Hung
It just occurred to me, while I was on my bed trying to fill a journal entry after a month of self-imposed absence; trying to fill in the date in the top-left corner of my non-virtual moleskine, that today might just be Cesar Pelli’s birthday.
Odd. I know. Why should something like an old architect’s birth date be of any importance to me. Did I really obsess over this date, not only four years ago? Was it four years ago? Turning on my laptop and doing a quick search, I seem to have been mistaken. It’s the 12th of October, not 8th.
Funny. Consulting my bookshelf, in the top left corner where fussy and heavy architecture and picture books sit pretty; I pull out my copy of “Observations for Young Architects”, with its rotting Kinokuniya price tag and sealed plastic wrapping and stare at the yellowing piece of watermarked paper I have stored in the book for all these years.
It’s funny really, reading it. Embarrassing even, but it still gives a thrill to read to the very end; and try to decipher whether the signature really is a flourish of the hand or a print. It’s odd seeing that I’ve still not finished the book, after getting well convinced out of what I thought I wanted. Its actually, really dusty. The spine is still unbent and the edges, remarkably still straight and stiff; something that cannot be said of most of my books now.
That’s a nice note to take down when my mother decides to inventory everything off to sell when I go to college.
The books that look remarkably untouched are those from my daughter’s collection before aged 14 and those with stretch marks are good paperback publishers, I assure you . You can also take my word that that copy of War & Peace and Anna Karenina is in perfect form. In fact, I bought it for her and maybe thats why the stubborn little bugger left it untouched.
I really should be studying for Chemistry and Add. Maths tomorrow. Both subjects of which I am doing absolute shit at, with utmost flamboyance. My wit and grace and unaccountable talent in bull-shitting has not only ventured into the suave manner of not answering single questions, but whole sections!
Drawn
Typical. Just as I have stonge and near stoic-like subjects to account for, my state of mind meanders into something more lyrical and affectionately artistic. Some things never change.
Take the weekend for instance, I just spent it reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement, which I am absolutely gutted to have read. The last time I felt this pang of emotion, of beauty in the beautiful prose of the English countryside, of childhood and irreconcilable madness that is the family institution was probably last year when I read Black Swan Green in the early summer mornings as I was jet lagged and my little cousin snored in the bed beside mine. Or it could be two years, no three; years ago when I was reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
Quartered
There’s something haunting about these books with bright eyed children bordering on decapitation. Precocious bright little things with so much enthusiasm and charm to only be dulled with the objections of reality and time. Makes you want to reach out for your little ghosts, in the tiny but unreachable crevices of unfinished journals from years ago, in awkward and thick lined sketches, in photographs and archives of yet another virtual haunt. Or like the one in my case; the dusty book and New Haven postmarked yellowing watermarked paper which I am to flip through after years of resolve to grow up.
Hark. I am facing my demons.