Winter's doctors

It's doctor's day at Boccioni, the famous business school nearby, a pleasantly sunny atmosphere, a couple of toga and a lot of nervous young women on very high heels. Meanwhile I seem to have reverted back to my Liverpool days: another flat that's impossible to heat... At least it's not as cold as on Merseyside...

Routine

Time and garlic

Milano

Back from Ireland

A selection...

October, mild weather

I'm in a Hollywood...

Alcatraz

In and out, de young museum

The complete art of breaking

Chic! Derry city hotel view and not so chic Belfast Ibis mirror

Federal witness plummets to death

"Johnson stood up - yawning, stretching. Check the heater - thick pipes - nix ballast.
Open window - nine floor drop - this geek half breed smiling.
"Sir, what do you think Jesus drives himself?"
I banged his head against the wall, threw him out of the window screaming."

James Ellroy, White Jazz, 1992, p.17

The compensatory scheme(s)

"Not to mention once when in a burst of absurd half-drunken freshman hubris he'd accepted a massive assignment that involved auditing a Russian Existential an Absurdist Literature class and writing the papers for a wealthy and tormented son of a Rhode Island State Supreme Court justice who was actually enrolled in the class and discovering that not only all the reading and critical background but the seminar itself was actually held in Russian, which David Wallace did not know or speak one garbled syllable of, and had to sit there with an enormous rigid grin, transcribing the phonetic version of whatever unearthly and incredibly rapid sounds were being made by everyone else in the room every Tuesday and Thursday from 9.00 to 10.30 for three weeks before he was able to think of a plausible excuse and backed out of the arrangement... The point is that is this what David Wallace did in these situations, which was to assume and hold by main force an enormous grin that he imagined communicated ease and confident familiarity with whatever was going on but in fact, unbeknownst to him, in its rigid dissension and lack of eye-involvement together with the skin situation, actually looked like the agonized rictus of someone having the skin of his face slowly turned off..."

David Forster Wallace, The Pale King, p.446

"The way hard desk work really goes is in jagged little fits and starts, brief intervals of concentration alternated with frequent trips to the men's room, the drinking fountain, the vending machine, constant visits to the pencil sharpener, phone calls you suddenly feel are imperative to make, rapt intervals of seeing what kinds of shapes you can bend a paperclip into, & c."

"In Philo educating yourself was something you had to do in spite of school, not because of it - which is basically why so many of my high school peers are still there in Philo even now, selling one another insurance, drinking supermarket liquor, watching television, awaiting the informality of their first cardiac"

David Foster Wallace, The pale king

The pale King

Talking about dexedrine and the bad breath it entailed: "Your mouth tasted like a long dead frog in a cloudy jar in biology when you first opened the jar".

and the last line of that remarkable section around page 200 to 300:

"...to find no one else there from the prior day except the same Service recruiter, looking even more exhausted and disheveled, who, when I came in and said I was ready for advanced processing, and gave him the forms from the homework I'd plowed through, looked from me to the forms and back again, giving me the exact kind of smile of someone who, on Christmas morning, has just unwrapped an expensive present he already owns"

David Foster Wallace, the pale King, 2011

Nantes on a Sunday

Liverpool sight

Hotel view, Manchester

The Britannia in Manchester, great staircase, and, euh, that's about it

Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool

Finally in the Adelphi

Locarno on a rainy day

72

All out for 72...Changing times...

Shopping mall conference centre, Belfast

Belfast

the professor's common room

“To enter the room from the Professors' corridor was to suffer an extraordinary change of atmosphere, no less sudden than if a swimmer in clear white water were suddenly to find himself struggling to keep afloat in a bay of soup. Not only was the air fuscous with a mixture of smells, including stale tobacco, dry chalk, rotten wood, ink, alcohol and, above all, imperfectly cured leather, but the general colour of the room was a transcription of the other smells, for the walls were of horsehide, the dreariest of browns, relieved only by the scattered and dully twinkling heads of drawing pins”

Mervin Peake, Gormenghast, part 2, chapter 10

Thinking about Milan

War and peace

The castello sforzesco and I think a charriot of peace.