TOVE JANSSON'S VERSION OF WONDERLAND

I found a reprinted edition of Alice in Wonderland in the Fruitmarket Gallery the other day, where I was hiding from the cold waiting for a friend’s train to arrive (saw the exhibition Narcissus Reflected, including a real life (!!) Dali: Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937. It actually boggled my mind a little bit, which surprised me since I never quite know how I feel about Dali. Part of that might possibly be due to overexposure durings school).

I’ve never actually read Alice in Wonderland, so that was reason number one to buy it. But reason number two: it’s illustrated by Tove Jansson...[CLICK CLICK CLICK] 

The urge to cave in was so strong, but it was £12.99 and I have to keep reminding myself that drawing pens are more urgent than rather beautiful books, no matter how much I try to pretend that it would be ‘research’. 

It'll probably be about three weeks til I cave in...

MR ECO'S LUNATIC EXPERIMENTS

From Serendipities: Language and Lunacy Umberto Eco preface p.VIII

"...even the most lunatic experiments can produce strange side effects, stimulating research that proves perhaps less amusing but scientifically more serious..."

WINE STOMPING

WEATHER: woolly red scarf and warm boots

MUSIC: The Cat Empire

CATTLE GRIDS CROSSED: lost count at around five.

THE CARPET NEEDS A HAIRCUT

STEFAN THEMERSON [disinfecting words]

From Tom Harris by Stefan Themerson [intro by Nicolas Wadley]

"The initiative behind his concern with semantics was to free words of confusing sentimental or literary references, and, as with the photograms, to expose their own incontrovertible identity. The autograph character of his later novels is of several simultaneous currents of narrative and thought that may appear only obliquely related and that, together, create their own cumulative reality and sense. His whole oeuvre as a writer is like that: a continuous collage, its parts distinct but full of allusive echoes and repetitions"

[Nicolas Wadley, pg. ix]

"I wanted to disinfect words, scrub them right to the very bone of their dictionary definitions. That was how - somewhat  ferociously and sardonically - I invented Semantic poetry. It was meant to be funny. Both serious and funny."

[Stefan Themerson, pg. xvi]

"Fiction allows you to do things that history or treatises can't - especially in the sense that you can rescue or retrieve meanings that are lost from generation to generation. These time barriers are harder to cross than geographical barriers."

[Stefan Themerson, pg. xvii]

"COLOURLESS GREEN IDEAS SLEEP FURIOUSLY"

xxx

"Balance.
Repetition.
Proposition.
Mirrors.

Most of all, the world is a place where parts of wholes are described
within an overarching paradigm of clarity and accuracy.
The context in which makes possible an underlying
sense of the way it all fits together,
despite our collective tendency not to conceive of it as such.

But then again, the world without end is a place where souls are combined,
but with an overbearing feeling of disparity and disorderliness.
To ignore it is impossible without getting oneself into all of kinds of trouble,
despite one's best intentions to not get entangled with it so much.

Meanwhile,
the statues are bleeding green.
And others are saying things much better than we ever could;
as the quiet become suddenly verbose.

And the hail's heralding the size of nickels.
And the street corners are gnashing together like the gears
inside the head of some omniscient engineer.
And downward flows the garnered wisdom that has never died

Then finally,
we opened the box, we couldn't find any rules.
Our heads were reeling with the glitter of possibilities, contingencies...
but with ever increasing faith we decided to go ahead and just ignore them,
despite tremendous pressure to capitulate with fate.

So instead, we went ahead to fabricate a catalog
of unstable elements and modicums and particles.
With not zero total strangeness for brief moments which amount
to nothing more than tiny fragments of a finger snap.

Meanwhile,
we're furiously seeing green.
And the map has started tearing along its creases due to overuse...
when in reality it's never needed folds.

And the air's withholding the sound of its wellspring.
And our heads approach a density reminiscent of the infinite productivity of the center of the sun.

And therein lies the garnered wisdom that has never died.

Expectation -
leads to disappointment. If you don't expect something big huge and exciting...
usually...
I dunno,
just, uh yea..."

[THE BOOKS: SMELLS LIKE CONTENT]

WANDERLUST

I think I secretly want one of those river creature things.

MORBID [...yes. but quite beautiful]

THROUGH THE ROOF

MUSIC FOR QUIET PLACES [one]

For some reason I just cannot get enough of this song these past three days. I'd forgotten how grand Nick Cave and Tom Waits are to put on to work to.

Music = essential drawing fuel.

WE LIKE STUFF [and Gremlins]

No no no, The Nest is still very much loved and lived in; it has just spawned a wee side-kick, somewhat like a wet Gremlin.

But I am a survivor of Art College, and therefore have had ‘context’ repeatedly drummed into my little soul until it hurts (and possibly bled a little). The Nest stemmed from a need to detract myself from vanishing into a circular oblivion during the final year of my degree (quite literally, because I was cooped up drawing circles until my hand swelled and I accidentally got that Deep Heat muscle rub on my tongue, which feels weird, though not as weird as getting toothpaste in your eye, resulting in a feeling that can only be described as a “minty fresh eyeball”. Don’t do it, though, because it stings).

Subsequently, The Nest became text based in a bid to create new scenery away from the very visual, and now the laws and concepts of context have been laid (though they retain the right to change at any moment, without warning, and possibly when you’re not looking). It appears to be the place where I attempt to intertwine the mundanity of biscuits into tangential ponderings about what I would like to pretend are some sort of haphazardly knitted philosophies, but I’m afraid I lack the intellectualisation that Proper Philosophy requires (hence why I studied Fine Art and not Philosophy, and why I like to bastardise words - we might talk about that one day, but in the original Nest). Slightly skew-whiff observations, perhaps, speckled with stories about being small and things that freak me out. Like a lack of toothpaste and rabbits. Generally I end up confusing myself in the process, and the Caramel Digestive is currently proving to be a right tricky bugger in the follow up to this one.

This here spawn-thing is the distraction, as not only do we like nests, but we also like distractions (because The Nest originally was a distraction...but distractions are tricky things and have a habit of asexually reproducing and stemming off into new domains... Like Gremlins).

Apparently we also like Gremlins today.

Skip to the end: this Other Nest is simply a place to document distractions (and will potentially be fuelled by Youtube). Also known as Stuff I Like, or just stuff that has impregnated The Brain. Basically it’s just stuff.

We like stuff.