Wednesday, March 26, 2008

while cycling in paris...

...i noticed that the streets have rivets going thru them - it occurs to me that perhaps paris is floating on a sea of Dadaist flotsam and jetsam and is permantnely in danger of being washed down the Seine into the Atlantic, so has to be held down strongly by bolts and rivets...

this also explains the driving...

I have some pictures to prove it....but they are too big to fit in this
water margin

meanwhile, I've decided that while English has the biggest vocabulary in the world, this means that meaning is diluted compared, say to french, where every word is dripping with implications and significance....the weight of a single utterance in french can compete with the entire logos of the ancients of Athenian Greece in its overwhelming resonance. n'est ce pas?

Thursday, March 13, 2008

from acton to padington by bike

so thios morning i dropped a car at one of the extremely far-and-few-between subaru approved garages and then cycled to kings cross - the garage was in acton, so i cycled thru harlesden and neasden and harrow and down on thru to padington....aweome - now i know why I hate west london - what is weird is that some of these places are quite nice, but only if you arrive at them from somewhere else (like from camden town) ratehr tan seeunbg them in successon coming on down the old ewst london dosser route..

'arrow-on-the-'ill
it ought to be called...

padington looks really rank when you see it arriving from under the A40 flyover ("westway") - truly the road to hell is paved with tarmac and suburbs

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

postcards to the edge

I'm sort of jaded about people living out there in extremis (out here in the periphery, here where the creatures live, out here where there are no grassy knolls, no death nolls, we are oliver soned, un-imacculate; out there, out of luck, out to lunch, out of limits, out of my mind, out of pure spite, out of change, same difference, plus ca change), not in the palace (jade or limestone, or limey tone, or lame), then when they get lost little girl, they try to come back ,and they write those sad sad stories

good therapy for them.

but if we were decent, we'd have sent them stories of RL, to lure them back sooner -
we would have written to them about breakfast and warm rain, and hugs, and sunlight on the pool by the beach, and dancing straight, and a beer with friends...we'd have written

postcards to the edge

Sunday, March 09, 2008

cherie blair is a CIA agent...

made you look, made you look, made you look:)

anyhow, read Ghost, By Robert Harris - very good if you like a sort of
"revenge by fiction" that the novelist seems to be achieving - I think he is a very good thriller writer - the NY TImes review seems to regret that it wasn't a John le Carre book, but that is missing the point - it is meant to be more populist and the intellectually clever framing - the story is told by an anonymous narrator who is ghosting the thinly fictionalized brit ex prime minister's memoirs, and tries to get "under the skin" of a main who appears really just to be a cypher (pun intended). This is a neat way to pretend neutrality in the face of horrendous tales of rendition and waterboarding and daily suicide bombings on the streets of london and N, apparently a direct result of the "war" on "terror".

The quotes from a ghostwriter's manual that start each chapter are tartly ironic. The
events unroll slightly Tom Clancyesque towards the end, although, for me, that was more a result of Harris' very professional writing skill simply picking up the pace (as you do) when the plot gets more physical...

good stuff..if only it were true...