LIFESTYLE

^Image by Ilona Dorota Sagar

Below is the text for a video collaboration with Ilona Sagar currently showing as part of the Visionary Trading Project in Hackney. The film weaves a quiet montage of constructed and documentary scenes from around London Fields and Broadway Market, together with a voiceover that tells a tale spoken through a collage of buzzwords taken from advertising material for new housing developments in the area.

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I

This is our stage; We are the set; It’s nothing without us.

It’s vibrant when we’re here, and when we’re here we’re buzzing.

We look distinctly contemporary, and each look we get is spectacularly new.

We are dynamic creatives, well-adjusted living, clean, modern, simplicity.

II

We shine, clean and new, breath-taking flagships-of-ourselves,

The bespoke measure of our many, fashionable attributes,

bustling with world-class, real friction.

III

Nostalgic-chic is the vintage-new, and we want unique,

Disconnect of brushed-steel, 24-hour, red-brick- heritage. Plucked and fragrant.

A pure and natural, home-baked-innocence, 

With graceful proportions, and superb specifications.

IV

We have distinctly-dramatic, spectacular- tranquillity,

Superbly packaged identity-specifications, and lush-green dramatic-schemes.

Pioneering bespoke-culture of bright-young- things,

With our bucolic, cosmopolitan-chic. Watch us, watch you.

V

We are energized products of renowned, home-made, elegant cafes,

and i-phone-footage catwalk-parades, in understated, state-of-the-art.

It’s more than a feeling.

VI

We glide dynamically, into edgily-packaged, genuine, cosmopolitan-debt,

featured in urban-village-galleries and ethnic-sweatshop-global-magazines,

from the unrivalled-creative-glamour of emptied traditions.

VII

We are the newly-arcadian-creatives, buzzing with world-class pastoral-technology-specifications, many fashionably homemade café-utopias, radical cosmopolitan-innocence, spectacularly-tranquil avant-garde delights, and brand-new flagship-heritage.

We are quick with the seductive anxiety of non-stop 24-hour-reinvention, and vibrant-contrasting exhaustion, running, endlessly-perfect bright-young-things with the burden of internationally-renowned-bodies, wearing breath-taking, cutting-edge, and distinctly-urban-culture.

We are acting the bespoke-measure of our many trend-setting spontaneous-designer-initiatives, and watching the buzz in urban-village-galleries that multiply our organic-corner-shop bike-repair-innocence, until the dynamic-creative-mechanism is too anxiously-energized with chic lifestyles and each look we get is exhausting and we feel, genuinely feel, spectacularly, really spectacularly, breathtakingly, dramatically   – a u t h e n t I c

RESTLESSNESS

^source

22 August

It is quite disastrous, Wilhelm: all my active energies have been cast down into restless listlessness, and I can neither be idle nor accomplish anything. My imagination has deserted me, my feeling for nature gone, and books nauseate me. Once we are lost unto ourselves, everything else is lost to us. I swear there are times when I wish I could be a day labourer, simply in order to have something to look forward to in the day ahead, a sense of purpose, hope. I often envy Albert when I see him up to his ears in paperwork, and I fancy I should be content if I were in his position! I have repeatedly been on the point of writing to you and the minister, applying for the embassy appointment which you assure me I would obtain. I too believe I would do so; the minister has a long-standing regard for me, and has often urged me to devote myself to some business; and for one brief hour I am on the brink of going ahead. But then, when I consider it anew, and the story of the horse that grew weary of freedom, had itself saddled and bridled, and was ridden into the ground occurs to me –I do not know what to do. What is more, dear friend! May not my yearning for change be a restless impatience within me, which will pursue me everywhere?

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Diary extract from the Penguin Classics edition of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther"

NOTRE-DAME de PARIS

An essay I wrote (in imitation of certain art historians whose style I was at the time in love with) on Scholasticism and Aesthetics in the development and legacy of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Tutors were Irénée Scalbert and Dr Timothy Brittain Catlin.


CLICK HERE for the PDF

RHYTHM

^Glassblowing Workshop, Portland, Oregon (source)

“The substance of the routine may change, metamorphose, improve, but the emotional payoff is one’s experience of doing it again. There’s nothing strange about this experience. We all know it; it is rhythm.”

-Richard Sennet, The Craftsman

Richard Sennett’s book The Craftsman is a call to appreciate and value the kind of creative labor that once dominated in the craft trades, and which he points out is still alive and well in disciplines as varied as Linux code-writing and mobile-phone development.

