Skip to content

New Herbs #n

Cold wind, grey cloud growing luminous and showing blue as the morning progresses. I went out early, to cut "new herbs" for the new year for my bedside, pine twigs and rosemary. Nothing in flower, not even a first daffodil, but two starved looking little white dianthus in a pot, but in the fish pool a first clump of spawn had sprung into being overnight. I scooped it out (goldfish eat spawn).It's now in the plastic tadpole bowl, pending proof of fertility, and so another year begins.

Reading

I've finished The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas. It was very interesting, full of famous people, and occasionally arresting insights: cubism, the link between "Cubism" and its compartments, its rigid print inclusions, with the usual display of items for sale in a Spanish shop window of the time: a pipe, set in a frame of its own, and so on. And Picasso one day seeing a camouflage-painted cannon rolling down the Boulevard Raspail, and being transfixed; saying look, "C'est nous qui avons fait ça", because that was what cubism had done to buildings in a landscape: it was "the way of building in spanish villages, the line of the houses not following the landscape, becoming indistinguishable in the landscape by cutting across the landscape. It was the principle of camouflage." (1907-1914)

Still don't know what to make of Gertrude Stein though. Neglected genius, who wasted her talent through arrogance, and on providing a wonderful salon and support system for male geniuses? Or a crank with inherited income and a knack for spotting celebrities early, and hanging on to them; like Mme Verdurin in Proust? She certainly could pick them, and she certainly did like them male; with all their tinder-fragile maleness about them (picasso, hemingway).

Still can't help feeling there's something slightly naff about writing a pretend autobiography for your spouse, all about yourself. As if she's a pet animal or something.

Looking forward to

An embarrassment of riches, all forced on me more or less.

I've been reading W.H.R Rivers on Medicine, Magic and Religion, for my anthropology story, so now I really have to get hold of Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy, which I've never read.

I've snagged about the last two tickets for Antigone at the Barbican, and damn the expense, because I couldn't miss Juliette Binoche in that role.

And The Hard Problem live from the NT, at the Duke's in April. We went to see Arcadia at The Theatre Royal a week or two ago, and it was a delight. So nostalgic for those heady days in the eighties and nineties, when Science was outing itself as a pathetically limited enterprise, just beginning to dare to open up to the real world, with kindly computers holding it by the hand; and Chaos Theory, and Fractals, and that particular brand of sparkling, witty, "classless" male academic, University of Sussex all over him. . . Besides breaking a jinx for me. Everything I've paid to see at The Theatre Royal for years has turned to mud, but not this time.

I don't think The Hard Problem will be as good. It's a daft hard problem, it will vanish, when all the "easy" problems of consciousness are solved. Like the hard problem of the mysterious irreducible binary differences between men and women. Fix the non-gendered human rights issues involved, and I promise you, the mystery will melt away, because it doesn't exist.

Plus Behind The Beautiful Forevers, also live at the Duke's, and two Shaffer plays at the New Venture Theatre, one of our local non-profit theatre companies. And now my pockets are empty. Have to wait for them to fill up again.

Okami footnote.

Catwalk wall, cakewalk. I hate that marlin. I hate that fish so much I might even be defeated.


A very frivolous post. Makes a sheepish change.

Trackbacks

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as Linear | Threaded

No comments

Add Comment

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA 1CAPTCHA 2CAPTCHA 3CAPTCHA 4CAPTCHA 5


Form options

Submitted comments will be subject to moderation before being displayed.