A man, a plan, a canal — Panama!

Languages and codes.

Listening to the radio, I learn of a classical composer (I believe it was Shostakovich but I couldn’t find confirmation of this) who had a piece of metal inside his head that vibrated, causing him to hear highly original music, which he immediately transcribed… The metal was shrapnel, and it moved when he tilted his head. I listen to the radio in the car, and unfortunately I arrived at my destination before I could find out if he decided to have it removed or tuned…

The same day I came across the word palindrome, which reminded me of palimpsest, and as I was finding out what it meant I uncannily came across the following example:

"Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas".

And palindromes don’t just exist in human language, they are also present in molecular biology…

Last weekend we had no electricity because of the storms, and I decided to allow myself the luxury of reading all day Saturday. I read a biography of Bjork, and then the book that jumped into my hands was Marguerite Duras' Un Barrage contre le Pacifique. I had been meaning to read this book for years. I love the title, and I love it even more because the Pacific in the title is the China Sea. Oh the enormity of it all. Duras’ mother apparently refused to call the water by its proper name.

Some time later I discovered the book has just been made into a new film with Isabelle Huppert as Duras’ mother. Excitedly I looked up the screening schedule and found that the film had been shown at our local cinema the night before the book jumped into my hand.

In other words, all this is proof that I most definitely am a part of the universe. I exist and I’m connected to everything else. There are some crossed wires and some delayed reactions in my circuits, is all.

Not only do I exist, but I am also one of the Keith Tyson 5000.

Keith Tyson did a series of paintings called the History Paintings. I happened to visit Charlotte Higgins’ blog at the Guardian on the day that…

and here is my history painting…

Apart from the irresistibility of a freebie, there is the possibility of being involved in a crowd-sourced response project – a kind of big thank you to Keith Tyson – though, so far there are only eight of us. The other 4992 seem to be playing hard to get.

This raises the passably vast questions of what I think of gambling – I have always been against gambling, finding Pascal’s gambit intellectually dishonest – and the moral discomfort this causes reminds me of Lacan’s ne pas céder sur son désir and the feeling of trahison. Betrayal. Giving way, letting your standards slip, or just plain doing something you don’t believe in or doing something you believe to be wrong…

- and what art is, or Art, whether you like your A's capital or prefer a petit a, and could the two be related, and points to the démarche theory - a/Art is what is produced by artists, artists being people who are recognised by the community as producing art – winners of art prizes…

Sybarite

Whenever I come across a new word for the first time, I invariably come across it again very soon afterwards. It’s that second time that makes me want to think about it. Funny how the first and second times are always so close together…
Sybarite is the latest word. It means "a voluptuary”. Something like a hedonist with luxury thrown in.
I came across it in a blog. I was reading the blog because I had been very impressed by a concert. Reese, aka Yves-Henry Guillonnet, is a first rate musician, and he was playing guitar in a duo with a certain Manu who has the sexiest voice I have heard in a long time. Their compositions were subtle, interesting, tender, cocasse, and amusing. In a word, they were brilliant! Unfortunately they have not yet released the recording of the gig, but they will, one day.



It was Saturday 10th May, and there were two concerts of interest on the same evening! The odds against this happening in (or, rather, around) a place like Lombez are mind-boggling. The first concert was at aperitif time and it was Vicky La Sardine (top picture), a friend who writes her own songs and plays them accompanied by an accordionist. She is also an excellent performer, and had a bit of success with a comedy act at one stage.

The second occurrence of sybarite came today, in a crit of the film by Claude Lelouch, “And Now Ladies and Gentlemen, please”. I watched it last night, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I fell asleep the first time I watched it, but I was very tired… Part of the reason I like it is because Patricia Kaas sings some of the songs I’m practicing now for my piano/voice duo with Bertil Sylvander. Bertil’s day job is running a clown school, at La Robin, and we are working on some nice jazz standards and improvising. I hope he doesn’t want us to wear red noses… (Ha ha! They're not that kind of clowns - "Send them in", I hear you say). Yesterday we worked on “Que reste-t-il de nos amours” and I switched blithely from that to "I wish you bliss, but more than thiss...". When I watched the film last night, you guessed, that’s what Patricia Kaas does, starts off in French and switches to English... well, at least I know where I got that idea from... a lot of the time I am convinced my ideas are original and all it means is that my memory is not as good as it could be…

Which is another thing I like about the film – the main characters are suffering from amnesia and at the end the line between phantasme, reality and memory becomes very hazy...

Scathed

I feel scathed. I shouldn’t take it personally, I know, but I entered the Willesden short story competition with a fictional account of the last half hour of the life of Jean-Charles de Menezes, and not only did they not award the prize, but they had the following to say:

“To be very clear: just because this prize has the words Willesden and Zadie hovering by it, does not mean that I or the other judges want to read hundreds of jolly stories of multicultural life on the streets of North London.”

Right, well, not to worry, ho hum, I’ll know better next time!

