samedi 29 mai 2004

Clarification Oh dear. Last night's post has caused an unintended stir. A couple of the stirred say the "comments box" isn't working. Occasionally it doesn't, but there's nothing I can do about that since it depends on software beyond my control. I neither wrote that I'm going to "stop blogging", nor was yesterday's entry a "goodbye", but what I should perhaps have explained more clearly is that the time has come for a "major re-evaluation of things", and this is one re-evaluation I'd prefer not to undertake in public. But I shall reply to the e-mails. The title of that entry is a line from 'Tiger-Psalm', one of the many poems I love by Ted Hughes (Ann Skea's site is an excellent introduction to his life and work). 9:34:07 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 28 mai 2004

'The tiger kills by thunderbolt' Unless you're a total newcomer, there's no point in asking where I've been these past three days because you already know. Nobody even came forward to wake me up, to say "It's all a dream, miracles don't happen." If ever I doubted that this log was more than a personal notepad and has acquired a following (including a handful of people as far away on this planet from France as it seems possible to be when I look at the globe), you've laid that notion to rest with your comments, e-mails and even -- good heavens -- 'phone calls. But what's with you people? One of you, quite mad, has married me off. Some want more writing about sex, not the four-letter word, but the act of love, leaping to the totally irresponsible and irrational conclusion that because I chose not to have any for the past dozen years, I'll be less boring about it than those who spend their playtime trying out every imaginable suggestion at Tantra.com. Others want to know her name, what she does for a living, where she comes from, where she lives, whether she likes her chocolate dark or milk (it was Laurent who got that one started), whether we met on the Internet, and even how old she is. And the men (Michel, Philippe...) are every bit as bad as the women (except perhaps for the Wildcat, but that's only normal). Even the sometimes sensible Cindy, who long ago won a prize for the best succinct self-description ever to land in my e-mail, comments on the power of the "first kiss" as if others are bound to follow, when I've told you no such thing. As if to make up for that, Cindy has since contented herself with a "hunk (Dusting my Brain...) 'o nerdly love" (I'm relieved to see that the French page on this six-inch desktop fantasy offers only a Babel Fish translation, which guarantees total confusion and myriad misunderstandings). Where I've been is to every cliché in the book and some I've only just discovered. Nearly sleepless nights. Lack of more than a purely functional appetite. The dark side of the moon. The gates of heaven. The other place. And blogger's block again. Her name, for those who have been totally inattentive, is E. No, I didn't meet her on the Net, but right here in Paris, about two months ago. She's American (I also told you that before, but some people have brains like sieves). I haven't seen her since Monday night, but since I've obviously thought of almost nothing else, how do you expect me to blog? The kiss was a miracle. One miracle, in the very same month when I also had to look death full in the face, is enough for me. This is no fairy tale. Women like E. don't come without other attachments in their lives. If there have been any small miracles since Monday, it's that she's still talking to me even though I have broken almost every rule in the book of "common sense" and paid not the slightest heed to my wisest advisors. By rights -- whatever those are -- I should already be broken-hearted or dead and possibly both. Today came the final slash of the knife through the fraying tether that has just kept my feet on the ground, and that from the most unexpected quarter. Though this is the Sunday of my working week (while still being Friday for most people in France), I kept my appointment with Dr G., the "psychosomatic shrink". Given the depth of her experience, the wisdom in all our previous encounters, the astonishing range of the reading matter on bookshelves where it is apparent that the dozens of volumes are not just there for show but have actually been read and digested, I expected a cold shower. I didn't get one. Instead she gave me encouragement, grounds for hope and a key to a domain where anything resembling conventional morality has no place... And on that note, I'm suspending this blog until further notice. It could be days, it might be months. When my heart, body and spirit are all singing the same music, I can go on reading you all, and shall, but I won't be able to write without being boring. At least I can still write to E a bit better than this. Until she took up the job, there has been a muse behind my every word. But E's no mere muse. I may seem to have gone into final fantasy mode, but E's no fantasy either, not even just a lifelong dream come true. She's got a heart of her own and must do what she will with it. I did promise her a flower. That's easy for once. There's only the one. I'll be back. One way or another. There's no saying when. And I have no more to say about E. It's not on this blog that I'm going to set down the two things that still remain to be said to her. 10:01:01 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 25 mai 2004

The best life has to offer "Canon," Sam said when I ran into him this evening. "Le top!" Sam, friend, restaurant-owner, inspired chef, magician in his moments, excellent judge of character. As if I needed his judgement. Though for all my fluency in French, I hadn't realised before tonight that canon has one further meaning apart from its English counterparts. "really ? you boastful ;-)))))" comments François, friend, Netwiz, musician. He happened to be passing when a woman and I left the Canteen last night, past midnight, but I have nothing to boast about, just immense gratitude to whatever makes certain things happen. I've got no idea what comes next. What Tim Swanson's remark on my last entry means, I dunno. Perhaps he understood. Somebody in South Africa hasn't, because I 'phoned Joburg today in the course of work and he said, "By the way, Nick, this hasn't got anything to do with anything, but I've just been reading your blog and I don't see the connection between the flower and your comment." It's simple. The Wildcat told me a story early yesterday evening. She began it when I was shopping, poured more into my ear as I carried three heavy bags up four flights of stairs in the other hand, and finished an hour later. It was a wonderful story and it was true. When I put the 'phone down, I listened, because of the Wildcat's story, to Schönberg's 'Verklärte Nacht', which musically recounts a tale she inevitably brought to mind, while I reflected on hers (except that the Wildcat isn't pregnant and there were other differences). Later, a woman knocked on my door and we went to the Canteen. What happened then is nobody's business but ours. All that I will tell you is that before we parted, I kissed her goodnight. And then came an "accident" with an absolute, irrefutable, inevitability. My lips found hers. It was very short, chaste even. Perhaps it foretells disaster. Perhaps it is the most marvellous thing that has happened to me, apart from the birth of the Kid, since a previous such kiss led me to chuck in a job, pack my bags, and come to France in August 1980. That kiss made one thing easy. Today, I was able to tell the person I consider the loveliest looking woman who works under the same very big roof as I do how and why she recently became muse to this blog for a brief while, which she took with grace. Though she told me, finally, that she prefers milk chocolate to black. I will also say that for a very long time, so long that I cannot exactly remember but it is certainly more than 11 years, I have for three or four reasons, mostly a matter of choice, not made love to a woman, apart from one short episode which bruised two people. It hasn't always been easy, but I have been content to wait. I have a very rich imagination and fantasy has sufficed. You may think that unusual, unhealthy or insane, you may wrongly decide that this explains many things about me, but I really don't give a damn. That kiss and this woman were worth the wait. Last night, she found me "serious even when you joke". I couldn't help that, though I want her to keep laughing and I would like her to be very, very happy. She is, indeed, "le top!" Whether I have anything to do with her future happiness -- because such developments are never without their difficulties -- does not for the moment strike me as the essential question. The Wildcat is bounding a long way ahead of herself when she tells me what she thinks about all this... The only phrase I can think of partly to describe what the kiss did to me has become a bit of a cliché. It sung my body electric. My mind is, of course, completely blown. That I managed to do a day's work without too many mistakes was quite an achievement. As to the only music I could listen to and really appreciate today, it came from Sandy Denny and goes back a very long way. She was not just a fabulous singer, she was a very gifted poet. I particularly adore this passage: "Please my friend help to make me glad, Help me find the one and only thing I've never had. What is true? Even though it only ever whispers part of what it knows, And it's never ventured through the locks Where the brazen river flows. It's the fingerprint which is never made. It's the perfume of a rose." Even if it doesn't work out with the woman -- and I have made very many mistakes in the past, I hope I've learned from them as well as what I have learned from others -- the kiss alone was worth the wait. Because, as I wrote a while back, henceforth I'll settle for nothing short of the best. Last night, just for an instant, I was blessed with the best life has to offer. 11:21:36 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 24 mai 2004

