I've finally put the toasted almonds back where they belong in the kitchen. Last night, instead of writing an entry like a well-behaved diarist, I must have popped about a kilo and a half of mandel-lovin' into my slack-slung maw one -- by -- salty -- delicious -- one, my eyes only half-focussed on my stupid computer game. When I shut my eyes on the bus, to rest them, I see little round animated game-pieces, slowly turning over from white to black and back and forth. If I don't get out of the house soon, my wrists will fuse to my laptop and I won't be able to brush my teeth without entering a password.
Current music: Tallis, Lamentationes Ieremiae Prophetae: the Hilliard Ensemble before they started fucking around with jazz saxophonists and stuck to absolutely crystalline readings of golden-age polyphony. When life seems most absolutely hopeless, I pick out, say, Rogers Covey-Crump's voice on the tenor line, tack it gently to one of my back muscles: each liquid ascent, each flawlessly-intoned descent of a hexachord smooths another kink out my day. It puts the planets back in their immutable circular paths, the Earth stills her heavy, listless roll to gaze upon her Sun in love. They do english renaissance pronunciation of the latin on this recording: Christus and Maria with the long, post-vowel-shift i [it rhymes vaguely with french œil]. It's not beautiful the way italianized latin is, which darts from the tongue open and exotic. Indeed, something about those messy shakespeherian diphthongs sets my sympathetic strings buzzing: instead of disembodied choristers, it evokes the sweaty, worried clerics of the age of Copernicus, adrift on a newly-unfamiliar planet with only Ficino's commentary on the Symposium and musica ficta to guide them.
Most of the day, I've been feeling hollow and metallic inside. I went out for coffee with KM, to catch up on all sorts of things. I didn't exactly keep up with my half of the conversation (I rarely do these days: I find listening difficult and surprising enough without having to generate any more talk). She's in the middle of A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, like everybody else I know. She reads her Proust on the T: I can't imagine a better way to lose track of all sense of reality, not to mention going completely deaf. I can only read Proust in a bathtub full of ice, under an enormous blue neon sign that says IDENTIFYING WITH FICTIONAL CHARACTERS IS A SIN.
Martin menoit son porceau: it's a very cute and very naughty sixteenth-century french chanson. The text goes, Martin and Alix were driving a pig to market. In the middle of the great plain, Alix says to Martin, let us make the sin of the one on top of the other, and Martin says, Foolish wench! Who, then, will watch the pig?
Current cin�ma: I watched the/le Closet/Placard with ED and E, his texan friend, tonight. "Et ce sont nos.... essayeurs."
There was a selkie maiden in the sink disposal tonight when I was washing dishes: I helped her out, gave her a towel. She gave me one wish: I asked for a practical streak. She laughed and handed me a plastic shopping bag full of makeup removal pads. "Here," she purred, "these'll do you more good."