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Monday, 28 November 2005
Alright Poirot, calm down.
In Sunderland right now, clutching a flatscreen monitor amongst the duos and trios of people huddling around their terminals not for interest, nor information, but for warmth. Governmental spending means each and every student has access to an internet-ready, Windows XP, Pentium 4 radiator.
November means snow, and I woke today – late and refreshed - to flurries, blizzards and miniature white-outs. The snow chased down the back-alleys and settled upon the frozen ground, although soon dissolved into the gutters and drains. At the feet of damp, tottering walls lay small triangles of drift and upon the grass remained a cracked top of ice. I ate eggs and bread in silence and waited for the water to heat-up. The gas fire has stopped working, the bill unknowingly unpaid.
Monday is university, and has all day has been a circumnavigation of thesis and thought, a wary circling of topic. My field is narrowing, and by process of exclusion rather that inclusion I am left with a few key points of interest. I shall leave them to form of their own accord, nodes joining unconsciously with each hour, with each glance at the darkening sky.
About to go and meet old work-mates now before my evening lecture. The temporary nature of my multiple careers mean I have many past acquaintances and very few regrets. Nothing lies too long when formulating a future. I found heaps of money today, around fifty pounds in creased fivers, shining pound-coins and fifty pence pieces. It has really scared me. I don’t think it is my money, it was in the external pocket of my rucksack and I would never keep my money there. I would never have that much in cash either. Someone is going to come and get me, I know it. I’d better spend it quick.
Interestingly, I have been postulating upon the detective novel today. Perhaps I am in the centre of a benevolent case? All detective fiction starts with an initially unexplainable occurrence and works backwards until motive and means are revealed. The money is not mine, it is being written. How did it get there, they ask? My life is operating within fiction, within its realms, ordered by it. You are, depressingly, what you study.
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Sunday, 27 November 2005
Plan B.
Watching the outside fade, deep within the crumple of linen, I have actively lost the day. I slept through the hours of daylight and now, approaching a reasonable evening hour I intend to read and sleep and no more. The filthy weather continues in the North East, banshees in the guttering and floods in the backyard. A reason enough to leave the house only once - to the supermarket for bread, cheese and yoghurt. The rest of these hours have been spent with a little light reading, a browsing of journals and a familiarising with the words and wherefores of the literati.
Poems ride close to my mind at the moment, I haven’t produced a piece for a while. This space does not lend itself to the poetic form (in terms of intention and limitation of formatting) and nor should it. I am gently thinking about my forthcoming poetry readings in the New Year, where I shall be offering supporting verses to established poets, held within the relief of a dormant audience.
Tomorrow, though, more urgency is needed. My academic work must be tailored and honed, slimmed down and given a point-of-entry. I must assuage my distractive efforts, suppress the glimmer of recreation and apply myself to the folders of handwritten notes and the indexes of critical volumes. The results will become apparent, a swift rejection of forms unknown (the rock on which literary criticism is built) and a sturdy, plodding discussion between two points. The points however are imaginary and solely mine. A to B is my interest and my input.
A space has now opened itself to me; the debris of the last two weeks can be picked through and my calendar re-established. There is no time for emptiness, no template for inactivity and the rubric of hard-work condones only production, ethic and production. I must have something to show, something to give, for all my efforts over the next two weeks; a visual indicator of an applied mind, sat between a coffee cup and an overflowing ashtray.
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Thursday, 24 November 2005
Pinnacle of achievement.
Final day of the film-festival today. So much has happened over the last few days, such eloquent, symphonic peaks and troughs, that to talk of them is simply to redeem a feeling of exhaustion. You can assume the details, for the event followed every event that involves planning – it held disasters. Not threatening disasters, nor undermining disasters but momentary ones, the sky caving and the ground rising. In the midst of a schedule, a minute out of place is a seismic shift.
I am early to the office, writing a morning blog which is unlike me these days – I write to filter and file, not to prepare. But this is the time when I have the energy, first in the office, trailing down the long, frosted hill into town with handfuls of people wrapped in sleep. The bells in the town ring, provoking a start. People below walk in both directions.