Explosively yours Volunteers required to scrape the ceiling clean. 10:11:29 AM  link   your views? []

dimanche 23 mai 2004

Private parts and public broadcasting When Lee gets personal, her writing is more interesting than ever. This weekend, she explains something it took me longer to learn: "ex-girlfriends are always rather sensitive subjects." "But when the ex is also the mother of your man's child," Lee adds from 'Odessa Street', "it obviously complicates the issue quite a bit. (...) "It's funny: when confronted with uncomfortable situations, we still have the same fight or flight mechanism as we do when in the face of life-threatening danger. The last two days have given me the chance to face some of my fears, to talk to people I had some serious problems with. (...) Amazingly, by opening myself up a bit, both situations are considerably better now than were 48 hours ago." What annoys me particularly about that "fight or flight mechanism" is that, if the psychologists' work I often delve into is right, that choice is so inbuilt into our neurological circuitry that there's almost nothing we can do to switch it off. Being rational is quite simply almost never an option. "Today’s saber tooth tigers consist of rush hour traffic, missing a deadline, bouncing a check or having an argument with our boss or spouse. Nonetheless, these modern day saber tooth tigers trigger the activation of our fight or flight system as if our physical survival was threatened," says Neil F. Neimark (Mind/Body Education), a family-oriented doctor in California. A friend recently sent me Neil's way, strongly recommending the updated version of a book about IBS he co-authored with William B. Salt. I've not read it yet, but probably should. This has been a quiet weekend with the Kid, once again spent trying to catch up on things undone. She didn't want to go out to see 'Kill Bill 2' and I couldn't raise much interest in 'Troy'. Even when I suggested we watch a DVD, we couldn't agree on which one. She wanted 'Underworld', for about the fourth time, and was in no mood for anything high-minded. In the end, that's what she did, while I discovered that one way you might try to deal with the past and unresolved relationships that gnaw at your insides might be to kill yourself for a minute or five and find out what happens then. While I certainly wouldn't put Joel Schumacher's 1990 sci-fi film 'Flatliners' ('Rotten Tomatoes') about the often alarming adventures of a bunch of medical students in any Top 50, I didn't regret buying it. Of the reviewers who liked it, I felt pretty much the same as Chris Hicks, whose opening comment gives me a good category for half the escapism in my life: "file under guilty pleasures." In a recent trackback, Norm at 'One Good Move' surprisingly warns that this place of mine will leave you "with a smile on your face, or a tear in your eye" -- I'd hope far more of one than the other -- but he's dead right about one thing. Lately preoccupied by curiosity about Lady E., I've steered clear of most matters political like the plague. Where controversy goes, I have no plans right now to discuss anything apart from religion and sex. My appetite for the latter is growing in inverse proportion to my amusement at what politicians are doing, and I'll save my spleen for the other poor sods at the Factory. I like to pretend I'm deeply cynical, but we all know that almost every cynic is a frustrated romantic and dreamer, and most major news stories of the past week, let alone the past six months, have revolted me beyond further comment. The most you can expect from me in the foreseeable future is a link or two to people like Norm and Felber's 'Fanatical Apathy' where Adam suggests "Operation Enduring Oops." I was led to that by 'No Cash Value!', following the mutation of 'The Sesquipadelian', which has long been blogrolled among the "playfully weird". I may have to change the label for that part of the blogroll, since it's increasingly obvious that nearly everybody there is far healthier and more balanced of mind and heart than those regularly covered in the preceding part of the list, where I've excised the word "politics" from the title. It's already a dilemma choosing whether people like Augustine, Nathalie and Lord 'No Photos Please' Segdwick are pundits, playful, pisstakers or weird. They are all, in any event, "remarkable" and have stronger stomachs than mine. All this reminds me that I was ticked off at the Factory (again) last week for sending a correction to a story with the explanation that it removed a "tautologous word from the title". First, I was informed that "tautologous" would mean nothing to the Kansas City milkman's news editor, then that the word didn't exist. I should've bet on it... The next link is for people like Donald, who recently bought his first "word processor" to write a bestseller to keep him in pocket for the rest of his old age, looked almost suicidal a week later and wanted to throw the machine out of the window because he'd failed to understand that people remain far more intelligent than computers, and then discovered broadband as well as the Internet. PublicRadioFan features "program listings for hundreds of public radio stations around the world. Follow the audio links to hear your favorite programs and discover new ones." This splendid list comes to you courtesy of Joe, who has forgotten so far today that the main subject of his "book" is sex and offending unscrewed(-up) feminists. This in turn reminds me that, since there's no pleasing everyone, I don't write enough about sex for the Wildcat, who has requested that I get even more personal than Lee and Venomous Kate rolled into one. The latter, poor love, may have "a bad attitude and a great pair of breasts", but was reduced to painful silence by learning that it is a mistake to rub the sleep out (Electric V) of one's eye. If you insist, you should either remove jewellery or bite your fingernails more often. Kate neither said "a pair of great breasts" nor mentioned silicon valleys. Anyway, I find small breasts every bit as appealing as bouncing boobies, but what provoked that demand from the Wildcat was a recent entry here. Darling, that inadequate tribute to Lady E. little fable was but a dream, a fantasy! And I got in trouble with Marianne yesterday when she could bothered enough to get off her backside and walk into the bedroom rather than sending my e-mails or press me again to install MSN Messenger (I refuse to have any more to do with Microsoft than absolutely necessary and in any case if I want to shout at her I can always use iChat). She's glad I've ordered a second-hand copy of the 'Final Fantasy' video, but cross about the desktop pic of Aki Ross. "Why do you have to look at a perfectly good scientist in a bikini?" she asked, apparently failing to realise that the two can be perfectly compatible. Nor did my answer satisfy her: "I'll try to take the bikini off then, in the name of pure research." On the model for Aki's body, I have forgotten what I read at the time. Some say an "Asian Bridget Fonda", but Michael Rechtshaffen at 'Hollywood Reporter' tickles my balls bells with Lara Flynn Boyle. Possibly... Where was I (don't you ever get lost here)? Oh yeah, about to tell you how Lady E.'s mind-blowing about to remind the Wildcat that as a general rule, I think women write about sex better than men. If it's dreams and fantasies she's after, I can furnish those by the bucketload -- just as long as she's the one who goes around mopping up afterwards, not me. As for truly erotic writing, you could do worse than embark on the new ERA. I'll leave you at it since I've got a wonderful dinner engagement week in the Factory to look forward to. No pix. 7:51:20 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 22 mai 2004

