December 08, 2009
'Tis the season
... for New Year's resolutions.
This coming year, I will commit myself to reading 12 books in Portuguese by Portuguese authors (some are well deserved rereads).
So, here's the list for my own reference:
- Húmus, Raul Brandão.
- O que diz Molero, Dinis Machado.
- O Dia Cinzento, Mário Dionísio.
- O Vale da Paixão, Lídia Jorge.
- No Reino da Dinamarca, Alexandre O'Neill.
- O Pequeno Mundo, Luísa Costa Gomes.
- Gente Singular, Manuel Teixeira Gomes.
- A Casa Grande de Romarigães, Aquilino Ribeiro.
- Mau tempo no canal, Vitorino Nemésio.
- Seta despedida, Maria Judite de Carvalho.
- Um homem de barbas, Manuel de Lima.
- Finisterra, Carlos de Oliveira.
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December 03, 2009
The week's collection
The actor-manager Henry Irving was a real-life inspiration for the character of Dracula (Stoker worked for him).
Everytime we walk by his statue behind the National Gallery I mention the Robertson Davies passage from World of Wonders that R. keeps saying he doesn't remember reading.
"I'm going to lay a few yellow roses - I hope I can get yellow ones - at the foot of the monument to Henry Irving behind the National Portrait Gallery. You know it. It's one of the best-known monuments in London. Irving, splendid and gracious, in his academical robes, looking up Charing Cross Road. (...) The Irving monument stands in quite a large piece of open pavement; near by a pavement artist was chalking busily on the flagstones. Beside the monument itself a street performer was unpacking some ropes and chains, and a woman was helping him to get ready for his performance. Magnus took off his hat, laid the flowers at the foot of the statue, arranged them to suit himself, stepped back, looked up at the statue, smiled and said something under his breath."
*****
Saw Clive Wearing's diaries on Thursday at the wonderful new Wellcome collection exhibition (always a high brow cabinet of curiosities exquisitely curated). He has "an acute and long lasting case of anterograde amnesia and thus only a moment-to-moment consciousness".
His diary entries are eery and, as usual and by some fetishistic innate attachment to objects, seeing the diaries in the flesh was much more impressive than reading a transcript online:
8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.
9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.
*****
Paul Dirac and Cary Grant were classmates as children. What an unlikely duo.
*****
Reading surrealist artist Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet. Turns out the author is 92 this year, the same age as the protagonist of the story. The novel is comic and sad and probably the only one I've ever read where almost all the characters are senile old women.
"Everyone's had an interesting life," she says. "Unless they're interested in business or something." -- Leonora Carrington interviewed by the Independent.
*****
(on describing a couple whose only daughter got married and moved away)
"the Clementses felt dejected, apprehensive, and lonely in their nice, old drafty house that now seemed to hang about them like the flabby skin and flapping clothes of some fool who had gone and lost a third of his weight." --Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov
How on earth did he come up with such wonderful similes?
*****
Also as a result of the Wellcome Collection exhibition on Identity, need to research more about Claude Cahun's Héroïnes (part of which is online at the french national library).
"Feminism is already in the fairytales," Cahun remarked, the slightest shift in the angle of view will make the suppressed content plain. Cahun reformulated a dozen or so fables from the viewpoint of their "misunderstood" heroines and contributed several, including "Judith, la sadique," to the prestigious literary journal Mercure de France 6 for publication." -- in Acting Out
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December 02, 2009
Humbug
"I want to thank the people of Britain for the legacy of Charles Dickens and the chance to tell this story. This story couldn't be more important now - it's about the immorality of greed."...
...Jim Carrey said as he switched on the christmas lights of the two biggest shopping streets in London as part of the publicity stunts for the opening of a Disney movie grossing $196.2 million since being released. Was he being facetious?
Also, Dickens works are on the public domain so the chance to tell the story is thanks to the fact that Mickey Mouse was born a few decades later. Otherwise...
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November 24, 2009
Anglicans and Hairs
Sign posted at St. Barts in the City (lovely church, lovely music).
"The current proposals for a Covenant between Anglican provinces represent an effort to create not a centralised decision-making executive but a 'community of communities' that can manage to sustain a mutually nourishing and mutually critical life, with all consenting to certain protocols of decision-making together. As Harvesting notes, Anglicans have been challenged to flesh out their rhetoric about communion through the crises and controversies of recent years, and this is simply part of a variegated response that will, no doubt, continue for a good while yet to be refined and formulated.
The recent announcement of an Apostolic Constitution making provision for former Anglicans shows some marks of the recognition that diversity of ethos does not in itself compromise the unity of the Catholic Church, even within the bounds of the historic Western patriarchate. But it should be obvious that it does not seek to do what we have been sketching: it does not build in any formal recognition of existing ministries or units of oversight or methods of independent decision-making, but remains at the level of spiritual and liturgical culture, as we might say. As such, it is an imaginative pastoral response to the needs of some; but it does not break any fresh ecclesiological ground. It remains to be seen whether the flexibility suggested in the Constitution might ever lead to something less like a 'chaplaincy' and more like a church gathered around a bishop."
Enchanted by the Archbishop of Canterbury's address in Rome. Still stunned that there are Anglicans ready to defect to the Catholic Church. Ever since I've moved here I've been continually surprised by the openness, tolerance, inclusiveness and diversity of opinion in the Anglican church. Why would anyone want to give all that up that is beyond me.
