Jul 102016
 
The Crowd

“I prefer the teeming crowd of souls to the teeming soul itself”, walkingtalkingwriting, please join the conversation: THE CROWD I prefer the teeming crowd of souls to the teeming soul itself. This has nothing to do with my material condition. Every kind of virtue is found in a crowd: that humans in a crowd create [...]

Jul 082016
 
"death ... hospitals"

‘entitlement’ was the word I was remembering. I added it between these other two, “death … hospitals”, when we were meeting yesterday in the city-centre Cafe. We were in the spirit of walkingtalkingwriting, and one aspect of the entitlement word we were on about was (entitlement/un-entitlment) the dialectic, in which both of us were entitled [...]

Dismal Deaths and How to Avoid Them

 Posted by at 11:48 am  Exodus, Old Men Travelling  Comments Off
Apr 082016
 
Dismal Deaths and How to Avoid Them

“How unbearable the body of a living being who fights with death, and now seems to win, now to lose. I don’t know how long we remained like that”. The Days of Abandonment,  Pp 145. Elena Ferrante explores in this story what happens to us when our lives results in an unbearable absence of sense. [...]

Feb 092016
 

This is the title of a book by Gabrielle Wittkop. No, I’d not heard of it either. Neither the title nor the writer. I find an excerpt in the latest copy of the very excellent Sonofabook magazine http://www.cbeditions.com/magazine.html The book was published postumously: “…a celebratiion of death and life , Eros and Thanatos, beauty and [...]

Musical Instability

 Posted by at 8:44 am  Exodus, IN Conversation, Old Men Travelling  Comments Off
May 172015
 
Musical Instability

Pin your ears between the oscillating voice of the self and the voice of the text, score, or content: most of the time it’s either tinnitus or grand narrative but occasionally terminal humour succeeds, Harry Kratchnikov said. Bees should be told of the death of their keeper, writes Alberto Mongrel in Curiosity . ”I’ve wished that [...]

Apr 292015
 
Beached

Who says? Men’s voices raised in argument, but that this was rhetoric hadn’t occurred to him before. Rhetoric – the word seemed to belong to a bygone age, of voices raised in sharp arguments, and adversarial set-piece speeches, and ornamentations and elegant phrases to divert and entertain, and of being in a court with clerics, [...]

Mar 202015
 
Blue to be Sure - but not the Blue Danube

Playing in’Waltz Time’ – Ummpapa, Ummpapa – but the rhythm section is adding triplets and other faster tempos and we hear far more than four beats to the bar. “The musical component comes first”, we are always saying – remember balance, rhythm and measure. It is simply that here there is an absence of melody [...]