If my literary dick were big enough, as big as D H Lawrence's, I could probably get away with "the chick of pity is hatched from the egg of hate," as he does in the prologue he wrote to Multatuli�s Max Havelaar. In addition to some blather about the "Anglo-Saxon mind"�s rejection of novels which profess viewpoints about society, D H also tells us, speaking ex cathedra, that society needs to swallow the pill of something-or-other, though our forefathers have licked the jam off it [?], in order to make our societal bowels move. Bend over, Mr Lawrence! I'll show you how to make your bowels move. I'll move 'em for you!
There are days when things happen; this one one of those. There are, by necessity, then, days which lie more or less undistinguishable except by number. JD the new guy at work noticed a database record entered on 11 September 2001. �It was a Tuesday,� somebody said. Number, day of the week; something happened that day, like it or not.
Today's happenings: a screaming fight at work. Would you believe grown human beings, university-trained, employed, not smelling or substance-crazed, could call one another fuckheads in a business-casual setting? If not, your experience of the world need attention. I went out for to B*mb*y Cl*b with KK the new (thus may you disseverate her from KK, the attorney) and talked about Pride and lesbic Drama and voluntary amputees. From those windows, all C*mbr*dg* lies open to your gaze. Sweet C*mbr*dg*! She is lovely with the casual disregard for the slime of this earth, for she is builded compact together upon a swamp, like her mother. Her streets are decked with Volvos, the Volvos are decked with parking stickers. Her ladies are dressed with ethnic panache and home-made-looking necklaces.
Two of my favorite C*mbr*dg* ladies co-sponsored one of my favorite concerts at the B*st*n **rly M*s*c F*st*v*l. The concert was of music also by ladies; the astounding Antoinette Bembo who, unsuccessful in her attempt to land a divorce in seventeenth-century Venice decamped to Paris and professional musicianship. Go�ts-r�unis avant-la-lettre, she wrote religious music to graceful dance-tunes � la fran�oise, which from time to time burst into splendid burls of venetian madrigalesque word-painting, as if italic illogic is a meal she can't quite keep down.
Before that concert I wandered shy between the ranks of harpsichords to try and hardly touched one of them. I bought facsimiles (two books of Jacquet de la Guerre, Parthenia, Mattheson's suites, a set of Handel trio sonatas, and Purcell). Monday night I took them out and started wading through the clefs for the first time. Jacobean English keyboard tabs (this would be Parthenia, or the Maydenhead, that is the first musick printed for the virginalls) has six lines per staff and looks to a pianist friend of mine [yes, I do speak to pianists sometimes] like ants squashed on graph paper. It is an exercise in humility to somebody who can sightread regular treble-and-bass with some speed to have to count lines and spaces again. Luckily, I have always had humility to burn (or at least false modesty, which makes a brighter flame).
Yet another sigh-worthy exercise in humility comes with noting that the newest crop of HIP stars to crowd the festival stage are about my age. I decided at some point, or it was thrust upon me by fate, that I was unlikely to become a professional musician, at least not by the standard model. But what a serpet eats my heart when I think that I could have had that direction, that drive to be beautiful. The ability to play music is perhaps the only effect I continue to want to have on my body. Please associate the related art of dance, if you will. The anti-materialist in me is shocked and horrified. That now living corse will soon turn to grass! What are you doing trying to improve it? Improve it so that you can make vibrations which will only drown in thin air?
I need to start swimming again. I couldn't get my trousers on today without resorting to prayer. I'm not looking for liposuction ex machina right now; exercise! is the only thing for it, the only thing I can afford. This is pragmatics (not vanity of the flesh) since it obviates the necessity of buying a set of business casual muu-muus. I was sitting with KK the younger outside of C*f* P*r*d*s* drinking espressos and saying something inane about being the shortest person in my extended family . . . �I�m only five-eight-and-a-half�, I said hastily, and some TOTAL STRANGER on the street jumped in to say, �Nah, you�re only five-eight.� Huh. �Thanks,� I said, because I really couldn't think of anything to say, and saying �Sorry,� which is the usual social catholicon would only have encouraged him to repeat what he said.
Somebody needs to tell him: this is B*st*n. Interaction is poor form.
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