*****
And now for something completely different.
*****
I donated hair for an art project. I visited a independent/small publishers fair held at Conway Hall some weeks ago and there was a norwegian artist there selling a book with photos of stuff that was inside his vacuum cleaner. Since I have a similar, yet only in the realm of ideas, pet project involving belly button lint, I was interested. I ended up giving him two hairs and I am still fantasizing he is a mad genetics engineer who will populate some inhospitable part of Norway (shouldn't be hard to find) with Claudia clones, roaming the wilderness like little animals waiting to be tamed. Phew. Just reread the paragraph and, boy, does this sound terribly weird. Oh well.
*****
Bought the book "Transmission" by Chisato Tamabayashi at the same book fair. It's so beautiful that tears come to my eyes everyt ime I open it and all this intricate sculptures of colorful paper pop out.
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November 20, 2009
Following Eco's Poetics of Cataloguing
I like Jerusalem Artichokes | Sempé's Cartoons | Mendelssohn | Camilleri's Montalbano | Conceptual art | Being read out loud to | Sunny, cold Autumn days | Warm clotted cream rice pudding | to cook | to read | to go on long walks | to be naked in the cold rain after a hot sauna | to drive abroad without a map | Caillebotte | the colosseum in Rome | BBC Radio 3 | Eric Rohmer's movies | Lamb's Conduit | snow | heirloom tomatoes | Freud's Wolfman paintings | Francis Alys | Mariage Frères Tea | the smell of roasted peppers | warm wool socks | head massages | Purcell | Stationery | quakers | pedestrianized bridges | the Prado | moss | ripe persimmons | ligne claire drawings | making quince paste | older people | the japanese garden in Holland Park | Amartya Sen | Turin | old cemeteries
I dislike the monument to Vittorio Emanuel II in Rome | celebrity chefs | almonds | shopping malls | pre-prepared meals | "working lunches" | strong winds | bitter fruit | italian operas | noise | shopping for shoes | having a haircut | yoga | bracelets | boats | long skirts | Berlusconi | strong coffee | the toes in the subjects painted by Botticelli | the smell of disinfectants | pink flowers | squirrels | cemented front yards | gps | Tony Blair | Dogu figurines | women wearing leggings without a skirt on | bull terriers | Barcelona | chocolate with nuts | Wedgwood's Jasper White on Pale Blue Porcelain | Live chickens | People speaking on bluetooth headsets | old plays adapted to a contemporary setting | guitar jazz other than gypsy swing | Rothko paintings hanging in brightly lit rooms | putting the liner bag inside the garbage bin | celtic music | when there's wet cardboard on the sidewalk | Schoenberg
***
Asked R. for help with the dislike list. He said "that's easy, you're always ranting about something" and then proceeded to remind me of my pet hates.
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November 18, 2009
Prosper
It's such a joy for me to subscribe to Sotheby's auction announcements and to be able to browse their e-catalogues. It's as if I am awarded a glimpse of a beautiful work of art or of a piece of memorabilia that will soon submerge once more into the deep waters of private ownership. Almost in a week's time, they're auctioning off some wonderful items on a Paris book sale. My favourite being a doodle-like self-portrait of Merimée in prison.
Merimée has been lately on my mind ever since I compiled a little guide (self-published on Lulu.com and everything!) for our summer roadtrip in the south of France and realized how much of our sightseeing was provided by his conservation efforts as a Inspector of Monuments. This led me to find more about Merimée and his life which in turn made me want to draw a relationship map of his lovers, friends and acquaintances. I'm pretty sure it would cover a huge part of 19th century France's intellectuals. And through Merimée's biography I discovered Guglielmo Libri. Reading "The life and times of Guglielmo Libri (1802-1869) : scientist, patriot, scholar, journalist, and thief : a nineteenth-century story" is like paging through a bookish thriller, the sort where you end up hoping the bad guy will get away with it - even though he is a book defacer and manuscript robber. In any case, Merimée did side with Libri and that's why he ended up in prison. It's also why Sotheby's has this particular sketch to sell since otherwise, Merimée seems to have been a law abiding citizen.
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November 09, 2009
Historically induced awe
A feeling of awe: attending a book launch among a small audience that included 92 year old Eric Hobsbawm. It's like having the whole 20th century sitting there with you.
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November 04, 2009
Domestic silly scenes
C: What are you thinking about?
R: Nothing at all.
C: But that's amazing!
R: Huh?
C: There are people who spend decades in buddhist convents trying to achieve that.
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October 28, 2009
I've been having weird, weird, weird dreams. "Aren't they all?", you'd say. I know, I know. But mine are usually very frivolous and I wake up annoyed at myself for losing REM time with things such as Carla Bruni turning out to be Juliette Binoche wearing a wig. Yet, lately, I've been having dreams that sound like Umberto Eco plots. The best of them all was one where I was sitting in a dusty library reading manuscripts and I had made a fantastic discovery regarding John Chrysostom and cartography. Whatever the discovery was, it was so exciting that I woke up, convinced it was real and that I should get up and write it down. I didn't, so I have no idea what it was.
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October 26, 2009
Huh?
Can anybody explain to me why is that the french trailer for the new Zemeckis animation movie boasts "Jim Carrey est Scrooge" when the movie is dubbed in french (presumably not by Jim Carrey, says I)?
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