monday–friday

By bombshell | Published: November 20, 2009

I’ve lately discovered that the weeks go by just as fast when you’re out of a daily routine as when you’re in one. Another set of Monday–Friday is already gone. There are multiple ways I can separate out the days of this week to differentiate them from those of last week and those of next week: which friends I’ve seen or talked to, which films I’ve seen, which song has been my favourite. But most dramatically, this week I’ve had epiphanies about time as (mostly) provided to me by my current book About Time: Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution by Paul Davies.

Monday: The division of time into past, present and future is physically meaningless. Motion is relative and so is simultaneity. Just by moving about we can put ourselves into the past or future of events happening on planets in far-away galaxies. Any inhabitants of those planets can do the same to us.
Tuesday: 20-year anniversary since I left high school
Wednesday: A few microseconds at the event horizon of a black hole is infinity in Earth time. This is because of the gravitational timewarp.
Thursday: Physics does not rule out the possibility of two (or more) scales of time in the Universe. Though nothing has been proved.
Friday: Quantum physics allows observed photons to change their behaviour, even if that behaviour happened in the past. (I had to read this chapter twice.)

His argument is still building. I’ll let you know what happens.

Posted in physics, times goes by so | Leave a comment

time is a place

By bombshell | Published: November 13, 2009

I’ve taken the initial thoughts that I wrote back in May on the concept of time as a place, stripped them completely bare and reworked them a bit:

The New York Herald Tribune post below was completely absorbed by the fact that I went looking for the 1959 Champs Elysées in 2009 and I didn’t find it. My frustration was that it didn’t look the same. But that didn’t dig deep enough.

Godard did not film that scene in the same place we stood. It may be the same building, the same location, but he did it somewhere else. It’s not just the location that’s a place. Time is too.

Even if I’d found my perfect 1959 Cinema Normandie in the middle of my perfect 1959 Champs Elysées, I still would have been in the wrong place.

I’m now trying to figure out if this thought has any basis in philosophical and/or scientific reality. Or if it’s the idea that’s going to unlock my novel for me. Or maybe both. Or maybe neither.

Posted in times goes by so | Leave a comment

sydney

By bombshell | Published: November 10, 2009

I can reach back. It was May 25 and I was sitting on the bed writing an addendum to the piece below. It’s funny, when I see myself sitting there writing I realise that my memory has placed me in a room belonging to a different flat. One that was nearby, but that I lived in five years previously. But that’s not the important thing, the important thing is that I was hurrying to try and write down the distinct feeling I was having that time is a place. Time is a place. I interrupted my fractured sentences and ran to meet M in The Camel, wondering aloud to him who I should read to help me think this through. Walter Benjamin? Other philosophers who think about time? Or scientists? I don’t know what happened next. I think I went to work and forgot about everything.

One Friday evening at the beginning of September, before I even had time to think about it, I was driven though London. I was busy having conversations in my head with it as I usually do, as we passed through the different neighbourhoods on our way. But I didn’t say goodbye. I didn’t even understand that I was leaving until the plane was taking off. And then it was Sunday morning and bleary-eyed we were looking in astonishment at the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House. Ever since the plane had landed I’d been brightly announcing “we live here now!” whenever the thought occurred to me, but looking at the picture-postcard icons I secretly knew we must be on holiday.

Posted in london, sydney, times goes by so | Leave a comment

New York Herald Tribune

By bombshell | Published: May 25, 2009

I already know you can’t recreate the past. We studied The Great Gatsby in school when I was 16 and I learned that lesson so clearly from that book. Intellectually, I know it. But in my heart, I never give up.

I have this habit of loping up 50 years later and expecting everything to be the same. Wanting to pick up the pieces of moments that were lived before I was born.

