« Les valeurs oniriques l’ont définitivement emporté sur les autres et je demande à ce qu’on tienne pour un crétin celui qui se refuserait encore, par exemple, à voir un cheval galoper sur une tomate. » André Breton (1896-1966)
• “Oneiric values have definitely won out over the others, and I maintain that anyone who still refuses to see, for instance, a horse galloping on a tomato, must be an idiot.” — André Breton, viâ Soluble Fish by Incunabula Media
Category Archives: Literature
Renoir et la Reine Noire
« Le noir, une non-couleur ? Où avez-vous encore pris cela ? Le noir, mais c’est la reine des couleurs ! » — Renoir (1841-1919)
• “Black, a non-color? Where did you get that idea? Black, why, it’s the queen of colors!”
Gorge the Gaze on God’s Gift
“The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.” — John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. 2 (1853)
Bored Bard
Pol. How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter: yet he knew me not at first; he said I was a Fishmonger: he is farre gone, farre gone: and truly in my youth, I suffred much extreamity for loue: very neere this. Ile speake to him againe. What do you read my Lord?
Ham. Words, words, words. — Hamlet (c. 1600), Act 2, Scene 2
Hamble On
HAMBLEDON (n.)
The sound of a single-engined aircraft flying by, heard whilst lying in a summer field in England, which somehow concentrates the silence and sense of space and timelessness and leaves one with a profound feeling of something or other. — The Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983)
Elsewhere Other-Accessible
• The Meaning of Liff — full text
• The Meaning of Liff — at Wikipedia
Alt-Writer
“I’ve found a place halfway up the churchyard, near enough to the church to be aware of, in a spiritual sense, matins on Sunday morning, but also to be within reach of, in a temporal way, orgies on Saturday nights in The Woolpack. And alternating between the temporal and the spiritual is the way I wish to spend what eternity is left to me.” — Laurie Lee, Down in the Valley: A Writer’s Landscape (2019)
Glowing Troppo
pombero, M. Á guar. En la tradición popular, duende imaginario de quien se dice que protege a los pájaros y a los cocuyos y rapta a niños que persiguen.
cocuyo, M. Insecto coleóptero de la América tropical, de unos tres centimétros de longitud, oblongo, pardo y con dos manchas amarillentas a los lados de tórax, por las cuales despide de noche una luz azulada bastante viva. — Diccionario esencial de la lengua española (2006)
Ghost Coast
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
• “A Forsaken Garden” (1876), Swinburne
Bristol Ditties
“Having no testosterone altered me physically and mentally. I grew breasts, became more empathetic and enjoyed the music of Nick Drake.” — Jeremy Clarke, The Daily Mail, 25ii20
Elsewhere Other-Accessible…
• Ink Tune — review of Nick Drake: Dreaming England (2013) by Nathan Wiseman-Trowse
Triumph of the ’Ville
Is it wrong that I find it amusing to be mistaken for a Guardian-reader or Guns’n’Roses fan? Yes. Very wrong. It’s also wrong that I’d be amused to learn that someone thought I was serious about the title Gweel & Other Alterities. Serious about the Alterities bit, I mean. “Alterity” is a word used by, well, I’d better not describe them. But one example is China Miéville. ’Nuff said. And here he uses the word with exactly the phrase I’d’ve hoped he’d use it with:
“I’m not interested in fantasy or SF as utopian blueprints, that’s a disastrous idea. There’s some kind of link in terms of alterity.” — “A life in writing: China Miéville”, The Guardian, 14v11
Elsewhere Other-Accessible
• Ex-term-in-ate! — extremophilically engaging the teratic toxicity of “in terms of”…
• ’Ville to Power — Mythopoetic Miéville incisively interrogates issues around Trotsko-toxicity…
