Carolina Caliaba's Bookmarks

Although some people wore the masks because they had colds or were afraid of catching them (and contagion from bird flu was a real fear), the majority of wearers are actually allergic to the cedar pollen that has become so annoyingly common since the end of World War II. Massive deforestation during and after the war was compensated for by thousands of cedar plantings, which unbeknownst to the agrarians at the time, gave off potent pollen on a par with ragweed in the United States. Apparently, the surgical masks, which cover nose and mouth, considerably reduce the intake of the allergens. What’s more, since blowing one’s nose in public is considered bad form (I learned from experience), any reduction of sneezing is as much a question of manners as hygiene. (Interesting though, tissue packages with advertising, for everything from girly shows to currency exchange, is one of the most common advertising give-a-ways on the street.)

On the back of each package were detailed diagrams on how to use the masks, and also how germs — usually presented as little balls of florescent color — were blocked from entering the breathing passages.

covering one’s face with a mask has gloomy and sinister connotations (what’s more, Homeland Security would probably ban it).

Yeats had written in 1900 that: ‘It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings besides the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, than any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of Nature. The poet of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstances of life’ (‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, E&I 87).

La iglesia, de hecho, nunca rechazó el invento -y eso se comprueba claramente en la implantación de las primeras imprentas y editoriales en las Universidades dominadas por la jerarquía eclesiástica-,

Las culturas del libro son aquellas, como la cristiana, la judía o la musulmana, que creen que de la lectura de un solo texto pueden desprenderse todas las enseñanzas necesarias para conducirse en la vida, y si el texto en sí mismo no resulta suficiente, se inventan profusas combinaciones cabalísticas o aritméticas esotéricas para encontrar un mensaje transcendente pretendidamente oculto.

el poder democratizador de la imprenta, porque la democracia se basa en la capacidad de los ciudadanos para plantearse preguntas y responderlas al margen de los dogmas y las imposiciones de los poderosos.

A small crowd meanwhile had gathered at the gates of Buckingham
Palace. Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them, they
waited; looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at
Victoria, billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of running
water, her geraniums; singled out from the motor cars in the Mall
first this one, then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon commoners
out for a drive; recalled their tribute to keep it unspent while
this car passed and that; and all the time let rumour accumulate in
their veins and thrill the nerves in their thighs at the thought of
Royalty looking at them; the Queen bowing; the Prince saluting; at
the thought of the heavenly life divinely bestowed upon Kings; of
the equerries and deep curtsies; of the Queen's old doll's house;
of Princess Mary married to an Englishman, and the Prince--ah! the
Prince! who took wonderfully, they said, after old King Edward, but
was ever so much slimmer. The Prince lived at St. James's; but he
might come along in the morning to visit his mother.

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, 

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not 

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither 

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,  40

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, 

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, 

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, 

Which I am forbidden to see.

Unreal City,  60

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, 

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, 

I had not thought death had undone so many.

'That corpse you planted last year in your garden, 

'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? 

'Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? 

'Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, 

'Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!  75

'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'

In vials of ivory and coloured glass 

Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,

'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street 

'With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? 

'What shall we ever do?'

And if it rains, a closed car at four. 

And we shall play a game of chess, 

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.

It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. 

(She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.)

Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

THE river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf 

Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind 

Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. 175

Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. 

The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, 

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends 

Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. 

And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; 180

Departed, have left no addresses. 

By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept... 

Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, 

Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. 

But at my back in a cold blast I hear 185

The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

On a winter evening round behind the gashouse 190

Musing upon the king my brother's wreck 

And on the king my father's death before him.

One of the low on whom assurance sits 

As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

Endeavours to engage her in caresses 

Which still are unreproved, if undesired.

(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all 

Enacted on this same divan or bed; 

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall 245

And walked among the lowest of the dead.) 

Bestows on final patronising kiss, 

And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit...

O City city, I can sometimes hear 

Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, 260

The pleasant whining of a mandoline 

And a clatter and a chatter from within 

Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls 

Of Magnus Martyr hold 

Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold. 265

 

A current under sea 315

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell 

He passed the stages of his age and youth 

Entering the whirlpool. 