Out on a limb Among others at Brutally Honest Personals, Laine Doss is to be congratulated for sheer courage: "Buried under a mountain of credit-card bills and debt from spending like Paris Hilton on a bender, I live in the lousy part of Jersey City with three dogs and two rats, named Ratso Rizzo and Albino Andy. My dogs misbehave and are small toy poodles—the kiss of death for any man. (...) But I can probably kick someone to death with my legs of steel." Since I agree 100 percent about the three little monsters -- I've yet to mistake one of those horrors for a football, but the day will surely come -- I suspect it was in defending them that Laine discovered her thigh power. This pair may look inoffensive, but cross the Kid and you'll find that she can not only swear the hind leg off a donkey but kick like one too. I found those ads via Will Pate, and they come as a timely warning that if I was idiotic enough so much as to mention Lady E.'s elegant legs, I may not even live to rue the day. Until yesterday, I was convinced that I was in such deep trouble this time that about all I dared to listen to on the iPod was the J. Geils Band at a volume sufficient to empty my brainbox of anything else. Marianne considers this to be "de la musique de grabataire" and if you don't know what that means, it wasn't kind. Unlike Lady E. But that's another story. Out of Senegal, I'll soon be exploring the sound of King Ibu and his wife Tyia (thanks to Mike at WorldBeatPlanet). "No deadlines and no labels for King and Tyia. They are completely independent, musically, and loving the fact that there won't be 'some large entity coming in and telling you what to do, and to sell mass quantities,' Tyia said (talking to Californian journalist Christina Reed in January last year). 'The record labels colonize you,' King added." The write-ups remind me to drop a long-overdue link to the Britain-based 'African Musicians Profiles', good on links as well as some of the less well-known performers. Will P. also attracted my attention to 'What's Wrong with the Music Industry in One Long Sentence (annotated)' at the 'Big Picture'. "Annotated", be warned, is an understatement. There's so much wrong with the music industry that you could spend a couple of hours reading that sentence on it. While both Lady E. and the Wildcat both merit bouquets rather than simple blooms for things recently said, I'll keep quiet for now. With a flower of her own, 'Ataegina' reminds me that: "Parfois il faudrait juste se taire, parce qu'il n'y a rien à dire, parce que tout a l'air parfait, trop parfait, comme de l'eau immobile..." You don't need to understand French to admire her superb photo gallery. 8:48:45 PM  link   your views? [] OS X-men (and women) warned of hOle '"What, me worry?" — Alfred E. Neuman "That about summarizes the attitude many a Mac user has had about security. In recent years, Apple's relatively small user base looked on smugly as the horde of Windows users struggled with a plague of worms, viruses, and Trojan horses that rivaled anything Jehovah rained down on the Egyptians in the Book of Exodus."' Much excitement, it would seem, took hold of the technical blogosphere on Thursday. In the piece quoted above, Eric Bangeman "takes on security" at Mac.ArsTechnica, for those of us who can no longer luxuriate in being superior about our "safe operating system". Since many of my Mac OS X-using friends don't generally read all this technical stuff, simply take note that there is a big security hole in it. Apple has released a software update, Unsanity has turned out Paranoid Android for free and Jason Harris's whitepaper explains why they've done this. In the unlikely event that your software update panel fails to fetch you Apple's plug, the Panther one is here and the Jag version is here. I understood less than half of what I read at Mac OS X Hints, but have installed the android, since Apple's update appears to be insufficient. The PA works (several people have written nasty little things to frighten you and test it). One unknown remains why the Apple patch is dated May 24, but they think so different that I don't expect to be told. Oh, and should you decide that an iPod Mini just has to be your latest fashion accessory, but don't like the colour, Think Secret has revealed that the salesperson has been instructed to try to bribe you with "a free iPod case as an 'appeasement' or token of goodwill (via the "unofficial Apple blog"). Odd that. Thursday was the day when the clip on my leather iPod holster finally snapped. The iPod survived the fall without harm... I have also been through three Apple remote controls in less than six months. Is it just me, or have they stopped making things like they used to? 3:33:40 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 21 mai 2004

Veibershe shtiklach An exchange on the Factory's notes wire opened another door on the world today. I asked somebody who likes fun whether we could have a story about "lots of fed-up people and a talkative captain". "...morning nick, here's what we can come up with at this point (...) cross yr fingers for a talkative captain," she replied. "...Dat's grate, tanx. Wanna byline?" "...hiya nick, humbly declining a byline in pursuit of below-radar status in this ferkakdeh country. cheers." "PARIS, 1204 yr 0935. Stealth flight understood; 'ferkakdeh' stumps us all..." The answer to that came by 'phone. "Haven't you got any Jews on the desk?" "Any Jews on the desk today?" I asked pointlessly. "No Jews today." "Ferkakdeh is Yiddish for 'completely fucked'." In gratitude for this memorable piece of information, I found an extraordinary place to be shared. I knew there were Yiddish dictionaries on the Net, but if anybody knows of a more comprehensive site and labyrinth of links than 'The Yiddish Voice' in Boston, go on, astound me. 7:40:15 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 18 mai 2004

Much moved by airs and Gracey When Ana Gracey has the misfortune (sorry, mixed fortune) to make the annals of a musical fame beyond fads, remember that you probably read it here first. Here's one "voice of a woman" giving me a hard time to find words for what it is that she does, particularly on the strength of gifts displayed in semi-"demo" shape. Listening to 'The Unplugged Album', fleeting analogies in mind have been the vocal range and surprises a Kate Bush musters, the maturing I hear in Madonna's music before and after Alan Parker's multi-layered 'Evita' (1996; IMDb) and the voice training that went into that screen role, the great Ella F. being scatty, and the sweet-sour sadness of some of the Brit-folk renewal bands of the 1970s and early '80s. All such passing comparisons, however, simply reflect facets of a young singer who has come into her own; the sense of listening to a lass maturing may also simply lie in the order in which I -- not Ana -- chose to compile the mp3s downloaded from her website (left to right and top to bottom for the 12 'Unplugged' tracks, followed by 'Rain You Down' (or 'You Rain Down'?) and 'Dream' (again) off the released 'Innocence' album. I've no idea who Ana's other musicians are, apart from Billy Thompson, a fantastic fiddler (violin virtuoso -- take your pick, pop, jazz or the "classical" touch), but her lyrics are all of love, happy love, sad love, frustrated love, sexual love, hate-love... First time round, I thought some banal; second time round I enjoyed them as simple truths sung with uncommon honesty, and third time round, the way this girl uses mere words as a trampoline for her stunning vocal acrobatics, leaps and pauses was still taking my breath away. There are tabla in the percussion and quarter-tones in Ana's vocal chords and lungs; she went to RADA and came out with one of those rare voices that can become a played instrument -- like strings or woodwind -- at the service of pure, interwoven sound, where words are left behind. I mean something akin to what Sheila Chandra can do in a different musical domain. If there's anything I don't like about Ana's considerable style, it was an occasionally Americanised or mid-Atlantic edge which struck my just maybe unjust ears as not quite the real her -- more of a gimmick than a part of the gift most enjoyable when she is singing free. Listening again, this ceased to bother me. But it used to drive me insane when the early '90s for some reason brought a handful of British buskers to Paris's summertime Métro and they tried to sing Dylan songs like Dylan when they couldn't. When one or two of them ventured into more original stuff, this was revealed for what it was: a disservice both to their voices and to Bob Dylan. The "semi-'demo'" term I used at the outset comes only from hearing 'Dream' (Unplugged) and then 'Dream' (Innocence) -- same song, different simplicities and subtleties -- pending purchase of an album which I hope will take her far ... and maybe bring her and the band to Paris, since I'd love to see and hear her both live and fully stripped on stage. Stripped of time. All but a couple of the songs offered on her site are "single" package length, between three and four ½ minutes long. This format might suit the music industry and radio stations, but what Ana packs into it is at times a revelation! Her music is quite different from almost anything I know by either of her illustrious parents (who led me to her in the first place, as I wrote on Saturday), but Ana and her musicians have the originality, talent, energy, control and, already, a mastery of timing, that incite to taking risks. With a voice like Ana's and a jazz inheritance of improvised interplay between human and instrumental sound already manifest on some of these tracks, I'd give a lot to hear what this particular band can dare when it comes to a combination of jamming and pure "vocalise". So please grace us, Gracey, with some more airy Ana. You've already got the wings. Fly high! This entry having gestated for three days and born in the wake of a couple of quick chats today with an Arian -- Milady, too, sung the blues, now banished, I hope, by an azure sky -- tonight's choice of flower for Lady E. is suddenly quite obvious. Courtesy of some Californians, I lay at two pairs of feet, but with one special heart in mind, the bedded delphinium, nicely placed at Sheridan Gardens among "the church steeples in the village of perennials". For its "meaning", you see, is a matter of the airs. 9:39:36 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 17 mai 2004

