30.6.07

Yesterday





Un après-midi à Genève

29.6.07

Where will we be
When summer's gone

Morning found us calmly unaware
Noon burn gold into our hair
At night, we swim the laughin' sea

When summer's gone
Where will we be

We had some good times
But they're gone
The winter's comin' on

Summer's almost gone

The Doors


I love this song. For some reason, it always comes to my mind at the beginning of July, as a soft remembrance of last year's cold, as a gentle warning of the cold to come, as a kind of "carpe diem". It used to make me sad, now I see it as a chance. "They are lucky, who don't notice whether it's winter now, or summer", Chekhov wrote.

I say, they're lucky, who have a song.

And summer's not gone, anyway.

27.6.07

On my way to work

26.6.07

Sad steps

Groping back to bed after a piss
I part thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleaneliness.

Four o'clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.
There's something laughable about this,

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

High and preposterous and separate -
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

Philip Larkin

25.6.07

N'est pas pauvre celui qui n'a rien, mais celui qui n'a personne.

Proverbe africain

24.6.07

Old friends...


...are a great thing.

Cabane Bella Tola, 2346 m above sea-level

22.6.07




... as if every love story were going to end here.

(one of my favourite films)

21.6.07

Dreamy


Marc Chagall, Au dessus de la ville

20.6.07

Monty Python's Flying Circus - Dead Parrot Sketch

A reason why I booked a super intensive English course in Cambridge for the summer to come.

19.6.07






La main est l'un des animaux de l'homme.

Francis Ponge

17.6.07

Dimanche matin

14.6.07

A year is nothing: a feather in the breeze, a breath of air. Turn around and it's gone. Ice, bud, leaf, twig. Geese on the pond, stubble in the field. Three hundred sixty-five mornings, three hundred sixty-five nights. Minor lacerations, a sprained ankle, runny nose, the death of a distant relative. There's a squirrel in the attic, a tree down in a storm. The clock in the hallway cranks round seven hundred and thirty times. Windows are raised, shades drawn, dishes, cups and spoon dirtied and scrubbed, dirtied and scrubbed. Thunder hits the hills like a mallet, snow climbs the fenceposts, sunlight burnishes the windows like cooper. A year. One of so many: fifty, sixty? The days chew away at it, insidious.

T. C. Boyle, Water Music

2.6.07

Un film à voir absolument












Euphoria, par Ivan Vyrypaev
Russie, 2006



She opened the curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving - perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold walkings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Picture: J. M. W. Turner, View of a Town, 1798