Dedication plays away

Strictly come dancing (Breton duet)
Dedicated to Lucy and Tom
“My dear why don’t I mull some wine? Our Mol
Is bored and I’ve suppressed a thousand yawns.”
“You’ve had your Dowland, now let’s both enthrall
To streams of photons from Cartesian dawns.”

“My dear I’m neutron-mad, I learnt from you.
I am your wife, no mass, but critical.”
“But too naïve so take the vector view
Embracing targets algometrical.”

“My dear, these shining shells, these angled arms
Don’t sing to me of Werner’s certainties.”
“And yet in mining grace from physics’ charms
You ditch the maths and seek analogies.”

“My dear, but tell me where’s the parallel
With made-up faces and a sliding gait?”
“The face, uncertain, is the particle
The slide its even more uncertain state.”

“My dear - ” “Dear wife it’s time to mull the wine,
Heat the Bourgueil, not the blest Lafite
While I sit mulling on an endless line
Eight on its side, so hard and yet so neat.”

NOTE: Colours have no politico-significance

Novel progress 13/3/10.Ch. 17: 0 words. Chs. 1 - 16: 73,302. Comments: After re-reading and editing Ch. 16 I shrank it from 6037 words to 5674 words.

Getting to the heart of the matter

Fed up with motorbikes, kitchen utensils and public urinals I baited my hook with technology and cast a line into River Google. A massive tug brought this to the surface:

“… there is nothing too technological about the true essence of technology, as Heidegger has shown that technology's ultimate essence resides in a rather poetic dwelling near the truth of Being.”

EXTRAPOLATION
DELETED
BECAUSE

OF
INCOMPREHENSIBILITY

Novel progress 4/2/10. Ch. 14: 869 words. Chs. 1 - 13: 58,239 words. Comments: Roof repairs for Clare.

Mrs BB's reading progress: On January 25 I asked her how many titles she'd read in 2010. the answer was 24.

Bit of a ragbag

Sonnet - Metamorphosis

I am the victim of time’s violence.
This pressing sky, these over-sleekit roads
These blizzards of ebullience,
This rain, this fog that frequently forebodes
Much worse. All kept me from the barber’s chair
And let my hair presume to reach my brow.
My gliding form has lost its athlete’s flair,
And, seaweeded, retards the forehead’s prow
When cutting through the pool’s décolletage,
Requiring several towels to get it dry.
A Neptune slowed to Saturn’s gnarly age
My crawl-stroke wasted, power gone awry.
But could my new-born wastrel turbulence
Proclaim a poet’s mane of consequence?

NOTE: Not to be taken seriously. An attempt to break away from the 3½ quatrains that the sonnet form tends to impose. To me, habituated, it forms a different straitjacket.

UNAVOIDABLE Twentieth-century music! Twelve-tone shivers down the spines of those who drew up the drawbridge with Brahms. But the century includes Strauss, Elgar, Sibelius and Mahler. If you want to know how it all fits together (including jazz and pop) “The rest is noise” by Alex Ross, music critic of New Yorker, was enthusiastically reviewed in the UK and is brilliantly written – a must read. Your stepping stone to the Berg violin concerto, which, like Naples, you must experience before death. Or afterwards if there are suitable facilities.

DARWIN UPDATE BBC4 yesterday continued its wonderful series on hard science with, in effect, a lecture on the origins of chaos theory. Ah the mind of man. Ending with an unbelievable piece of software containing an algorithm which simulates evolution, a process which in real life takes millennia. An incompetent cartoon mannikin trips over then learns to walk with confidence and it’s the maths what done it.

Novel progress 20/1/10. Ch. 12: 1724 words. Chs. 1 - 11: 48,792 words. Comments: Unproductive day. Still on the M6.

What did they do in pleasuredomes?

Sonnet – Harmless and invisible
With women I’m cut off the photograph,
Out of my depth, an awkward northern crotte,
Both bold and shy with nervous coughing laugh
A landscape made cohesive by a blot.
But here within this guarded crystal sphere,
Face hidden, body masked, words free to roam,
Why, I can act the flannelled boulevardier
Provide an entrance to the pleasuredome.
Unseen, I chat to women who, outside,
Would pass with nostrils widened in disdain
Would toss a coin while lengthening their stride
Would look for interest in a nearby drain
Articulate, I tell this sagging face
I have an answer to this lack of grace.

(1) Copy this and paste under D for doggerel.
(2) First four lines are, nevertheless, true. I left
the north unable to talk to, never mind impress, its ladies.
(3) Boulevardier pronounced English way (bool-var-deer)
not French (bool-uh-VAR-di-ay).
(4) Lines equivalent to whistling in the wind.