tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-84479005219169137812024-02-20T10:54:27.995-08:00Errands into the mazeGlennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.comBlogger67125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-30205649319644347962013-03-11T14:14:00.000-07:002013-03-11T14:14:44.222-07:00Painting in Florence<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
She
dips the brush into the copper pot of balsam. She is still at thirty-one
experimenting with mediums, with glazes, with all her manifold materials. She
has learned how untrustworthy the chemicals she needs for her art are. The
primers, the pigments, the poisons, the oils. They betray her constantly, like
unfaithful lovers. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
<i> I paint from nature; I paint what I see. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
She adds medium to the colour she has
mixed on her palette. Her palette with its pageantry of firebrand earth
colours. She squints at the furrows and folds in the boy’s shirt. At its rhythm
of lines. Its choreography of lights and darks. Its shadow shapes and submerged
order of half tones. Adds another touch of cadmium red to the colour she has
made on her palette. The colour glistens pink like the flesh of a newly spliced
watermelon. She holds out her sable brush as she strides forward. Her narrowed
blue eyes move back and forth between the image on the canvas and the face of
the boy by its side. There is a rhythm in the act, as if a pendulum swings back
and forth in her mind. She lays down strokes on the air as she walks, quick
corkscrewing flourishes of the brush, rehearsing her intention, marshalling her
forces, whipping up her blood. She stops at her easel. Stands forward on her
toes. Makes a new mark on the canvas. In her idle left hand she holds a dozen
brushes, splayed out like a fan.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
Today is a good day. Today she feels she
is the master of her craft. Today she is free of the grinding tyranny of doubt.
The voice that mocks her ambition. The voice that bites and slanders and causes
her more heartache than any other voice. Today she is focused, she is exultant.
Her every brushstroke like a wake of radiance. Today she can move the paint
around the canvas at will. If only painting were like this every day. Without
the sudden extinguishing of light, the collapsing of belief, the cursing and
flailing, the knots and clenched fists in a world gone suddenly dark. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
The boy, Leo, blinks when she studies
him. She senses he has to steel himself against the audacity of her exacting
eye. He sits with the sleeves of his jersey pulled down over his hands. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
<i> I paint from nature; I paint what I see. <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
There is a physical intimacy when she is
up at her canvas, when they are side by side. His body heat, his heartbeat,
some essence of his being is part of her mood as she lays down paint. She
breathes him in, breathes him out, onto the canvas. Sometimes she feels an
impulse to touch his face, to trace the contours of his skull with her hand. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
She lays down a brushstroke, smudges it
delicately with her finger. There is paint beneath her nails, engrained in the
lines on her hands. Her smock is a grubby rainbow of fused colours. She wipes
her brushes on the blue fabric. Everything in the studio is peppered with
pigment, smeared with oil paint, sticky with resins. The coins and banknotes in
her purse often have alizarin crimson or raw umber fingerprints on them. Her
ration coupons are crisp with sun-thickened oil stains or blackened with
charcoal dust. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
She walks backwards away from the canvas.
Tilting her head this way and that. Squinting at her picture. She walks forwards
and backwards along this same trail every day for hours on end. The boards
beneath her feet shaking, making things rattle in the studio. As happens when
the planes fly low overhead. As happens when the armoured vehicles pass by on
the riverside street below. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
While she follows the stroke of the brush
over the canvas her eyes narrow to thin slits, her brows wrinkle up, her tongue
darts out frequently and licks at her upper lip or she pulls faces she would be
horrified by if she saw herself in a mirror. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
When she is up by her canvas she can
sometimes smell rabbit skin glue. A rotting kind of smell that catches at the
back of her throat, that makes her feel queasy. A smell of death among
earthroots. There is a blackened pot of the fudge-coloured solution that she
has recently heated on the stove in the small kitchen. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
She looks at her image in a small mirror
where it seems distant and separate from her, the umbilical cord cut, the
intimate connection severed. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
She frowns. She curses aloud, forgetting
she is not alone. Scrapes away some of the paint she has laid down with a
palette knife. Every decision is measured, is intricate, is fatal. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
But this is pretence on her part, another
trick one part of herself plays on another part. A brushstroke is never fatal,
though it is a vital element of the painting process to pretend this is not the
case. To pretend there is no room for error. She plays countless tricks on the
artist in her. Holds back knowledge from her as though the artist in her is a
child and she the mother, filtering through intelligence only when she is sure
it won’t do any harm. A brushstroke can be erased as though it never existed.