Sennett does not advocate a return to an economy of pre-industrial manual work, instead he analyzes and explains how certain core elements, which were involved in these professions, made them intrinsically fulfilling and meaningful to those working within them. He explains that the distinction between conceptual inspiration and the act of making is an artificial, and recent one. It is a workplace separation that tends to generate an unhelpful stratification between ‘unskilled’ inflexible production lines, and ‘creative’ but unengaged researchers and developers.

Alternatively, Sennett suggests treating the act of making as a creative endeavor, where research, design and development can occur at the same time as developing the manufacturing process. This not only motivates the designer/maker to have a deep personal connection with the work, but opens up the possibility for mistakes, dead-ends, and tangential explorations within the framework of the process. These mistakes and dead-ends are positive inefficiencies which are necessary for the process to throw up unexpected opportunities and breakthroughs. And for these positive inefficiencies to occur, be understood, overcome and harnessed, there needs to be the space and time for the maker to repeat their process again and again, developing their own personal rhythm. In the same manner that pianists practice repeatedly, until the core skill of playing becomes instinctive, allowing them instead to focus on variations, emphasis and mood within each repetition, so the maker engages initially through repetition with the core skills of his process until they are second nature, by which time the act of repetition is thrown open to become an active field of experimentation, a generative rhythm—adaptive and evolving—of exploration and innovation.

It is when the repetition of work becomes the rhythm of craft that any form of labor can become creative, meaningful and fulfilling.

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NB, this post was initially published in The BiBlog

BEST

^George Best with Miss World Mary Stavin. source

"Below is an extract from Chapter5 -Truth, Virtue and Objectivity- of Terry Eagleton's After Theory (I highly recommend it). Via the case of the footballer George Best, Eagleton puts forward an argument against judging the personal ethics and morality of one's trajectory in life through the lens of any form of goal-oriented, utility-driven set of values. As humans, we are not means to an end, unless death is our sole purpose in life, and, like Sennett in The Craftsman, he asks that we not only look ahead to results and achievements, but inwards to the process of life & living, crafting our actions and social relations to best fulfill and embody our values, and not just our desires.

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"Take the well-known story about George Best, perhaps the finest footballer in history until alcoholism brought him low. Best the ex-footballer was lounging in a five-star hotel room surrounded by caviar and champagne, with a former Miss World lounging amorously beside him, when a member of the hotel staff entered, weighed down with yet more luxury goods. Gazing down at the supine star, he shook his head sadly and murmured: ‘George, where did it all go wrong?’

The joke, of course, is that one would hardly claim that life had gone wrong for a man with such a lavish lifestyle. This is how Best tells the story himself. Yet the hotel worker was right: Best’s life had gone wrong. He was not doing what it was in him to do. He was certainly enjoying himself, and might even in some sense have been happy; but he was not flourishing. He had failed at what he was supremely equipped to excel at. It is true that his life was probably more pleasurable than it had been in his footballing days, when he was constrained to break off nightclubbing from time to time in order to train. It is not that he had been happier as a footballer in the sense of enjoying himself more, though he managed to enjoy himself enough for a whole league of players even then. Nor is the point that his post-footballing lifestyle actually brought him a great amount of suffering, apparently confirming the evangelical view that the dissolute always get their comeuppance. It is rather that he had ceased to prosper. His life might have been happy in the sense of being opulent, contented and enjoyable, but it was not going anywhere. The casual greeting ‘How’s it going?’ suggests something morally significant. Best had come unstuck as a human being. Indeed, one suspects that he used to tell the story so gleefully partly as a way of disavowing the fact.

But where are human lives supposed to be going? They aren’t, after all, like buses or bicycle races; and the idea that life is a series of hurdles which you must leap in order to attain a goal is just the punitive puritan fantasy of scout masters, major-generals and corporation executives. What had come unstuck in Best’s life was not that he was no longer achieving, but that he was not fulfilling himself. It was not that he was no longer piling up goals, silver trophies and salary cheques, but that he was not living, if the pun may be excused, at his best. He was not being the kind of person he was able best to be. Indeed, he was actively out to destroy it. The post-footballing dissipation, as the sniffier commentators tended to call it, was perhaps a substitute way of trying to achieve. Best was now desperately scrambling from one starlet or bottle to another, in a grotesque parody of winning more and more matches.