And so we found ourselves standing in the doorway of the Cinema Normandie and it was all wrong. The Champs Elysées was all wrong. They’ve ruined the Champs Elysées. They’ve ruined it because it doesn’t look the same. And because it looked much better in 1959. Less traffic, less people, no tacky signs. It had started out as an intoxicating spring day in Paris. I was high on what felt like a stolen moment – waking up on a midweek morning and finding myself not in London, but Paris. One special day in Paris, one day to say I love you and goodbye. One day in which to wear a New York Herald Tribune t-shirt and walk down the  Champs Elysées as if I was Jean Seberg in A Bout de Souffle. If I could, I would happily climb through the screen and live inside A Bout de Souffle – build my own life there according to the rules of this not-always naturalistic film. Recreating it on a stolen Parisian day was the best way I could think of to say goodbye.

But it’s all gone. 1959 is all gone. The Champs Elysées buildings featured in the film all still stand but none of them look the same. And it was at the Cinema Normandie that my dreams did come crashing down. We stood in the very same spot as Jean-Paul Belmondo did when he looked at a cinema poster for Humphrey Bogart and made his character’s self-defining gesture: rubbing his thumb back and forth over his lips, and I was ready to cry. In 1959 the Lido de Paris, a showgirl revue, may still have shared the building, but its neon lights did not take over the foyer. I may have liked the Lido de Paris in 1959. In 2009 it’s neon-tacky. Belmondo’s subtle and yet highly charged moment is immortalised on film, but its real life equivalent is lost forever, buried under all the years that have passed by and the attendant changes those years have brought.

I do realise that I was looking for a 1959 Champs Elysées theme park and that there would be something wrong if I found it. I do think that it’s a much less attractive street now, but life shouldn’t stand still. But it felt so unlucky to not be able to find any traces of what once was. Especially in a city like Paris where so much is preserved. I felt desolate. And silly. Silly for trying to recreate a fiction, silly for being upset by not being able to. Desolate because, real or fictional, every moment slips through our fingers. We can never go back, we can only go forward, and however much I know that as a fact, there’s still something about it that I don’t understand.

Posted in paris, times goes by so | Leave a comment

paris nous appartient

By bombshell | Published: April 18, 2009

Paris Nous Appartient / Paris Belongs to Us (1960),
directed by Jacques Rivette
Film shown at the BFI, London, April 13, 2009

I was attracted to this film by the title, and by the fact that it’s playing as part of the BFI’s Nouvelle Vague film festival. I love the bits and pieces of Nouvelle Vague films I’ve seen, particularly À Bout de Souffle, which is my favourite film, and I’m trying to see as many of the festival films as I can, concentrating mainly on ones that I’ve never seen before.

The opening credits show a train rushing along what appears to be passing countryside. It soon arrives at the Gare d’Austerlitz in the south of Paris. I’m mentioning this because I found the appearance of countryside amazing as I’m sure that all that space will now be banlieue.

As soon as we hit the station we get the title of the film:
Paris Nous Appartient / Paris Belongs to Us
and then immediately a quote contradicting the title:
“Paris n’appartient à personne” / “Paris belongs to no one” (Charles Peguy)
I was so happy about this contradiction, because it’s exactly how I feel, that I think it was my favourite part of the film. Also, I found this early promise very heady, and what followed was mostly disappointing.

The story revolves around a young woman, Anne, who abandons her university exams to be in a production of Shakespeare’s Pericles, during which time she starts to fall in love with its director. Meanwhile, she is also trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious death linked with the theatre company, and in so doing discovers what may or may not be a worldwide conspiracy.

The film was long, it was meandering, and I found myself completely resistant to the sideline in paranoid conspiracy.

But there was a scene fairly early on that caught my attention. Anne has just been to her first Pericles rehearsal and she is now standing on the street talking to the director while he waits for his girlfriend to come and pick him up. M nudges me. “It’s the Bateau Lavoir”, he says. I take a good look at the street on which the characters are standing. It is the Bateau Lavoir. We’d just been in Paris a few weeks before and we’d been standing there too, taking our time as we walked through Montmartre, trying to slow the moments down until we would have to leave and go back to London. I couldn’t quite believe that we had just been standing in this same place, but that we had been there 50 years later.

