Les Sucettes

Dreaming at the Ballet

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 21:07:20 +0100

The truth is, goddesses are lousy in bed.
They will do anything it’s true.
And the skin is beautifully cared for.
But they have no sense of it. They are
all manner and amazing technique.
I lie with them thinking of your
foolish excess, of you panting
and sweating, and your eyes after.

- Jack Gilbert

The Remains

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 21:16:00 +0100

I empty myself of the names of others.
I empty my pockets, I empty my shoes and leave them beside
the road. At night I turn back the clocks; I open the family
album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

- Mark Strand

Mods and the like.

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 10:13:39 +0100

Mods and the like.

On Josef Goebbels

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 10:56:47 +0100

From Wikipedia:

Goebbels also discovered a talent for oratory, and was soon second in the Nazi movement only to Hitler as a public speaker. Where Hitler’s style was hoarse and passionate, Goebbels’s was cool, sarcastic and often humorous: he was a master of biting invective and insinuation, although he could whip himself into a rhetorical frenzy if the occasion demanded. Unlike Hitler, however, he retained a cynical detachment from his own rhetoric. He openly acknowledged that he was exploiting the lowest instincts of the German people — racism, xenophobia, class envy and insecurity. He could, he said, play the popular will like a piano, leading the masses wherever he wanted them to go. “He drove his listeners into ecstasy, making them stand up, sing songs, raise their arms, repeat oaths — and he did it, not through the passionate inspiration of the moment, but as the result of sober psychological calculation.”

An archive of his propaganda.

I knew he was an excellent director, but I hadn’t seen his photography. More Wim Wenders.

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:35:00 +0000

I knew he was an excellent director, but I hadn’t seen his photography. More Wim Wenders.

A Softer World

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:53:39 +0000

One of my favourites in a long while. The rest here.

"We never could have any knowledge except that of the present instant. The moment each of our..."

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:35:19 +0000

“We never could have any knowledge except that of the present instant. The moment each of our sensations ceased it would be gone for ever; and we should be as if we had never been… We should be wholly incapable of acquiring experience… Even if our ideas were associated in trains, but only as they are in imagination, we should still be without the capacity of acquiring knowledge. One idea, upon this supposition, would follow another. But that would be all. Each of our successive states of consciousness, the moment it ceased, would be gone forever. Each of those momentary states would be our whole being.”

- James Mill

"The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to..."

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:53:33 +0000

“The IMAGINATION then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.”

- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

500 Days of Summer

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 19:09:00 +0000

Could be a good film, could be a flop; more importantly, it has Joseph Gordon-Levitt in it. Ow!

For my own aesthetic pleasure, I’m also re-linking that Ellen von Unwerth photoshoot.

Valley Song

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 23:53:39 +0000

Your eyes and the valley are memories.
Your eyes fire and the valley a bowl.
It was here a moonrise crept over the timberline.
It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down.
And your eyes and the moon swept the valley.

I will see you again to-morrow.
I will see you again in a million years.
I will never know your dark eyes again.
These are three ghosts I keep.
These are three sumach-red dogs I run with.

All of it wraps and knots to a riddle:
I have the moon, the timberline, and you.
All three are gone — and I keep all three.

- Carl Sandburg

"Society is absolutely necessary for the well-being of men; and these are as necessary to the support..."

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 14:06:52 +0100

“Society is absolutely necessary for the well-being of men; and these are as necessary to the support of society. Whatever restraint they may impose on the passions of men, they are the real offspring of those passions, and are only a more artful and more refined way of satisfying them.”

- David Hume

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan’s Come On Over (Turn Me...

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:41:18 +0100

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan’s Come On Over (Turn Me On). Sounds like the focal track in a Bond soundtrack sung by a choirgirl and gruff older man.

I Had Sex With My Brother But I Don’t Feel Guilty Incest: An Age-Old Taboo Two conflicting...

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 18:19:03 +0100

I Had Sex With My Brother But I Don’t Feel Guilty

Incest: An Age-Old Taboo

Two conflicting articles about incest, or rather, personal experience contrasted against objective reality. It’s interesting how something so commonplace in ancient civilisations grew so taboo that it now incites knee-jerk reactions.