Throwing up his football career, even if it was getting difficult to carry it on, could be seen in one sense as a courageous rejection of the success ethic. It was a recognition, however bleary-eyed, that life was not a matter of goals, in every sense of the word. Best was now free to enjoy himself, not live as some kind of self-entrepreneur. In another sense, the frenetic high living was a shadow of exactly that. The emptiness of desire replaced the hollowness of achievement. For both ways of life, the present is fairly valueless. It is just a bridge to the future, which will turn out to be just the same. How Best might genuinely have enjoyed himself would have been by carrying on playing football. It would not have been pleasant all the time, and there would no doubt have been times when he felt discontent; but it would have been how he could best thrive. Playing football would have been the moral thing to do.

Perhaps what helped to bring Best down was the fact that he was not able to play football just for its own sake. No footballer can, in a sports industry which is about shareholders rather than players, artistry or spectators. It would be like a hard-pressed commercial designer imagining that he could live like Michelangelo. To live a really fulfilling life, we have to be allowed to do what we do just for the sake of it. Best was no longer able to play just for the delight of it, and turned instead from delight to pleasure. His hedonism was just the other side of the instrumentalism he chafed at.

The point about human nature is that it does not have a goal. In this, it is no different from any other animal nature. There is no point to being a Badger. Being a Giraffe does not get you anywhere. It is just a matter of doing you Giraffe-like things for the sake of it. Because, however, human beings are by nature historical creatures, we look as though we are going somewhere –so that it is easy to misread this movement in teleological terms and forget that it is all for its own sake. Nature is a bottom-line concept: you cannot ask why a Giraffe should do the things it does. To say ‘It belongs to its nature’ is answer enough. You cannot cut deeper than that. In the same way, you cannot ask why people should want to feel happy and fulfilled. It would be like asking what someone hoped to achieve by falling in love. Happiness is not a means to an end.

If someone asks you why you do not want to die, you might reply that you have a trilogy of novels to finish, or grandchildren to watch growing up, or that a shroud would clash horribly with the colour of your fingernails. But it would surely be answer enough to say that you wanted to live. There is no need to specify particular goals. Living is enough reason itself. There are certainly some people who would be better off dead; but those that would not do not need a reason for carrying on. It is as superfluous to explain why you want to live as it is to explain why you don’t enjoy being nuzzled all over by buzzards. The only problem is that something which is or should be valuable in itself, like living, does not seem to need to end. Since it is not instrumental for something else, there is no point at which we can say its function is fulfilled and its purpose over. This is one reason why death is always bound to appear arbitrary. Only a life which has realised itself completely could seem undamaged by it. And as long as we are alive, there is always more self-realisation where that came from.

The idea of fulfilling you nature is inimical to the capitalist success ethic. Everything in capitalist society must have its point and purpose. If you act well, then you expect a reward. For Aristotle,  by contrast, acting well was a reward in itself. You no more expect a reward for it than you did for enjoying a delectable meal or taking an early morning swim. It is not as though the reward for virtue is happiness; being virtuous is to be happy. It is to enjoy the deep sort of happiness which comes from fulfilling your nature."

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From After Theory, Terry Eagleton, Penguin (26 Aug 2004)

• ISBN-10: 0141015071
• ISBN-13: 978-0141015071

JUPITER

^source

Below is a little play-within-a-play extract from Raymond Queneau's wildly creative 1932 re-imagining of Descartes Pensees as a novel (in this book instead coming to the repeated conclusion "I think, therefore I get myslef into a load of crap and a world of mirages"... think Burn After Reading), set in the petit-bourgeois Paris suburbs, "Witch Grass" was his literary debut, the version of which quoted here being currently published by New York Review Books Classics, was translated by Barbara Wright, and is available to buy here on Amazon. See here for an earlier post on Queneau and Perec.


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"Marcheville, some thirty miles from Torny, the industrial centre, is more like a large village than a small town; a peasant population, a few bourgeois, among whom are the lawyer and his dog. The lawyer’s dog is a white poodle, answering to the name of Jupiter. Jupiter is highly intelligent; if his master had had the time, he would have taught him arithmetic, perhaps even the elements of formal logic, fallacies and all. But his various pursuits have obliged him to neglect Jupiter’s schooling, and he only knows how to say woof woof from time to time and sit on his behind to get a lump of sugar. However, though there may be some doubt as to the extent of his learning, there can be nothing but admiration for the care he takes of his person. Shorn like a lion, he swaggers about within a radius of fifteen yards of the notarial house. At any greater distance, enormous beasts, jealous of his elegance, menace him with their vulgar, ill-bred fangs.

