87. Richard Hamilton. He foresaw his pale body. 
						      Graphite and watercolour  
                              Saw this upstairs, in the British Museum, of all places, even though the National Gallery of Australia apparently owns   one as well, and the title is from the Lotus Eaters chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses: 
                              "Enjoy a bath now: clean trough of water, cool enamel, the gentle tepid stream. This is my body.  
                                He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked,   in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw   his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly   upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled   curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp   father of thousands, a languid floating flower." 
                              The chapter begins with Leopold Bloom leaving his home   at 7 Eccles Street, walking to the Westland Row post office to collect a   letter from Martha Clifford, with whom he's been in a kind of erotic   pen-friend relationship, but before he can read it must endure McCoy's   conversation concerning the details of Paddy Dignam's funeral that   afternoon, finally reading it under the nearby railway bridge, the   letter ends with P.S. Do tell me what kind of your perfume does your wife use. I want to know.   Bloom tears it up, as he must destroy the evidence, he then sits in the   All Hallows church for a while incoherently pondering pretty women and   nature of communion and considers that priests would do better to rinse   out the communion chalice with Guinness rather than wine, and he thinks   about Molly a lot, among a thousand other seemingly disconnected and   random thoughts, gets distracted by leaflets for plays, newspapers,   advertisements, buys scented lemon soap from Sweny's in Lincoln Place,   and ends in the Turkish Baths in Leinster Lane near Trinity College,   with the lemon soap.  
                            Re-read Joyce's Ulysses during the year I lived in   Dublin, Tailors Court in Bride Street, which is actually mentioned in   the book. Blind to the world up in a shebeen in Bride street after closing time. My new copy being bought from Hodges Figgis, the bookshop which is also mentioned. The   virgin at Hodges Figgis' window on Monday looking in for one of the   alphabet books you were going to write. Keen glance you gave her. Also created walking agendas from Hart & Knuth's A Topographical Guide To James Joyce's Ulysses, that I bought from a basement bookshop in Nassau Street. He crossed at Nassau street corner and stood before the window of Yeates and Son, pricing the field glasses.   Discovering that 7 Eccles Street no longer exists (although it's door   was then being exhibited in The Bailey on Duke Street), but I refrained   from buying the scented soap which can still be sourced from Sweny's,   and I'm not sure if the Post Office in Westland Row still exists, if it   does then I couldn't find it, just the railway booking office, but   definitely walked under the railway bridge at what's now Pearse station,   refraining from tearing up any letters, and passed All Hallows. The   Turkish baths no longer exist, but I'm more yer shower type guy then yer   bath type anyway.   |