When one good woman can lead to another I have sinned, but there is much to be gained from the odd excursion into immorality. Tonight's floral thought for Milady is not only theft, but a mere detail from one of Chara's often stunning photos. Recently enamoured of photography, she wields her camera with all the wit, sense of fun and intelligence unleashed by the many artistic gifts shared on the Chara A. Williams site. The search for Lady E's picture sent me browsing Chara's online world for an astounded hour, from the "yoyodyne" (keep right on clicking) -- defined as "the amount of force required to impart an acceleration of one centimeter per second per second to a yo-yo with a mass of one gram (cm/g/sec)" -- to an essay which begins like this: "'Should they or shouldn't they have sex?' The question arises from the mouths of X-Files fans as often as 'are there or aren't there aliens?' A heated, inexhaustible, and at times hostile debate has taken place between X-Philes, both online and off, over the fate of Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully's sex lives. The most oft asked question on the eve of The X-Files movie's release in June 1998 was not 'Do Mulder and Scully discover the aliens once and for all?' but rather, 'Do Mulder and Scully kiss once and for all?'" (read on at 'Contextual Intercourse: Decoding Sex in The X-Files'). With return visits in mind, I've added Chara to the roll of honour (and infamy). What a change such accomplished and varied work makes from the dozens of software tutorial sites I've frequently stumbled across in the search for the flower of the hour... 9:08:56 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 16 mai 2004

Saying it with ... you know You could hand over hard cash to find out who you are at 'True Colors' -- or you might try it for free in one of 'kstarbuck's Quizilla' offerings. I found that my mind is not the same colour as my aura's generally supposed to be, according to somebody who professes to know about these things. Thanks to Lynn at 'Bacon, Cheese and Oatcakes' for the brain tint, and for forwarding me via her enjoyable blog to Fembat ("Glimpse of a Grrl" is today's poser there). Both have been added to a blogroll which is getting special attention since I've just renewed my subscription and quite forgiven Blogrolling for a recent server crash which had blogs all over the place refusing to load properly. Fembat has an original way of doing the "100 things about me" thing -- she leaves it entirely to others! Though I have a hard time thinking of myself as an unadulterated Brit, I also can't resist the opportunity to make this the first frog-blog at Britblog, also now added though the place offered me a choice of "categories" where I had an equally difficult time squeezing this log into a box. All that's by the by when the main priorities, apart from getting as much sun as possible before tomorrow's return to the Factory, include meeting Lady E's need of the day. In this, the helping hand was extended by chemist and traveller Kay Stefan Gröninger. Finding the bloom of the moment is becoming quite a challenge, since while it has to convey the right message, I seek to avoid repeating myself ... and more and more people seem to be caging even their wild flowers with electric copyright fences. Kay took this picture on that Portuguese island whose rugged beauty I mention again at its peril, since I'd hate to see the place go the way of too many once unspoilt spots. Just as her silence had me beginning to wonder whether I had, after all, frightened Lady E. off with an overdose of unavoidable fervour, she put paid to my paranoia by explaining that she's been unwell. Hence, in part, the hibiscus. It's not the first Portuguese connection of the day, because when I dropped in to buy some refreshment for the evening, it was with a heartfelt "O merde!" "What's up?" asked my Moroccan friend behind the till. "I didn't spot that ad outside Francis's shop until it's too late," I explained. My quick-witted friend told me that if I got up to a nearby corner in time I could still get a copy of yesterday's 'Le Figaro', but "run, run, run!" I did. The kiosk was closing but I bought the right-wing daily, gave it straight back to the vendor and kept the DVD that came with it. "You don't want the paper?" "I wouldn't pay a cent for 'Le Figaro', but at that ridiculous price I'd have kicked myself to have missed 'Capitães de Abril', which is a gem." The newsvendor heartily agreed. Film-maker and actress Maria de Medeiros (high-class Tomatoes) instantly made the higher end of the Top 50 ranking for both me and Marianne with this only slightly romanticised recent history movie (2000; IMDb) about the Portuguese revolution of 1974. It's very well acted and as full of humour as suspense. Carson Jones of New York's favourite line was "Coup d'état! May we come in?", but one of the funniest bits I've not forgotten -- and apparently true, according to a Portuguese friend -- comes as the "April captains" and their armoured column reach Lisbon. "Why have you stopped?" one nervous young officer asks the tank driver. "The traffic lights are red." As for Sam, I know I often say that he surpasses himself, but today's lunch really was one of the best yet and I much regret that Lady E. was too busy catching up with other aspects of life after having "completely wasted my day", the poor lass. It was one of the rare Sundays when Sam decided to treat any interested parties to a couscous. It smelled wonderful and looked good, but I told Sam that vestiges of the Condition have left me wary of such rich food. "I promise you that you won't regret it," Sam said, and how right he was. When Baudier arrived at the Canteen at his usual late Sunday hour, I tried to convince him to join us. "Couscous?" he said, looking almost as gloomy as ever in spite of the wonderful weather. "It's so heavy that it'll put me to sleep for the rest of the afternoon and I've got more of my book to write." "Not this one," I said. "It's light, delicious and spiced with love and genius." In vain. André settled for his usual hunk of steak and pasta, while the couscous was kind to my insides and gave me the energy, along with the sun, to walk half across town to one of the prettiest stretches of the Seine, a suitably romantic place to daydream that Lady E. was there with me. Oh well. There'll always be a next time. There's no help for it. I'm lost. Without serious distractions, I unmentionable think of her from the instant my morning mind is kicked into gear by those wretched pigeons to the moment I drift into sleep and it's too late: she even knows it now. As for the birds, the one snapped here this morning is generally the first to arrive and the boldest, usually waiting on one of the roofs opposite for me to wake up, but the picture I'll really need patience to get is when two of these sky-rats start their daily fight. Each considers the windowsill to be their private preserve, so they chase and peck at one another and perform the most comical aerobatics while the others simply ignore them and get on with their breakfast. I doubt I'll be able to blog very much over the coming week, which will probably be another tough one at the Factory, but I'm grateful for the break I've had. On getting home from today's long stroll, I'm relieved to note that Africa isn't making any of the main AFP headlines, but other sites tell me I've still got a lot to catch up on. Anyway, I imagine the Faithful Five ¾ have had enough for a while of the ramblings of a lovesick lunatic... As a rule, I steer clear of the top 40 topics in the blogosphere, since it seems a waste of time to add my two cents to the same subjects as everybody else, but the arrest of a blogger for writing things the mayor of a Paris suburb would prefer to keep quiet deserves a mention. Christophe tells his story at MonPuteaux in French, but offers plenty of links to the English blog pick-ups. More to my taste is the revelation that: "Swapping spit actually consumes about 336 hours, or 20,160 minutes, of the average person's life. That time could not be possibly spent in a better way. OK, there are a few better ways, but you usually have to kiss to get there anyway" ('Kisstory in action' at La Voz, via Metafilter. Dana, meanwhile, is waxing: 'What is "feminity"?' (Note-It Posts), which also brings me back to Lady E., since I've had to inform her that if she reminds me of anybody famous, it has to be Uma Thurman... Even Heli, who often devotes much of 'Heaven and Hell' to spitting acid at some of the world's most dangerous politicians with admirable accuracy, has taken a brief respite to burst into flower. Though if you can make more sense of her cryptic "My Yellow Poppy is Back" than I can, do let me know. As usual, I'm probably hoping for mysteries where there aren't any... More flowers? Try this before I turn back into a pumpkin: "It was a moonlight nite outside and Bibo was going for a stroll around the Bag ENd garden. He loved the garden wit its cloying scents its rich fruits, its heralds of madness, its delicate blossoms, its wild and rare flowers and blossoms - its chrisanthenums, roses, poppies, gardeenias, carnatiosn, foxglove, orcids, labias daisies, and pretty berries. It was like an earthly paradise, a palimpsest of scent and dizzying beauty, it was as though God had tumbled his marvels upon the barren earth where each had sprung up with shots of lightt o create some delicate flowerheaveny as sin 'Sigh' Bilbo sighed and moaned 'Its a tragedy that on this night I should be so lonley, how now I long for a lady love, a woman to set me alight, to hold my hand in times of need, to flush crimson and scarlet if i where to whipser sweet nothings into her ear, a woman as fair as elfs, and as deep as wter, lol sigh.'" I know the feeling. Though the rest of 'A Troubled Widsh' from 'sTrawberry fics' leaves me panting for more. Well. Almost. 10:25:45 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 15 mai 2004

