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Tuesday, 31 January 2006
Impending stanza not forthcoming.
Journeys by car at night remind me of the great, modern Asian metropolises. Fragments of life, redolent in the shadows and giving fresh leave to the senses mark the pace of A to B, all the time experiencing a nothing landscape, shells of buildings and traces of roads, for without human activity, without dwelling, there is no place. It is all of the lights.
Today was untoward, profitable and meek. Sly agendas were reached by lunchtime, piping secret messages into the ears of subordinates. You will do my work, please. But meetings were held still, I had to attend them, the rules of delegation could not be applied (namely, that firstly you must chose the right person for the right job, and secondly that you must allow them to get on with it) and it proved productive, teasing out layers of detail and form, plugging them into my timetables and schedules which grow by the day, unwieldy behemoths of grid and yore.
Courier practice round town, acquainting myself with the players, the fractious divides in local politics and the governing of authority. Who leads whom? I sauntered about the streets with a frostbitten fettle, menacing my way down alleys just to stop my toes from curling with the impending late afternoon freeze. Down Grey Street past the bastions of architecture, a glance into the doorway of the Lloyds building and into the Theatre Royal, before cutting up Highbridge St and slipping through The Shambles.
In Central Square things change. As a new build it orchestrates itself and the complex is complex. No amount of water-bearing pyramid fountains will ease my shivers but I’m up to the fourth floor in the mirrored lift and back down again before you can say ‘cultural investment’. These people want to know what is good for us.
Meanwhile, but really after, the day finishes, seemingly not as cold as last night but cold enough to justify an early retreat into my bed. No poems yet again of course, and with the poetry evening tomorrow, I have begun to worry.23:45 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Monday, 30 January 2006
Scholastic ordinary.
A brief retort at this late hour after a return to termlife and school. World literature and its comparisons this evening, setting us up for the term. It is nice to approach some theory, to reason with the structures of it all – even if the literature itself is in short supply due to the library’s erratic loaning systems.
Walking up the central staircase, the concrete column to the top, I thought of something, but have now forgotten it. Amnesiaced by Goethe, I don’t where to start. His oppositions of literature as a horizon, as a normative horizon, have startled me already. Goethe was always unapproachable, too bound in reverence and criticism to even begin reading. So perhaps I will; start with his ideas of criticism, his notions of a world literature that is dually universal – both to the lofty and the profane.
Within this, many rises and paradoxes are promoted. But most of all it is my tiredness that prevails. I live a languorous, ponderous journey during these long, dark days. It is a blessed grind though, full of exclamation and grounding, and I am learning, slowly, but I am learning. Most of all, I am looking forward to Goethe.
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Saturday, 28 January 2006
Celebre.
An excuse for a post, bare-boned, bare-backed, barely there or here.
A trial, a mediation, a reggae, a prophet, a dirge, an expectation, a rose, a rise, a set of pearl eyes, the motion of dragonflies, and then the end. You ended it for me.
Happy birthday king sturge, you am die bestum.
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Wednesday, 25 January 2006
Breconridge.
Achieving something of a fad, these early mornings, pearl light and brisk skip across the traffic lights. Past the felled trees, a community centre is building, and round the punjabi restaurant, and to home - briefly - before setting off to work. Half a pint of orange juice, half a pint of water, the obligatory marmite and tea.
The occasion of my birth has happened twice. Once and first in a snow-capped, red mountain range sitting out upon a frozen veranda amongst the iced refuse sacks and frosted asphodels. It was Colorado Springs, 2003 and I was reading, clutching to something. Then the weather snapped and we got taken upon the highway in convoy, three of us in tan coloured people-shifters, long wheelbase and drinks-holders in the back. The drifts of snow got deeper and the herds of buff and cow grew more sporadic but also denser - they fought against the cold those animals. We stopped for petrol at a sloped, attended gas station. Inside, the fridge was full and the door was open.
The mountain whined and points of light shone out, a zig-zag of macadam just visible as space between the trees. the pines grew up and out, positioned preposterously on overhangs and bends. The drifts were true drifts now, footprinted and full of history and we peered through the reflections as the car slowed into gear upon the treacherous corners, looking for mountain lions and even bears.
Stopping at a small wooden bridge, filmed with ice, we wondered. I walked, accompanied by three men and two women, all brave enough against the cold. The children stayed in the cars, laughing and sleeping at intervals. We weren't long, perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, but it seemed long enough as we trudged up a compacted hill following the trails of our breath, much like this morning only more urgent and it was not work that we hurried for.
At the rise, just as fatigue began to break in, we summoned ourselves and paused. Looking around, we knew what we were here for, but the faces stared at each other first, in solemn silence, an approval of sorts before the act of looking.
At this height, the entire state could be seen.
