Monday, March 27, 2006

almost cut my hair

Well, I didn't cut it myself, but I had it cut. Not that you can tell. It's just the same, but shorter. Debs wondered why I bothered. I tried to take a picture, but all I managed were pictures that showed a) the dirtiness of the bathroom mirror and b) the mingingness of the not-a-cold-sore thing on my lip, so I gave up.

After singing Handel on four out of the last six evenings, I still have bits of the Messiah buzzing around my head. This is mostly lovely, except when you're trying to go to sleep and get a fugue-like bit (most often And with His stripes, or worse, He trusted in God) stuck in your head and it goes round and round unrelentingly for hours.

Ah, yes, I was going to rave about how great the Messiah is, wasn't I? I'm a bit too tired and feeling the effects of the missing hour (oh, has anyone read Mason and Dixon , no? Oh well, I'll spare you the riff on what got lost in the missing hour, like the horse and dogs that didn't make it, or maybe did and went the long way round, I really can't remember. It's a very long and odd novel and that's one of the more coherent bits. There's some really odd stuff about giant plants and things that I just gave up on. Either I lost the plot about halfway through, or Pynchon did.) and as you can tell, not really in a fit state to write sensibly. But it is great, and the music is sublime, even the bass arias. Although I wish there was another really good bit like the Hallelujah chorus at the end.

I'll stop now.

Or not. There's a novel by Stevie Smith which I love, called Novel on Yellow Paper. I wanted to quote some lines from it, about going on and on, but don't worry, there's a 10,000 word limit (something like that), but Google won't give me the quote I want. So I'll give you this one instead. Perhaps an apt quotation for all bloggers.

"For this book is the talking voice that runs on, and the thoughts come, the way I said, and the people come too, and come and go, to illustrate the thoughts, to point the moral, to adorn the tale."

STOP

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