Badaude

Lots of fun with Finn...

This week, Finn Fordham upheld writer Matthew Reynold's theory that your destiny is governed by your given name, by finally producing his literary child which has been a womb-churning 20 years in the making.

We celebrated at the Soho branch of Nottingham University until long after the staff tried to get us to move on, with Southern Indian food from Rasa and plenty of Blanc de Blancs complementing the blanks in Joyce's prose rhythm.

After a few glasses, Finn (whom you can also see hitting the water like Buck Mulligan* in my Tipping Point post) spoke a passage from Finnegan's Wake which ended with the dreadful sucker pun(ch);

-- Is it so exaltated, eximious, extraoldandairy and
excelssiorising?
-- Amengst menlike trees walking or trees like angels
weeping nobirdy aviar soar anywing to eagle it!

...Well I suppose you had to be there. But, at the end of a page and a half of complicated prose, it was breath-taking, icy-water funny.

And when my current favourite Montaigne expert, Richard Scholar, (a name that could only lead to a life in libraries and the production of volumes of academic volumes - Jenni Diski, London Review of Books) doubled up with an involantary groan at Joyce's joke then suddenly, unbeliveably, on hearing the passage torn from dusty covers and delivered with the panache of a stand-up comedian we found ourselves, after a split-second of panic at WHETHER YOU SHOULD ACTUALLY FIND JOYCE OUT-LOUD FUNNY, doing what the author had no doubt intended all along - laughing.

...

No drawings from me this week, but the cover, pictured below, is by the very fascinating Ruth Maclennan.

(* I rather have a bit of a crush on the sensual, sensible, cynical Buck Mulligan much in the same was as I do Raskalnikov's mate, Razumikhin.)

Women's Velib-eration

I've been reviewed by a site called outyourbackdoor.com which is a charming but perhaps surprising compliment as the site features the traditional kind of randonnage which involved meadows and mountains rather than (St-Germain-des)-Prés and Montaigne.

Just below my link, they reviewed another page called 'Pretty Girls Riding Bikes' which turned out to be a rather tame article about a social phenomenon (OK, so I have a dirty mind...)

I'm afraid the author of the article is unlikely to think of me as a 'girl' (as she says, 'one always thinks of them as girls, even if they’re well into their 40’s'). I may not be quite there yet, age-wise, but I'm certainly deflating the image of a mobile, zip(code)less fuck as I have that greatest of passion-killers strapped to the back of my velo, a child seat.

I ride my own bicyle. Velibs, good as they are, do not accomodate a siège porte-bébé . The day I got my child seat was one of true liberation. Able to go anywhere at a reasonably adult pace, I felt truly empowered.

My now four-year-old son has developed the habit of loudly shouting, Owww me butticks! every time we ride over a bump to the bemusement of French passers-by.

Of course, as my son sits on bony, Anglo-saxon buttocks as opposed to smooth French cuisses or fesses, his ride is bound to be less comfortable.

----

Later, walking. This guy just went at walking pace on the trottoir in front of me all the way down the Rue Jacob.

Gratuitous dog-related photo

I know it's boring to go on about the crottes in Paris, but this note of pride(?) or protest(?),left on a particularly well-visited corner of the trottoir in 19e did strike me...

 

"Rode by all with joy"...

Three posts in one week? But you are really spoiling us!

This is my last holiday postcard. It's a holiday I take every year, and I don't have to go far from home...

I returned to find my house covered in scaffolding. My roof's being repalced.

The builders have Radio 1 on really loudly right outside my window.

Radio 1 joke:

I was having a shower when there was a knock on the door. I said, 'Who's there? The voice said, 'The blind man' so I went downstairs naked and let him in. He said, 'OK, where do you want these blinds put up then? Big penis by the way...'

Well I thought it was funny.

I think I'm going to have to go out if I'm every going to do some work...

More seaside postcards...

I spent the third week in August in the Sud. St Pierre la Mer was bizarrely underpopulated at the peak of the holiday season: it's concrete apartments a little lacking in soul without managing Houellebequian excess...

Never look a gift holiday in the mouth?

Rentrez Bien!

'cause the summer has been, to say the least, a little disappointing...

Find weather definitions here,

and financial news here (I wrote this postcard 3 weeks ago, but the French mail is slow, or maybe it's just that, like most postcards, I forgot to post it until I got home).

and Corto, of course, here...