The devil is the detail

A blog would be nothing without a large dose of solipsism. So here's a list of the pictures, posters and poems I have pinned up around my desk:

1. Roger McGough's poem, My cat and i:

Girls are simply the prettiest things
My cat and i believe
And we're always saddened
When it's time for them to leave

We watch them titivating
(that often takes a while)
And though they keep us waiting
My cat and i just smile

We like to see them to the door
Say how sad it couldn't last
Then my cat and i go back inside
And talk about the past.

2. A poster depicting George W Bush as a Second World War airman, standing in front of his plane and being watched by Arabs. The slogan is:

Heeeeeeere's

FREEDOM!

Now do we what we say, or....

WE'LL KILL

THE REST OF YOU!

3. This piece from the Guardian, because it has a photograph of Carnegie the cat standing on the card index at the Rochester Public Library in New York.

4. The lyrics to Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. I sing this from start to finish when I play it, which is no fun for anybody but myself. When your gravity fails, and negativity don't pull you through.

5. A postcard reproduction of Joseph Wright's An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump.

6. A map of the world with all the national flags. It mentions Kampuchea and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

7. The Italian Pulp Fiction poster depicted here.

8. A postcard reproduction of Georges Braque's Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece.

9. A postcard reproduction of a detail from Bartolomé Bermejo's St Michael Triumphant over the Devil with the Donor Antonio Juan. (The detail is an image of the devil: use the zoom function here and it's toward the bottom right.)

10. The Whiskas Cat Calendar 2004.

11. A picture of a kitten aiming a rifle out of a window like a sniper.

12. A frame from the very first issue of the web cartoon Get Your War On:

If you could say one thing to God right now, what would it be?

I think I would say "Thank you God, for your healing gift of religion". What about you?

13. A photograph of Guthrum.

14. A photograph of Alfred.

15. A passage from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass - part of the thirty-second section of Song of Myself:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained.
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

The passage is the one spoken by Christopher Lee under Edward Woodward's window in The Wicker Man. Ingrid Pitt plays the librarian. Very much the sort of librarian I'd like to be.