Wednesday 25 October 2006 at 11:21 pm
turned 29 with an ape, a rubber cobra and a blonde woman. climbed the london eye, ate a spectacular whisky chocolate cake with plastic spoons outside the royal palace, fed pigeons with sticky marzipan residue. the pelicans wanted none of it, nor did the passing children. the ape drew the attention of passing orientals. later, in true david lynch style, my blue birthday balloon flew into the middle of a rainy motorway off manor house station and was kicked into the other lane by a small noseless boy with a hideously torn face. all in all, ace.
Tuesday 17 October 2006 at 1:44 pm
good old
anton:
"BEHOLD! The mighty voices of my vengeance smash the stillness of the air and stand as monoliths of wrath upon a plain of writhing serpents. I am become as a monstrous machine of annihilation to the festering fragments of the body of he (she) who would detain me. It repenteth me not that my summons doth ride upon the blasting winds which multiply the sting of my bitterness; and great black slimy shapes shall rise from brackish pits and vomit forth their pustulence into his (her) puny brain."
from the "invocation employed towards the conjuration of destruction", in the
satanic bible.
fresh out of bed on a tuesday, it may just make me choke on my morning coffee; still, it does make me think twice about pissing off one of his followers. i'd hate to imagine herds of pimply computer geeks with black make-up spending their saturday nights intoning invocations like this with my name in the brackets.
Sunday 15 October 2006 at 11:11 pm
I feel like a slow dark cloud covering the sun, in a clear sky: not the mass of darkness, but the bright light that spills around its edges. this is good.
my mother and I took the pier in for the winter today. the girder that held the set of planks closest to the shore was rotten through and through, snapped with a soft sound when I lifted it. after years, it is time to replace with a more convenient structure - the old girders of 18 planks each were made by men in front of women, back in the 70s: they're bulky as hell and unwieldy even for two reasonably strong men, convenience sacrificed at the altar of macho.
later, I ratted on a leopard-spotted slug sliming across the porch - omnivorous and monstrously fertile, these particular beasts are humid locusts in slow motion. half an hour later I found it in a white plastic tub next to the door, thin sausage dissolving in a saline bath. when called to, mother legislates the local ecology expediently.
Friday 13 October 2006 at 6:13 pm
it is difficult to conduct oneself as an angry young man, around here.
it might be the ample horizons, the shimmering sunsets, the rapidly cooling air - fresh and tinted with salt, infinitely transparent. the mercurial sea. the gentle rhythm of the house, the plentiful food, the shelves full of books I want to read. the long mornings in bed pretending to feel the cold touching the outside walls, and dark evenings spent reading under a lamp in the corner of the sofa. or the brisk walks, mud-brown puddles soggy with leaves, the bare wet trees spindly and red with rowanberries.
I could write that my hands tingle and the world is sharp in detail, the space behind my eyes bright and full of light. instead, I write - STILL - about famine and calamity, mass starvation, 'welfare catastrophes' and the politics of Rudolph death.
Monday 09 October 2006 at 1:35 pm
reading kazantzakis these days, finally working my swathe through
the last temptation of christ - a beautiful work, dense and fleshy scented prose shot through with fierce light - but man did I miss out on things last time, age 19 and deep in the throes.
kazantzaki's christ is not simply human, he is a greek man. two parts nietzsche, three parts carlylean hero worship, all thunder and blood and searing wings, heroic denials and more heroic submissions. underneath the rich surface and the honest questioning, the story is curiously barren. there is power and will and destiny, puffed-out chests and butting antlers, but not a shred of love. patience is a sin for women. in short, infatuated boys who dream of swords and lightning, aggrandizing denials and conquering the world: unsubtle, unwise, deeply silly. and I'll just gloss over the fertile, simpleminded women clinging to their hearths and men, and the laughing little devil negro with the white teeth.
all this is toned down in
scorsese's film, which tells the story much more humanely for stripping it of kazantzaki's boy-greekish misogynism and bombast. a rare case where I not only tolerate but in fact prefer the movie.
Thursday 05 October 2006 at 5:20 pm
the riot of snakes retreated some ten days ago, their disappearance
timed to coincide exactly with the arrival of the blonde. a stay of
smooth velvet, pleasant in its folds as in its minor dips - though not
unhaunted by nightmarish hallucinations and occasional screams. just
the way it is meant.
today i found a transient little caern, on the flat rocks at the base
of the cliff at the end of the island. six small unripe blackberries,
bright red, arranged in one half of an ovoid ellipse around a heap of
nine large blue berries, each of them cut with a cross to reveal the
seed. the array was not beyond coincidence, but with the ruffling
breeze and the bright autumn light over the dark blue sea it made me
nostalgic. wandered for a while in that mode, drifting around
everything and nothing in particular - people who come and go,
closeness and distance, threads and cages, love, fear, disquiet,
memory, satisfaction, kindness, truth and preservation, masks and
disguises, the character of selflessness, touching.
ostensibly,
i'm now here to edit my thesis, and some work has been done. the
current batch that presents itself, however, is stretching out in time
like ripe bubblegum. it's the sixth chapter, hopefully, and it concerns
the political effects of welfare discourses in a herding context. it's
not a bad chapter, per se, but stuck as it is between my chapter on
curved knives and my chapter on the fetish logic of meat, it just
refuses to motivate me. when i look at it in my current frame of mind,
i want to wreak vengeance on the fool that wrote it. still. i have
given myself one more week to finalize a coherent draft of it,
high-oscillation mood swings or not
"Thirty-five is when you finally get your head
together and your body starts falling apart." Whoever said that
Still, retrospectively a happy b-day; hopefully with the rubber-cobra deep in your butt
Dirty Monk - 27 10 06 - 08:35
Pelican already too full of pigeon to manage any marzipan - no, seriously: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/londo..
flats - 28 10 06 - 21:41
Grats! I actually remembered on the day, but I was omw to the supermarket at the time of remembrance, and thus it was lost to me when I got back home :P
Ingvild - 30 10 06 - 13:03
thank you all for birthday congratulations! though I am reaching the point where condolences are more appropriate...
flats: is that cannibalism?
ingvild: this perplexed me for a bit. are you associated with a certain breed of tasty fungus from yuggoth, from earlier this year?
and 'dirty monk', welcome! good quote, and the rubber cobra was deliciously smooth. mm-hm. looks like I shan't be going to dortmund after all, but we should try and intersect over the next few months. keep us posted if you move out of sausage-land.
aging monkey - 05 11 06 - 14:40