In the room next to me, a fiscal meeting is prepared, the CEO and his PA abbreviate business plans and forge a solidarity of strategy. They make cups of tea for each other, gaining respect or buying magnanimity, this is the way of the world. Assymetrical, imbalanced, order denies a fulcrum. Affairs are lopsided and conflicts are a redress.
I have been offered several jobs as a direct result of my work for this one. Some of them were offered to me while drunk and the alcohol mist does not permit my recall. Murmurs of Edinburgh, rumours of running, commercials, art regeneration, audio-visual showcases. What does all this mean? I did not study this, not wait for this, not expect it.
Treading naieve, I sit tight and am patiently watching for an arrival. I fell into a career, I will tell my children, and you can too. I have been asked to give a talk to eager university-newcomers on how to pursue media-sector jobs, what shall I say? Have no ambition, decide what you would hate to do, have faith in the momentum of nothing and through luck and nepotism you will achieve your non-goals?
Hopefully, I am good at what I do. We have to assume this, for my progression will not depend on my rhetoric's dynamism, nor on my curriculumed expertise, nor on who I know. And so we have to assume that I do what I do well, and that is the crux. Simply do what you do, because none of us wanted this, and this surely isn't advice.
I am bad at the networks, I fail in the circles. Contacts and contacting are weaknesses, morally. Does this end me before I am? Does the ethic of labour count for anything? Does my endless questioning tire you? Is this post going anywhere? Will I really get paid tomorrow?
I decided about half-way through this to finish this post, instantly. These words are my lie. My final piece of advice therefore: trust your intuition. And never be your own editor. That's what I'll tell those freshers when I bore them shitless.
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Wednesday, 23 November 2005
Site.
Backdated this one, making up for lost time. Application to other circumstances similar (perhaps identical on the surface) is allowed & forgiven. Create a template and displace across weeks; this is another Monday, is another Wednesday. Time-honoured, a mould of learning, feeling the same rope slip through fingers over and over again, the will to grasp evident in cogitative tracing but motor-skills ignore the impulses.
He is a collector of books, interested in the covers over the uncovering. New editions hold a fascination, yet another allusion to unpick. The final allegory – a retranslation. Who edited? do the page numbers remain the same? where do the appendices lie? Follow the serif of that type with your eyes and ask – does this increase something? My reading has hit a wall, held dead. It is all too much. But occupation is on the way, my other distractions are clearing with each morning that opens and so I expect to return soon. There is Kundera to expose, challenging his interfering narrator on his claims to clarity. Kundera wishes for it both ways; the freedom of fiction and the authority of history. Of course, in doing so he reverses them – history is freedom (a writing, an authorship of time) and fiction is authority (the individual as truth). The relations here are given, specifically in The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, through the eyes and ties of memory.
DeLillo looked promising. Previous works digested, enjoyed and remembered intellectually. Check. Seminal modern work. Check. Influential and progressive literary friends. Check. Nominal sense of postmodernity and contemporality. Check. It all went wrong with Cosmopolis though, written without true emotion, taking the construction of a world (the novelist’s greatest allowance) and cleaning it out, paring it down, sterilising it. I have only read it in starts and fits, never conducive to drawing out theme and intention, but I feel no love. However, this may lead to an essay; disillusion (or seeing what you’re trying to do but knowing you cannot do it) with a text provides concrete foundations for an argument. You have to search for the validating components of the work.
Presentations to be given on Poe (flanuer, narrators, doubles) and Ishiguro (ghosts and memory, duality) are also due in a couple of weeks so hopefully this space can return to form, be of use to me and of interest to a reader. It is a testing ground and a boundary point, so bear with me.
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Monday, 21 November 2005
Adjourned
You grow expectant, but you should know that my shoulders creak with bags of books and I have seen each hour, by its number, in sequence. I counted them, made them, revisited them. My mornings are your years - grades of time, the same point in time, massive time - and I sit here with pens and papers, colouring the same space. I occupy it with ink, layers of hue seeping into the paper until it rips, a sodden, fleshy blue pulp.
Torn through, I colour the desk.
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Tuesday, 15 November 2005
Rewriting without the vowels.
