philip glass

 one of my favurite soundtracks - here it is adapted for piano. an ideal start to the week 

mrs dalloway

 it's interesting, i think, to watch the approach other people have when they teach. these, which are woefully undersubscribed, are apparently for younger people - although i don't know any 'younger' people who would watch these, let alone read the source material! i also liked comparing and contrasting what he does here to how i looked at mrs dalloway, away back in the day. parallels with the classics would've been frowned upon! is there a link between that type of restricitive educational practice and the dismal politics of today? i wonder! lol 

still, a nice non taxing way to start the day

kanitta meechubot

one of the strands i look for in visual art these days is something that captures a sense of what it is i see and do at work. so i was browsing an old copy of granta this morning and came across kanitta meechubot. you can see more in this series here, catch up on her blog here and if you're in that london you can see her exhibition at the book club until january (should you want to send me the accompanying catalogue i would accept it with some gratitude!)

in contrast, and seeing as how i'm never going to get round to it, i've had a blog post kicking about in my head that's kind of jeanette winterson, kind of virginia woolf and a bit of a lament about the state of writing at the moment. maybe this is because i'm just after reading woolf's the waves, which if it was written today i'd hazard wouldn't have chance one of getting published, and a fair bit of la winterson, who i'm always surprised gets published at all.

there seems, to me (!), to be so much really excellent, thought provoking and generally wow-ish visual art knocking about these days (all hail the internet) in contrast to the written word. is it just because reading takes longer? are there repositories of genuinely dazzling writing that it just takes too long to get to? who knows? me, rather than reading i'm going off out on my bike with a head full of kanitta meechubot. that'll do me!

louis

I am the stalk.
My roots go down
to the depths of the world,
through earth dry with brick,
and damp earth,
through veins of lead and silver.

I am all fibre.
All tremors shake me,
and the weight of the earth
is pressed to my ribs.
Up here my eyes are green leaves,
unseeing.

I am a boy in grey flannels
with a belt fastened by a brass snake up here.
Down there my eyes are the lidless eyes
of a stone figure in a desert by the Nile.
I see women passing with red pitchers to the river;
I see camels swaying and men in turbans.
I hear tramplings, tremblings, stirrings round me.

But let me be unseen.
I am green as a yew tree
in the shade of the hedge.
My hair is made of leaves.
I am rooted
to the middle of the earth.
My body is a stalk.

I press the stalk.
A drop oozes
from the hole at the mouth
and slowly, thickly,
grows larger and larger.
Now something pink
passes the eyehole.
Now an eye-beam
is slid through the chink.

Its beam strikes me.
I am a boy in a grey flannel suit.
She has found me.
I am struck on the nape of the neck.
She has kissed me.

All is shattered.

virginia woolf

the waves

The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. The wave paused, and then drew out again, sighing like a sleeper whose breath comes and goes unconsciously. Gradually the dark bar on the horizon became clear as if the sediment in an old wine-bottle had sunk and left the glass green. Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold.

The light struck upon the trees in the garden, making one leaf transparent and then another. One bird chirped high up; there was a pause; another chirped lower down. The sun sharpened the walls of the house, and rested like the tip of a fan upon a white blind and made a blue finger-print of shadow under the leaf by the bedroom window. The blind stirred slightly, but all within was dim and unsubstantial. The birds sang their blank melody outside.

virginia woolf