Of local talent and ladies in waiting After giving me a hearing back in the winter of what was then very much a work in progress, my netwiz buddy François tells me that, with luck, a first album he's making with friends should be released in a month from today. I enjoyed much of it at the time, but the final version has seen enough changes to wait until it comes out to say more. In the meantime, I've been taking a look at dozens of oil on canvas works by the artist who's doing the cover. Francois himself offers a "best of Legac" at his place, but the two examples I've scaled down for this entry -- Dancing and Stain of Desire -- have been "borrowed" from the extensive gallery Jehan L.'s own site. "From Dali, I have the same fluid obsession, like if the body skin could liquefy and melt. From Lautrec I got the same need to draw and paint women. This passion never stops, whether complete bodies or body parts, I am addicted to lace, suspenders and corset," Legac told the Widemag e-zine in an interview. If you're into this sometimes stylishly original work -- that's my view, anyway (I like some of his paintings a lot, others not at all) -- and others, Widemag offers a most varied selection of "artistes d'mon" (English despite appearances). There'll be more about the forthcoming album of electronica at 'ambio'. Via TaxyNet, meanwhile (another site related to the various undertakings of the Three Musketeers I sometimes have lunch with at the Canteen), I've stumbled on, at last, 'CTQui?', a free reverse phonebook for France, and, much more frequently useful, Inside Paris. I'll add a permalink to that on my home page, since it reaches some of the parts 'Think Paris' doesn't. When it comes to all my pages, I recently discovered that the indexing of entries here for the "search" box came to an end last month. This free service, provided by 'Atomz', could take no more once this log hit the 500-page mark and around three-quarters of a million words. Anyone would think I have been writing novels after all... I did 'phone Atomz in the States to ask how much it might cost me to continue to benefit from their excellent search engine on a fee-paying basis, but the blunt answer came in the shape not of a fistful of dollars but three digits and more. They deal mainly with corporate clients, the friendly fellow I spoke to told me, and have no offers for individuals. Since a weekly report by e-mail informs me that people use that search box a surprising amount, if anybody knows of a viable but not astronomically priced alternative, do please drop me a line. Returning to music, once my post-murder blues were over and I was able to start listening again to people other than J.S. Bach -- including the wonderful 'Lambarena - Bach to Africa', I've notably been rediscovering the fabulous Barbara "Lady Saxophone" Thompson. I've been a virtually lifelong fan of both Barbara and her band Paraphernalia, as well as the many doings of her virtuoso percussionist husband Jon Hiseman, mainly of 'Colosseum' fame. Several times I went well out of my way to enjoy some unforgettable live gigs by one or the other outfit while I was still in England. It's only today that I learn, sadly, from their Temple Music site that Barbara has been battling Parkinson's disease since 1996 ('Lady Fights the Blues' on the press page). In the May 2002 interview for 'You' magazine whence the press picture is pinched, Barbara not only optimistically says Paraphernalia could be touring again one day, but adds that she gets up "at 5:00 am and compose. What has saved my life is the computer." Barbara and Jon have a daughter who's inherited her parent's gifts and is off to a pretty darned good start with 'The Unplugged Album'. Ana Gracey (check out her site) is very generous with mp3 files, now transformed into a fine hour-long 14-track album on my iPod. Ana's a very promising addition to this year's "voices of women" I'm exploring; I'll be buying her first album, 'Innocence'. Otherwise, I've been listening to Avril's 'That Horse Must be Starving' (quite unjustly labelled as "mere" electro-dance; there's far more to that on a CD which I like more each time round) and Beth Orton's 'Trailer Park'. As to today's flower for Lady E.... ...you could call it a question of patience. (I can't credit the artist, because it came without attribution.) 11:36:48 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 14 mai 2004

