Apparently you're not meant to take this advice literally. Them and their bleedin' koans. Why do you think I've been sentenced to eternity as a tea-bag once I shed my current froggy form?

"If you see the Buddha on the road, run him over."

After first trying to see Cohen play live in 1975, I finally succeeded 33 years later in 2008. Well worth the wait, Len was.

"My friends are gone and my hair is grey, I ache in the places where I used to play..."

The key line describes Duchamp's attempt to pit, chessically speaking, the 'artistic mind' (his) against the supposedly normal chess mind type -- scientific, mathematical, geekish, ubernerdish, capable of doing engineering, accountancy, measurements, statistics, hard sums and other such arcana.

"But the memory boys were tougher", wrote Tomkins.

I don't accept for a moment that Duchamp actually thought in these terms -- far too binary and simplistic for such a subtle man. He may have been an artist - and have passed through a 'retinal' painterly phase - but much of his thinking was closer to the rigour of science (and accountancy, in the best sense of the word: cf '3 Standard Stoppages') than to the romantic subjectivism usually associated with art.

Didn't Nabokov say something about the rigorous logic of poetry and the beauty of mathematics?

And most of *my* favorite artists in whatever medium -- Duchamp, Greenaway, Resnais, Burroughs, Nabokov, John Cale, to name a few -- have been formalists of one type or another.

The biggest difference between the thinking processes of Duchamp or Burroughs and those of a good creative scientist is *aleatory*: the 'artists' are happier to use random chance elements in their work, while repeatability is a hallmark of science.

Either way -- and no matter who used it first -- I love that phrase, "The Memory Boys". It'd make a great title for a book/ movie/ painting/ song/ move in a conceptual game.

And precision matters in these things. Just like chemistry and combinations, your only men.

Certain heretics are already interpreting "chemistry and combinations" as <Alchemy & Combinatorics> or even <Stinks & Sums>.

This will not be tolerated. The firewood and the stake are ready: we gonna have us an old-time auto-da-fe. In the case of *very young* heretics, I may be willing to show mercy and use <Pale Fire>.

Repentance will be required, of course. You're never too young to repent, as many a born-again foetus has shown.

- Vivian Darkbloom & The Memory Boys, 'The Ballroom in St Patrick's Cathedral'.

And now <today's Quote of the Day> is yesterday's already. Serves me jolly well right for endlessly pondering the branches in the forest of links. And the lynx in the frottage cheese of ... oh, stop it, post it, spot it...

Opts to comply. Lesser-spotted, freeposted. And ...

"Like that ancient teenage dream
Of soul to poison soul to poison soul"

- John Cale.

What? You say nobody's actually used that last one yet? Can't imagine why, it's one of my best ... although Dan Brown is sure to have <allegedly been unwittingly a tad influenced by> - my lawyer insists on this locution - the plot.

It features nukes in the Vatican, Mecca, Jerusalem, Amritsar, etc -- fundamentalist terrorists who want to vaporize the world's holy places -- releasing a cloud of *sacred fallout* to girdle the globe, convert everyone before they die of radiation sickness, and thus immanentize the eschaton.

Nah. Too complex for Dan B. Strip it back to one bomb, one target - say Rome, it's got art as well as holiness - one hero (an art-loving nuke-defuser) - one heroine (a sexy nun torn between her vows and her biological clock) ... and voila.

Hero defuses nuke, starts clock, is rewarded with a cormorant (or 'shag') and is made a Knight Commander of the Holy Order of the Little Sisters of the Sane Scientists.

Meanwhile, the Pontiff returns to his day job as keeper of the Bridges of Madison County. And Mormons complain that, yet again, they were ignored -- nobody threatened to nuke Utah.

A final message from the bomb-toting fanatics reads "If we *had* nuked Utah, who'd notice the difference?"

<koan> ah, so that is what those are called, thanks!

But I have a question, if you are currently a frog and sentenced to an eternity as a tea-bag in the next life, how on earth did you kill the Buddha?

Unless he was a fly, and you ate him for lunch I guess. But, how could you be expected to recognize the Buddha then, hardly seems fair.

Vol 1:

"Nimzovitch might be right, but putting my Bishop on g3 feels like bending down to pick up the soap in San Quentin" - S Tarrasch

"Advantage doesn't count, it's how you use it" - M Tal

"I gotta go pee" - V Kramnik on why he uses the bathroom so much

"He isn't solid enough to hold" - V Topalov on why V Kramnik uses the bathroom so much

Quite right!

Quite possibly the worst song he ever wrote, no?

close- but nope.

Doh!

I'm in the wrong forum <again>.

Well that's just typical.

So I took a quick peek, saw a Najdorf, and reckoned I'd woken up in the wrong universe. Next time I looked, it was a draw. Call that *missing the fun* if you like ...

<mack, Jess> Dylan's worst song - I can't even bring myself to recall its name - is the one on Street Legal with the lines <"Can you cook and sew/ Make flowers grow/ Do you understand my pain?">

<Dee dum dee dum dee dee dee dum, or is your love in vain?> There, that's what it's called.

"Do you understand my pain?" might be OK - we could be eavesdropping on a conversation between Bob and his doctor ...

- And my best friend, my doctor, can't even say what it is I've got.

- Well, try me, Mr Zimmerman. What are the symptoms?

- Morning sickness, a strange bulge...

- You're pregnant, Mr Zimmerman.

- Gee ... guess I stayed in Mrs Hippie just a day too long.

And so on. But why would Bob ask his doctor about cooking and sewing? Why would he ask his cook or his seamstress about his medical condition? Unless ...

He can't possibly have been searching for an old-fashioned *wife*, can he?

Even wives are meant to stimulate lines like "I married Isis..." or "Staying up for days in the Chelsea Hotel writing Sad-eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you".