jottings to self (2nd day)
11/26/09
I think the whomp of time difference is affecting me – oddly – I’m tired at 9 a.m. (4 a.m. nyc time) despite having slept all through the night – 8 hours & more – my body isn’t buying the light. yesterday: Chelsea again for brkfst (stockpot), picked anglesea arms as dinner spot for tonight, deposited richard’s 20 pound note in hsbc, tubed to Leicester sq and walked over to Trafalgar square: deep dive into 15th thru 1900 british faces at nat’l portrait gallery (how interesting to me that the 16th century – largely the dutch/Flemish guys, Holbein et al – really captured our sense of the modern face almost before any other art quite captured what we think of as the modern mind: as if the visual arts are always at the vanguard) – walk down strand/aldwych to get tkt for endgame – pushed further down to st clement danes, royal courts of justice – saw endgame, quite marvelous, kept beckett as interesting as he can be by riding the line between despair & comedy with great exactitude – dark wonderful London, an hour of the nat’l gallery, very struck by rembrandt’s heads – mostly old people including a self-portrait in his last year (a room away from a young self-portrait) – gave me the idea that if I drew anything here it will probably be an amalgam face – an old man – I am coming slowly to think of London as a “he” – first city to evoke that for me – had a comparatively healthy (compared to the eng. brkfsts I’ve been subsisting on) light Italian meal, walked up to Leicester sq and happened to pass a quaker meeting building on st martin’s lane at 6:13 – 6:15 meeting about to start so I went in & sat down for 45 minutes in quiet. Two men spoke – one of them I found very attractive – Brit quakers all. It’s strange to me still to think that if you poked one of any one of them they’d involuntarily erupt in an English accent. Increases my sense of the place being irrevocably stained with itself – as surely every place is. But there is a completeness to it here for me that continually piques/interests. Tiny breaths of word choice – ice cream commercial (for ben & jerry’s!): “perfect for a night in.” A night in! My back hurts from the bed, I think: at any rate it did yesterday too & it made walking a stiff business at first until it unkinked, which it did completely, and which it will today too. British museum this morning, I think, and then a walking tour thru Kensington, then back here, perhaps, to start on that amalgam face & head, before Nigel Kelly & wife come to meet me & we proceed on our walk past QC’s beaufort street abode & to dinner at anglesea arms. I have no idea what or if I’ll ‘write’ – no poem occurs. I think life has entirely moved into the place poems used to be. One is living it, isn’t one.
11/26/09
I think the whomp of time difference is affecting me – oddly – I’m tired at 9 a.m. (4 a.m. nyc time) despite having slept all through the night – 8 hours & more – my body isn’t buying the light. yesterday: Chelsea again for brkfst (stockpot), picked anglesea arms as dinner spot for tonight, deposited richard’s 20 pound note in hsbc, tubed to Leicester sq and walked over to Trafalgar square: deep dive into 15th thru 1900 british faces at nat’l portrait gallery (how interesting to me that the 16th century – largely the dutch/Flemish guys, Holbein et al – really captured our sense of the modern face almost before any other art quite captured what we think of as the modern mind: as if the visual arts are always at the vanguard) – walk down strand/aldwych to get tkt for endgame – pushed further down to st clement danes, royal courts of justice – saw endgame, quite marvelous, kept beckett as interesting as he can be by riding the line between despair & comedy with great exactitude – dark wonderful London, an hour of the nat’l gallery, very struck by rembrandt’s heads – mostly old people including a self-portrait in his last year (a room away from a young self-portrait) – gave me the idea that if I drew anything here it will probably be an amalgam face – an old man – I am coming slowly to think of London as a “he” – first city to evoke that for me – had a comparatively healthy (compared to the eng. brkfsts I’ve been subsisting on) light Italian meal, walked up to Leicester sq and happened to pass a quaker meeting building on st martin’s lane at 6:13 – 6:15 meeting about to start so I went in & sat down for 45 minutes in quiet. Two men spoke – one of them I found very attractive – Brit quakers all. It’s strange to me still to think that if you poked one of any one of them they’d involuntarily erupt in an English accent. Increases my sense of the place being irrevocably stained with itself – as surely every place is. But there is a completeness to it here for me that continually piques/interests. Tiny breaths of word choice – ice cream commercial (for ben & jerry’s!): “perfect for a night in.” A night in! My back hurts from the bed, I think: at any rate it did yesterday too & it made walking a stiff business at first until it unkinked, which it did completely, and which it will today too. British museum this morning, I think, and then a walking tour thru Kensington, then back here, perhaps, to start on that amalgam face & head, before Nigel Kelly & wife come to meet me & we proceed on our walk past QC’s beaufort street abode & to dinner at anglesea arms. I have no idea what or if I’ll ‘write’ – no poem occurs. I think life has entirely moved into the place poems used to be. One is living it, isn’t one.
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