things move around

Yesterday I came home to a dragonfly, which had entered via the balcony and become disoriented. It had based itself in a windowless corner - or rather openingless, since the whole apartment is window - and periodically sallied out, zanting about the room in a panic, my daughter saying “he sure can fly” and “he sure can escape!” It was the size of a small hummingbird, bright yellow- and green-banded, with the familiar iridescence of the wings. I had never seen a dragonfly so close before; it had a corporality, a bodily strength which in an insect was exciting. Eventually I tried to waft it in the right direction with newspaper and fly-swat, but it was steady and unmoved; then I became over-enthusiastic and dealt it a glancing blow, which took the zip out of the poor creature so that it crawled meekly onto the swat and I shook it free out of the window to an uncertain fate, while I felt glum and oafish.

Later I learned from Wikipedia that “Japanese children catch large dragonflies as a game, using a hair with a small pebble tied to each end, which they throw into the air. The dragonfly mistakes the pebbles for prey, gets tangled in the hair, and is dragged to the ground by the weight.” Fine in theory, I suppose.

Tomorrow is Pride Parade - I’m going to take E out (it’s L’s naptime) and applaud dancers, eat gyoza, ogle buff homos, jeer politicians, and hurl excreta at phony corporates.

Today I read Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr Fox” to E, which she loved. Back to crappy Stuart Little tomorrow: “he’s a mouse” (who likes to use lots of stupid figures of speech and dull episodic plodding)…

I woke up today with a dead arm, a dead neck and a dead ear. I was practically a corpse!

Summer is here, and there is nothing I like better than to spend my free time people-watching. I sit quietly, all alone, sipping a soft drink, and remark silently on the great variety of interesting people I see. Here, for example, is what I saw today, between twelve and one o’ clock, in the small pedestrianised area at the northern end of Hornby Street:

Office worker, seated, eating sushi from plastic tray. Office worker, seated, eating salad from plastic tray. Office worker, walking. Office worker, walking, eating ham sandwich. Office worker, seated, reading newspaper. Office worker, seated, talking on cellphone. Office worker, walking, with a blue shirt on. Office worker, walking, with a pink shirt on. Office walker, seated, eating fruit. Office worker, seated, idle. Office worker, seated, eating salad from plastic tray. Office worker, walking, with a ferret on a leash. Office worker, crouching, eating an egg and spam bap. Office worker, seated, talking to another office worker, also seated, eating a tofurkey baguette. Office worker, walking, weeping, wailing, lamenting, wracked with anguish, torn by grief. Office worker, seated, eating plastic tray.

Isn’t people-watching great.

While Lucretius was right about some things:

• Atoms are in constant motion (2.62)
• There are other worlds than Earth (2.1048)
• Centaurs never existed (5.878)
• Thunder comes after lightning because sound is slower than light (6.164)

…and wrong about others:

• Atoms move faster than light (2.142)
• Images are caused by films thrown off from the surface of things (4.26)
• Erotic movements are undesirable for women (4.1263)
• The moon and sun as perceived by us are actual size (5.564)

…he was spot on about one thing in particular:

• tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (1.101)

Actually I still think centaurs might have existed.

It won’t be the Olympics without the Bulagrian weightlifting team. Every four years I scour the schedules specifically to see them in action - especially the women - so this news makes me very sad. As is the Bulgarian Weightlifting Federation:

“The work has become meaningless and the tears that were to be shed in front of the national flag are replaced by tears of helplessness.”

I spent Saturday out of doors, labouring - not in the giving birth sense of the word, but in the horny-handed son of toil, labor omnia vincit sense. Although my labour wasn’t especially hard, it was sufficient to inflict an assortment of aches on my thumbs, shoulders and my left flank, close to where my kidney supposedly is. I’m not into DIY, but I don’t mind getting stuck in with honking great prybars, hefting timber, creosoting, things of that nature. I agree with whoever it was that said every creative act is first an act of destruction, although that sounds a little bit marxist. Ah, it was Picasso. I’d like to see him wielding a six-foot prybar, fuelled by sausages and cider.

I’ve chosen my top 10 quotations of Leif Segerstam:

• Was this a conspiration to read my beat?
• Just play in your box until you come to the climax… so that we hear the clappering.
• The winds can rehearse the length of the teedle-eedle-boom.
• Something is satelliting out of the control of the beated music.
• How about talking about the spot where someone composes the registration number of his car.
• Tonnmeister, are you heavy enough in the Glockenbox?
• The non-metric pulsator on the podium.
• Use parabolic crescendi… they are more animalic.
• We get a plankton plasmatic flimmer.
• We still have a pleep.

What are your favourites?

Dialogue can be delightful if dramatically or comically stylized or artistically blended with descriptive prose; in other words, if it is a feature of style and structure in a given work. If not, then it is nothing but automatic typewriting, formless speeches filling page after page, over which the eye skims like a flying saucer over the Dust Bowl.

- Nabokov, answering the question Why do you so dislike dialogue in fiction?

I don’t understand why so many authors fill their books with screeds of unartistic direlogue. I’m surrounded by dialogue all the time; when I read a book I hope to hear people talk differently, if they talk at all.