She erases many of the strokes she puts down. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%;">
The air raid siren begins shrieking and
before long she hears the now familiar low drone of planes in the sky. The
grumbling noise gains in intensity. It becomes a sensation in the body, an
irritation on the skin, like a feeding insect. The frames rattle, dust is
displaced. Circles shiver on the surface of the balsam in the pot on her
palette. She goes to the window. Lifts the black drape that keeps out the
reflected glare of daylight. Never have the planes been this low in the sky
before. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-44158375159260197372011-07-26T11:49:00.000-07:002011-12-24T13:41:52.642-08:00(thus far)<div class="yiv1285201626msonormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0cm;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">He walks along the river. Its arresting glitter, its teetering laughter of light, reflected as a pale gold glow up onto the high windows of the riverside palaces, some of which are hung with Nazi banners. So far, so good. </span></div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-73037823699935013972011-07-02T12:44:00.001-07:002011-07-02T12:44:35.964-07:00Montemarte (on a Monday evening)<div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.5pt;">“If you are lucky a very beautiful woman will serve you dinner at # 61 in the Au Virage Lepic restaurant</span></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.5pt;"> </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><b><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.5pt;">chez Rino + Maurice</span></b></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13.5pt;">.(tel: 01 42 52 46 79)</span></span>”<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;">I was clearly unlucky, again. </span></span></div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-37290950686098956422011-04-15T13:25:00.000-07:002011-04-15T13:25:58.462-07:00The Saddest Thing aboutLife<div class="MsoNormal">Perhaps the saddest thing about life is that certain moments only happen once. There you are suddenly radiant with life, aglow with blessings and everything in the world is phosphorescent with accessible energy. And then, in the skip of a heart, that time is past, is a letter in a shoebox, a stain on a sheet. But then again you also realise that the concept of once is a primary source of the sustaining beauty life has. Of all the arts it’s dance that probably expresses most eloquently and poignantly the transient nature of life’s moments of grace. And this is why everyone should go and see Wim Wenders’ film about Pina Bausch. Twice I was lucky to see her dance company perform and both times it was like being stripped naked and daubed in mud and pollen by the girl with the most beautiful hands. </div><br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxgsKVM-6HI&feature=related">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxgsKVM-6HI&feature=related</a>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-63904152986768323322011-03-30T02:31:00.000-07:002011-03-30T02:31:10.186-07:00Authonomy<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">My first impression upon stepping over the virtual threshold of Authonomy was of a halfway house for writers. Cheerful and hygienic it might appear but there's also a furtive sense of dispossession, even seediness; a feeling one has now slipped down a social pecking order. One's most treasured possession – one's ambition - is already looking a bit more ragged here, a bit more moth-eaten. One looks around a little warily at one's fellow inmates. One is immediately suspicious of so much overt friendliness, daunted by the ubiquitous flourishes of self-belief. These clearly are people who have tasted the acrimony of rejection on a regular basis. What the hell have they all got to be so cheerful about? Slowly though one settles in. One lowers one's expectations. One begins to enjoy and look forward to the meals on offer. One finds a chair to one's liking and is content to ignore the world outside for longer and longer periods. One realises one might never get out but there's always that one chance in a million that someone will recognise one's truly unique talent.... </span>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-1039095572876024092011-03-17T13:07:00.000-07:002011-03-17T13:07:20.501-07:00What happens when your wife betrays you for a civil servant?<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">“Do you know what I do now? my old teacher asked, giving me a kind of self-pleasuring wink. “I watch MTV. Does that shock you? Do you ever watch MTV?”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Now and again,” I said.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“My daughter watched MTV. It was her religion. That’s where she got all her ideas from. I realise now it formed her far more than I did. MTV is all about images. The music is incidental. Once upon a time images were created for churches, now they’re created for MTV. So why go on painting? Images are marketing tools now. Is that why I paint? So that some marketing executive can use my pictures to sell hair products or car insurance?