                          Gentile or Jew 

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, 320

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

He who was living is now dead 

We who were living are now dying

  If there were the sound of water only 

  Not the cicada 

  And dry grass singing 

  But sound of water over a rock

Who is the third who walks always beside you? 

When I count, there are only you and I together 360

But when I look ahead up the white road 

There is always another one walking beside you 

Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded 

I do not know whether a man or a woman 

—But who is that on the other side of you?

The jungle crouched, humped in silence.

We think of the key, each in his prison 

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded 420

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient 

To controlling hands

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

And, from far above the story itself, we hear Virginia Woolf meditating, reflecting on the crowd’s need to be associated with Greatness. The car is just a car—and even the Queen, if she be inside, is only a woman.

Yet this potent mystery takes the crowd away from its sense of being ordinary. The car endows each person with an Extraordinary Moment. Everyone feels individually distinguished because they have encountered the possibility of being in the same street with royalty, with England. We observe the blind awe of the crowd and listen to Virginia Woolf comment that only historians will know for sure who is in the mysterious car. Her attitude is like the attitude of Clarissa when, earlier, she was crossing London streets. Both women smile at the comic folly of us mortals.

The instant patriotism for Royal England that held the public spellbound only minutes before is gone—but the awe of the unknown remains. No one knew who was in the black car before; now no one knows what the skywriting says, yet both forces have a similar compelling power over the public. The skywriting letters form words but the message is blurred and indecipherable. What the public is watching is only an advertising gimmick, but they don’t seem to recognize it as such. They are enchanted by this riddle of a commercial message in the heavens. Their attempts to read the sky-writing are wryly described, as though there were an oracular significance to the enigmatic letters.

The rhythm beckons mightily to Septimus; the metaphorical rhythm of the great Unconscious, of the sea, is like a siren’s song to Septimus’ unconscious, and the remnant of his rationality fights to preserve itself. He pleads with himself that he will not go mad. Septimus is struggling to be the master of his own destiny, just as Clarissa is still struggling (in a parallel, though much less intense way) to be master of her destiny.

but the difficulty of enunciating a monosyllable in reply to Mr. or Mrs. Stelling was so great, that he even dreaded to be asked at table whether he would have more pudding.

he was clearly a boy whose powers would never be developed through the medium of the Latin grammar, without the application of some sternness. Not that Mr. Stelling was a harsh-tempered or unkind man; quite the contrary. He was jocose with Tom at table, and corrected his provincialisms and his deportment in the most playful manner; but poor Tom was only the more cowed and confused by this double novelty, for he had never been used to jokes at all like Mr. Stelling's; and for the first time in his life he had a painful sense that he was all wrong somehow. When Mr. Stelling said, as the roast-beef was being uncovered, "Now, Tulliver! which would you rather decline, roast-beef or the Latin for it?" Tom, to whom in his coolest moments a pun would have been a hard nut, was thrown into a state of embarrassed alarm that made everything dim to him except the feeling that he would rather not have anything to do with Latin; of course he answered, "Roast-beef," whereupon there followed much laughter and some practical joking with the plates, from which Tom gathered that he had in some mysterious way refused beef, and, in fact, made himself appear "a silly." If he could have seen a fellow-pupil undergo these painful operations and survive them in good spirits, he might sooner have taken them as a matter of course. But there are two expensive forms of education, either of which a parent may procure for his son by sending him as solitary pupil to a clergyman: one is the enjoyment of the reverend gentleman's undivided neglect; the other is the endurance of the reverend gentleman's undivided attention. It was the latter privilege for which Mr. Tulliver paid a high price in Tom's initiatory months at King's Lorton.

Changing patterns of patriarchal authority fell within a wider scenario of expanding rights and diminishing subservience for many people, including employees and young people. In some ways resistance to change in gender relations thus represented a symbolically concentrated reaction against general democratisation. Early Victorian gender prescriptions featured men as industrious breadwinners and women as their loyal helpmeets. Reinforced by social philosophers like Auguste Comte, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and John Ruskin, this developed into a mid-century doctrine of 'separate spheres', whereby men were figured as competitors in the amoral, economic realm while women were positioned as either decorative trophies or spiritual guardians of men's immortal souls. From the 1860s, to this social construct the Darwinian theory of 'survival of the fittest' added a pseudo-scientific dimension which placed men higher on the evolutionary ladder.

