TDQ
Reply
Category Archives: Enthusiasms
Games? Must We?
Fort Himmelfarb
A reader writes:
Dear Mr Key, I am pleased to hear you are heading abroad for a well-earned break. I would be most interested to know what you are taking with you as holiday reading.
Though I am leaving very early tomorrow morning, I have not finished packing. However, a couple of items have already found their way into my suitcase: the current issue of Fortean Times, and a new collection of essays by Gertrude Himmelfarb.
Map
A hand-drawn map by my son Sam. Click to enlarge.
Pietà Friday No. 3
Pietà Friday (On Saturday) No.2
I ought to have posted a Pietà yesterday, but events of the past few days have led me to leave Hooting Yard untended. First there was an eye test involving blurring-effect droppages, then a three-hour marathon radio broadcast as part of the ResonanceFM fundraiser week, and certain other matters which I may go into at a later date. Onwards and upwards!
Pietà Friday No. 1
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Friday No. 5
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Friday No. 4
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Friday No. 3
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Friday No. 2
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner Friday No.1
184 Today!
On the occasion of her 184th birthday, I am reminded of my long-abandoned project of concocting an entirely new corpus of works by Emily Dickinson, through the simple procedure of jumbling up lines from her poems more or less at random. Perhaps reviving this scheme will keep me occupied during my (imminent) dotage. Here is a sample:
Because I could not stop for Death
Its little Ether Hood
Between my Curtain and the Wall
Had power to mangle me
RW & AB
Approaching his seventieth birthday, Robert Wyatt has reportedly decided to “stop making music”. The writer Richard Williams rang him up to confirm if this was true. Wyatt responded with an anecdote
about the novelist Jean Rhys, who, after a long period of inactivity, responded to her publisher’s gentle suggestion that she might like to write another book by asking him if he’d enjoyed her last one. “Yes, of course,” he answered. “Well, read it again,” Rhys said.
Indeed. I will be taking up the invitation (the command?) to listen again to Wyatt’s extensive back catalogue. He was one of my earliest musical uberenthusiasms, from the day in the very early 1970s when my older brother came home clutching a double-album reissue of Soft Machine Volumes One and Two. (Side one of the latter remains one of my putative Desert Island Discs.)
Just as the career of the out of print pamphleteer Dobson is intertwined with his inamorata and Muse, Marigold Chew, so we must never overlook the contribution of Alfreda Benge to Wyatt’s work. I was once asked to name my favourite painting. It wasn’t an Old Master or modernist masterpiece from one of the great galleries. It was – still is – Benge’s cover for Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard (1975). (Click for huge version.)
Ten Books
I was persuaded to take part in one of those Facecloth round-robins, in which I was asked to name ten favourite books “without thinking too hard”. Here is my list (A-Z by author):
1. Watt, Samuel Beckett
2. Who Was Changed And Who Was Dead, Barbara Comyns
3. The Household Wreck, Thomas De Quincey
4. Amphigorey, Edward Gorey
5. The Falls, Peter Greenaway
6. Bartleby The Scrivener, Herman Melville
7. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
8. W or The Memory Of Childhood, Georges Perec
9. The Crying Of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
10. The Purple Cloud, M P Shiel
Do not be confused by No. 5. The screenplay of Greenaway’s majestic film is (or was) available in paperback, and takes the form of a continuous piece of prose.