catalog

Well-known member
First time I met him I gave him acids and took him through Tate Britain but he didn't seem terribly interested in pictures. Not really his thing I don't think.

All the art he uses is very classic stuff, feels like he's using it to break the page and the text up more than anything else. That's a good use still, helps the eye rest a little. But I don't think the pics add much otherwise.

All that dot circle line stuff, he's writing it as a thought experiment really, an imagination thing, he's not ever thinking of actually physically doing it, even though he's also sort of advocating that, in a sense, by what he's saying about the thing being the thing, not a representation.
 

luka

Well-known member
I feel guilty cos while insisting everyone else read it I have yet to read the whole thing through myself
 

luka

Well-known member
What's he like, then? Shy and shifty? Charismatic and gregarious?

Neither really. He's a filthy hippy but he gets away with it by being intelligent and well read. And he's not remotely precious. He's happy to drink 20 pints.

He speaks in a very slow, perma-stoned drawl. And he's one of those people who have had so many adventures and done so many things that they make you want to commit suicide. You think, I've done nothing, risked nothing, achieved nothing. I should throw myself off a bridge at once.
 

luka

Well-known member
He's older than we are. He belongs to a slightly different time. One we saw on the news but were too young to participate in. He was involved in a lot of the early anti globalisation protests for instance. He was part of that backpacker-activist circuit, switching between long trips through India, Mexico, Thailand etc and riots against the man. Dance parties on beaches. Mushroom trips in Mayan ruins.

But still managing to read and absorb far more than we have, those who have never left our bedrooms. So it's quite galling and suicide seems like the logical response.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Fallen into a bit of a grapejuice hole this morning and been reading from the beginning. Much simpler writing in the early blogs. Lots of very interesting bits, but this paragraph from one about the 2012 Olympics has caught my eye, given the odd synchronicity in timing with current events:

"There could also be a relation between Dante's trip through the underworld and the voyage of Sirius through the Duat. Dante's journey is set to exactly match the three days that Christ visited and conquered Hell. It also takes place from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. According to the Bible, Christ compared the time he would soon spend in the underworld with the three days that Jonah spent in the belly of the whale. Each of these involves an underworld ordeal lasting three days."
 

catalog

Well-known member
Might as well continue posting, cos the ideas are coming. In the same blog, basically the next paragraph, he shows this image of Dante's conceptualisation of hell, purgatory, earth, ascent to heaven:

unnamed (1).jpg

What has interested me is how between the moon and the sun, youve got mercury and Venus. I've been thinking about this in relation the 'moon' thread we had going. I always associate moon and sun together, they seem the obvious binaries. But this picture shows mercury and Venus in between. Is mercury wisdom and Venus beauty? I think so. But anyway, obviously this picture is a 14th century conceptualisation so it does not necessarily make any logical sense now, but it's just made me think: between the moon and sun is wisdom and beauty. Between the night and day is this element of passage, of learning. Just a thought that I've not though before. There are things between the binaries. Stages that I've previously not thought about.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
"Falling into a bit of a grapejuice hole" sounds like getting accidentally drunk on wine in the middle of the week.
 

luka

Well-known member
I love stuff like this. The mosques in Istanbul totally blew me away. Also the Celtic/Saxon interlace tradition - those pages in the Book of Kells that are just totally filled in with intricate patterns.

The Celtic-Muslim continuum was something I got very intrigued by a while back. The nudge was Finnegans Wake which draws on the book of Kells but also the Koran and seemed to me to be demaracting a kind of other cultural bloc that included both. So I made some trips to the British museum to look at that period of time when Europe had emerged from the dark ages and was beginning to build cathedrals and Islam was also doing its thing, looking at the decorative motifs and so on, not in any kind of scholarly way need, needless to say.

Musically too there are similarities which don't respect the religious divide.
 
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luka

Well-known member
Fallen into a bit of a grapejuice hole this morning and been reading from the beginning. Much simpler writing in the early blogs. Lots of very interesting bits, but this paragraph from one about the 2012 Olympics has caught my eye, given the odd synchronicity in timing with current events:

"There could also be a relation between Dante's trip through the underworld and the voyage of Sirius through the Duat. Dante's journey is set to exactly match the three days that Christ visited and conquered Hell. It also takes place from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. According to the Bible, Christ compared the time he would soon spend in the underworld with the three days that Jonah spent in the belly of the whale. Each of these involves an underworld ordeal lasting three days."

Funny you should say that cos he told me this post attracted a huge spike in interest as the corona thing really started to kick in.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Another little synchronicity: same blog later on and there's a mention of Tiresias, who I was talking about the other day in the 'what you reading' thread:

"In Homer's Odyssey, the Greek hero of the Trojan War, Odysseus, finds it necessary to visit Hades to speak to Tiresias in order to attain knowledge about his return home to Ithaca"
 

luka

Well-known member
If you had stuck with the wasteland you would have found that Tiresias is the central figure in the poem
 

catalog

Well-known member
What actually is the legacy of the 2012 Olympic games? Has this been discussed? I remember the time quite well, and it was quite a good year for me personally, I have some fond memories. And the next 5 years was a sort of new adventure.

My only thoughts at this moment are to Iain sinclair who was of course very critical and identified them with the gentrification of East London and pushing out of previous cultures. This is obviously key and important, probably very true, but at the time I found it to be quite a mundane and not very interesting idea. I thought it was his most boring idea to date.

But I still don't really know what those games heralded.
 

catalog

Well-known member
If you had stuck with the wasteland you would have found that Tiresias is the central figure in the poem

Well this might actually persuade me to go back and read it at some point. I did listen to it but in some ways I have already made up my mind about it. But thanks for the reminder.
 

luka

Well-known member
Me and Barty both see it as a kind of high point and last hurrah for the multicultural ideal.

Since then we have seen only backsliding, with Brexit being the nadir and anti-Olympics.
 
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