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I saw an ad that used the Mona Lisa to advertise a sanitary towel. In Italy of all places. Because even Italy can’t bear to think of itself as old fashioned. Do you know I sometimes imagine Bin Laden sitting in his cave watching MTV. And then I feel like I understand him. I sympathise with his anger and his hatred of the West. I feel like he and I could be friends. Except he doesn’t drink. Do you know what I think? And I’m going to get into trouble for saying this.” He beckoned to me to lean forward over the table and when I had done so spoke through theatrically cupped hands in a hoarse whisper. “The emancipation of women has led to a world that’s interested in nothing but a narcissistic notion of pleasure.” He sat back with some satisfaction in his chair “Is that what women wanted all along? More pleasure?” He lifted his glass. “I propose a toast. To the Taliban and Bin Laden,” he said loudly, monitoring out of the corner of his eye the response elicited by his words in the bar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-25730254440188424592011-03-09T05:34:00.001-08:002011-03-09T05:34:40.163-08:00The Big Bang<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is it a new phenomenon this mania on the part of people to impart erroneously piecemeal information they have read up on or heard on TV? I have heard a host of so-called facts lately – that asthma is on the increase because we’ve become too hygienic, that every year the earth accumulates 30,000 tonnes of space dust, that one percent of the dancing static on the TV when you zap onto a non-existent channel are residue particles from the big bang, that.21 billion<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pieces of junk mail are delivered to Britain’s homes each year requiring 3.3 million trees to make. All things someone will misquote to someone else on a bus or in a pub today. <i>Did you know that 21 billion fucking people suffer from asthma and it’s caused by residue particles from the Big Bang? </i></div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-77411926696845150392011-03-09T05:10:00.000-08:002011-03-09T05:10:40.100-08:00FIFA Barcelona 3 Arsenal 1<div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Sure Barcelona utterly outplayed Arsenal and sure the statistics suggest only one team was ever going to win this game. But, let’s be honest, Barca were struggling in the final third until the officials started to lend them a hand. Two years ago Chelsea were denied four penalties against Barca all of which were more clear cut than the one given against Arsenal last night. As for the red card, it wasn’t a bad decision or a joke: it was just moronic. One silly little man gratuitously ruining an entertainment being enjoyed by millions of worldwide viewers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fact is twice now in the past three years Barca have benefited from hugely dodgy decisions in their favour The truly great teams of the past – Van Basten’s AC Milan, Ronaldo’s Real Madrid – didn’t need large favours from FIFA officials to progress in the Champions League. So, no, Barcelona are not the greatest team to ever play football. If Iniesta and Messi personify the grace and dazzle of Barcelona, there’s Dani Alves to remind us of their playacting and cheaper tricks. If there's a more obnoxious footballer currently playing the game who is he? You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for whoever FIFA Barcelona draw in the next round – because even if they manage to hold off the blaugrana they’ll no doubt have FIFA officials eventually intervening on behalf of their opponents.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-42662471396420091232011-03-07T06:57:00.000-08:002011-03-07T06:57:56.808-08:00Getting Dumped<div class="MsoBodyTextIndent"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why do we men always want women to see the pain they cause us? We always want women to feel on our behalf. Because when we feel they don’t give a shit our world caves in. We can’t just go away and weep in private though. First of all we have to make a song and dance of our hurt. We have to pour forth our pleas of please and sorry. We might start off by standing under our jilter’s window in the rain (we like it that it’s raining, the rain gives every entreaty we call up a more impassioned touch of theatre.) And, despite the hurt, the churning hollow wretchedness, we’re also secretly pleased with ourselves beneath the window. We have a soft spot for this emotion. The if-only-you’d-come-back-to-me-life-would-be-beautiful feeling. It’s the stuff that gets poetry written, religions underway. When we’re standing in the rain with our heartbreak it’s as if we’re alone under the spotlights on stage at Wembley Stadium with a guitar around our neck. We’re about to perform and we may well give the performance of our life. This one is for Katherine (or Maggie or Medusa), we say into the microphone. And we hear the crowd cheer and see an ocean of little bobbing flames. We thrash out some elegiac chords, make all our favourite words rhyme and we sing our poor heart out for the departed Katherine (or Maggie or Medusa). And if she’s not in the audience we hope someone who knows her is, someone who will tell her how much pain we’re in because she has decided to go back to her old boyfriend. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-70480704876901809062011-03-04T07:30:00.001-08:002011-03-04T07:30:25.599-08:00Why do women become so vicious when you catch them out in a lie? (part three)A week later we split up.Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-92138878629499702972011-03-04T07:29:00.001-08:002011-03-04T07:29:20.317-08:00Why do women become so vicious when you catch them out in a lie (part two)<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">I soon got a bit bored with ex-girlfriend’s duplicitous charade and suddenly said it didn’t matter if she had sent me a text meant for her ex-boyfriend. That was when she went mental. I suppose it might have been a bit insensitive of me seeing as how much energy she had just expended creating her cock and bull story but even so. After explaining the meaning of every sentence in the text <i>again</i> – by now she was beginning to sound like Carl Jung wrapping up his views on the significance of the king, the queen and the two doves in medieval alchemical etchings - she told me it was the first time she had found my behaviour unattractive, that I was being absurd and that if this was what I was going to be like it might be better if we split up now. She still won’t admit that text was to him, she still gets angry when I bring it up. <span lang="CY" style="mso-ansi-language: CY;">Women are the same when they betray you</span>. Again something vicious emerges. They might look a bit sheepish at first but that doesn’t last long. Pretty soon it’s your fault. Pretty soon they’ve worked themselves up into a righteous scorn for the eternal inadequacy of your feeling. We can never quite get it right where feeling is concerned. It’s always slightly underdone or a bit on the burnt side. Women like to complain that men have always tried to tell them how to look. So why don’t men complain that women have always tried to tell us what we should feel? It seems to me most men just throw in the towel at a certain point. They can’t be bothered anymore. Disagreeing with a woman on a point of feeling is more exhausting than anything gyms have so far been able to come up with. One assumes the married man learns what’s expected of him, like a schoolboy, and generally comes up with the correct answer. <i>Aren’t those tea cups the prettiest things you’ve ever seen, dear?</i> Is that a trick question? It could be of course. She might just be testing you to see how well she has you trained.</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-74215746282836903292011-03-04T07:20:00.000-08:002011-03-04T07:20:44.289-08:00Why do women become so vicious when you catch them out in a lie?<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">At the beginning of a relationship with an ex- girlfriend she once accidentally sent me a text message meant for her ex-boyfriend. Initially I thought it was for me and its oddness might be explained by a stressful day at work. The text was sprinkled with the kind of affectionate platitudes that were they to be given a market value would provide you with a palm-full of change from a pound coin. Certainly it contained nothing to get jealous about. But when she realised her faux pas there followed an elaborate and increasingly dubious explanation as to how the text was intended for a girl she worked with. She practically told me the entire erotic history of this mysterious girl as if then there could be little doubt that the message was indeed intended for her. But even the stupidest criminal knows that if you’re going to create an alibi, keep it simple. Don’t tell the police that you spent the entire night in question with your aunt Harriet and that you remember it well because you fixed her dishwasher which was only four months old but had already begun to make disconcerting noises, that you then tucked into a vegetarian steak and kidney and pie but didn’t go much for the cauliflower, because, to be honest, you had never really cared for the stuff; and actually this weird image had sprung into your mind, while Aunt Harriet was asking if you remembered driving golf balls at the panes of glass in poor old Mr Conk’s greenhouse at the bottom of the garden, when you were a young lad of not taking a Big Mac out of the packaging, of just putting the whole merchandise, styrofoam and all, in your mouth and chewing on it because that’s what cauliflower tastes like when it’s just been boiled in a saucepan and dumped on a plate; that you finally settled down, you on the sofa, Aunt Harriet in her favourite armchair beneath the three flying porcelain ducks, two of which had damaged wings, and watched the five hour remake of The Ten Commandments but that actually you preferred the original with cant-remember-his-name in it. Even the stupidest criminal knows that’s just the quick route to damnation</span>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-85318702170846947252011-03-03T04:42:00.000-08:002011-03-03T04:43:04.504-08:00Wayne