On this particular morning, Jupiter’s habits are upset; so are those of the lawyer and his family. Everyone is restless, and dressed in black. Forsaken, Jupiter goes to sleep in the hall. A person with a small suitcase in his hand comes in; woof woof, says the poodle intelligently; the lawyer, who has lost his collar stud, comes down in his shirt-sleeves. Good morning, good morning, he seems to be saying; Jupiter shows his approval with his tail and gets a smack on the thigh for his pains. Then another meussieu arrives, a very tall, very fat one. The greetings start all over again; Jupiter wants to take part in the palaver, but the tall-an-fat person treads on his toe nails. Owch, owch, says Jupiter, and goes and hides under a chair. The meussieus talk with restraint and compunction, like the day of the little boy’s first communion. Eulalie brings some coffee. Maybe there’s a chance of a lump of sugar. Jupiter sits up and begs, but he realises from the uninterested looks of the meussieus that he’s put his foot in it. This isn’t the moment for playing the fool. He goes over to the door to get some air; so far and no farther, because Caesar, the Butcher’s dog, is watching for him out of the corner of his eye.

The meussieus start walking. He follows at their soles. Caesar is close behind. They get to a house that Jupiter knows well; it belongs to an old lady who’s generous with her sugar. The old lady isn’t there; there’s a meussieu dressed up as a widow, it’s true, but that’s not the same thing. The meussieu in petticoats starts singing, accompanied by two little boys dressed up as girls whom Jupiter recognises only too well as being the bullies who, last Sunday, tied a corned beef tin onto his stump of a tail. Then they take a great big packing case out into the street; he goes and has a sniff to see what it is; it smells of the old lady. A kick in the rib teaches him to respect the dead.

With the big packing case being towed in front, and the crowd following behind, the ensemble makes its way toward a garden surrounded by walls and planted with huge great stones sticking up at right angles. Jupiter runs up and down and is amazed that his master, who’s usually in such a hurry, doesn’t try and get in front of the big box; he’s walking slowly, leading the way, with the young man with the suitcase and the tall, fat meussieu.

At the entrance to the garden, Jupiter’s heart misses a beat; he’s just noticed Caesar waiting for him, with an ominous look. So it’s advisable not to stray too far from the blackened bipeds. Everyone has come to a standstill around a hole. In the middle of the gathering, the man-woman mutters a menacing song; the bullies wave steaming teapots. Two professional drunks lower the box into the bottom of the hole. Then the guests toss in drops of water. Jupiter is losing interest, and he wanders off and goes scrounging from grave to grave; but, just behind that of Madam Pain, that most worthy lady whokept her idiot daughter in seclusion for fifteen years, he finds himself muzzle-to-ass with Caesar. This encounter gives him wings; he gallops, he flees, he decamps; he jumps onto a mound of loose soil, near his master; the soil is loose, as we said, it crumbles, and Jupiter tumbles, in a cloud of humus and compost, onto the grandmother’s coffin. Some people burst out laughing; other’s exclaim: How shocking! And a few murmur: Putrefaction! The lawyer let out a kind of strident shout, his personal roar of laughter, and then recovered his dignity. But he wasn’t going to forgive Jupiter.

That evening, the young man said to the poodle, as he handed him a lump of sugar:

“Will they put a chin-strap on you when they bury you?”

“Woof woof,” says the other, who hasn’t understood a word.

The next day Jupiter is hanging at the end of a rope, because he has assailed the dignity of the dead and of the living.

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RELICS

RELICS by Marcel Proust

"I have bought up all of her belongings that were put on sale -that woman whose friend I would like to have been, and who did not even condescend to talk to me for a few minutes. I have the little card game that kept her amused every evening, her two marmosets, three novels that bear her coat of arms on their boards, and her bitch. Oh, you delights and dear playthings of her life, you had access -without enjoying them as I would have done, and without even desiring them- to all her freest, most inviolable, and most secret hours; you were unaware of your happiness and you cannot describe it.

Cards that she would hold in her fingers every evening with her favourite friend who saw her getting bored or breaking into laughter, who were witnesses to the start of her liaison, and whom she threw down to fling her arms round the man who thereafter came every evening to enjoy a game with her; novels that she would open and close in her bed, as her fancy or her fatigue bade her, chosen by her on impulse or as her dreams dictated, books to which she confided her dreams and combined them with dreams expressed by the books that helped her better to dream for herself -did you retain nothing of her, and can you tell me nothing about her?

Novels; she dreamt in turn the lives of your characters and of your authors; and playing cards, for in her own way she enjoyed in your company the tranquillity and sometimes the feverishness of intimate friendships -did you keep nothing of her thoughts, which you distracted or filled, or of her heart, which you wounded or consoled?