'The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation, and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest... But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle - and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision... She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise -wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she many never fail from his side.' (John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 1865, part II)

From infancy onwards, gender inequity permeated all aspects of British life. 'Think what it is to be a boy, to grow up to manhood in the belief that without any merit or exertion of his own ... by the mere fact of being born a male he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race,' wrote John Stuart Mill in his 1867 polemic against 'The Subjection of Women'

Whereas in 1800 the majority of Britons had a predominantly practical education, acquired at home and at work, by 1901 formal learning at primary level was universal, with higher instruction available to the better-off. It is worth noting that girls were beginning to move on to university study by the 1860s.

the classicist Jane Harrison (1850-1928), who trenchantly observed how scholarship was dominated by 'that most dire and deadly of all tyrannies, an oligarchy of old men'

Nationally (which in this period included the whole of Ireland as well as Scotland, England and Wales), male employment shifted from agriculture to heavy industry, manufacturing and transport, with an accompanying increase in clerical and professional occupations. Men also left domestic service, which remained the largest category of female employment throughout the period (employing 10 percent of the female population in 1851, for example, and over 11 percent in 1891). Women also worked in textile mills, potteries, agriculture and garment-making, as well as in seasonal or unrecorded employment, especially laundering.

Compared to the 20th century, there was indeed some contraction in the work open to women, as protective legislation barred their employment underground or overnight.

Generally, male workers strove to secure wages that enabled wives to be full-time mothers - an aspiration in tune with bourgeois notions of orderly domestic bliss. The organised labour movement was overwhelmingly male, with a few trade union activists such as bookbinder Emma Paterson (1848-86)

It is calculated that while most men worked, only one-third of all women were in employment at any time in the 19th century (as against two-thirds in 1978, for comparison.)

From the mid-century, educated women began to prise open certain professional and clerical occupations, partly in response to the powerful Victorian 'gospel of work' that castigated idleness, partly to provide for the perceived 'surplus' of single women, and partly for the sake of self-fulfilment. As a result of these struggles, by 1901 here were 212 female physicians, 140 dentists, 6 architects and 3 vets. Over a quarter of professional painters (total 14,000) and over a half of musicians (total 43,230) and actors (12,500) were female.

Women ran the house, undertaking domestic work and child care themselves, as well as supervising the servants employed to cook, clean, carry coal and run errands. Moreover, almost from time immemorial, with a 'work-basket' to denote her tasks, each girl and woman was a needleworker, responsible for making and mending clothes and household linen. One major change in the period was the invention in the 1850s of the domestic sewing machine, which greatly assisted both private and commercial dressmaking. By 1900 ready-made garments were increasingly available in shops.

All women are likely, at some period of their lives, to be called on to perform the duties of a sick-nurse, and should prepare themselves for the occasion when they may be required,' noted Mrs Beeton. Professional nurses might be hired, but in many homes 'the ladies of the family would oppose such an arrangement as a failure of duty on their part'.

STYLE IS NOT TO BE TRUSTED.

I think this idea first occurred to me
when I was looking at a marvellous etching of a bull by Picasso. It
was an illustration for a story by Balzac called The Hidden Masterpiece.
I am sure that you all know it. It is a bull that is expressed in 12
different styles going from very naturalistic version of a bull to an
absolutely reductive single line abstraction and everything else along
the way. What is clear just from looking at this single print is that
style is irrelevant. In every one of these cases, from extreme abstraction
to acute naturalism they are extraordinary regardless of the style.
It’s absurd to be loyal to a style. It does not deserve your loyalty.
I must say that for old design professionals it is a problem because
the field is driven by economic consideration more than anything else.
Style change is usually linked to economic factors, as all of you know
who have read Marx. Also fatigue occurs when people see too much of
the same thing too often. So every ten years or so there is a stylistic
shift and things are made to look different. Typefaces go in and out
of style and the visual system shifts a little bit. If you are around
for a long time as a designer, you have an essential problem of what
to do. I mean, after all, you have developed a vocabulary, a form that
is your own. It is one of the ways that you distinguish yourself from
your peers, and establish your identity in the field. How you maintain
your own belief system and preferences becomes a real balancing act.
The question of whether you pursue change or whether you maintain your
own distinct form becomes difficult. We have all seen the work of illustrious
practitioners that suddenly look old-fashioned or, more precisely, belonging
to another moment in time.

