pastiche Is a pasty which has collided at high speed with a quiche. Or, on a more subtle level, is a pasty made up of lots of carefully arranged pieces of quiche, each one chosen and positioned according to the culinary style it represents and the ingredients enmeshed within it. Don't eat it too fast or you might miss the complex message produced by the fragments working together (but don't work too hard to interpret it because you'll find it resists closure. Warning for those of fragile digestive dispositions - it won't go down without a fight). Can be found in most good Ye Olde Cornish Pasty Shoppes.

17.12.05 12:20 Permalink / comment

Pendulum Pendulum. Pen - du - lum. Peeennnnjjjjuuuuullllluuuummmm. It has a way of going away and coming back again. Sweeping into your head smooth and brassy and out again sleek and swift. It makes me think of 'my grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf...' one of the songs we had on a yellowed cassette we used to listen to again and again along with P-O-S-H (from chitty chitty bang bang) and 'never smile at a crocodile.' It has arrived because I have starting reading a book called 'Foucault's Pendulum' by Umberto Eco. It is quite a dense and complicated book so I don't really know what it's about yet, but every pages is filled up with triggers for strings of images that are hugely evocative. So far I am in a cavernous museum with dilapidated aeroplanes and bicycles and the like strung up, and glass baubles and copper tubes and alchemist's gold... And a great big pendulum swinging around from a very high ceiling. Not quite sure what it's doing there yet, but we shall see....

5.12.05 23:22 Permalink / comment

hegemony Today's word is hegemony. It has been stuck in my acoustic playback for weeks now, maybe if I purge it here it will go away. It's not a very useful word, really. Or at least, apparently it is useful because I find it strewn across all sorts of articles, but I think it's one of those words that serves mainly to up register rather than convey anything especially revelatory.It means ' The predominant influence, as of a state, region, or group, over another or others.' So a kind of power relationship, except potentially manipulative and perhaps covert? Not sure really. A better definition in my opinion would definitely involve hedges. Can you imagine a moaning hedge? No thats not very convincing, is it. How about the power of hedges to hem in certain areas? Crop circles might be a related effect. Hedges ae a big pain in the countryside; there are too many of them in Dorset.

5.12.05 09:02 Permalink / comment

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