Cards, novels, you were so often in her hands, or remained for so long on her table; queens, kings or knaves, who were the still guests at her wildest parties; heroes of novels and heroines who, at her bedside, caught in the cross-beam of her lamp and her eyes, dreamt your silent dream, a dream that was nonetheless filled with voices: you cannot have simply let it evaporate -all the perfume with which the air of her bedroom, the fabric of her dresses, and the touch of her hands or her knees imbued you.

You have preserved the creases left when her joyful or nervous hand crumpled you; you perhaps still keep prisoner those tears which she shed, on reading of a grief narrated in some book, or experienced in life; the day which made her eyes shine with joy or sorrow left its warm hues on you. When I touch you, I shiver, anxiously awaiting your revelations, disquieted by your silence. Alas! Perhaps, like you, charming and fragile creatures, she was the insensible and unconscious witness of her own grace. Her most real beauty existed perhaps in my desire. She lived her life, but perhaps I was the only one to dream it."

extract from NOSTALGIA by Marcel Proust

"Desire makes all things blossom, and possession makes them wither away."

MEDIOCRE

^Peckham, South London (photo by author)

Thankfully, most of our lives are played out through a chain of objectively unimportant, low level events that are on the whole unremarkable in the grand scheme of things, quotidian. In the same way, we tend to grow up, live, work, fall in love, have families, and fade away in entirely ordinary, run-of-the-mill architecture, built stuff that gets the job done, that holds in the heat and humidity in the local pool, and manages to pass planning because it has a gable roof and red brick façade, stuff that answers similar questions in similar ways in a million different variations from Perth to Plymouth.

If you took a picture of any of this low level architecture that fills Britain, the image would present a depressingly mute mediocrity, nothing but the complete factual averageness of the building or space which, if of recent vintage would no doubt end up, to howls of anguish, on Bad British Architecture. But Architectural photography severs the container from what it contains, it shows the aesthetic failure, but not how that failure is really a triumph.

It is precisely these places’ anonymity, their almost total lack of outstanding independent qualities, that ramps up the value of any uniqueness that does exist to such a degree, meaning that we become like archaeologists digging for clues, constructing local significance from minute fragments of singularity that are gathered slowly, over time. It takes longer to become attached to places so messy and banal, their qualities are not handed to you on a Haussmannian plate, one must work for it. And everyone does, instinctively, attaching their memories cumulatively to slight peculiarities, like the unusually large traffic island where the ice cream van sits vampiricaly, opposite the school, or the incredibly narrow gap between two wings of the sports centre, that is just the right size for kids to squeeze between to sneak a smoke, or a snog. Memories which gradually fill the most mediocre of piles with magic, memories which we all tot-up, and that cling to apparently inhospitable places and thrive there, generating an ambient, splendidly subjective beauty, a beauty which only stands out in its greatest relief when the objects of architecture sink, or rather rise, into glorious mediocrity.

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NB, this post was initially published in The BiBlog

FANCY

^Building, Matteo Thun, 1983

We can’t help who we are attracted to, we have no control over which person draws our eye in the tube carriage, just as we are not always in control of our thoughts, they wander off without us to whatever takes their fancy, day dreaming precisely at the moments when we should probably be concentrating, working on something. It can be irritating being turned back into a lusty teenager through no desire of your own, or drifting off unprompted into puerile, fanciful worlds of escape in your head, but on the other hand it is those moments when something truly singular sparkles into life.

It is in those moments that our rational minds briefly lose control of our waking instincts, momentarily relinquishing authorship over our thoughts, letting our bodies and our intuition guide us. It is right then, if we pick up a pen or a pencil, and use all the skills at our disposal to take our flight of fancy seriously and frame it, capturing it, that we can extract from the ebb and flow of our daily lives — always so concerned with satisfying the judgments of others — a pure cross section of ourselves, a distilled fragment of subjective creation.

The sketch and the Capriccio, the former capturing the fleeting structure of an idea as it passes by, the latter being the flesh added to its bones, the full flight of fancy, the private and passionate love affair between the artist/architect and his imagination, drawn out and expanded into vignettes of autoerotic intensity, which if pursued with enough zeal begin to stand on their own as inspirational artifacts, intriguing specimens from the intimate obsessions of our fertile minds. It is in the caprice of our fancy — the beautiful face we cannot stop staring at, the ideal place we keep trying to imagine — drawn out and expanded, that we will find the coming together in one space, in one scene, compressed, of the very subjective ground of our anterior architectural instinct.

