Uncannily like vivacious

Vivace = perennial


Oh do not ask what is it
let us go and make our visit…





You would hardly believe this… I was listening to TS Eliot on the net, reading his poems, and finding fault with his reading… I had a “superior” voice in my mind. When we read silently I suppose we use the perfect voice of the Big Other.

picayune – minutiae - the time catcher. Rather like the feather structures designed by Red Indians to catch dreams, I imagine a fine net that would catch time as it flees too fast through our lives…

I continue to describe my milestones as they turn up regularly or irregularly. Irreducible parts of experience, the nuggets. I enjoy them, no matter if I'm repeating myself – I should apologise but I'm tired of apologising, and we never apologise for the right thing, anyway - the only way to be sure to mention them all is to mention them as they arise and you know you have come full circle when you see one for the second time… they say you have to hear something three times to assimilate it.  This is a restful feeling. No need to shout or emphasise anything in the moment. Because it is all going to have to be said again, and again... until...

This reminds me of the thrill of reading Cortazar’s Hopscotch. From a few pages into the book you never know where you are, how much you have read, how many pages are left. It is a totally disorienting experience. Suddenly, just when you are wishing the book would go on forever so that you can stay inside it like in a friend’s company you realise that what you are reading is familiar to you and so you check and yes, you have already read that chapter, the book is over. A cruel ending, but an unforgettable, inimitable one.

Some books hang around, though, and I often drink maté, nowadays.

… though like a stone, unbothered by it…

About the difference between séduire in French = attract, and “seduction” in English, which is bad. (Laura Says Frank Sinatra was arrested for it!)

seduce
To lead away from duty, accepted principles, or proper conduct.
What chance have we got? The rest of the world is at it, playing the game and we British are worrying about the political correctness of being sexual.

and we run away from it all in the the passion to own…


jobsworth, noun
1. (context, mostly, British) A minor clerical worker who refuses to be flexible in the application of rules to help a client or customer.
Etymology: From the phrase "It's more than my job's worth . . ."

I have come up against or stumbled into the semantic minefield of the uncanny in analysis. The frightening aspect of the familiar.


“He ascribes the essential factor in the production of the feeling of uncanniness to intellectual uncertainty; so that the uncanny would always, as it were, be something one does not know one's way about in.”

Being lost at home.
An African painter (Joël Mpah Doo) I was translating used the expression "exiled inside himself..." 
Sometimes, I see an English word in French – on my shopping list on the kitchen wall I had scribbled “pain” which stayed bread for a while then suddenly one morning I saw it in English and wondered why I had written douleur on my shopping list
The other day it was towards the end = vers la fin… and I saw fin as nageoire.
fish-ends
.aleas = contingencies – fringencies – sitges – singe – singer - someone who sings when looked at through French eyes becomes someone acting the monkey…


and death shall have no dominion
dylan thomas


Magpies make a helluva racket!

compunction

"The morning segues into the afternoon."             "they didst this"
 and I'll end with a nice typo - translitted - and some sunny pictures...  October and the weather is glorious.

plants 0909

Rush job...

My analyst has erected gateposts to divert the traffic in front of her house off her lawn. I feel good about her re-defining her limits and protecting her patch. We both enjoy her garden. Sometimes I think I feel good about any kind of positive change.

This is a field not far from my house, which I discovered when I was out walking last Thursday. It is said to be “en jachère fleurie” – floral fallow?

I had to translate “audition” in the legal sense, which in English is “hearing”.

It made me think of the musical sense of audition which I suppose is “casting” in French.

Much as I would love to see myself as “good-natured” I have to admit when I try to do too many things at once I become churlish.

I like to take my time over blog posts, and tend to put off writing till I have a reasonable space of time to spend putting them together. However, the world is speeding up, things are becoming crazy, it is very hot, I have a l_o_t of work to do, last night there was a French Canadian storyteller in Lombez, Robert 7 Crows (who says Crow = Corneille and Corbeau = Raven… Mmm. For me, corbeau has always been crow but I have no time to check this ...) On Saturday night I’ll be singing (my workshop has a 6 minute slot) at the end of year extravaganza of Music’Halle and the next day it seems I’ll be off to Marseilles for a week on "business". (nudge nudge wink wink).

so this one is rushed.