"An ego thus educated has become reasonable; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure..."

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 20:29:55 +0100

“An ego thus educated has become reasonable; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished.”

- Sigmund Freud

Samuel Beckett’s Play on film, directed by Anthony...

Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:33:08 +0100

Samuel Beckett’s Play on film, directed by Anthony Minghella and starring Alan Rickman.

You know those girls everyone talks about? The effortlessly thin, flippantly fashionable,...

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 18:12:00 +0100

You know those girls everyone talks about? The effortlessly thin, flippantly fashionable, casually beautiful sort? I avoid them, out of jealousy (and repress my fawning adoration), but she charms me.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:47:00 +0100

I watched Julian Schnabel’s film a few weeks ago, and was affected for days. Here is an extract from Jean-Dominique Bauby’s book, which I have not read.

Prologue

Through the frayed curtain at my window, a wan glow announces the break of day. My heels hurt, my head weighs a ton, and something like a giant invisible cocoon holds my whole body prisoner. My room emerges slowly from the gloom. I linger over every item: photos of loved ones, my children’s drawings, posters, the little tin cyclist sent by a friend the day before the Paris–Roubaix bike race, and the IV pole hanging over the bed where I have been confined these past six months, like a hermit crab dug into his rock.

No need to wonder very long where I am, or to recall that the life I once knew was snuffed out Friday, the eighth of December, last year.

Up until then I had never even heard of the brain stem. I’ve since learned that it is an essential component of our internal computer, the inseparable link between the brain and the spinal cord. That day I was brutally introduced to this vital piece of anatomy when a cerebrovascular accident took my brain stem out of action. In the past, it was known as a “massive stroke,” and you simply died. But improved resuscitation techniques have now prolonged and refined the agony. You survive, but you survive with what is so aptly known as “locked-in syndrome.” Paralyzed from head to toe, the patient, his mind intact, is imprisoned inside his own body, unable to speak or move. In my case, blinking my left eyelid is my only means of communication.

Of course, the party chiefly concerned is the last to hear the good news. I myself had twenty days of deep coma and several weeks of grogginess and somnolence before I truly appreciated the extent of the damage. I did not fully awake until the end of January. When I finally surfaced, I was in Room 119 of the Naval Hospital at Berck-sur-Mer, on the French Channel coast — the same Room 119, infused now with the first light of day, from which I write.

An ordinary day. At seven the chapel bells begin again to punctuate the passage of time, quarter hour by quarter hour. After their night’s respite, my congested bronchial tubes once more begin their noisy rattle. My hands, lying curled on the yellow sheets, are hurting, although I can’t tell if they are burning hot or ice cold. To fight off stiffness, I instinctively stretch, my arms and legs moving only a fraction of an inch. It is often enough to bring relief to a painful limb.

My diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. There is so much to do. You can wander off in space or in time, set out for Tierra del Fuego or for King Midas’s court.

You can visit the woman you love, slide down beside her and stroke her still-sleeping face. You can build castles in Spain, steal the Golden Fleece, discover Atlantis, realize your childhood dreams and adult ambitions.

Enough rambling. My main task now is to compose the first of these bedridden travel notes so that I shall be ready when my publisher’s emissary arrives to take my dictation, letter by letter. In my head I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph.

Seven-thirty. The duty nurse interrupts the flow of my thoughts. Following a well- established ritual, she draws the curtain, checks tracheostomy and drip feed, and turns on the TV so I can watch the news. Right now a cartoon celebrates the adventures of the fastest frog in the West. And what if I asked to be changed into a frog? What then?

"I’ve got to get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini."

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:10:26 +0100

“I’ve got to get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini.”

- an obscure California columnist

Some stills from film noir classics on Moderntimes.com.

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 11:16:12 +0100

Some stills from film noir classics on Moderntimes.com.

More Gilbert, this time reading The Forgotten Dialect of the...

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 22:01:44 +0100

More Gilbert, this time reading The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.