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NB, this post was initially published in The BiBlog

Roll Over & Differentiate My Data Sets Baby.....................................................Patrick Schumacher & Some Old School AA-Speak

^annotation in personal copy of LOG21 by blog author

“This is not something I am dogmatically imposing, I’m just observing that I, my friends, my students, naturally adhere to these principles without fail. Their hand would fall off rather than draw straight lines. Is anybody here drawing a triangle, a square, or a circle? Ever again? No!”

“you will always work with laws, with rule-based systems of differentiation. These can be applied meaningfully, for instance, in the adaptation of facades to create an intelligent differentiation of elements. You can do this by taking data sets like sun exposure maps and make them drive an intelligent differentiation of brise-soleil elements, which are scripted off the data set. But you can also apply this sort of technique to urbanism. We’re talking about urban fields, about the lawful differentiation of an urban fabric according to relevant data sets.”!

“You can always identify where the rigid forms still persist, where there is still too much simple repetition, where there are still unrelated elements. You can always ask for further softening, further differentiation, and further correlation of everything with everything else. There’s always more to script and correlate to intensify the internal consistency and cross-connections and resonance within a project and to a context. It’s a never-ending trajectory of a project’s progression. The intensification of relations in architecture reflects the intensification of communication among all of us, everyday and with everything.”

Extracts from "Parametricism And the Autopoiesis Of Architecture" by Patrick Schumacher in the winter 2011, 21st edition of Log magazine, published by AnyoneCorporation, & edited by Cynthia Davidson

Frivolous & Serious Play

^drawing of Wonderwall, New Orleans, 1982-1984 (dismantled)

Extract from Charles W Moore's essay "The Yin, The Yang, and The Three Bears"

"Buildings, I have insisted for a long time, can and must speak to us, which requires that we grant them freedom of speech, the chance to say things that are unimportant, even silly, so when they are grave or portentous we can tell the difference. I have taken it as my particular mission to emphasise the light and sunny moments. I’m calling some of my projects Frivolous and Serious Play; I think the two are not inimical, and that both can be joyous."

^Wonderwall, New Orleans, 1982-1984 (dismantled)

Collapsed Time in Collected Space

Scene in the Antique Dealer's collection, taken from Honoré De Balzac's philosophical novel "The Wild Ass's Skin", where he outlines the uncanny and alluring effect of a multitude of collected objects -not yet divested of historical allusion or meaning, nor icily institutionalised- contained in a small, compressed private space, and set upon by an eager imagination.
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Extract From "The Wild Ass's Skin"


At first site the showrooms offered him a chaotic medley of human and divine works. Crocodiles, apes and stuffed boas grinned at stainless glass windows, seemed to be about to snap at carved busts, to be running after lacquer-ware or to be clambering up chandeliers. A Sevres vase on which Madame Jaquetot had painted Napoleon was standing next to a sphinx dedicated to Sesostris. The beginnings of creation and the events of yesterday were paired off with grotesque good humour. A roasting-jack was posed on a monstrance, a Republican sabre on a medieval arquebus. Madame du Barry, painted in pastel by Latour, with a star on her head, nude and enveloped in cloud, seemed to be concupiscently contemplating an Indian chibouk and trying to divine some purpose in the spirals of smoke which were drifting towards her.

Instruments of death, poniards, quaint pistols, weapons with secret springs were hobnobbing with instruments of life: porcelain soup-tureens, Dresden china plate, translucent porcelain cups from china, antique slat-cellars, comfit-dishes from feudal times. An ivory ship was sailing under full canvas on the back of an immovable tortoise. A pneumatic machine was poking out the eye of the Emperor Augustus, who remained majestic and unmoved. Several portraits of French aldermen and Dutch burgomasters, insensible now as during their lifetime, rose above this chaos of antiques and cast a cold and disapproving glance at them.

All the countries on earth seemed to have brought here some remnants of their sciences and a sample of their arts. It was a sort of philosophical midden in which nothing was lacking, neither the Red Indian's calumet nor the green and gold slipper of the seraglio, nor the yatogan of the Moor, nor the brazen image of the Tartar. There was even the soldier's tobacco pouch, the ciborium of the priest and the plumes from a throne. Furthermore, these monstrous tableaux were subjected to a thousand accidents of lighting by the whimsical effects of a multitude of reflected gleams due to the confusion of tints and the abrupt contrasts of light and shade. The ear fancied it heard stifled cries, the mind imagined that it caught the thread of unfinished dramas, and the eye that it perceived half-smothered glimmers. Lastly, persistent dust had cast its thin coating over all these objects, whose multiple angles and numerous sinuosities produced the most picturesque of impressions.