The room works through a loose geometry, fading time progressing through non-math; sketchily reasoned lines of organised affairs, the stuff of life. No paperweights here, the tower either burdens itself or topples over onto less significant clutches of distinction, lesser piles – a dated newspaper, the receipt for an electric radiator, discarded notebooks. Stacked rectangles of lecture notes are everywhere, sets of printed film festival brochures too, all bound by elastic, ripe for distribution, bound for coffee tables, ripe for discussion.
My low brown table supports a pot of compost, rotting matter not reading matter, a tub centred with a dead stem. Early frosts came by surprise and in twos, a pair of Sunday and Monday colds that declared the cordyline sundance palm dead by Tuesday.
An arriving winter was felt in the cuffs and collar of my borrowed jacket earlier tonight, painful extremities announcing the change of season, but only after the city’s window displays had heralded it first, chiming and garish. I need to buy other things before presents though, my shoes have holes and I wish for warmer, more functional outer garments. Playing with vision the wind made shadows on the kerb, shadows seen as huddling rats, first bunched and then fleeing, shadows dispersed as the sturdy wind parts branches overhead and sprays the streetlight this way and that. I walked quick.
On my return home I got into a lukewarm shower, pulling on the sad whine of aging pipes, my lathering a dry gesture under a trickle, the water barely there. I made it brief as clouds of damp breath circled exhalations in the bathroom and I dressed with economy before remembering to rinse the bath, taking care to try and wash away the cracks in the enamel.
And to here we come, a resumption of journaling, a reclamation of my own time, a repossession it from sleep and chore. Knifing it into the floorboards, the story of the day, the novel of the hour, it acts as a leaving and a return, a dutiful marking and a pleasant fleshing-out. There are details here that exist only here, but the coldness really does sit just at my windowsill, nestling into the ivy and brick, and the time really does gradually fade into tomorrow, a tomorrow where I face a few long walks and a few even longer hours.
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Monday, 14 November 2005
On detecting two authors.
On detecting two authors, I discovered Edgar Allen Poe to be the false embarrassment to American literary history, our fragmentary flaneur and psychological botanist of the asphalt. Inventor of detectives, subjective obsessor of the ephemeral and the epistemological, he walks at night with supernatural, absurd steps and whilst circling psychological truths with an overabundance of meaning he cannot help but fall upon social comment and deliberately scything prejudice. He is all in one the trace of causes, the solver of mysteries and the mystery of a solution.
Paul Auster is to be found as his pupil, the arch-identifier with transparent cities and master-dislocater of genre, a geographer of ontologies, all beard and brain and failing eyes. Disappearing notebooks means disappearing author, he vanishes into his trilogies and translations, drawn into the complexities of city-plans of phone-calls in the night and gently ridiculous speech patterns. He knows of a knowing, and is the man of reconstruction; the thread of his discourse always concealing an awkward sensuality, the cut of his remark always filling a space you thought you saw.
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Sunday, 13 November 2005
The cinemas.
Here again, five days later, with carrot and coriander soup having sulked for a week, burst in and out of conversation with myself, impacted explorations into purpose & place, written nothing and eaten very little. Sunday is spent in the cinema, alone in the offices amongst the dead PCs and silent phones the rustle of paper provides echoes.
In this street there are two cinemas, one in use and the other abandoned. The sit opposite each other. The old, disused Odeon cinema projects to no-one, it has been left to the pigeons and towering piles of cardboard and building materials, it occupies itself. The multiplex round the corner is made of glass, the old Odeon is five stories of crafted art-deco turns and ledges, pillared overhangs and a classic, theatre frontage.
I watch it from over the road, here on the third floor of my cinema. We still show films. The corridors are wood-panelled and each door contains a pane of frosted glass with the function of the room printed upon the glass. The shelves that line the walls are cluttered and heaving with old film guides, festival brochures and boxes full of reference to obscure silver-screen movements and actresses. When actresses were actresses.
I’m reading quietly. Occasionally someone slips into a room behind me, the gentle pull of the door disturbing my calm, a reflection of someone I used to wake to, the frame setting and disappearing as they enter, but for now I am reading. I have been missing her for weeks, she is back in four.