Courting near-disaster... a narrow escape Maybe it's because 'Troy' has just come to town as well to as a Cannes Film Festival (Fr and Eng), which sounds particularly promising with Tarantino for president -- and a number of his compatriots set to boycott this year's show if one's to believe what much of the press here has been saying. Maybe it's because my current bedtime reading has had me online refreshing my knowledge of Greek mythology (two superb links for such things: the Encyclopaedia Mythica and in2greece, lovingly launched and superbly maintained by Victoria Sandels). But I seem to have caught the attention and won the blessing of some onetime inhabitant of Olympus. You see, I was being slightly economical with the truth yesterday when I said I'd "gone and put the wind up myself". The Wildcat helped, once I'd mentioned Lady E again. Knowing me only too well, as soon as the Wildcat heard that I'd felt compelled to e-mail the lass, it took her less than no time to guess the appalling and shameless magnitude of what I'd done. "You've really blown it now!" she whispered. "How could you still be such an idiot?" It was only at around three in the morning, as I tossed and turned in the dark and mused on the probable, indeed almost certain, effect of allowing myself to forget every lesson ever learned about women in a few moments of romantic excess, that I was sure the Wildcat was right. She'd informed me clearly that if any sensible woman gets an inkling of but a fraction of what can go through my head in my moonstruck moments, she'd be running for the hills, etc., never to take the risk of even speaking to me again. This I really should know for myself, having accumulated an impressive list of "disasters". Yet still some Grecian or even the White Goddess herself ("essential reading") smiled on me regardless. Unable to bear the silence this morning, however pitiless the tidings might be, I had to telephone Lady E. and stumble my way on to her answering machine just like the young fool for love I'd become. And -- "O frabjous day!" -- with infinite mercy, she returned my call and put me out of my misery, prepared still to talk to me, even professing readiness to see me again soon. With unspeakable relief and deciding that Lady E. has even more tolerance and strength of character than I'd dared hope, I have to let the true moral of this episode for all stricken men (and some women) go unsaid, in the name of what remains of discretion and a total respect for "milady's" intimacy. Mais j'en ai échappé belle ... and won't go messing with the stars again for a while. The only imaginable celebration of such survival to die another day is stolen, for the likes of her, from the Honeyguide of the wide-ranging Raphael Carter, who's achieved some thoughtful reconciliation with his 'Sonnets on Science' and wrote 'The Fortunate Fall' (Amazon US for once). Fortuitously, this both looks like my kind of SF reading and also has the right title for my feelings. Due to a business I shan't go into again, I've appreciated an e-mail from Nathan of E/B/T/B, who occasionally blogs in English as well as French. He's suggested a drink I hope I'll be able to make next week with a couple more of the local bloggers met online of late. That kind of prospect sounds better, I fear, than 'Troy', now the top IMDb source of some of the most mixed crits I've read there lately. The arrogant Brit I can sometimes be particularly relished the warnings there and on some other movie megasites of "spoilers"?! This very lunchtime at the Canteen, I became engrossed in a long and interesting debate with a man of about my own age who was bemoaning the lamentable fact that history, legendary or otherwise, forms only a minimal part of the French national curriculum nowadays. It happens that the Kid is as interested in certain historical periods as I was at her age and devours pertinent books of her own choosing. Were Marianne to stick strictly to the syllabus I've seen, Rome may not have been built in a day, but any knowledge dispensed about the place at school might be the work of less than a week. Though 'Gladiator' also played fast and loose with historical "truth", it has won a place on the slowly growing shelf of something I thought I'd never do a year ago: purchased DVDs of some of my own Top 30 films, snapped up whenever the price is right, and a few others besides. While most are either not to my taste or still cost too much for my "culture" budget, it's worth letting others know that Amazon France is currently running a batch of mainly Cannes-related special offers. Nevertheless, while Marianne has won me over to DVDs, I remain convinced it's madness to have the luck to be a movie buff living in Paris and steer clear of the big screens as some do out of choice. Jean-Luc Godard (BFI) got it right in 'Les Inrocks' last week. One of his interviewers challenged him when he said that 'Allemagne 90' has never really been seen here: "'Uh-uh - it was shown on telly, giving it more of a public than it would have got in the cinema.' JLG: 'It was seen more than if it had come out in the cinemas, and at least seen at all because it made television. But let's say that people got a notion of it on television...'" Which is little more than I expect to get when watching DVDs on my Mac ... but then, as my experiences with women amply prove, I can tend to overdo the all-or-nothing bit sometimes. Here's a fairly similar outlook: "Quarsan answered it, I heard a rather loud expression of delight and then silence again. For several hours (...) Underneath my TV was a huge, ugly speaker and dotted around the floor were 5 more smaller ones. There were thin, black wires everywhere which I'm sure can be sorted eventually but the very word 'eventually' is a rather daunting one that may just as well be translated into 'never'." "Ebay," concludes Zoë whose 'Boyfriend Is A Twat', "is Evil." Zoë is one of the funniest women I've read since meeting the Squipper and some of the other boobied bloggers. On thoughts of where all this home cinema stuff is going, Dave fast-forwards us 10 years in with a foretaste of PTV (How to Save the World). "Who," he asks, "would go to a movie theatre with such a limited selection and no 3D vision?" (a question to which I won't make some snide remark about how the other far, far more than half of us are still likely to be living in 2015...). As for Cindy herself, she wants to know 'What Contest...' you might win. That brain-dusting chick also has the distinction of being the first and only woman ever to offer me flowers... Intelligence, which Godard possesses in ample quantities but in increasingly oddball vein the older he becomes, is not something you can expect much out of me at present. Somebody who got something right last night was Maia "La Coureuse", sneaking a dreamy look close to the right hair colour and length, a full moon and even "milady's" pair of wings into one of the artistic endeavours she should blog more often. Serendipidity is everywhere I look. Even Vacuity's perpetrated an overhaul and has now started setting some of her sights on a 'Sexy Saturday'. You have been warned! since I've been finding things there that even I hadn't thought about... yet. 10:34:14 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 13 mai 2004

Life's just one bitch you can't beat Lady E. has yet to tell me whether she might study my etchings on any of the three imminent opportunities put to her, but now I've gone and put the wind up myself. Have I said something really silly? After two sunny hours spent at the Commissariat de Police again yesterday -- giving more evidence about the Mayday murder under oath -- one well-informed buffoon told me that I've put my own life at risk. N'importe quoi! Even if it were true (I'm not stupid about such warnings; it's happened before and I don't doubt that it could occur again in what's proving to be an eventful life), I've only contempt for remarks like "You'd have done better to let the fuckers fight it out among themselves". Being as much of a coward as anybody with an imagination is no reason to live and let die when gang war starts creeping its way up the road into a really decent neighbourhood. Life's a bitch, sometimes, and love can be a son of a bitch! I've nicked the detail of a 1915 photo of the statue in the other Piccadilly Circus (not Montparnasse) from the Museum of London because I'd forgotten whether Alfred Gilbert's version of the fellow was blindfolded. As pictured by Teri Stearns, one of a bunch I sometimes drop visit at GFX artist, Eros is decidedly a trouble-maker. What set me off on this tangent was a long talk with an old and tearful friend who was suddenly and irredeemably in love. Her dilemma was all the worse because the boy who had become so "beautiful" in the twinkling of an eye was equally obviously smitten by her. Fine, you'd think. What more could one ask on a gorgeous Paris afternoon in May (the kind of weather that of course turned horrible again almost the minute I dared to mention it)? But the bloke's already in love with somebody else who loves him back. Well, I hope I said some reassuring and right things in a situation which always feels like the end of the world, but rarely is. In my experience, which is probably no different from most people's, you never can choose to fall in love. It happens whether or not you like it and there's no cure for it. It's not very helpful in my poor friend's circumstances, but the girl might take a look at Murphy'S Love Laws. In gathering more of the multitudinous Laws of Murphy into one great site than I've ever seen anywhere else, I consider that Raanan Avidor and all his contributors deserve this month's medal for services to humanity for seven years of ceaseless toil. About as nonsensical as some of the scare stories now doing the rounds of my part of town more than ever is a notion I used to be brainwashed into believing: that it's impossible to be in love with two people at once, like my friend's friend. In a sensible article, Tashneem Chaudhury last month told readers of the Hindustan Times: "When two people click mentally, coupled with deep physical attraction, an emotional drama is bound to begin. And it does, previous commitment or not. Monogamy is a myth, says relationship expert Peggy Vaughan". Dr Pepper Schwartz knows this just as well: "The idea that love has to be confined to only one person is a myth, plain and simple. The truth is, most of us don't want to entertain the possibility that our love can extend to two individuals at the same time, because it's scary to imagine such a confusing state of being. Alas, our hearts have a lot more capacity for affection than we give them credit for — or are brave enough to recognize" (more at Lifetime sexpert). My poor friend! It's little consolation for her to know that if she hurts, it's certainly even worse for the man who courageously didn't seize the chance to go to bed with her. Or to be told that with my kind of track record, who knows when I might end up sobbing on her shoulder. Get this though: "Apparently, when the world's top researchers finished mapping out the human genome last year, they found firm DNA evidence that true romance still exists. However, it is a rare trait, and in most males of the species it's somewhat impaired, according to a report in the New England Journal of Chromosomal Abnormalities. But don't despair. Gene therapy — which is now being used to cure a startling number of inherited disorders — will soon be available," says MP Dunleavy, also at Lifetime. I had a look at the New England Journal of Medicine and more. I wouldn't recommend investigating chromosome abnormalities unless you really must. Personally, I think the pain of it all just has to be better than a "promise" like that... 7:19:44 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 11 mai 2004