To begin with the, the stranger compared these three showrooms, crammed with the relics of civilizations and religions, deities, royalties, masterpieces of art, the products of debauchery, reason and unreason, to a mirror of many facets, each one representing a whole world. After registering this hazy impression, he tried to make a choice of specimens he enjoyed; but, in the process of gazing, pondering, dreaming, he was overcome by a fever which was perhaps due to the hunger which was gnawing at his vitals. His senses ended by being numbed at the sight of so many national and individual existences, their authenticity guaranteed by the human pledges which had survived them.

The longing that had caused him to visit the shop was satisfied: he left real life behind him, ascended by degrees to an ideal world, and reached the enchanted palaces of ecstasy where the universe appeared to him in transitory gleams and tongues of fire; just as, long ago, the future of mankind had filed past in flaming visions before the gaze of Saint John of Patmos.

A multitude of sorrowing faces, gracious or terrifying, dimly or clearly described, remote or near at hand, rose up before him in masses, in myriads, in generations. Egypt in its mysterious rigidity emerged from the sands, represented by a mummy swathed in black bandages; then came the Pharaohs burying entire peoples in order to build a tomb for themselves; then Moses and the Hebrews and the wilderness: the whole of the ancient world, in all its solemnity, drifted before his eyes. But here, cool and graceful, a marble statue posed on a wreathed column, radiantly white, spoke to him of the voluptuous myths of Greece and Ionia. Oh, who would not have smiled, as he did, to see upon a red background, in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase, the brown girl dancing before the god Priapus and joyously saluting him? Facing her was a Latin queen lovingly fondling her chimaera! The capricious pleasures of imperial Rome were there in every aspect: the bath, the couch, the dressing-table ritual of some indolent, pensive Julia awaiting her Tibullus. Armed with the power of Arabian talismans, the head of Cicero evoked memories of republican Rome and unwound for him the scroll of Livy's histories. The young man gazed on the Senatus pupulusque romanus: the consul, the lectors, the purple-edged togas, the fights in the Forum, the plebs aroused to wrath. All this filed past him like the insubstantial figures of a dream.

Then Christian Rome became the dominant theme in these presentations. One painting showed the heavens opened and in it he saw the Virgin Mary bathed in a cloud of gold in the midst of angels, eclipsing the sun in glory, lending an ear to the lamentations of the sufferer on whom this regenerate Eve smiled gently. As he fingered a mosaic made of different lavas from Vesuvius and Etna, in imagination he emerged into sun-drenched Italy: he was an onlooker at the Borgias' feasts, he rode through the Abruzzi, sighed after Italian mistresses, worshipping their pale cheeks and dark, elongated eyes.

Espying a medieval dagger with a hilt as cunningly wrought as a piece of lace, with rust patches on it like bloodstains, he thought with a shudder of mighty trysts interrupted by the cold blade of a husband's sword. India and its religions lived again in an idol dressed in gold and silk with conical cap and lozenge-shaped ear-flaps folded upwards and adorned with bells. Near this grotesque figure a rush mat, as pretty as the Indian dancer who had once rolled herself in it, still exhaled the perfume of sandalwood. The mind was startled into perceptiveness by a monster from China with a twisted gaze, contorted mouth and writhing limbs: the creation of an inventive people weary of unvarying beauty and drawing ineffable pleasure from the luxuriant diversity of ugliness.

A salt-cellar from Benvenuto Cellini's workshop brought him back to the bosom of the Renaissance at a period when art and licence flourished together, when sovereign princes found diversion in torture and prelates at Church Councils rested from their labours in the arms of courtesans after decreeing chastity for mere priests. He saw the conquests of Alexander carved on a cameo, the massacres of Pizarro etched on a match-lock arquebus, the wars of religion -frenzied, seething, pitiless- engraved on the base of a helmet. Then the charming pageantry of chivalry sprang up from a Milanese suit of armour, brightly furnished, superbly damascened, beneath whose visor the eyes of a paladin still gleamed.

For him this ocean of furnishings, inventions, fashions, works of art and relics made up an endless poem. Forms, colours, concepts of thought came to life again; but nothing complete presented itself to his mind. The poet in him had to finish these sketches by the great painter who had composed the vast palette on to which the innumerable accidents of human life had been thrown in such disdainful profusion.

