'BACK! Caught you lookin' for the same thing, it's a new thing, check out this I bring...'
So, sorry to slow updating, but what a week it's been boys and girls...
On Tuesday night, following a short but brutal visit to the dentist, HD and I got a take-out curry and drove down to the river to eat it, morosely debating the property and the women that seem eternally out of our reach...
On Wednesday, I was invited down to London to introduce a film by Jean-Luc Godard (1987's messy, impenetrable King Lear). I love coming to London. The air crackles with energy and everyone seems so much more attractive and intelligent, so much more vital and important than in the rest of the country. Whenever I come to London, I wonder why anyone would choose to live anywhere else in the country, and what the hell I'm doing stuck out in the far-flung provinces. But, after the film, when my acquaintances hurry off to catch trains, I can't face an evening alone in South Kensington under the pouring rain, so return to my room to floss and am in bed with Virginia Woolf by eleven.
Sometimes I could just drown in self-pity.
Virginia Woolf, of course, knows precisely what I'm talking about:
'It was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he had promised in six weeks' time to talk "some nonsense" to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, in the phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife's beauty, in the tributes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge - all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase "talking nonsense", because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like - this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.'
( - To the Lighthouse, chapter 8)
Thursday night, cocktails and Chinese food with HD, Tom and Stef, and Atsuko. Inconclusive, again, with Atsuko, but only because I'm so indecisive.
So brutal was my treatment at the hands of the dentist on Tuesday, and so tense had I been in the dentist's chair, that I was left with crippling pain and stiffness in my neck and shoulders for days afterwards. So much so that I was obliged, on Friday, to pay a young woman named Rowan to massage this tension from my gnarled torso, which thing she deftly did, although her good work was somewhat undone by the need, subsequently, to return to the dentist for further artless drilling. As a result, groggy, in pain, and feeling increasingly sorry for myself, I was in no mood to concentrate on the opening papers of a conference on European cinema, and instead met HD for the usual aimless eating, drinking and wandering around the city.
Somewhat refreshed on Saturday, I was better able, as the conference continued, to flirt with a guy from Brisbane and talk philosophy and politics with a Polish-German couple out of North Carolina, then, over tapas with Atsuko in the evening, I expounded my (actually rather specious and glib) theory about all human endeavour tending toward the same ultimate truth, and quoted her one of my all-time favourite movie lines:
'Every being in the universe knows the difference between right and wrong.'
(Kevin Spacey in the much under-rated K-PAX)
But, when I kissed Atsuko on the cheek, she enquired, comically: 'Are you all right?' Far from it, Atsuko, far from it...
A week of being beaten into submission (by the rain, by the dentist's drill) was appropriately rounded off this afternoon with Michael Moore's belligerent Fahrenheit 9/11.
As if this weren't enough, just as I was sitting down to write these notes, I cut my finger open slicing an apple and the blood was such (on my jeans, on the carpet, on the bathroom floor) that I decided I'd better walk the half hour to the ER and see whether it needed a stitch (it didn't).
Five medical visits in the space of a week (did I forget to mention the two and a half hours I spent in the melanoma screening clinic on Thursday afternoon?): could it be my body's trying to tell me I'm working too hard?
So, sorry to slow updating, but what a week it's been boys and girls...
On Tuesday night, following a short but brutal visit to the dentist, HD and I got a take-out curry and drove down to the river to eat it, morosely debating the property and the women that seem eternally out of our reach...
On Wednesday, I was invited down to London to introduce a film by Jean-Luc Godard (1987's messy, impenetrable King Lear). I love coming to London. The air crackles with energy and everyone seems so much more attractive and intelligent, so much more vital and important than in the rest of the country. Whenever I come to London, I wonder why anyone would choose to live anywhere else in the country, and what the hell I'm doing stuck out in the far-flung provinces. But, after the film, when my acquaintances hurry off to catch trains, I can't face an evening alone in South Kensington under the pouring rain, so return to my room to floss and am in bed with Virginia Woolf by eleven.
Sometimes I could just drown in self-pity.
Virginia Woolf, of course, knows precisely what I'm talking about:
'It was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he had promised in six weeks' time to talk "some nonsense" to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, in the phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife's beauty, in the tributes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge - all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase "talking nonsense", because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like - this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time.'
( - To the Lighthouse, chapter 8)
Thursday night, cocktails and Chinese food with HD, Tom and Stef, and Atsuko. Inconclusive, again, with Atsuko, but only because I'm so indecisive.
So brutal was my treatment at the hands of the dentist on Tuesday, and so tense had I been in the dentist's chair, that I was left with crippling pain and stiffness in my neck and shoulders for days afterwards. So much so that I was obliged, on Friday, to pay a young woman named Rowan to massage this tension from my gnarled torso, which thing she deftly did, although her good work was somewhat undone by the need, subsequently, to return to the dentist for further artless drilling. As a result, groggy, in pain, and feeling increasingly sorry for myself, I was in no mood to concentrate on the opening papers of a conference on European cinema, and instead met HD for the usual aimless eating, drinking and wandering around the city.
Somewhat refreshed on Saturday, I was better able, as the conference continued, to flirt with a guy from Brisbane and talk philosophy and politics with a Polish-German couple out of North Carolina, then, over tapas with Atsuko in the evening, I expounded my (actually rather specious and glib) theory about all human endeavour tending toward the same ultimate truth, and quoted her one of my all-time favourite movie lines:
'Every being in the universe knows the difference between right and wrong.'
(Kevin Spacey in the much under-rated K-PAX)
But, when I kissed Atsuko on the cheek, she enquired, comically: 'Are you all right?' Far from it, Atsuko, far from it...
A week of being beaten into submission (by the rain, by the dentist's drill) was appropriately rounded off this afternoon with Michael Moore's belligerent Fahrenheit 9/11.
As if this weren't enough, just as I was sitting down to write these notes, I cut my finger open slicing an apple and the blood was such (on my jeans, on the carpet, on the bathroom floor) that I decided I'd better walk the half hour to the ER and see whether it needed a stitch (it didn't).
Five medical visits in the space of a week (did I forget to mention the two and a half hours I spent in the melanoma screening clinic on Thursday afternoon?): could it be my body's trying to tell me I'm working too hard?
VIEW 11 of 11 COMMENTS
any time you can laugh hard enough to give yourelf a headache perfectly sober, and have pics of the incident? that's a win-win situation.
~cheers