That title, I have to say, has nothing whatever to do with today’s post: it just came to me in the middle of the night and I thought it would make a good title for a poetry collection. Not, probably, the one I am assembling at the moment for a competition:
http://www.cinnamonpress.com/competitions/
nor the one I am re-doing as a pamphlet which already has a title (The Ballad of the Bowstring Bridge) – but possibly a slightly whimsical or political collection.
Hm.
A propos of that, I had a rather nasty comment on this blog yesterday. Mostly commentators are polite, witty, respectful and interesting; but I do occasionally get the odd abusive comment. These will not be published – and I will usually suggest to the commentator that if they would like to make their point again without being rude or insulting, I will be happy to publish it.
But! onwards and upwards… for Tuesdays are concerned with prose, and I have begun a non-fiction work which is a memoir of forgetting. (LOL). If this sounds a bit paradoxical, it illustrates the paradox of my life for the last five years since hitting (or being hit by) menopause. I have forgotten everything: streets, routes, maps; people, people’s names, people’s children’s names; what I did yesterday, what everyone else did yesterday, what Katy did; what I watched last night, last week, last month – in short, my whole life is a continual forgetting.
I am interrupted by Mark asking if I can read Urdu.
‘Not in the slightest,’ I tell him. Then I think for a moment. ‘But I do know that the little dots are vowels,’ I say triumphantly.
‘No, they aren’t,’ he retorts.
See? I don’t even know what I know.
Aaaand back to the post… so, it’s quite helpful to me to be writing this memoir and if, when it’s done, I can publish it, it will hopefully be useful to others.
One thing I do remember from yesterday is that at Philosophy we talked about Descartes (or ‘Day-cart’ as everyone seems to call him.) My knowledge of Descartes was previously confined to one phrase – albeit in three different languages:
Cogito ergo sum
Je pense donc je suis
which of course in English means ‘I think therefore I am’.
Everyone knows that phrase. But what I didn’t know was everything else he thought about consciousness – and now I can’t tell you what that was without referring to my notes. Nope, I’ve looked and it’s too complicated to put on here.
Whilst we’re on the theme of prose, though, I was interested to hear that the winner this year of the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction was a biography of an Italian Fascist written in an experimental style. The SJ prize is not known for being avant-garde, so I think the likelihood is that the experimental style is highly successful, so I’d be interested to read it.
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/04/biography-fascist-samuel-johnson-prize
Must go now as I’m trying to listen to Grayson Perry and that is not conducive to blog-posting.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/reith
Kirk out
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