I spend a good half an hour upstairs searching through boxes of old photocopies & magazines trying to track down an interview with JW. I am adamant that it's in Parataxis only to discover it was in Angel Exhaust and then that the particular paragraph I was after (concerning JW's habits of composition) occurred not in an interview at all but the introductory speech he delivered before a reading.

I hope that's clear to everyone. Phew.

Anyway, what I'd forgotten was JW's thoughts on government mental health care policy and the pervasive influence of managerialism. I read these paragraphs now - ten years after initial publication - almost with tears in my eyes for the lucidity of his writing and the way he diagnoses and predicts how this infection will spread into every nook and cranny of what we call modern society.

And the wonderful defiance against goal-oriented thinking and predictable outcomes that comes at the close of his penultimate paragraph:

"To feel alive means to say, I went looking for this or that which I thought I wanted, and instead I found something which mattered to me more."

Perfect.

Surely one of the best definitions of why poetry - indeed art in general - matters.

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collage 3/1/13

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Started listening to the first track on Nils Petter Molvaer's album Khmer when I had the urge to go upstairs & start fiddling about with another sketchbook. Not knowing where to begin I decided to limit myself to botched pages & simply start tearing & arranging. Here's the first two-page spread. 

Sitting in the Ikea cafe this morning thinking I could be herding reindeer.

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The sounds from the coffee machine resemble a particularly virulent bout of diorrhea ... diaorhea ... diarrhea (that's it - there is no 'o' in diarrhea but there is in diorama).

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Ikea sells boiled eggs for breakfast but does not provide teaspoons. E. abandons the dessert spoon after two attempts, then improvises first with a wooden stirrer, then the slightly concave wrong end of a knife. Success! A true bricoleur.

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I notice the sprigs of parsley carefully placed adjacent to the salmon or meatballs in the display photos. The semiotics of such cafeteria imagery: connotations of freshness, Nature, haute cuisine all in an attempt to conceal marketing connivance and portion controlled servings.

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Unusually we elect to follow the arrows on the floor - obediently taking the prescribed path through this wonderland of pre-fabricated self-constructed living. Imagine John Ruskin shopping in Ikea ...

We still manage to get lost somewhere in Shelves.

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Back home I build my desk with (unexpected) assistance from L. It is simple and white and nothing to write home about. But it does the job as desks go. It will do.

Sitting at it I could be back at school or in a bay of a college library.

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Far away, reindeer are grazing. I can see them from my desk.

A morning of resolution & soup making (lobster bisque from the remains of last night's indulgence; leek, celery & potato; lentil & tomato). Begin to despoil a new notebook. Rain unremitting.

After lunch, e-mails & scanning pages from last year's journals. Sudden inspiration to move the shelf unit from behind the main table to across the room & replace it with a small desk (free of computer & other gubbins). Unfamiliar sense of zest & purpose.

Listening to Part's Credo on the eponymous Helene Grimaud CD with new-found enthusiasm when the sun breaks free of the cloud for the first time in what seems ages. Minor key epiphany of sorts.

Tomorrow: off to find a desk ...