READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Day 11 ‘Miro in his Studio’, text by Joan Punyet Miró. Photographs by Jean-Marie del Moral. Translated by Caroline Beamish. (Thames & Hudson, 1996) 100 words on a word in the title: Studio (July) Whenever creative loneliness occurs, July emptiness, January blank, I turn to ‘Miró in his Studio’. He sits there, surrounded by works in progress. I bought the ageless book in swishy Waterstones in Dublin in 1996. Photographs of Joan Miró’s tables of found objects: lead weights, scallop shells, pinecones. I meditate on tins of brushes and paint-accreted benches. Philip Hunter said the studio is where we belong. Meaning, the artworld is nonsense, just keep to work. “Miró with his biro,” he jested with an eye-rhyme. Waiting, I open a page on a bookstand for days: black figures, watery air, full-scale sunlight.  

Day 10 How many people read the same novel every year? I don’t mean the video, I mean read the book. Academics with a syllabus, perhaps. I read parts of James Joyce’s two big books every year to write scripts, seminar papers, lyrics, and other things for the annual festival of Bloomsday in Melbourne. I re-open the pages somewhere and two things always happen: the pleasure aroused by the beauty of his language, and laughter. Odysseus took a Latin turn sometime and became Ulysses. Here are 100 words on the title word: Ulysses (July) Ulysses navigates its way into English in the seventeenth century, the body of a boat, a mast, a prow ploughing waves of esses. You-list-seas, though Joyce’s Irish was Who’ll-is-ayes, or even Ooooh-lessees, a susurrus of Aegean in its wake. His Ulysses is a wanderer, but deceit (an Homeric attribute) is not in him, only an impromptu cunning. He’s cheated in June who by July will be home again, again. Joyce wrote of his “usylessly unreadable Blue ...

Psalm: Heidelberg West Day 9 The Bible and Shakespeare are non-starters on a desert island. The rules of that game imply that the island consists of the Bible and Shakespeare. Here is the book that I have been reading every year, in one way or another, though especially in church, since I was born. It is the Book of Psalms. All 150 appear in the Bible, but also in every kind of translation in pew notes, overheads, powerpoints, CD booklets, &c. Lately someone has been painting the word around more desolate parts of Melbourne. 'Someone', though it's probably a collective of psalmists, given the varying calligraphic styles of PSALM. In keeping with this exercise, here are 100 words on a word in the title: Psalm (July) Lately we sing the oldest songs. The only book I’ve heard every year of my life. Lately, this July, I heard an explanation of discernment. We live with God within the spacious confines of consolation and desolation. Whoever we are in all t...