Of course we must know the difference between scepticism and cynicism
because cynicism is as much a restriction of one’s openness to
the world as passionate belief is.

And then
in a very real way, solving any problem is more important than being
right. There is a significant sense of self-righteousness in both the
art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often
begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the
ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that
as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a
point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.

Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read ‘ Love is the extremely
difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

Everyone interested in licensing our field
might note that the reason licensing has been invented is to protect
the public not designers or clients

"One pronounced aspect of Victorian design was a great interest in creating the illusion of depth, particularly so with lithographers. Type, vignettes, products and design elements are made to seem multi-layered through the use of shadows, superimposition, dimensional banners and ribbons, turned-up faux page corners and choice of colors.

Some have labeled this the Gaslight Style approach to design, for example Maurice Rickards: "Said to have derived from the play of lamps on three-dimensional street lettering, i.e. storefront signage, etc. The style appears to have originated in Germany, spreading, through the influence of German printing skills, throughout the world."

Chief features of the style are heavily three-dimensional lettering with a vigorous rendering of tonal gradation and shadow effects. A characteristic treatment involved the use of a vignetted 'cloud-work' background against which lettering appeared in lighter tone, with heavy shadowing to hold outlines where these overlapped on to plain paper. A wealth of heavy scroll- and strap-work, also rendered in three dimensions, filled in the interstices of the design.

The style, for which at the time no specific name emerged, is thought to have been inspired by the chiaroscuro effects of gas lighting, and has subsequently received the designation Gaslight Style."

Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the ‘whole’ before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them.

“It was a dream.” Although in the preceding two hours Mr. Baker has delivered a fair number of dubiously reliable utterances, you’re inclined to believe him on this one because that’s what the movie feels like to the viewer too. It’s nominally a documentary (Oscar-nominated in that category in 1989), but it documents something that only faintly resembles waking reality. And Mr. Baker, who wanders through “Let’s Get Lost” with the eerie deliberateness of a somnambulist, appears to be a man who knows a thing or two about dreams.

And what Mr. Weber winds up doing in this original, deeply eccentric movie is giving Mr. Baker a luxurious fantasy world to live in, a holiday condo of the imagination, where age and time are utterly irrelevant.

The ’50s die before your eyes in “Let’s Get Lost.” It feels like the last stand of something that may not have been worth fighting for in the first place.

When Mr. Weber starts interviewing people who loved the musician not from afar, as he did, but from too close — his bitter wife, a few girlfriends, three of his neglected kids — you see how tough it’s been: how many drugs it took, how much willful indifference, how much hollowing out of whatever self may once have inhabited the pale frame of Chet Baker.

The enduring fascination of “Let’s Get Lost,” the reason it remains powerful even now, when every value it represents is gone, is that it’s among the few movies that deal with the mysterious, complicated emotional transactions involved in the creation of pop culture — and with the ambiguous process by which performers generate desire. Mr. Baker isn’t so much the subject of this picture as its pretext: He’s the front man for Mr. Weber’s meditations on image making and its discontents.

Australia must stand on its own ability. Australians, in fact, had waited longer than most nations to address the true definitions of nationhood – the acceptance of responsibility for their own fate.