It started when I was having a coffee in Starbucks next door to the IPCC in Old Holborn last September and I first heard of the De Menezes case. I was passively on the look out for a subject for the Willesden short story competition. The fact that the video footage from inside the tube station had mysteriously disappeared made me prick up my ears. I read as many articles as I could and became interested in the case. A tragedy; a communication breakdown. I imagined the stress in the crowded control room in contrast to the calm attitude of a man going to work unaware that he was even being followed. It seemed to me that the points of view of the other players involved would be given adequate coverage so I felt compelled to give voice to the victim who suffered most. Reading on, I nearly choked on my coffee when I read that Jean Charles de Menezes was on his way to Willesden to fix a fire alarm when he was shot.

“That does it,” I said to myself, amazed at the synchronicity, convinced that destiny was pointing a huge arrow in that direction for me. I shall write it and call it “trying to get to Willesden/is this the way to Willesden/on my way to Willesden" before finally settling for “On the way to Willesden”.

Neither of us made it.

Synchronicity, etc.

I was in the habit of drinking my morning coffee from a very attractive René (Rennie?) Mackintosh rose-style china mug, (9^th one down, Blue Kintyre) which, like so much in my kitchen, was a present from my sister. The word "Evasé" comes to mind, curving outwards to be wider at the top, giving a larger surface for the hot liquid to cool, reminiscent of the way champagne glasses used to be before it was discovered that the bubbles burst faster.
I needed clothes pegs. I went to the local ironmongers, which is the biggest store in the village. Outside urban centres people need to be able to fix things and do things themselves, I suppose. They only had plastic ones. As I head for the exit, I catch sight of an attractive china mug with roses on it. I pick it up and stand in line to pay for it, a voice in my head saying “clothes pegs. You need clothes pegs. You do not even remotely need another china mug. What are you doing?" But the instinct won and I paid for it and took it home.
The next morning I poured my hot drink into my trusty mackintosh bone china mug and it cracked open and fell apart. I had its replacement right there, waiting to be put to use.
I was totally awestruck. If only, thought I. If only life could be like that more often…

The Double bind
On Christmas day, a son receives a gift from his mother of two neckties; one red, one green. Invited to his mother's house for boxing day dinner, he wears the red tie. She greets him with “what’s wrong with the green tie I gave you, don’t you like it?”.
The only way he could have avoided this particular reaction would have been to wear both ties at once, making himself look effectively crazy.
Laing’s most famous patient was Mary Barnes, who painted this (detail):

Small world

Browsing at random, I came across this wonderful story about the Glasgow coat of arms, which includes:

the tree that never grew,
the bird that never flew,
the fish that never swam,
the bell that never rang.

The fish that never swam

“The coat of arms always shows the fish with a ring held in its mouth. This is because a King of Strathclyde had given his wife a ring as a present. But the Queen gave it to a knight who promptly lost it. Some versions of the story say that the King took the ring while the knight was asleep and threw it in the river. The King then demanded to see the ring - threatening death to the Queen if she could not produce it. The knight confessed to St Mungo who sent a monk to catch a fish in the river Clyde. When this was brought back St Mungo cut open the fish and found the ring. When the Bishop of Glasgow was designing his own seal around 1271, he used the illustration of a salmon with a ring in its mouth and this has come down to us in today's coat of arms.”

It's a small world. I wrote about a variation of this story on March 11th.

Otoliths

I was translating a list of fish that can be caught in Gabon and had to look up “otolithe”. I had never seen the word before, in French or English.

Otolithe

Pseudotolithus senegalensis
Cassava croaker

As well as a fish, I found another meaning:

An otolith, (oto-, ear + lithos, a stone) or otoconium is a structure in the saccule or utricle of the inner ear.

Browsing the web, I came across the word again, in a fascinating article.

This phenomenon is common enough, sometimes called synchronicity, when you encounter a word for the first time then come across it again immediately afterwards. It sort of pops into existence. The second time you meet it, it feels as if another reality has winked at you. The reality of hidden connections.

It conjurs up lithops and monoliths, palaeontology and palimpsest, which reminds me that the word that set me off on this blog leaves me free to delete everything and start all over again.

Fish are fascinating. I never think of them hearing. Watching salmon attempting to jump up waterfalls is the best lesson in determination I can imagine.

Coincidence?

Serendipity

Synchronicity

Heard on the radio: a man was out fishing and lost his diamond cufflinks over the side of the boat. One week later he went to his favourite restaurant and ordered a whole fish. When the fish was served, he cut it open, and his cufflinks weren’t in it.

I started this blog recently, about a month ago, and so far have included only two links, one to an artist who paints, and one to a thinker, or, more precisely, to a journal about a thinker. Both these links go to people who were born in what was then Yugoslavia. Strange coincidence.

My friend Tamara was born in London, but her mother is from Yugoslavia. I remember when Belgrade was being bombed, she said it was so close it could just as well have been Glasgow.

At the beginning of the eighties, just before I left Britain, I heard Casper Weinberger on television saying “Britain could be totally destroyed, or worse…”.

I still haven’t got my mind round it.