Rooney's New Goal celebration<div class="MsoNormal">There he stands, chest inflated, nose in the air, arms outstretched with regal disdain towards all us mere mortals, the epitome of smug self-satisfaction. Anyone would think he had just discovered the cure for cancer. But hang on. Wasn’t it you, Wayne, who played like a turnip for the entire duration of the World Cup? Who was largely responsible for making the World Cup a tawdry humiliating experience for every English football fan? So next time you score a goal how about celebrating it with some boyish exuberance instead of nominating yourself for the Nobel prize? </div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-7201132902688658142011-02-28T06:27:00.001-08:002011-02-28T06:27:33.768-08:00Hindsight<div class="MsoNormal">There often, with the benefit of hindsight, seems an inevitability about what happens to people. One believes the clues were there all along, compressed into conversations, encrypted into encounters, like a word whose meaning one was then yet to learn. But one wonders a bit about hindsight. Is it really all it’s trumped up to be? Would I now with hindsight not have stolen money from my mother’s purse when I was ten? I doubt it, even though I was eventually caught and the crime caused some domestic distress. The amphetamine rush of creping into the bedroom while my parents watched television directly below and spying the bag on the bed was a reward in itself. That to me was life on a scale worth living. And the possibility of outrage and punishment was part of the pact. Hindsight hasn’t done the planet much good either. I suppose because, like apologies, it always arrives too late. Sometimes I think history is a bit like Cluedo. This time round it was Professor Plum with the lead piping in the conservatory. So what? Next time it might be Miss Scarlet with the dagger in the ballroom but the plot is always the same.</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-2231053366595348522011-02-26T03:43:00.000-08:002011-02-26T03:43:42.525-08:00Losing my Virginity<div class="MsoNormal">When I was fourteen or fifteen a boy at school told me a woman had two entrances – a right one and a wrong one. This of course was an alarming idea. A year or two later, when I realised the girl I was kissing was prepared to go upstairs to the bedroom, the idea was still there in my mind - a grotesque insistent thing with a leering mocking mouth. Therefore I excused myself for a few minutes and made straight for the drinks cabinet. I was as naïve in those days about alcohol as I was about a female’s sexual anatomy. I gulped down the contents of the first bottle that came to hand. The only thing I therefore learnt from my first sexual experience was that it is a very big mistake to frantically drink large quantities of sherry.</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-59739641328363359112011-02-24T05:53:00.001-08:002011-02-24T05:53:43.833-08:00Physical Exercise<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;">Last summer I spent a few weeks living alone in a farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside miles from civilisation and carless. The first time I ventured out on a bike was to be the last. It was all tally-ho fun to begin with, flying down one curving incline after another, with my shirt catching the breeze and billowing out behind me (it hadn’t yet occurred to me that I would have to pedal back up all these fun slopes: I rarely dwell on the likely consequences of my actions). I bumped and flew past the small lake at the foot of the valley where cattle were drinking and began to feel a bit thirsty myself. The thought of a bar became my oasis though I knew it was still at least six kilometres away from any outpost of civilisation. Then I hit a series of uphill slopes, one after another and finally had to get off the bike and walk it. A sign announcing that Paganico, the nearest village, was still five kilometres away and the sight of another steep incline ahead finally defeated me and I decided the only thing to do was to head back. For a while I sauntered back down slopes with butterflies fluttering in my flight path and lines of white gulls waiting for the fields to be sown again but after a while arrived the relentless uphill part of the journey. Even pushing the bike exhausted me and several times I had to stop to catch my breath. When I could finally see the eccentric little yellow house across the valley I was virtually hyperventilating and feeling sick. The flies buzzing in my ears I told to fuck off and even the sweet smells of the wild roadside flowers began to smell like mockery. When I reached the house of the neighbouring farmers I began retching - in full view of their windows and I bet they had a giggle at my expense. Finally I dumped the bike and staggered home. When I could smoke again I made a vow – from now on, I said to myself, I will limit my forays into the realms of physical exercise to carrying my dictionary from one side of my room to the other. