Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Qu'est-ce qu'un cendrier





  
  On a stack of bedside
  reading, likely to be
  acknowledged sometime
  here, I laid a wish-
  bone I had promised a
  man to keep for him,
  in a vessel now obso-
  lete in this house, a
  shining ashtray from
  dinners drawn from an
  urban cocotte I loved.






























Ian McEwan
Sweet Tooth
Jonathan Cape, 2012©

Peter J. Conradi
A Very English Hero
  The Making of 
  Frank Thompson
Bloomsbury, 2012©

Baccarat photo, Laurent




4 comments:

  1. There is a WWII brass ashtray here at the apartment, a relic from the place's former owner. It's never used, but I don't exactly want to part with it. Yours is very smart, I must say.

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    1. A commendable relic and a binding provenance! I collected (why?) a WWI Dunhill trench lighter; I sense it is still around, somewhere. Kind of you to admire my glass, DJS; it might work nicely for a ticket stub from the Met, come to think of it ..

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  2. That's what Cendrillon was named after...
    She's our french "cinderella".
    Actually, I come to wonder then what cinderella stands for. Could it be an ancient word? something like: cinder = ash ...?

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    Replies
    1. Possibly in changing climate conditions, we'll have cause, GW, to read your research with more than etymological interest. Or maybe not. :) But I suppose we will not give up on Rossini. Thank you for the suggestion.

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