I am [. . .] interested in how the subject constitutes itself in an active fashion through practices of the self, these practices are nevertheless not something invented by the individual himself. They are models he finds in his culture and are proposed, suggested, imposed on him by his culture, his society, his social group. (Foucault, 1997: 291)

Lakatos argues for a model of the history of science in which a degenerative research programme is replaced by a progressive research programme after the theoretical and ontological commitments of the old programme can no longer weather, through what Lakatos calls the protective belt, new, or new configurations of, phenomena (132, 136-44). Lakatos spatialises scientific knowledge and methods in terms of a hard core of theoretical commitments protected by this belt of hypotheses and secondary commitments – elements which can be altered and discarded without the hard core being fundamentally challenged.

in Lakatos’ model of change in knowledge production is that it modifies the criteria upon which practitioners in a field can ascertain a paradigm shift

non-literary areas of studies and in particular three theories that cross boundaries between the political and the literary fields: Jürgen Habermas’ history and theory of the public sphere; Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of the literary field; and the application of Foucault’s concept of governmentality to literary fiction. I will expand on these three central theories below, but would just like to affirm that what was signalled in the auto-biographical opening of this thesis are those shadow-structures- “the dynamic, informal networks and collaborations that form beneath and across the surface structures

One boundary across which this thesis shuttles is that which intersects citizenship studies and Australian literary studies. The study of citizenship is well-suited to literary studies as the figure of the citizen is, at its most basic, Janus faced: the public, institutional face necessarily borders a private and intimate one. Novels, in particular, are similarly oriented, with their representations of subjective interiority, of phenomenological lived experience, textualised and addressed to an open assemblage of reading and critical publics, including markets, which can use the text in a variety of ways.

Any genealogy, in Foucault’s sense of the term, of the citizen will often be faced with having to locate those borders at, and moments in, which the interiority of the subject – that revealed and lived in the private”intimate sphere” – is renegotiated and refigured by its relation to that intersubjective realm of the public which is the concern of states, media and corporations, wherein the self is an addressee and subject of law (Habermas, 1989: 55).

The figure of the citizen – a subject in relation to a nation-state, primarily, who has a set of putatively equal rights and obligations legitimated and enforced by the nation-state in which they have membership – is a very useful one to overlay onto individual literary texts and the spheres, fields and discursive formations that they circulate in

Jürgen Habermas’ focus on the literary precursor to the political public sphere in his historically concrete work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1989). The rational-critical acts of active citizens whose new-won privateness provides the foundation upon which to participate in spheres of public debate and decision in relation to the limits of the state are pre-figured by cultural forms

The civilised citizen who learns of the modes of private-public subjectivity and rational-critical debate through the print-culture discipline of ‘English’ provides a strong model, albeit residual, for a relationship between citizenship and literary text

If Mark Davis is right when he argues that “the decline of the literary paradigm isn’t simply to do with literature; it’s to do with a broader reconceptualisation of the public sphere itself” then something of this reconfiguration should be visible, and even audible, in fiction itself

If there is a figure of the citizen in Bourdieu’s work in such books as The Rules of Art, then this figure is to be assumed rather than one that is explicitly delineated and analysed by Bourdieu. Indeed, the figure of the citizen in this study of the genesis of the literary field is that of a game-player in a relatively autonomous field who seeks to accumulate symbolic capital through the contra market-liberal tenet of “loser takes all”(21). This quest for the sort of capital that is to some extent residually pre-modern (consecrated honour and distinction) is portrayed by Bourdieu as initiated by a refusal of the logic of the market in material goods: a refusal of commercial success

n seeking to fuse art for art’s sake (Kantian indifference) with literary realism, Sentimental Education, for Bourdieu, both refuses the market in material goods and at the same time depicts the quotidian lives of a group of young middle-class Parisien men in the period leading up to the 1848 revolts, thereby foundationally contributes toward “the constitution of the literary field as a world apart, subject to its own laws [and which produced] principles of intellectual freedom”

What is critical then in Bourdieu’s account of the literary field and its ‘generations’ of autonomy is how the market is positioned and considered within his sociology of art and literary art in particular. Specifically, there is a problem with Bourdieu’s sociology of symbolic capital and autonomy in the literary field if we find that the logics and games of the dominant market, as opposed to the market in symbolic goods, begins to break the containers Bourdieu has placed around them. The limits of Bourdieu’s sociology of the literary field are therefore ones that will be tested in this thesis by examining the rationalities and discourses of the market in relation to those of the market in symbolic goods and the operations of the literary field at moments in the long Labor decade.