I also liked seeing the shabbiness of some of the Paris apartment interiors. You never see Paris presented like that now (at least not the centre of Paris) – it always seems so immaculate with insides to match the outsides, so I was fascinated by this new way of thinking about and seeing the city.

It may seem as if I don’t have very much that’s good to say about the film, but I was so happy to have seen it on a Monday afternoon, having gone in when it was cloudy and then come out again two and a half hours later into the temporary promise of evening sunshine. We we were laughing about the film and it’s “doo di doo” of existentialism (to quote M) as we walked across Waterloo Bridge and completely took for granted the centre of London in full bloom all around us.

Posted in london, paris | Leave a comment

one year later

By bombshell | Published: April 11, 2009

So, exactly one year has gone by since I first started this blog. Does it feel like it? Lots of stuff has happened while I haven’t been writing here. My Dad was sick and I was sick. I went to the Scottish Highlands and Berlin and St Ives and Dublin and Geneva and Paris. I learned to ski (sort of) in the French Alps. I watched every episode of The Wire and read all of Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. I saw Barry Manilow perform and discovered Ladyhawke (the woman, not the film). I took the tube to work every morning, except for when it snowed and I tried to walk.

A friend said to me last week that a year and a half is not very long in her life. Nor in mine. And a year is much shorter.

Posted in times goes by so | Leave a comment

the last month

By bombshell | Published: May 23, 2008

So, it’s been more than a month. Since I last wrote, I’ve spent a few days in Paris – skipping through the raindrops, eating the biggest pastry ever, and managing to speak French coherently (though not all at the same time). Back in London, I’ve walked disappointedly out of David Thomas’s Pere Ubu (theatre done badly, done badly) but then had the evening redeemed by fantastic conversation with friends, read The Book of Dave, seen Vanessa Redgrave in The Year of Magical Thinking, started learning how to sew, taken a tour of the Houses of Parliament, almost been touched by the hand of Marc Almond, considered throwing myself off Tower Bridge the Night of Boris Johnson, watched Sebadoh perform their Bubble and Scrape album, seen a friend make amazing performance art, read Revolutionary Road, listened to Mark Thomas talk about the arms trade, felt angry and powerless about the Burmese government’s response to the cyclone, attended a filming of Bremner, Bird and Fortune, started crying again when I listen to my favourite songs, and been captivated and inspired by the film of Persepolis. I’ve also limped on average for two days each week, after doing exercises in the park. That’s pretty much it, aside from my continuing inability to capture these and other moments in any kind of tangible way.

Posted in times goes by so | Leave a comment

ten years

By bombshell | Published: April 10, 2008

It’s ten years today since the Good Friday Agreement. I remember that day well not just because of what was going on in the wider world, but because of what was going on in my world. In the afternoon I met V at Fat Boys in Fortitude Valley and managed to slip down the few steps between their top level and their ground level and land in an ungainly way on my lower back. While we sat drinking coffee, I was uncomfortably aware of how much my back was hurting. It had rained hard that day. I left V and walked slowly and painfully down Brunswick Street to the Village Twin, where M and I were supposed to meet after she finished watching a film. But she had got soaked on her way to the cinema, so we met only briefly and then went she went home. My flatmates had gone away for Easter so I walked the short way home to an empty house, starting to feel incredibly sorry for myself. My back was still hurting and I was getting worried. I talked to A, who told me to stay right where I was and she would come over and make me dinner. I loved her for that. In the end though, my parents came and took me to the hospital. Happily, though slightly anticlimactically in terms of this story, everything was ok and I had nothing more than bruising.

As I write these moments now, ten years ago they were in the process of being lived.

Posted in times goes by so | Leave a comment