chrestomathy: Sodomy & Prayer

“You see marriage for Melodia was what it must have been for Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Hutton, no big thing; and in Melodia's case, a natural consequence of sodomy and prayer.”

August Kleinzahler Cutty, One Rock
Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York, 2005-- --

chrestomathy: Alone in a Meaningless World

‘Cynthia was saying “I just can't accept so much, you know, Donna, and I feel, I really feel this, that my capacity to adapt to what is has been exceeded. I—”

“Cynthia,” Donna said. “We're all alone in a meaningless world. That's it.OK?”’
Joy Williams Honored Guest,
Knopf, New York, 2004-- --

aphorism: Questions That Need an Answer

Why is it that women in sofa adverts never wear shoes? It is as if these adverts form a distinct class of their own — what we might call pseudo-pornography: pornography that dares not mention sex.
-- --

chrestomathy: The Obvious Places

"She was beginning to feel that everything of interest was hidden. And none of it in the obvious places; don't, for example, look in trousers."

Hilary Mantel Beyond Black,
Harper Perennial, London, 2005-- --

chrestomathy: Accidents or Visions

"Life runs in very narrow sterotyped channels, until it is interrupted by accidents or visions."

A.S.Byatt: 'Body Art', Little Black Book Of Stories,
Vintage, London, 2004

fiction: Man, standing in background.

I have no photograph albums: there could only be blank pages filled with all the pictures I have never taken. There is another collection, however, that exists in the form of a ghost. It is the collection of all the photographs I have taken of other people with their own cameras, souvenirs of the times I have been stopped in the street by strangers, standing in front of tourist attractions, perhaps, or sitting grouped in some bar or cafe. It is is scattered across the globe in the homes of others, sometimes treasured, sometimes lying forgotten in a drawer.

All of them, I fear, have the stilted framing of snapshots everywhere. Though I have sometimes been tempted by gestures of radical artistic statement — portraits that decapitate people at the neck, leaving their lower bodies to gesture at the scenery behind them, pictures snatched at the moment the subject turns away, thinking it all over — I have never been brave enough. At most squatting down to capture the full height of a building or directing people out of shadow. Even so, I hope they all bear at least the lightest trace of myself.

Sometimes on quiet evenings I comfort myself with the thought I might be remembered in a place I will never visit — the invisible adjunct to a happy memory. I wonder, too, if I have ever been noticed in this collection's fainter kissing cousins — all those photographs in which I appear as an unbidden extra: the passerby chancing to step into the frame just as the shutter fell; man, standing in background.

poem: A Curse
(for two lovers in a café)

You smile at each other,
as lovers do,
so suffocating-sweet

I half expect
the milk to curdle
in the cup.

Do not get me wrong,
for you I will wish
a life together,

the days of it measured out
in front of you.
So much so, I would

have them happen all at once:
your life played out
in front of this audience

you have made of us.
(We sit politely,
feign indifference,

though all of us
know otherwise).
Let us have the highlights

and the lows, now,
as the days
reel out in fast forward.

Even as you pause to sip
your drinks together,
in sly complicity,

I can see the end coming
towards me — as you raise
your arms to drink,

your faces freeze
into a rictus as the skin
goes slack, then mocking grey.

We leave. File out quietly,
one be one,
to leave you there:

your cups raised,
your gazes forever locked
in stone memorial

to your pledge of love,
the looks, the words that say,
stay with me, now, forever.

lexicon: from Agyiomania
to Ultramontane

Agyiomania: 1. An abnormal interest in streets. 2.An excessive desire to be on the streets; especially, busy ones.
Exoteric: ordinary or simple (the opposite of esoteric).
Plenilude: the time of the full moon.
Ultramontane: relating to that which is situated beyond the mountains

These come from a list of definitions found amongst some papers. Judging from the material they were found amongst the list is at least ten years old. An old habit, listing new words (reading a dictionary is an even older one). Looking back it seems like there is an element of autobiography, in their selection at least. I do not suppose definitions drawn from a dictionary can really be called autobiographical, except, perhaps, of the people drawing them up.

lexicon: Decumbency

Decumbency: Staying in bed.
found in Leigh Hunt. 'Getting up on Cold Mornings'. The Indicator, 1821 reprinted in George G.Loane. Selected English Essays. J.M Dent, London, 1921

chrestomathy: TV Dinners

"She says all the English do these days is watch TV chefs and read recipe books. She asks me why we have all retreated into our kitchens? What happened to all the bad sex we were supposed to have in our bedrooms?"

Deborah Levy: 'Conversations with Famous Artists I have Known', Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places (A Lannan Selection), Dalkey Archive Press, 2004