Friday, August 15, 2008

tls


the subscription for the times literary supplement is no longer affordable
i shall miss finding this logo on the doormat
the artist is peter brookes ... a studious and affectionate pastiche of thomas bewick

semi-enigmatic dreams

In the last week I’ve had a number of dreams that involved anger and confrontation.

This naturally follows a real-life verbal confrontation which took place at work and created some difficulties, but has since been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

In last night’s dream I was irritated by the inability of a young neighbour to control his pet, the size of a large dog, which kept chasing and annoying everyone. The surreal part of the dream was that the pet was a long-haired, pale lilac coloured, tarantula.

I now realize that my dream has a simple two-part explanation.

On most days, a young neighbour exercises three pit-bulls on the green outside our window without the slightest possibility of being able to restrain them if the need should arise; and there was a photograph in the news this week, taken from a BBC wildlife film, of an enormous and hairy bird-eating spider sitting comfortably on the palm of a man’s hand.

But where, oh where, did my spider’s long lilac coloured hair come from ?

Ah ! Maybe it was a snatch of thirty year-old sports footage I’d seen on a friend’s TV one day, showing the balletic wrestler, Adrian Street, in combat on an afternoon when his golden hair had been coloured purple to match his frilly and sequinned purple velvet dressing gown.

It has to be said that the egomaniac Adrian was a brilliant wrestler, so brave and quick that comparisons with pit-bulls and tarantulas seem entirely appropriate.

Now that the Olympics has gone professional, they might as well introduce Saturday Afternoon Wrestling as a medal sport, in line with dressage and synchronized swimming.

http://www.bizarebazzar.com/pedigree.htm

Monday, August 11, 2008

professor esoterica conjectures ... was paolozzi's vision subliminally referencing a fatal incident in graceland ?



editor's footnote:
the professor had just come from boots the chemist ... having forked out £19.99 for some reading glasses in order to get a clear view of the minutae on display in the british library's magnificent ramayana exhibition ... and he he will be returning to the library for a third "peek"

heavy weather


Sunday, August 10, 2008

an early birthday present to myself



the plan is to read the whole thing before i am sixty ... then i can brush this master of padding ... who knocks joyce in to a battered trilby ... under the carpet for once and for all

fearless freddy's fine-weather friend fluffy forgot to wash his face this morning


as your eyes try to focus in the moments between awakening and feeling awake ...




Wednesday, August 06, 2008

on epsom downs


eclectic's corner ... a delightful homage to gustave courbet on crowborough hill
























and there is always this gem ... peter blake's "the meeting, or have a nice day, mr. hockney"



right to left ... howard hodgkin ?, peter blake, david hockney, daisy blake
and if you haven't yet been to venice beach ... there's still time

Monday, August 04, 2008

today would have been colin forward's eighty-fifth birthday


a handful of dust

After a life-time of hoovering,

... I am now reasonably certain that most household dust is of a feminine origin

… because nothing derived from the male could be so fine and fluffy

… ennit ?

drey making outside our kitchen window


Sunday, August 03, 2008

if i start getting difficult ( in 20 or 30 years time ) just re-read this article by oliver james about dementia ...








from a short piece by hilary mantel in the guardian review

Sentimental people will try to convince you that stories, like the act of reading, are as natural as breathing.

They say that we are narrative animals, but the broken stories of people who enter psychoanalysis suggest that if stories are natural to us they are not easy to construct in a way that serves both our sense of personal continuity and our need for freedom.

A story is always on the move, and from the author's point of view there is nothing natural about it.

Constant readers become writers at the point in life when they acquire a fascination with a process of falsification: with imposing shape while simulating the evolution of character and event, making determinations while fostering an illusion that in the next chapter anything might happen.

A novelist spends a lifetime in the business of presenting what's life-like, but not like life.

It's a sobering thought - life won't actually do.

Verisimilitude and the truth are conjoined twins, one often flourishing at the expense of the other.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/02/fiction7