2. I rewatched the Pussycat Dolls vs Coldplay video that I posted before. I like the way that the Coldplay tune underneath brings out the poignancy in the tale of this relationship. It starts well: she's his "favourite girl", and she says "my baby's sexy for sho, I had to have him when he walked through the do". It is not without its spiritual element: "he only wants me for my body and soul". But then Timbaland makes the classic mistake of leaving messages on her answering machine claiming that in return for his gifts she now owes him sex. "Why you be buggin like I'm some kinda ho?" she complains. The Pussycat Dolls are a remarkable phenomenon, not the less so for the TV series about the search for a New Pussycat Doll which gave a glimpse into the wierd world of what it's all about. They are like a plastic simulachrum of sexiness, pitch perfect and exact and not at all like anything real. They all look like very good male-to-female transvestites, for one thing. There's a bit in this video where the lead singer looks back at Timbaland from on the hood of a taxi while wiggling her rear at him which reminded me suddenly of the bit in the latest Pynchon about Mouffette the sexy lapdog. (This got him nominated for a Literary Review Bad Sex award.) The only Pynchon I have never reread is Gravity's Rainbow; I tried once but I gave up at the part where the flirty lipsticked twelve-year-old starts seducing people on the boat. But maybe I will try again, when I unpack my books this autumn, and think of her instead as a Pussycat Doll. It will probably make more sense that way. I wanted to record this because even though I have googled I have found no other instance of the Pussycat Dolls helping anyone to a better understanding of Pynchon. The reason it works is that Pynchon is a great writer and writes about things that are true.
3. Also on the theme of things I've posted about before: I went to the Pinacoteca again and took some photos. Here's the best I got of the mysterious half-smile I talked about:
4. In my classics appreciating mood I reread The Mayor of Casterbridge. I loved and devoured Hardy at the age of about fifteen and spent a happy summer writing an essay about him on a bench in our garden. The bench was overhung with honeysuckle and surrounded by buddleias so that there were butterflies everywhere and I kept having to sit very still because they had settled on me or on my book. Then after that I felt like I had grown out of Hardy, and his misery. His books divide roughly into tragedies and comedies; in the tragedies everyone dies, and in the comedies everyone dies but the young lovers. (One of my great aunts claimed that when Hardy was very young he was present at and may have caused the accidental death of some relative of hers, and that this was why he was always so moody, but I think his biographers have taken other lines on this.) So apart from The Return of the Native, which is my favourite, I haven't read any Hardy for ages. Anyway, early on in The Mayor of Casterbridge Elizabeth Jane is specifically attracted to Farfrae because of his lack of a sense of humour; he makes himself loved by singing nostalgic songs with the men in the pub, but he won't join in with their jokes. I am now collecting instances of a GSOH being an unattractive thing in the past. I think humour is over-rated, myself.
5. Here is Piazza Maggiore after dark. I like the graininess of my camera phone.
When I saw how the light was coming out I took this over-zoomed one of the bronze Neptune.
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