I was ready to write a tango of Fleur Jaeggy and Eileen Myles, a splendid non-pair, I thought, to share a dance floor, when a chance re-reading of an unfinished piece about a radio programme called 'Monday Night at Home' from 2008 made me think how I might finish it, and, into my mind fresh from a long sleep on the bookshelves outside the bedroom, came a book I bought in Paris called Sur Un Air de Scarlatti. I may not have read it for decades but I often think of the title and occasionally notice the book on which I put an orange cover since its own was decrepit, using paper with which I made chinese lantern lampshades for my otherwise charmless flat in Paris. 

Sur Un Air de Scarlatti by Edmond Jaloux is from 1928, printed on soft watermarked paper with uneven edges, dark woodcuts settled into the page and dropped capitals in orangey red at the start of each section. I have always known, without looking inside the book to remind myself, that it was a tale that had slipped effortlessly into my state of mind after I found it in a box outside a secondhand bookshop further along the rue Durantin where I lived. Yes, I thought the other day, the radio programme in my story could somehow end with that. The narrator, who already shares a number of my tastes, could have this one too, whatever it was.

Something to do with the french language, with being a young and dream-filled passionate reader looking for as many truths as possible on the page rather than on the street — though this being Paris the street had truths of its own — I was in a nearly constant state of heightened receptivity, devoured by my own emotions, like the narrator of this tale who goes to Venice in search of more indifference, greater calm, less involvement, and feels he's succeeding until, on one of his nocturnal walks he finds a garden where a a violinist is playing the Scarlatti sonata, a mysterious young woman accompanied by visions that he too can see, visions of a century before, 'cette nostalgie d'un Paradis de verre filé dispersé depuis le Déluge', and finds himself ensnared as never before.

So, shall I leave my radio announcer, Thom Katch, happily stranded in Edmond Jaloux's Venice, chasing visions and the light dream of a happiness without intoxication and without tomorrow?