Went to the seaside this weekend and when we got to Gruissan we found by sheer coincidence there was a vernissage of an exhibition containing a painting of Françoise. (Exhibition of paintings by Emma Boutin). So here is a very serendipitous snapshot of the subject having stepped out of the frame.

Cent titres

Watch more MySpace videos on AOL Video

The outrage of it all! My analyst hinted that my discourse could be
specious
adj.
1. Having the ring of truth or plausibility but actually fallacious: a specious argument.
2. Deceptively attractive.

[Middle English, attractive, from Latin speci sus, from speci s, appearance; see spek- in Indo-European roots.]

spe cious•ly adv.
spe ci•os i•ty (-sh - s -t ), spe cious•ness (-sh s-n s) n.

but “I hate you specious to pecious!”

It seems I expend a lot of energy expressing excuses for my neurotic behaviour in a way that is pleasing to myself, instead of rolling up my sleeves to do something about it. Hey, that rings a bell – “Philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it” – Karl Marx.

Marx wrote ‘all profit is theft’, but he profited from the profits of others.
Schopenhauer wasn’t nearly so miserable as someone who has just read one of his books must feel. Apparently he wrote doom and gloom and lived as a hedonist. And Virginia Woolf, who had arrived at the conclusion that for the world to become a better place, ‘one would have to give up inherited wealth’. But she didn’t give up her family purse that filled up automatically like the magic treacle jug without her having to lift a little finger. She committed suicide.

The only way it will ever change is if people stop living in contradiction with their stated principles.

“One's basic nature is totally without hope, and yet one's nervous system is made out of the optimistic stuff.” Francis Bacon



Words worth a mention: master deceiver - crystallisation - repurposed...



I saunter into the kitchen to make coffee and glance at the kitchen notice board and see PAIN and coffee.

Could it be I had never noticed that bread in French means douleur in English? Is it the douleur of the constantly renewed effort of earning our daily bread?

In any case, all these words are superfluous today, a mere pretext to show the work of two amazing artist(e)s. Painter Jan Roset and singer Etenesh Wassié. Above is a clip of Etenesh with Le Tigre, but she also has a duo with Mathieu Sourrisseau on the bass. My favourite is Sew Neutu. I don't understand a word of what she is singing, just as I haven't got a clue how Jan achieves her effect, but these are two languages I wish I could speak!

And a picture of my favourite Scottish islet - Ailsa Craig - at sunset. Taken from Dunure.

Holy shit

Yesterday I found a coffee widget and put it on my blog. It reminded me of the coffee machine on an island I used to work on. It would be easier to state the nationalities missing from that place than those represented. Some of my best friends today are people I met working in that multi-cultural atmosphere. As in all offices, there was back-stabbing and bad feeling, but it was easy to love the world during the coffee break. There is talk of a reunion… which would be quite incredible if we can bring it off.

I was excited about the new widget, which I think is a fun idea, but while I was chuckling to myself part of me felt ill at ease because here I was introducing money to a place I considered a haven in a heartless (capitalist) world. A bit like a Trojan horse.

It also felt like a necessary step into the real world; inviting money in on my own terms seems preferable to passively suffering continuous bombarding from the enemy I’m trying to keep out.

Whatever the ins and outs, psychoanalysis is a tool to escape the helpless bondage to repeated anguish that assails me.

Where there’s muck, there’s brass, so I rolled my sleeves up and typed ‘money and excrement’ in Google, which led me to the Tate Gallery and Piero Manzoni!

I then found an article about the acquisition in the Telegraph, which spoke of irony, and the same article reproduced in Australia with the word irony changed to symbolism.


As an American translator-musician friend once put it, "We all want to do our own shit".

Ah, is this not happiness?

Here are my favourite three of Chin Shengt'an's Thirty-Three Happy Moments

20. To find accidentally a handwritten letter of some old friend in a trunk. Ah, is this not happiness?

24. A traveller returns home after a long journey, and he sees the old city gate and hears the women and children on both banks of the river talking his own dialect. Ah, is this not happiness?

27. To watch someone writing big characters a foot high. Ah, is this not happiness?

And here is a quote from the Guardian that spoke to me:

“the best music is often made by fantastically damaged people who can often barely tie their own shoelaces. Even the most impressionable pre-teen would surely realise that they are not "role models", but talented borderline lunatics whose proximity to the existential abyss defines at least some of their magic.”