The only way I can be close to you is through your songs. Well, that's nothing to complain about. See, I met this couple and they made me think of the sleeve notes to 'Love Is A Sign'. A passenger in their car. The streets of Oslo in winter. A guest in their flat. Anticipating garden parties in summer. No geezer crying into his beer in a Wetherspoon's pub could write a song as coquettish, as positively flirty, as Number 4. So the Reverend Beebe said of Lucy Honeychurch, "If she ever lives as she plays, it will be very exciting." No, let her play. See, it's already in the archives:
I seem to recall that Henri Bergson once said:
'If reality could immediately reach our senses and our consciousness, if we could come into direct contact with things and with each other, probably art would be useless, or rather we should all be artists...'
(Actually this is from the canonical essay 'Laughter', from around 1899.)
He laughed and showed his white teeth. I can't believe that he ever smoked. Their shadowed intimacy... and and sweetness! Still, I had emerged from Euston station, on a quest of my own, and had walked rapidly in a southerly direction. The term was over, but there were still students hanging around, faculty or staff on their way home. No photos permitted. No tricks, no sleights of hand. Susan Sontag writes, "[...] W.G. Sebald [...] by seeding his books with photographs, infuses the plainest idea of verisimilitude with enigma and pathos." I don't believe in this. The streets look different when you're not there. (Would I even see them if you were?) So when I visit them alone, 'verisimilitude' is not what I'm after. I'm weaving my own dreams. The reader will not understand. Might as well make a book of boring postcards, without captions. (In that Parr exhibition, I realized that nostalgia is what saves kitsch from vulgarity.) The titles say plenty. One could walk past without knowing it. 'SOAS' is loud enough, but no 'SEH'. The quiet corner of a building. I seem to remember red brick and perhaps stone lions' heads. A significant history, of which I know nothing. They say Russell was a posh aristocrat. Student magazines. The future of the Trevelyan collection. I read the article at the bus stop. It put me in mind of freshman courses on composition--the careful exposition. This is no criticism: as you can see, I have enough trouble getting out of my own head. So I rolled it up into a telescope, into a baton, waving it in the air to march in time back to Finsbury Park, where my hurried goodbyes betrayed my anxiety (or relief?) at parting. Cos, you see, it was almost too much to take in at once, so I lost my head and couldn't remember important facts, like names of venues and their discography. What I'm after is the disinterested phase in attraction, in which the significance of a reply is not weighed against the pleasure of the other's company. But I feel like that geezer in 'A Tree * A Rock * A Cloud': even kids can see through me. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax http://taxes.yahoo.com/ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+