Where I was from was a long time ago.
I don't know if it still exists; I suspect and half wish it doesn't.
Above 'hot spot' you picked up D. Johnson's Tree/Smoke book, some Capote and Joan Didion's Where I was From; the latter only out of nostalgia...
Under the bridge, the Thames unusually choppy, the early morning gulls very noisy. Those lovely folding wooden tables are being opened up and set out in lines. Books are hurriedly stacked on them in no apparent order-and it's this people really come for, the chance find, the sudden gleam in the eye when someone finds what they've been looking for for aeons or if they chance across a book they'd read in childhood and forgotten until that very moment. And all that parceling out of chance and randomness under the bridge a result of casual, early-morning settlements and unselfconscious arrangements by the booksellers. They keep lots of coins in solid green boxes, set themselves down for the day, light up a cigarette or warm their hands by rubbing them together.
There are few people around to witness this spectacle. Sunday light is invariably brilliant, true, spotless, almost eternal in its possibilities. Under the bridge sounds are muffled by the shadows and all the words are thick, squarish.
Always good to be there before anyone else; other people are hell. To your delight you read the opening pages of JD's book. One for later, perhaps. Except no matter how many times you return you never find it again. Perhaps that's the way with bridges, or maybe it's just London: nothing gets repeated. There's a chance, an opening, then it's irrevocably gone, sinking back into the shadows. Who would have thought an aimless Sunday morning walk would have afforded so many opportunities for useless speculations on the role of chance in our lives!
The books. do you..er..actually read them or do you just talk about them the way a starving man imagines a fabulous meal in a French restaurant? The books are now just signs, to what, God only knows; the words glint back into the sun, as unreal as California.
~~~
Today you see a person with a long rectangular beard, jet black, not totally out of control. There are probably one in ten million people with such beards in England, an old 18th century Russian patriarch's beard. Fiercely stupid but still not the fanatical beard that sprays out in all directions. The well-trimmed types are usually conservatives or semi-educated; beards without a mustache are, of course, the missionaries (tablighis) or the Saudi-influenced. Now and then you see the wispy, straggling beards of the cunning foxes. Then there are the Iranian-influenced types and even the Ahmadis once had their own distinctive style.
I don't know if it still exists; I suspect and half wish it doesn't.
Above 'hot spot' you picked up D. Johnson's Tree/Smoke book, some Capote and Joan Didion's Where I was From; the latter only out of nostalgia...
Under the bridge, the Thames unusually choppy, the early morning gulls very noisy. Those lovely folding wooden tables are being opened up and set out in lines. Books are hurriedly stacked on them in no apparent order-and it's this people really come for, the chance find, the sudden gleam in the eye when someone finds what they've been looking for for aeons or if they chance across a book they'd read in childhood and forgotten until that very moment. And all that parceling out of chance and randomness under the bridge a result of casual, early-morning settlements and unselfconscious arrangements by the booksellers. They keep lots of coins in solid green boxes, set themselves down for the day, light up a cigarette or warm their hands by rubbing them together.
There are few people around to witness this spectacle. Sunday light is invariably brilliant, true, spotless, almost eternal in its possibilities. Under the bridge sounds are muffled by the shadows and all the words are thick, squarish.
Always good to be there before anyone else; other people are hell. To your delight you read the opening pages of JD's book. One for later, perhaps. Except no matter how many times you return you never find it again. Perhaps that's the way with bridges, or maybe it's just London: nothing gets repeated. There's a chance, an opening, then it's irrevocably gone, sinking back into the shadows. Who would have thought an aimless Sunday morning walk would have afforded so many opportunities for useless speculations on the role of chance in our lives!
The books. do you..er..actually read them or do you just talk about them the way a starving man imagines a fabulous meal in a French restaurant? The books are now just signs, to what, God only knows; the words glint back into the sun, as unreal as California.
~~~
Today you see a person with a long rectangular beard, jet black, not totally out of control. There are probably one in ten million people with such beards in England, an old 18th century Russian patriarch's beard. Fiercely stupid but still not the fanatical beard that sprays out in all directions. The well-trimmed types are usually conservatives or semi-educated; beards without a mustache are, of course, the missionaries (tablighis) or the Saudi-influenced. Now and then you see the wispy, straggling beards of the cunning foxes. Then there are the Iranian-influenced types and even the Ahmadis once had their own distinctive style.
2 comments:
Think you may have opened up a whole new area of research here, b. 'What Beards mean'?? Can we read significance into everything we see? OR, is doing so the province of poets, whose raison d'etre it precisley is? (Dark clouds massing over the Solway, driven by a rough wind wuthering down my chimneys, must portend something.)
Think you may have opened up a whole new area of research here, b.
I just knew a university education would come in handy one day.
'What Beards mean'??
or, as a French intellectual might say: 'Re-imagining the ontological status of beards in a world of alienated, inter-subjective "nullity" : deconstructing the dialectical "trace" of crypto-Islamo-fascism on the "face" of the post-colonial sub-altern "being".
Can we read significance into everything we see?
jesus, I hope not! I've been staring at those cinnamon rolls on my desk for too long.
OR, is doing so the province of poets, whose raison d'etre it precisley is? (Dark clouds massing over the Solway, driven by a rough wind wuthering down my chimneys, must portend something.)
dunno, dear C. that kind of view irritates me no end nowadays. They really should have just stuck to walking in the forest or something.
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