just keep doing what you're doing

I went to Dublin to do a talk on the weekend, and someone (thank you!) told me there was a William Blake show on and I could catch the last day of it. Along with works by Blake there were a lot of paintings by other artists to put him into context, some fantastic ones of fairies and monsters, cathedral ruins and devils. I took one photo of a Blake painting of a beautiful, heroic Satan but not many other photos of his work, I think because they are such divine images, it was truly nourishing for my soul. I’m so scatterbrained when I speak in public I might do what Cynthia Ozick does which is type her answer out to a verbal question.

A fairy painting by Henry Singleton.

I am reading Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and there was a Faust painting there too by Theodore Von Holst. The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice are two favourite novels so I don’t know why I took so long to pick up this one, but reading it now seems like a gift to myself. It’s an intense, beautiful experience. Am listening to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C Minor between bouts of reading it.( I can’t listen and read at the same time, as both produce mental images) Someone made a spotify playlist of all the music pieces mentioned in Doctor Faustus which is incredibly useful. Usually I don’t like novels with a lot of music reference esp if they use it as a sentimental crutch, but here you are on a learning adventure with the characters, the music provides intellectual not cheap emotional stimulus. I still might make my own to put particular recordings.

Seneca’s On The Shortness of Life reaffirmed to me that life is best spent reading and communing with the dead.

My local bookshop was giving out national book tokens so I bought a book of poetry by Wisława Szymborska with both the Polish and English. This is from the title poem “Here” (Tutaj)

“ Here we manufacture chairs and sorrows,

scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins,

teacups, dams and quips.

There may be more of everything elsewhere,

but for reasons left unspecified they lack paintings,

picture tubes, pierogies, handkerchiefs for tears.”

I always like a sense of thinginess, material reality in poems. Tenderness and sorrow only work in the poem because they are next to transitors and scissors, a lightness and heaviness.

a friend is going to go to this. 90 minutes seems far too long in a sauna for me, but I was interested in the choice. Unlike any of her male equvilent 20th century writers, I think Virginia Woolf has been rebranded as a luxury item and having her read in a sauna fits with this. Yes this is partially due to her class status and the associative decoratedness of her sister and co but I want Virginia as vile, sharp and interesting. Maybe there will be a surprise, maybe they will fill the sauana with mustard gas.

I enjoyed Nolan’s adaptation of the Odyssey so much actually. It took me about a minute to get over the American accents and mostly bad dialogue. The music, the battles, the boats unfurling red linen sails, Samantha Norton as Circe massaging men into pigs and pigs into men, the greedy eating of nearly translucent looking tripe, the smelly and sweaty hell of being inside the Trojan Horse. Nolan did the Cyclops especially well and psychosexually: His Cyclops has skin exactly the same texture as a human testicle, and the whole scene is quite spermy and primordial- Odysseus eating the Cyclops’ moist, brown bags of ‘cheese’ in the Cyclops’ cave, the flock of white sheep. It’s about the horror and terror of being conceived and born. If you are a sperm strong and agile and lucky enough to leave the cave, all that awaits you outside is inevitable death. In the poem, the Cyclops speaks to Odysseus, but I quite enjoyed this inarticulate giant phallic monster of Nolan’s, it felt like seeing a penis for the first time, it had truly been defamiliarsed and rendered horrible. You are looking at the penis you were expelled from into this god awful existence! The scene is very Cioran coded

‘We do not rush towards death, we flee the catastrophe of birth, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of life. We are reluctant of course, to treat birth as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good- have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our lives?” ( translation, Richard Howard)

I loved the ‘blind casting’, Matt Damon’s Brueghel face didn’t even bother me, why get anxious about historical accuracy in a Bronze Age poem with a Cyclops and witches and sirens. The Odyssey is a psychological and allegorical journey. The 1997 version which I loved as a kid, has Vanessa Williams play Calypso. Helen of Troy would have been played by a man in classical era Greece in Euripides’ play Helen! Seeing a wide variety of humans participating in and celebrating one of our greatest and oldest stories - it made me feel quite sentimental (!) about humanity. Think of all the mouths, hands and minds which have carried the story of the Odyssey through time, but its just really good fun to watch too, though Nolan’s is a very serious, broody Odyssey( many parts were filmed in Scotland) This Odysseus is heavy with guilt, not just for the Trojan War but every war and invasion it has inspired since. When the Achaeans behead a statue of Athena in Troy, it’s hard not to think of the parallels with the bombing of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. One of the few lines I remember from the clunky script is ‘one man’s trick, one man’s idea’ about Agammenon’s war scheme and forcing of his people to go fight in an unjust invasion felt like a direct reference to Putin though the film is also very deliberately and pointedly about US imperialism with its American cast and voices. Nolan’s Calypso felt very American wellness, California coded in the most sinister way, and pointed to the dangers of seeking superficial, amnesiac cures for an ill and troubled soul. Go see it on Imax for the big glorious shots of the sea and get wine drunk and cry. Simple pleasures!

Here is an ugly 17th Flemish painting of a scene of Circe and Odysseus!