Well, I sat down to write something about books, but then I noticed a line break problem on my last post and spent 20 minutes trying to fix it. Notice the word “trying”. I refuse to sacrifice any more of my life to the evil computer gods.

So now I have no idea what I sat down to write about. Instead, I will give you this weather station webcam shot of the delightful puffy clouds we are experiencing today in Paris.

From which one cannot escape by struggling; not to be escaped from.

“All glories of all storms of the air that fell, Prone, ineluctable.” - 1880 Swinburne, Thalassius 222 [OED]

Some words are just unbearably wonderful.

Ineluctable. Say it out loud. If you don’t know how, listen to it here (with an American accent).

I remember one whole week I was in love with the word “scissors”.

At the moment, I’m reading an article in the Times Literary Supplement about Beckett and Mallarmé and their investigations of words in another language. It’s quite interesting and I love Mallarmé’s surreal English lessons and books. (Such a fine line between inspiration and too far out in left field!) I can appreciate what they’re doing, but part of me also thinks it can get a little too self-indulgent at times. Here’s a quotation of a quotation that appears in the TLS article:

In 1930, in one of her most free-associating essays, “On Being ill”, Virginia Woolf meditated on the relation between sounding and meaning:

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other – a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause – which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain . . . . In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty . . . words give out their scent and distil their flavour . . . . Foreigners, to whom the tongue is strange, have us at a disadvantage.

We all know the cliché of the alcoholic writer. Lots of painters drank like fish, but for some reason people like to think of drunken writers. It’s romantic somehow. Like tuberculosis. How anyone thinks vomiting and/or coughing up bits of your lung is “romantic” truly escapes me.

But I am a sucker for anecdotes and this little article has a few good ones.

In the early 1980s, Norman Mailer was asked by director Sergio Leone to write a screenplay. Mailer showed his enthusiasm by locking himself in a hotel room for three weeks with a case of whiskey. Leone, says a biographer, recalled hearing Mailer in his room “singing, cursing and shouting for ice cubes.” He did not use the script.

Unfortunately, I can’t get my hands on a copy of this book. (?!?) For now, I’ll just have to make do with this article that I found in the LA Times. If the article is any indication, it promises to be a very interesting read.

In April of 1819, right around the time that he began to suffer the first symptoms of tuberculosis — the disease that had already killed his mother and his beloved brother, Tom — the poet John Keats sat down and wrote, in a letter to his brother, George, the following question: “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?”

…We need sorrow, constant and robust, to make us human, alive, sensitive to the sweet rhythms of growth and decay, death and life.

There was a magnificent exhibit in Paris a couple of years ago on the theme of melancholy with around 250 works (mostly paintings). Here’s a very good article about it with some excellent historical background.