I lay in bed this morning and thought for twenty minutes before getting up, showering and dressing. There is no need to write any of this down, I thought. Much has happened but that is all. They don’t want to hear of that, of the weeks tremors and tantrums, the pitching and lurching and falls and rises. Days passed, became numbered and then calendared and then forgotten. Monday felt like 1998.
Memory is a passage, a link between things, a direction of intention; not a diary. The sun’s breadth is climbing up the wall of the old, disused cinema. Rusted frames show where the O D E O N used to light up at dusk, five vertical squares. Now they split the three o’clock autumn light into divisions, parallelograms of the afternoon, a gradual shift of a cubist sundial, a movement from reflection to intention.
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Monday, 07 November 2005
Quitter.
A viral fury is taking over me at this, three o’clock.
All elements - animal/vegetable/mineral - are here to confound me, to confound and antagonise me, me in this wretched state of tonsillitis and anger. Under glowering skies, a rapid blankness is moving in opposition to the morning’s relative optimism. I even went to work this morning, so bright and low was the sun.
Right now, the criss-cross of streets surrounding the recreation ground are cowering beneath the transmission of rain, a telegraph borne upon the sudden turn of colour. First though, the wind stops and second, the temperature falls. Then the colour turns, a bleaching approaching from the west. The recreation ground, clogged with drifts of sodden tree matter, the odd-even terrace numbering, the pitching whine of emergency vehicles – all wait the evening and the rain.
Left the office this morning after just one hour, too little air, too little motivation. The cursor just sat, blinking. Home is where the heat is.
Trying to warm Cordyline Sundance palm by the radiator; forgot that she prefers Mediterranean climes. Probably won’t make it through the night. Have spent all day trying to find a poem, a prose passage, a piece of text. For an experiment, I need something blank, without weight like the sky. I cannot find anything suitable. I even looked back through my old work, but I stopped became distressed at how far gone I am, how little progress today’s writing shows in comparison with yesterdays, with last months, with last years.
I’m giving up.
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Thursday, 03 November 2005
Gift horse.
This site been quiet as a petulant protest at my inane life.
Today was better though, made a truce with myself over breakfast and a promise to inject some vitality into the onrushing hours. so I attacked the phones with gusto, organised the brochure distribution of 15,000 film programmes, and rescheduled the schedules once more.
Yesterday was a non-day, a blur of dehydration and boredom - needed to raise my game beyond the memories of last night's drinking (a heady cocktail of anarcho-sketch-comedy and electro-pop-fuzz) into a morning of meetings and clipboards and the endless checking of contracts. Couldn't do it. Health and Safety tours abounded, descending rusted staircases, brittle frames clacking against the HSBC offices next door, down past the bins and into the alley. And then back again, to the very top this time, with feeling, a different firedoor and a slightly different give to the pushbar, but the same descent, just a ceiling further into the air.
I faded fast, left work for lunch and never came back. The spinach wrap made me do it. I got my hair cut. It looks no different. It looked shit before, now it's just going to take a lot longer till it looks different again.
So that was yesterday. But allow me to take liberties - this is today. And today was better because even though I thought I'd left the oven on, I hadn't and so I wore headphones to work. I said hello to people in the building as I got there. I smiled at the cleaner. I offered people tea, answered politely on the phone. I even borrowed a hat and wore it all day, comically.
They made me leave the office.
Scurrying into town on errands, I was taken to the Lit and Phil Society, or rather the building next door. Cold marble staircase, double-doored lift (carpeted walls and ceiling) and lovely Edinburgh landings, great playgrounds of polished stone between one door and the next, and inside an airy room, emptied of every surplus item except a large rectangular table at which sat six designers at their flatscreens, and racks and racks and racks of printed t-shirts. All screen-print and tasty graphic, I was sold by the workspace, sold by the workmanship. In the blinding admiration, I staggered about shook hands and made towards the exit. Someone thrust something into my hand, I mumbled thanks and left, into the jaws of the lift or down the twist of the stairs, I forget which, but I left and outside on the street everything was fine, traffic moving the right-way, birds not flying upside-down.
In my hands was a t-shirt. What a lovely place, I thought, what lovely people. What a lovely world. Hello you, lovely!No need to go back to the office now. I'll go home, warm.
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