All done with mirrors: the spirits within Today has seen some exploration, outside and in, not all of which I dare to scribble down here. And, most importantly, today Lady E. must be given two more from the garden, after a week of neglect. Today's was one of those rare mornings when I couldn't bear to switch on the 'Today Programme' after getting up, early again, my mind still full of dream fragments I didn't want to shake off quickly, such as: A woman colleague at AFP too two-faced in "reality" for my simple liking, who'd become someone destined to pull one of my teeth in a vivid amateur operation ... beds and bedrooms ... a bizarre search at that woman's request for fire-fighting equipment which required an odd exercise in needing to open a door with the right kind of electronically chipped plastic pass card ... stumbling into a velvet-lined, plentifully cushioned room with a kindly, elderly lady who had what I needed but complicated matters with her forms and demands... The place was crawling, fluff-balled, purring and miauling with cats, including one distressed looking kitten which perturbed me until the lady said, "Don't worry, he's just been a washed pussy, not shaven, but washed..." ... a necessary white lie about where the blaze had broken out ... and, half buried under disarrayed sheets, blankets and more lazy felines on a kind of mezzanine bed, a high-breasted, wasp-waisted, fine-featured and clearly wholly naked young girl with fair skin, cool blue eyes, a big smile and a dishevelled tangle of dark curls. She had obviously just emerged from an immensely satisfying act of love (but with whom?), with one large aureole of a surprisingly dark and still semi-erect nipple bare above the sheet and ... ooh, là, where was all this? No "interpretations" solicited, thanks very much all the same. Somewhere out there, there's a collective blog which consists of nothing but these images, the stuff of many contributors' dreams, often boring but occasionally fascinating, while the Dreams Foundation makes a bilingual meal of it all, could I be bothered to eat there. Such mornings are a luxury, despite the cruel, tight band of a headache that generally has me in its grip on awakening, with the time to ease myself gently out of such a colourful dream world; not having to switch the radio on for news, news and more news... then the Net for African affairs... Then came the brief "panic attack", with a glance at the clock and the thought that at the same hour next week, in the price to be paid for this enforced holiday, I must already be running underground into the noisily crowded Hades of the Métro, set for another day of Africa editing all on my own. Meaning some 50 countries with who knows what threatening to break out where yet again: pestilence, starvation and film festivals, AK-47s in the hands of teenagers drugged utterly out of their skulls and fashion parades, horseback Arab militias perpetrating atrocities against villagers and breakthroughs in trials of new anti-malaria drugs... And everywhere, the musics, the bustle of fabulously colourful markets, the noise, the blazing heat, the glorious rich smell of some of the soils, thunderstorms and vast open skies, the laid-back pace to life I love so much about the continent, the time to talk, the legends of magic taken for granted. End of panic attack. This, simply, is life, ancient and modern, and its constant information overload. And then I thought of Lady E. As often I have these past days, knowing her near and holding her so distant: the prudent fool I've been -- perhaps -- to suspend connections, wishing in my black mood neither to call or write to somebody so new in my life and so immensely attractive. There was no way I was going to hunt down such a treasure at risk of drawing her, dragging her down with me into the semi-private and still only partially apprehensible inferno of the week I've endured. But it's over. And I'm back with that so little I know of her yet, apart from the relaxed feeling her company gives me, her broad interests, quick mind, the irresistible appeal of that fair sculpted face with the wise mouth and the wonderful eyes. It was hard with my mother, still stratospherically cruising, who told me when finally I 'phoned her: "You absolute wretch, I've been so, so worried about you, where have you been, last thing I knew you were in hospital!" "Oh come on, you'd know quickly enough if I was dead or anything worse," I said. "Don't make such a fuss!" "You didn't even acknowledge the pamphlet I sent you." "What pamphlet?" "One called 'Inside Out', I posted it days and days ago." "Well, thanks, but I haven't got it yet. Anyway, if you wanted, you could always read the blog, Mum, that's still there." "But I do sometimes, at the public library. I'm really not happy about it, it's not good for you, and it's often perfectly incomprehensible!" "Thank you. Just tell that to the Faithful Five ¾." "The who?" "Nothing. It varies. Forget it." But in the mailbox, the pamphlet had finally arrived. 'insideout: people with manic depression can become experts on their own mental health.' By the hitherto unknown to me Manic Depression Fellowship. Great! And that not long after another from my kind brother in Scotland: 'Irritable Bowel Syndrome: The Natural Answer to Good Health.' Well ... I should be much more grateful than I was, most especially for this morning's delivery, it really doesn't do to kick thoroughly well-intended gift horses in the teeth. But it's no good. I feel quite entitled to fret often about other people, but how I loathe it and squirm when they worry about me! That's not on; it comes as a cruel blow to my amour propre, such hard-won self-knowledge as I've got, and the unshakeable notion that I'm certainly no more badly screwed up than anybody else and in some respects very much less so. Even my easily forgeable signature provoked a comment from the police inspector when I put my name to the several pages of my statement on the May 1 murder. "What a splendid signature!" he said. "You've got to be kidding! My signature's just the scrawl of a kid, an early adolescent -- always was! And anybody could copy that." "On the contrary," the inspector said. "I often work with graphologists, you know. That's a very good signature. No flourishes, no underlining, no dots. A clear first name that speaks of a man who has fully assumed his role as a father and identity, while that surname says you've accepted your responsibilities as a mature citizen in society." Well, I was a little flattered, if surprised. "I used to have to cheat with 'o's," I confessed. "'O's?" "They used to be all scrunched up, badly needed rounding out. The most ill-assumed sexuality, you know..." "Well, it looks fine now. Still cheating?" "Oh no -- I have to squish them! But as for your squiggle..." "I've got two signatures," he replied. "One rather like yours, and this one for all the paperwork and signing cheques." The Wildcat waxed effusive last night about her "fantastic" Sunday evening. It was immensely entertaining in every detail, a tale I'd love to tell in full: her chance to snub the Don Juan of her town's haute société for the movie director who zoomed in on her swift as an arrow, a delightful man uncomplicatedly keen for her company. It was lovely to hear her so happy. Briefly, I was her miracle worker of the hour. But all I'd done -- with a curse or two during an earlier conversation -- was employ my Net wizardry and struggle with bits of a half-remembered foreign language successfully to reserve her a ticket for an occasion I considered she'd really be a gloomy idiot to miss when she was clearly set to be the "star of the ball". She'll kill me, not for the first time nor the last, but I can't resist one of her double punchlines. It must have been about two-thirty in the morning when the gallant film-maker asked not "Can I," "Could I" but "May I kiss you goodnight?" -- ah, how