raven72d's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Mrs. Dalloway Said That She Would Pet The Axolotls Herself Not a good week, really. Exhausting and dispiriting week at the office. I'm looking forward to sleeping through most of Saturday afternoon and having a vur' quiet Saturday night. Too warm today-- something like 86 F. I'm resigned to running the air conditioning here in the lakeside flat, and I suppose I'll be using the a/c in my car next week. I've been getting by with the windows down, but here we are in the Deepest South as April ends. I'll still be walking around the lakes or over to the levee in the evenings, but I'll be doing it later. Let's give things a chance to cool off a bit. A lovely post from Ms. Avery's Dorset today-- The Great Wood, which lay beyond the stream at the bottom of Old Fox's garden, was hazed with bluebells, sudden and miraculous amongst the green, and that overcast afternoon, deep within the trees, a cuckoo sang. Grey-blue-black as the spring clouds massing in the west, her stripes were immaculate and ever fashionable, as fine as eighteenth century taffeta, thought Old Fox. Too elegant and complicated for rustic life, she would abandon her young to a sensible and kindly dunnock, and then, at Midsummer, she would leave the little Dorset village. Grave with her singular courage, she told one soul – Old Fox – her route, planned in the quiet June nights; all her own it was, vast and angular, across France, across Italy to Dalmatia, to the islands, where she would rest in an rambling apricot orchard she knew from years past, high on a hillside and close to the glittering blue of the Adriatic. That's a beautiful vignette. I've seen Trieste and the Adriatic, and I loved the colours of the sky and the water. I'd like to go back, and I'd like to sit in an apricot orchard with a book and a bottle of wine. A letter arrived from Mister Taylor yesterday. He recommends that I listen to an early-90s band called The The, and specifically to a song of theirs called "The Violence of Truth". I did listen to it last night on YouTube, and it's quite good. I'd remembered The The from back in the Long Ago-- I think I discovered them on Post-Modern MTV, an utterly forgotten program. Anyway...I may go back through some of their songs and see which ones I'd have liked c.1992. I'm listening to FKA Twigs right now-- lovely haunting music. Worth your time. Mister Taylor's letter was done in his usual dissociated handwriting. He still letters exactly as he was taught in elementary school. And he said that-- I don't know about what it means to be non-binary, but I do know that I'm living in a territory that's beyond or outside the bounds of good and evil. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. Welcome to the Desert of the Real itself. He goes on to say that the snake swallows its own tail (tale?). What I'm chasing is now chasing me. And there's this disturbing part: Also there is the fact that a neighbor of mine accidentally caught another neighbor of mine spying on me and following me. Maybe they were just being neighborly, but it's enticing to think someone is stalking me. Maybe we can get together in Isabella Rossellini's apartment and afterwards go for a Lynchian joyride. What happens when two tribes go to war and two fantasies collide? One is all that you can score and welcome to the pleasure dome. Just relax and enjoy the ride. I keep thinking that this is all going to end in restraining orders or (worse) orders of protection, or whatever Texas courts call those. Or maybe it'll just all end in alien abduction. I could be in favor of that, of course. He'd enjoy alien abduction, and all the more so if the aliens were actually Lacanian or Jungian symbols. And I suppose that I'd enjoy getting to hear his stories. But I do worry about him. An old student/friend of mine sent an email this morning where he noted that, you know, so much about Vienna 1900 and the Habsburg Monarchy as a whole was all "smoke and mirrors". I emailed him back to say that, damn it, I'd read his message and then spent all morning at the office muttering to myself that where there's smoke, there must be mirrors. And of course I wrote down What are mirrors, but an excuse for smoke? in my Moleskine. I do need to go to the library tomorrow. I have a DVD ("Ripley's Game") to return, and I need to ask if my copy of Simon's "The Sciences of the Artificial" has come in. I do need to re-read that. Tomorrow The Falcon Reads has a new book review for his channel-- it'll be a long review of J.-K. Huysmans' "Against Nature". I'm quite looking forward to it. Huysmans was one of the top authors on the list of Decadent Books that I drew up when I was probably sixteen. I wish I still had a copy of that list. I drew it up based on references I'd found in other books-- references to books that were "decadent" or likely to be "corrupting". Yes, of course "Dorian Grey" was on it, as were Rimbaud's poems. For that matter, Henry Miller's Paris books and his own study of Rimbaud ("Time of the Assassins") were all on the list. Anyway...I can't recall why or where I found any references to Huysmans' "Against Nature" and "Là-Bas", but I did acquire copies and read them. I think I re-read "Against Nature" maybe ten years ago, but I did enjoy it. So I'm looking forward to The Falcon Reads' review. Let's see what someone else thinks of it. I will sit down tomorrow evening and write Mister Taylor a long letter. I haven't heard his views on "Ripley" or the final episodes of "Shogun" yet. He may be arguably insane and certainly annoying, but I do respect his opinions on books and films. And he is one of the few people left who enjoy long phone conversations. I can think of any number of lovely Young Companions that I'd rather be talking to, but Mister Taylor is my oldest friend, and I'm at least used to dealing with him. I'll note that I have a drawer filled with keffiyehs in different colours. I like the black-and-white ones, since that's the classic pattern and colour scheme. Still, a black-and-white keffiyeh has political overtones these days, and I don't share those views. I may have to see whether a blue-and-black or tan-and-black keffiyehs have any political significance. The first keffiyeh/shemagh I ever owned was in black-and-white-- something I saw as popular in Berlin and Vienna back in the days when the Wall still stood and a re-unified Berlin was unthinkable. I'm a creature of habit, after all, and I'd hate to give up those colours. Still, we'll just have to see. So...off to make green tea before bed. Breakfast tomorrow, and then getting some reading done. 10:25 p.m. - 2024-04-26 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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