GLUTTONY

^Mr Creosote, Monty Python's "The Meaning Of Life"

“How are your steaks, tonight?”

“Our steaks, sir, are if I may say so quite simply superb. Only the choicest cuts of beef, carefully selected and even more carefully aged, cooked to perfection as perfection is defined by your instructions, served with your choice of potato and vegetable and richly delicious dessert.”

“Sounds scrumptious.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll have nine.”

“Pardon me?”

“Bring me nine steaks, please.”

“you want nine steak dinners?”

“Please”

“And who, sir, may I ask is going to eat them?”

“You see anybody else sitting here? I’m going to eat them.”

“And how on earth are you going to do that, sir?”

“Well, gee, let’s see, I think I’ll use my right hand to cut, tonight. I’ll put pieces into my mouth, I’ll masticate, acidic elements in my saliva will begin breaking down the muscle fibre. I’ll swallow. Et Cetera. Bring ‘em on!”

“Sir, nine steaks would make anyone sick.”

“Look at me. Look at this stomach. Do you think I’ll get sick? No way. Come here –no, really come around and look at this stomach. Let me lift up my shirt… here. See how much I can grab with my hand? I can’t even sit close to the table. Have you ever seen anything so hugely disgusting in your whole life?”

I’ve seen bigger stomachs.”

“You’re just being polite, you just want a tip. You’ll get your tip, after you’ve brought me nine steak dinners, with perfection being defined as medium-rare, which is to say pink yet firm. And don’t forget the rolls.”

“Sir, this is simply beyond my range of experience. I’ve never served any one individual nine simultaneous orders on my own authority. I could get in horrible trouble. What if, for example, you have an embolism, God forbid? You could rupture organs.”

“Didn’t I say look at me? Cant you tell what I am? Listen to me very carefully. I am an obese, grotesque, prodigal, greedy, gourmandizing, gluttonous pig. Is this not clear? I am more hog than human. There is room, physical room, for you in my stomach. Do you hear? You see before you a swine. An eating fiend of unlimited capacity. Bring me meat.”

“Have you not eaten in a very long time? Is that it?”

“Look, you’re beginning to bother me. I could bludgeon you with my belly. I am also, allow me to tell you, more than a little well-to-do. Do you see that building over there, the one with the lit windows, in the shadow? I own that Building. I could buy this restauarant and have you terminated. I could and perhaps will buy this entire block, including that symbolically tiny Weight watchers establishment across the street. See it? With the door and the windows so positioned as to form a grinning, leering, hollow-cheeked face? It is within my financial power to buy that place, and to fill it with steaks, fill it with red steak, all of which I would and will eat. The door would under this scenario be jammed with a gnawed bone; not a single little smug psalm-singing baggy-skinned apostate from the cause of adiposity would be able to enter. They would pound on the door, pound. But the bone would hold. They’d lack the bulk to burst through. Their mouths and eyes would be wide as they pressed against the glass. I would demolish, physically crush the huge scale at the end of the brightly lit nave at the back of the place under a weight of food. The springs would jut out. Jut. What a delicious series of thoughts. May I see a wine list?”

“Weight Watchers?”

“Garcon, what you have before you is a dangerous thing, I warn you. Human beings act in their own interest. Huge, crazed swine do not. My wife informed me a certain time-interval ago that if I did not lose weight, she would leave me. I have not lost weight, as a matter of fact, I have gained weight, and thus she is leaving. Q.E.D. And A-1, don’t forget the A-1.”

“But sir, surely with more time…”

“There is no more time. Time does not exist. I ate it. It’s in here, see? See the jiggle? That’s time, jiggling. Run, run away, fetch me my platter of fat, my nine cattle, or I’ll envelop you in a chin and fling you at the wall!”

“Shall I fetch the maître d’, sir? To confer?”

“By all means fetch him. But warn him against getting too close. He will be encompassed instantly, before he has time to squeak. Tonight I will eat. Hugely, and alone. For I am now hugely alone. I will eat, and juice might very well spurt into the air around me, and if anyone comes too near, I will snarl and jab at them with my fork –like this, see?”

“Sir, really!”

“Run away for your very life. Fetch something to placate me. Im going to grow and grow, and fill the absence that surrounds me with the horror of my own gelatinous presence. Yin and Yang. Ever growing, waiter, Run!”

“Right away, sir!”

“Some breadsticks might have been nice, too, do you hear? What kind of place is this, anyway?”

………………………………………………………………………..

Extract from “The Broom Of The System”, David Foster Wallace, Abacus (7 Aug 1997)