I want to suggest that the representation of subjects in literary fiction of the period can be read as ones traversed by the emergence and dominance of Neoliberal governmentalities.

read self-formations, Bildung, as mimetic of historical changes in governmentality

Rather than slinking off backstage as Globalisation made glittering and triumphant entry, the Australian nation-state changed and re-formed in 1990s. The textual spaces and temporalities of the national remain fundamental to how we live our private and public lives.

At forty years old it would appear that there is virtually no action I can take that does not draw me closer to him, that does not make me more like him.

I found through the use of language, that I wrote god into existence. Language became the blanket that I threw over the invisible man, that gave him shape and form.

If the world was to suddenly fall silent God would deconstruct and die. Jesus Christ himself said, in one of His most beautiful quotes, "Where ever two or more are gathered together, I am in your midst." He said this because where ever two or more are gathered together there is language.

The love song is the sound of our endeavours to become God-like, to rise up and above the earthbound and the mediocre

The love song is a sad song, it is the sound of sorrow itself. We all experience within us what the Portugese call Suadade, which translates as an inexplicable sense of longing, an unnamed and enigmatic yearning of the soul and it is this feeling that lives in the realms of imagination and inspiration and is the breeding ground for the sad song, for the Love song is the light of God, deep down, blasting through our wounds.

Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care.

The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief.

In Lou Reed´s remarkable song "Perfect Day" he writes in near diary form the events that combine to make a "Perfect Day". It is a day that resonates with the hold beauty of love, where he and his lover sit in the park and drink Sangria, feed animals in the zoo, go to a movie show etc., but it is the lines that darkly in the third verse, "I thought I was someone else, someone good" that transforms this otherwise sentimental song into the masterpiece of melancholia that it is. Not only do these lines ache with failure and shame, but they remind us in more general terms of the transient nature of love itself – that he will have his day "in the park" but, like Cinderella, who must return at midnight to the soot and ash of her disenchanted world, so must he return to his old self, his bad self. It is out of the void that this songs springs, clothed in loss and longing.

Psalm 137,

the love song is the noise of love itself and love is, of course, a form of madness.

Love songs come in many guises and are seemingly written for many reasons – as declarations or to wound – I have written songs for all of these reasons – but ultimately the love songs exist to fill, with language, the silence between ourselves and God, to decrease the distance between the temporal and the divine.

When Kylie Minogue sings these words there is an innocence to her voice that makes the horror of this chilling lyric all the more compelling. The idea presented within this song, dark and sinister and sad – that all love relationships are by nature abusive and that his abuse, be it physical or psychological, is welcomed and encouraged, shows how even the most innocuous of love songs has the potential to hide terrible human truths

the yawning void

I am proud of these songs. They are my gloomy, violent, dark-eyed children. They sit grimly on their own and do not play with the other songs. Mostly they were offspring of complicated pregnancies and difficult and painful births. Most of them are rooted in direct personal experience and were conceived for a variety of reasons but this rag-tag group of love songs are, at the death, all the same thing – life lines thrown into the galaxies of the divine by a drowning man.

very similar to the love song. Both served as extended meditations on ones beloved. Both served to shorten the distance between the writer and the recipient. Both held within them a permanence and power that the spoken word did not. Both were erotic exercises, in themselves. Both had the potential to reinvent, through words, like Pygmalion with his self-created lover of stone, one's beloved. Alas, the most endearing form of correspondence, the love letter, like the love song has suffered at the hands of the cold speed of technology, at the carelessness and soullessness of our age

Some songs are tricky like that and it is wise to keep your wits about you when dealing with them. I find quite often that the songs I write seem to know more about what is going on in my life than I do.

The songs that I have written that deal with past relationships have become the relationships themselves. Through these songs I have been able to mythologize the ordinary events of my life, lifting them from the temporal plane and hurling them way into the stars. The relationship described in Far From Me has been and gone but the song itself lives on, keeping a pulse running through my past. Such is the singular beauty of song-writing.

The imagination desires an alternate and through the writing of the love song, one sits and dines with loss and longing, madness and melancholy ecstasy, magic, joy and love with equal measures of respect and gratitude. The spiritual quest has many faces – religion, art, drugs, work, money, sex – but rarely does the search serve god so directly and rarely are the rewards so great in doing.