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-7579227879514166252011-02-23T06:55:00.000-08:002011-02-23T06:55:18.682-08:00Oracles<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I open my copy of the King James Bible. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasure: Then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I enjoy opening the Bible at random and reading the first few lines on which my eyes alight. It’s like putting to the test the power of circumstance to body forth an oracle.</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-4502372182961190092011-02-22T05:01:00.001-08:002011-03-05T05:37:19.528-08:00Breakfast in Italy<div class="MsoNormal">There’s probably a campanile within sight. And at some point a bell will chime – bold timeless strokes which, like light after rain, will give to the moment an undertow. The play of shadows on a medieval wall will draw attention to the history of the stones, the struggles of blood and line they have witnessed. You’ll be sitting at a table with the sun warm on the back of your neck; scooters will fizz past; and then the waiter will arrive. “Cappuccino,” you say. Bliss. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-56773667743606453572011-02-19T03:28:00.001-08:002011-02-19T03:28:25.005-08:00Betrayal<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One's sentiments, one's fidelities are so instinctive that one hardly knows they exist; only when they are betrayed does one realise their power. That betrayal is the end of an inner life, without which the everyday becomes threatening or meaningless. At the back of the spirit a mysterious landscape, whose perspective used to be infinite, suddenly perishes.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;"><br />
</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-23135916215505644052011-02-18T07:47:00.000-08:002011-02-18T07:47:10.615-08:00Hope<div class="MsoNormal">Novel’s gone off on its first round of submissions. All the big guns. They were given a deadline to make up their minds – which is today. So today I dare not venture anywhere near my yahoo inbox. Then, after lunch, I came across some very appropriate lines from Byron’s journal on the subject of hope –</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">Why, at the very height of desire and human pleasure – worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious – does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow – a fear of what is to come – a doubt of what <i>is</i> – a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? Why is this? I know not, except that on a pinnacle we are most susceptible of giddiness, and that we never fear falling except from a precipice – the higher, the more awful…</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-128870767543525652011-02-17T11:55:00.001-08:002011-02-17T11:55:09.497-08:00Walking by the sea<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 36.0pt;">Walking by the sea. I took off my shoes and let the waves wash over my bare feet. Mills, my father’s whippet, was with me. Now and again I raced her over the sand. She would shimmy past me like a rugby wing back avoiding a tackle. I needed to feel like a teenager again. Needed to reassert a vigorous ongoing relationship with the soil underfoot. Finally I sat on some rocks and watched the waves. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I turned inland I saw two moving white columns in the sky which at first glance I thought was smoke. The two encroaching formations rippled into funnels and then spread out beneath the labyrinthine coral of clouds into fans. My vision blurred for a moment. Then I realised I was witnessing two perfectly synchronised flocks of birds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The abstract shapes they formed were flawless . I stood with my hands on my head as the birds tapered into a long undulating line which gently vanished behind the surface of things. The same thing happens when people die - they vanish behind the surface of things.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-21007746484794252182011-02-13T12:35:00.000-08:002011-02-16T04:40:50.745-08:00Magdalene<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 36.0pt;"> I spent the afternoon in the church of Santa Trinita pretending to be a middle-aged English woman with a guilty secret lodged in her breast. Would all those sacred images have thawed her brittle crust and inspired in her a longing to let out the truth? The wooden Magdalene might have shaken her. The idea of Magdalene with the vessel of consecrated oil is fascinating: it's a metaphor perhaps of the female's power to heal, an emblem of her sexuality and its powers of replenishment and protection, though the Church would not see it quite that way. And despite her wizened corroded appearance the Magdalene in Santa Trinita still has her healing balm. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-38702320182793603912011-02-10T08:20:00.000-08:002011-02-10T08:20:18.659-08:00My failure to win her back (part two - and again never sent)<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt;">The almond trees are in flower - the white flowers like snow blossoming from scarlet buds with tiny thumbprints of golden pollen on the anthers - and something of their wistful haunting beauty now hangs lazily over the city at night. As I write laughter rises up from the bars down below and the smells of Florence at night in springtime....In this rustling air, our bodies quiver. All's possible, all's unpredictable. