The Black Isle

Finish a book = adopt a kitty = NICO!

Almost there, almost there.
509 pages.

Writing, writing, writing!

One of my favorite passages in Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, and just about the best description of a ghost that’s not a literal ghost.

Penguin paperback edition, pp. 194-195:

Grenouille garnered his first individual odour in this Hôpital de la Charité. He managed to pilfer sheets that were supposed to be burned because the journeyman sackmaker who had lain wrapped in them for two months had just died of consumption. The cloth was so drenched in the exudations of the sackmaker that it had absorbed them like an enfleurage paste and could be directly subjected to lavage. The result was eerie: right under Grenouille’s nose, the sackmaker rose olfactorily from the dead, ascending from the alcohol solution, hovering there — the phantom slightly distorted by the peculiar methods of reproduction and the countless miasmas of his disease — but perfectly recognizable in space as an olfactory personage. A small man of about thirty, blond, with a bulbous nose, short limbs, flat, cheesy feet, swollen genitalia, choleric temperament and a stale mouth odour — not a handsome man, aromatically speaking, this sackmaker, not worth being held on to for any length of time, like the puppy. And yet for one whole night Grenouille let the scent-spectre flutter about his cabin while he sniffed at him again and again, happy and deeply satisfied with the sense of power that he had won over the aura of another human being. He poured it away the next day.

SILVER LAKE

It’s not like it’s Altadena where the drunken spinsters get married
then bitch and knit
and knit and bitch.
These people here have dogs and cats.
They’re happy and gay.

I know it best as the site of my husband’s egregious farting
on a patio overlooking the purdy reservoir.
The cat, one Constance Meriwether III,
(or somethin’)
smelled it. It’s dead now.
The cat, not the fart, I mean.
The fumes hang on, like the box-homes
clutching to the hillsides like Bauhaus dingleberries.

In Silverlake
Where the lake is fake.

(July 10, 2009)

John’s article on our dinner with Agnes Varda last week. From Vogue.com.

Postcard from Cannes, Part 2: every word/phrase of the following comes from the Tuesday, May 19, 2009 issue of Variety (Cannes Daily edition), I KID YOU NOT:

II.

CHAOS REIGNS

In shimmering monochrome
with hardcore insert shots of pubescent bodily fluids
The Danish bad boy,
who’s kind of bored with rural, middle-aged gaydom,
demonstrates his own breach birth using
kitchen tongs,
a moist watermelon and
- ripped from the headlines -
an egg.

This is a heavy meal to digest outside of fest arena
with potential offshore as a niche item
that could reach fractionally beyond
the pain-is-pleasure demographic.

Yet Middle East auds, like its protags, are
subject to things like nitrate burning,
and vinegar syndrome.
They cut
a big fat art-film fart
at this arrogant endurance test, especially the oh-so-real dialogue.
Distribution outside of gay-fest ghetto is both unlikely and undeserved.

An unexpectedly jazzy fox, rising out of the ferns,
refuses to endorse this death sentence:
“Many incidental pleasures!”
The Tzar’s Dogs reply: “Too late!”