funny how these things have a way of coming together

What we watched was a work by Harold Pinter called Betrayal...
'What did you think?' he asked.
'Of the play?'
He nodded as he chewed. I shrugged.
'Good.' I said. 'Pretty good.'
Rodney's expression demanded an explanation.
'Well'. I admitted, 'the truth is I'm not sure I understood it all.'
'I, on the other hand, am sure I didn't understand any of it,' Rodney said after emitting a grunt...'But I fear that's not Wong's fault but Pinter's. I can't remember where I read how he discovered his writing method. The guy was with his wife and he said to her: "Darling, I've got quite a few good scenes written, but they've nothing to do with each other. What should I do?" And his wife answered: "Don't worry: you just put them all together, the critics will take care of explaining what they mean." And it worked: the proof is there's not a single line of Pinter the critics don't understand perfectly.

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Javier Cercas, The Speed of Light

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inside out (2)

Every relationship is also a story.

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What a story reveals is no more the shell of its existence.

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Beneath the shell lurk networks and connections and fears and dreams.

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However, even in the best told of stories, nothing more than the shell can ever be revealed.

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it could quite reasonably be argued that we inhabit -

- A world cursed by the fascism of perfection.

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the tudors

Four eight year olds sit around a table. One has Somali parents. Two have Turkish parents. One has British parents. All are British schoolchildren. They are studying the Tudors. Religion under the Tudors. They've made a poster, with a picture of the Pope hidden beneath the flap. The exercise they are asked to do involves imagining themselves to be a Catholic and then a Protestant firstly in the reign of Mary and then in the reign of Elizabeth 1. Their Catholics express their happiness at being ruled by Mary and their Protestants their relief at being ruled by Elizabeth. Their Catholics express their fear of persecution during the reign of Elizabeth, and the Protestants the fear of persecution under the reign of Mary. When questioned they say that the exercise makes sense, and they like it.

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west london tales 11 - silence

I finish the play that I've been reading. It's gone midnight. The play's about a soldier who comes back from Basra and brings the war with him. I switch the light off. I notice something. I look out of the window, which is placed alongside the bed. The Westway is closed. Not a car passes. A camera flashes in the distance. I realise what it is that I am noticing. It's the first silence I have known in my home in the two and a half years I have lived here. I listen to the sound of my room. It hums. I hear a train go past, and see its lights reflected in the next tower block down. Or perhaps I see the lights and then I hear the train. The room hums. Silence.

Then, even as I am wondering what it might be like to live with silence, or that approximation of silence which the traffic, the traffic which never sleeps, snuffs out; the Westway opens again. Red tail lights drone Westwards. In an instant I forget what the sound of that silence, if that is what it was, felt like. Although the hum remains.

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pelevin on writing; on buddhism; on writing and buddhism

Life is a bitch, and then you die. Death is a bitch, and then you are born. Writing is very much like this, as it is living multiple short lives within your longer one.

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Buddhism seemed to me to be the only religion that didn’t resemble the projection of the Soviet power onto the domain of spirit. It was only much later that I understood that it was exactly the other way around—the Soviet power was an attempt to project the alleged heavenly order onto Earth. Well, Buddhism was totally out of this vicious circle and there was something so strangely compelling and soothing about it.

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http://bombsite.com/issues/79/articles/2481

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cash flow

Money is just an opportunity cost.

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For what you gain from the having of it, you lose from those things you might have gained from the not having of it.

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interchange

It might be said that in order to truly experience the pathos and/ or beauty of living in a big city, you need to be single, and lonely. In which state, every touch of humanity counts at least double.

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Having just crossed the path of the man who works in the BBC courier department at Kings Cross Station, on the down escalator as he passed on the up, a man who I met briefly earlier today for the first and probably last time.

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enfield locked

The exercise was about writing without thinking. Letting the pencil reveal what the mind contains and conceals. Six years olds sighed at the chore, before the classroom was given over to the sound of pencils tacking at paper.

A few days later one of them, a boy called B, told me his dad had been quizzing him. Normally when this happens, his mind goes blank, the more he seeks the answer he's searching for the more it eludes him. This time, he tried not thinking. And to his surprise, he found the answer he was looking for.

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reading and drinking

Reading a novel is not dissimilar to having a conversation with a drunk in the middle of their night.

Saying which:

Reading a novel you don't get on with is like being trapped in the drunk's headlights.

Reading a novel you do get on with is like getting drunk with the world's most entertaining boozer.

The only thing that's certain is that when the dawn comes, the night will end.

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feel the quality

We inhabit a conviction society. The more you convince yourself and others of your worth/ the worth of your idea/ the worth of your conviction, the more successful your integration within this society.

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