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 18.0pt; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Today, up in the hills, out on my own, I was suddenly, as if the wind had made your skirt rustle and lifted up into the air the familiar smell of your skin, granted a vivid sense of your presence. Now and again these moments arrive when we're able to see things as they really are, in relation to eternity and not to the thick fog of our fears, insecurities, conceits and hurts. When I returned to Italy after the summer I had a first class sleeper on the train from Paris all to myself. I was too excited to sleep and didn't. I remember in the early hours of morning the train stopped at a station - there were palm trees and marble platforms and a certain distinctive smell - and my whole body with a joyful shout knew it was back in Italy. Italy in that moment became everything I've experienced here - all the train journeys, all the conversations, all the embraces and all the goodbyes. Everything I had ever strongly felt here was returned to its original purity, endowed with its virgin vitality. It was almost as though I had died. I remember then wishing that you could see me just for a moment, just long enough for me to give you back the smile you so often inspired. In that moment all the horrible aggressive bullying and sermonising I was guilty of fell away and there you were again - curving like a question mark and forging in me a longing to hear your answering voice in the dark. I realised then that in all probability we will die without ever again speaking...</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-73569512244433731682011-02-08T13:02:00.001-08:002011-02-08T13:02:27.534-08:00The Letters of Love Never Sent<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 36.0pt;">This will be the last letter I ever write from my room by the river and it's probably appropriate that it should be to you since you are without question the person I've thought most about within these four walls. I'm sorting through my possessions and have realised how little you gave me, how little tangible evidence I have that I even knew you - two letters, a few photos, a few scraps of paper with messages on them. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Last Saturday I went to a wedding. It was in a beautiful 13th century abbey in the Tuscan countryside. At one point I went outside and sat on the steps - there was a beautiful choir with these ethereal voices silvering the air and the meadows were bristling with poppies and cornflowers and as always happens when life is suddenly too beautiful for words you become part of the moment.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps I didn't admit it to myself but I realise now there's always been hidden away in me the hope that you might suddenly discover one day that actually you couldn't go through the rest of your life without seeing me again. To imagine that moment - you shyly telling me the more vulnerable truths - enables me to realise how vast still is my capacity to be happy. That's another gift you've given me - because even if it never happens it's very close, like something in a neighbouring field which if I stand on tiptoes I can see and embrace as an inspiration at least.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-left: 36.0pt;"><br />
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</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8447900521916913781.post-2835674381655436152011-02-05T12:31:00.000-08:002011-02-05T12:31:48.915-08:00Constancy vs Betrayal<div class="MsoNormal">Constancy... that small change of love, which people exact so rigidly, receive in such counterfeit coin, and repay in baser metal.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal">On the money or too cynical? But having come across this quote of Lord B’s in his letters I was reminded of Joyce’s The Dead which I’ve recently reread. For the uninitiated the story undergoes a transfiguration when a husband discovers his wife has always secretly loved someone else. The husband suddenly sees his wife in an exalted light. Joyce loved his epiphanies and some were more successful than others. This particular one always struck me as bogus – an awkward artistic device to arrive at the required emotion, like Hollywood distorting historical facts to give a film more scope for cheers and boos. </div><div class="MsoNormal">But then I thought about it some more. Essentially we demand constancy from our lovers and friends to keep our illusions about <i>ourselves</i> in tact. Ironically though it’s often the act of betrayal that knocks us out of our pinched complacencies into a wider world. So Joyce, albeit a tad clumsily, was right after all… </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Glennhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04595341203764802002noreply@blogger.com2