it matters, each little accuracy of chivalry, in whatever the language! -- and the Wildcat said: "Of course not, you're a married man!" "You never told me that bit; or, well, only sort of..." I reproached her, given the woman's talent for making each saga sing by recounting it backwards. "Anyway, that never stopped you before, did it?" I teased. But, needless to say, she'd already recounted the whole splendid story to a confidante far, far closer to hand. The kind of dangerous confidante who says: "As if that kind of detail ever bothers anyone who is somebody in a town like this!" She's learned a thing or three, the Wildcat, aiming ever higher to get what she deserves. Oh. And she did let him kiss her. "It was a very nice kiss." It was all in her stars, anyway, much put out though she was when I dabbled in all that nonsense on her behalf (supposedly) nine or ten months ago. Should I really also have brought my relative incompetence in such arcana to bear on the delectable Lady E.'s state of affairs? I very nearly feel guilty about that, but goodness ... utter rubbish or revelation, the outcome certainly sat very well with the few knowns in my possession and was fascinating and even almost alarmingly erotic when it came to the unknowns. That's to say, there was a time -- the era of the scrunched "o"s -- when I would have found those erotic elements alarming, but these days, they can only fill me with longing and a probably hopelessly misplaced hope! I've realised that she's a cunning lass, Lady E., managing swiftly to extract a maximum of information from me while making sure she reveals as little of herself as she can get away with. 'Nuff said, more than enough. Rambling apart, you can see I've at last recovered some of my form from the new desktop. 'Final Fantasy: (mostly Rotten Tomatoes, but still 44% fresh) the Spirits Within' I enjoyed every bit as much as did the Kid, taking it simply for what it offered. I've temporarily mislaid the name of the real actress who served as model for the animated Aki -- an Italian? -- but she's a stunner, though I don't recall anything as sartorially simple as a bikini. And she's an improvement on last week's desktop, which was one of the wittier "everything is 'true', nothing is real" kind of variations on Matrix themes... Dr. G was so determined yesterday to have me dig very deep in search of whatever triggered my extreme and long-lasting emotional response to the sudden shock of awful violence (she even managed to get me somewhere with it all), that I clean forgot the excellent question the Wildcat has been recommending I take up with her: "Whence your capacity, Nick, for such profound empathy with other people, the way you get inside their heads and let what happens to them get far too much inside you?" Heaven only knows. I'm not even sure that it really matters very much, except that it's such a mixed blessing, both a great gift to be grateful for and an occasionally painful burden. A year ago, I just wanted to find the off switch. And for most of the time up until then, I didn't even know what empathy was, even when a certain kind of person told me that "at least half your problem is empathy". I'm not certain that I want to know too much. Israeli consultant and writer Dr Shmuel Vaknin has sensible suggestions on empathy, coming to a conclusion I can only agree with and bemoan: "Empathy - supposedly a spontaneous reaction to the plight of our fellow humans - is now channeled through self-interested and bloated non-government organizations or multilateral outfits. The vibrant world of private empathy has been replaced by faceless state largesse. Pity, mercy, the elation of giving are tax-deductible. It is a sorry sight." During my black spell, I was inclined to give up on my current re-reading of 'The Magus', one of the books I could only identify with very strongly as an adolescent. There are any number of discussions of this dense and ambiguous novel on the Net, along with what purports to be the John Fowles site, which reminded me that once I saw the havoc Guy Green wreaked on the book when he ruined it by dilution into an empty vessel (IMDb) of a film. However, despite the feeling that I'd had more than enough mystery and masque for a month, let alone magic realism à l'anglaise, I'm now glad I persisted, to be drawn once more into the deadly game of life Nicholas Urfe learns by unlearning on the Greek island of Phraxos in the 1950s. Coming back for the third time to this multi-layered and humanistic story -- well-linked by 'The Guardian' -- I still regret that Fowles felt so compelled to "improve" on it with the revised version, but never mind. I've also simply lived so much more since the very first reading that I'm far less inclined to accept the Fowles view of the quintessential part played by "hazard" in our existences. Still, it's a notion he deeply explored with far more insight and skill than ever Luke Rhinehart was soon to do in that much over-rated bestseller, 'The Dice Man', which has suddenly reassumed cult status. Any hope I had of further exploring certain "tricks done with mirrors" in tonight's excursion she has blown. The Wildcat. Dice woman! "Oh Nick! I'm getting nervous now," she calls to say. "What if he --?" "Don't even start that," I warned her. "You're off again." "What do you think he would do if I called him and said I was too frightened to meet him tomorrow after all?" "Don't be such a silly girl. But what do you think he would do if you turned up at the café and said that you had been a little frightened of coming? Why complicate things?" "How come you've become so wise all of a sudden?" Schlack! Who, me? "I suppose I must have learned something." Yes, and not without a little help from the Wildcat herself, skittish creature that she can be. Not to speak of Natalie's funny little gems ... and still I haven't finished 'Augustine's True Confession', which I prefer to sip in small doses, like the odd return visit to marvellous 'meryfela'. Whence I was led at my downest to Robert Anton Wilson, who has got about as much time for the moody blues as the Fowles of the Sixties had for any god but those of human fabrication... And if you've got to the end of this, well, congrats! I suppose. At least it's kept me from diving so deep into Lady E.'s eyes again that I'd scare the wits out of her even before I'd found out how to swim in there... It's truly the spirit within that fascinates me every tingling little bit as much as the shapely form without. 11:19:22 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 10 mai 2004

A break in the clouds? That Brock person, a born copy editor, has been among those assailing me with succinctly titled e-mails, but neither "Therapy" nor "Merciless" proved destined for the junk file like their counterparts offering discounts on mind-bending drugs or the sleazier variations on the act of coupling. For some unfathomable reason, Tony was "glad to read your reflections on witnessing violent death & hope it did you good to be able to set them down. I guess you left out any detail on the act itself from awareness of what a shrewd defence lawyer could make of advance evidence." He's right on the latter point and well, close enough, on the first. Also he'd "never thought of blogging as therapy but of course it is, like all writing. Graham Greene says somewhere that he writes to escape from the blind panic of existence (I have the ref. in my shelves but unlocated...)." I know two quotes by Greene, and that isn't one of them. My "favourite" aphorism by the man is among those listed at 'Think exist', where he observed, in 'The Ministry of Fear' that: "It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself." It's a cliché now, perhaps, but also a trap I loathe falling into emotionally, though it's been obvious that sometimes I still do. Tony, however, spares his wrath for an even more recent error on my part: