The house above the cork forest (5)

I admit it. I’ve been putting this off.

At the end of my last post about the house, Joost wanted closure. We all did.

When it came, or appeared to have come–when finally, after more than a year of delays and bureaucratic procrastination and sheer bloody-mindedness from one of the four brothers, who was never actually present but appeared to want more money, although that was never quite said, merely implied, with raised eyebrows and sighs and muttering, the papers appeared to be in order–when finally , after much vagueness and postponement and shrugging and looking towards the horizon, the price appeared to be established at a figure only slightly higher than Joost was officially prepared to pay–when finally, after a series of veiled threats by the neighbour with hole-made wine and woolly salami, the issue of the shared road appeared to have been settled and Joost had been convinced by my lawyer and E.’s lawyer and a third lawyer belonging, I think, to the surveyor that he would automatically acquire the right to use it as part of the purchase–when finally all this was settled and Joost bought the house…

I’ll save the next part for when I’m feeling stronger.

Arctic Monkeys

I’m a fan. If you are too,and you want to see the video of their new single Brianstorm, click here and then go to Arctic Monkeys. If you can’t be bothered, you aren’t a fan. If you can, you get a chance to see some stuff from the first album too.

See you later, Innovator.

A man goes into a delicatessen…

This interesting Japanese foodstuff (courtesy of engrish.com) reminds me of a joke I have no intention of posting (today…).

It also brings to mind that scene in one of my favourite films, Christopher Guest’s Best in Show, in which the gay couple behave outrageously in a deli. If I remember correctly, sausages play a fairly prominent role there too.

Fuck dolls for dogs

This may be too private to be shared, but my dog Toffee (actually, a sterilised bitch) expresses her displeasure by humping a cushion. Maybe I should get her one of these.

A vet friend said this behaviour was ‘unusual’.

Guess which one is gay!

Now that Poland is attempting to ban discussions on homosexuality in schools and educational institutions across the country, with teachers facing the sack, fines or imprisonment, it might be worth reiterating the information in this article, written by Doug Ireland last October. The article begins:

Poland’s homophobic Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski-the identical twin brother of Polish President Lech Kaczynski-was outed as a homosexual in major Polish media last week in the midst of a political crisis that threatened to cause his government’s downfall….

The gay one’s on the left.

Rosaries, punishment, the usual stuff

The recently announced electronic rosary pictured here appears to do just what it says on the packet. You press a button for each Hail Mary and receive a short but satisfying buzz. When you’ve totted up enough HMs, the buzz lasts longer, and you can get back to doing something useful with your life. It has all the charm of a battery charger, of course, but, as any believer would tell you, charm isn’t the point.

If you’re looking for something less solipsistic, though, maybe you should try the electronic group rosary developed by a company called Ron-Coe. This handy little device introduces a whole new level to the practice of group HM-ing. According to an article in Spero News, people tend to gabble their rosaries without giving much thought to them (which tends to happen when repeating the same phrase over and over again). This neat little gadget is designed to prevent this by timing each HM and giving the group leader a nasty little shock to the wrist if the pace gets too frenetic. This might seem cruel, even — dare I say it — unhealthy, but, as Spero points out:

…it is far better than bead burn which occurs when people run their fingers over the rosary so fast that the beads heat up burning their fingers.

ROSENQUIST: THE F-111

A man has a contract from the company making the bomber
A beam at the airport
A man in an airplane approaching a beam at the airport
A bug hitting a light bulb
A light sky blue area

The painting is a cube or a box with one empty wall space
The pattern in an elevator lobby
A wallpaper roller with hard artificial flowers
Aluminium flowers on an aluminium panel

A jet plane painted on aluminium panels
An idea of fragments of vision
A person buying a recording of the time

A vacant aluminium panel

A fancy cornice or something seemingly more human
A pulsing muscular notion to the speed on the avenue
A glimmer
A flash of static movement

An aluminium panel

A fragment of a machine the collector is already mixed up with
A couple of aluminium panels

Foodstuff

A shaft that goes in the middle of the cake from the core or mould used to bake it
A big hole in the middle of the cake
A giant birthday cake lying on a truck for a parade

The spaghetti just on the right, with the fork, has been painted orange with artists’ oil colour
The little girl is the female form in the picture
The grass in Day-Glo green colours is the change of nature in relation to the new look of the landscape

A vacant aluminium panel

An umbrella superimposed over an atom bomb blast
Someone raising his umbrella or raising his window in the morning, looking out the window and seeing a bright red and yellow atomic bomb blast, something like cherry blossom

An aperture for a view

The rod holding up the umbrella goes right down the middle of the explosion
The umbrella is realistic
The blue in the umbrella is its own colour
It’s a beach umbrella that was left up in the winter
The breath of an atomic bomb

A huge arabesque
A fold of aluminium material
A blanket
A painter’s drop cloth
Drops and residues of paint
An orange field, the image of spaghetti
A person who offers up a gift

A man in an airplane approaching a beam at the airport
A beam at the airport
A small relief to a heavy atmosphere
An artist offering up something as a small gift
An extravagance

A man has a contract from the company making the bomber

Little Monsters

Finally, after the most extraordinary experience of being edited to the last comma by someone who really knows her job (thank you, Sam!), the final version of Little Monsters is ready for copy editing (just in time for the London Book Fair).

Perhaps when I have the proofs in my hand I’ll be able to read it with detachment. Right now, what I see is a palimpsest of the many drafts it’s been through, with pentimenti lurking as memories behind every line.

Leaping to McEwan’s defence (honestly)

I’ve no great affection for the recent work of Ian McEwan (see my comments on his latest work below) but it’s hard not to sympathise with him when you read a letter as silly as the one published in today’s Guardian. Written by Professor Judith Okely, of Oxford, it drags up the accusation of plagiarism levelled at McEwan some time ago in a paragraph that could do double time as a textbook example of a non sequitur. She says:

Ian McEwan tells Natasha Walter, the reviewer or his novel On Chesil Beach, novels are not always about you”. But he did not fully acknowledge that his novel Atonement is partly using the autobiography of Lucilla Andrews’s No Time for Romance (1977; George Harpers).

The rather odd grammar of the second sentence suggests that Ms (sorry, Professor) Okely isn’t entirely at home with the English language. But logic is, or should be, extralinguistic. She goes on to say:

Apparently fiction is creatively original (!?), but non-fictional, published details of a woman’s life are mere “reportage” to be used in fiction.

Take out ‘apparently’, ‘mere’ and the inverted commas, and replace ‘woman’s’ with ‘man’s’ and see what you get. Okely’s no great shakes at syntax or logic, but she’s clearly a dab hand at cheap rhetoric.

Roy Zimmerman says Ted Haggard is completely heterosexual