Four crumples of mountain ridges, intersected by planes of sky and a delicate roll of land down onto the flats where valleys eased into farmland and the tiny collections of civilisation, commissioned to our eyes only by clusters of light. It was not dark but such was the scale of the thing that only the places illuminated were able to advertise, the rest was a dark guess, a landscaped grope before the uselessness of our eyes. The outlines we made clear, a difference in warmth more than anything, the sky simply registered as more nothing than the rest of the scene laid out before us.
Later, back in the car and returning home, we noticed the eighty-foot silent drop of the frozen waterfall just beyond the ledge, just beneath the land and the sky.
09:40 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 24 January 2006
The stone.
There is a man we know, we call him the stone. The stone is not a stone. He eats, breathes, smokes and sleeps. Every now and again we hear rumours of his commitment to another in a brief night-bound affair of intercourse, sordid amongst the trees. They – his partners - never come back to visit the stone.
Perhaps they fall into him as everything falls into him. In a room, he sits and waits, pulling on his cigarette, you can smell that pungent stench from down the street. Open the door and there he is, sitting, smoking, breathing. You take a step inside and fall into him.
This is his nature, he is impassive and impassable, from shin to ear.
Music is played in the room and he swallows it, note for note, without flinching. The electricity bills are huge, one cannot tell whether the light is on or not. One detects a flickering as the bulb’s emittance is cast into the room’s space and just as quickly it disappears. His processes begin and end at the same time, like an utterance in the present tense, no sooner formed than destroyed. He is carbon neutral.
The question of matter is often raised. What is he? One can see him, the stone, he exists and his edges are correct, they coincide with an environment. The stone obeys physics. His heart sinks the same as yours or mine. But there are questions that accompany his juncture. These questions are long and convoluted, they are often accompanied by rage or pity and their precise home is hurtful. Indeed, you recognise much of the spite deflecting away from yourself, reluctantly, as though it belonged there.
No-one sees the stone out these days. He used to travel far and wide; a roamer he used to be. But nowadays he just seems to wait, drawing in the long night. Long gone are the days where one could see him striding past a raised doorstep, chin tucked in jacket, avoiding the breeze. Nowadays he eats the stiff Northeasterlies that pass up and over the terrace wall and into the dusty yard. He eats the dust too, without noticing. The stone rarely notices, he rarely gives notice.
What he did on his roaming, no one knew. Perhaps this was the source of his entombment, the retraction into himself, the hardening of things that led to the perpetual absorption that he hides within? Is that what caused this? He saw too much. He grew accustomed to observation, to analysing the systems and signs around him, so much so that eventually it became not a task, nor a preoccupation, nor a daily literature but a reading. Then, things came to him. They rose and spoke and arrowed and flew into him, until he was backed up against a wall, round a crumbling corner and across the street, backwards through the spiked iron gate and blue front door and slammed into his seat, breathless.
And there now, he resides, for days and years, because neither matter and he owns them all, he takes them all and they fall into him, a drain upon the day. The stone is weightless because terms are an irrelevance, timeless because measurements hold no balance in his presence, and blind because his only directions are inward. The stone just sits and waits, he eats, sleeps and breathes, but mostly he just waits, waiting always, waiting for the tumbling of things.
19:50 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Back to work and then home again.
The wilful urge to write, here at my desk, my body cropped in shirt and trousers. Occasionally this need burgeons; there is no direct quality assurance, nor any guarantee that writing will take place, but something gives a reminder of the click and process of it all, the warm satisfaction of words. Writing gains its authority from language, simply. No work today, or rather work but from home.
The slog into town just couldn’t be managed after all this weeks events, indeed it has been too long since I wrote here. There has been a pooling since my last post, a collection of ideas around the joints and sockets of my creativity. At all the bends and joins, the flexible connections between concepts, something resides, something with purpose and energy. In denying it space though, I run a risk. To deny an idea, to suppress it with the confidence that it will return, focussed and stronger, takes a little faith. It is not a question of memory or recall, but rather relevance.
In ignoring the rise of an idea, we hope that it resurfaces after time as timeless, or at least independent of circumstance, that it holds strength of its own. The work of the writer is then to ingratiate the idea back into an artistic calendar, back into an area of re-relevance, needle-and-cottoning the concept back into the stitch of the everyday.
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Monday, 23 January 2006
You've been watching.
Eighteen bands over fourteen hours, a murk between them in the haze that hangs over the moor. We’ve just finished tying leads, the remainders and I, pulling them and separating from the bundle, unplugging from the mixing desk and wrapping them in figures of eight.
Remembrance comes in hurdles, mountable and singular. Back then things worked in order, but now we face a retrospective, turning to see ourselves, held in the crux of a morning and the cradle of an afternoon. It ended with an evening, with dancing and polyrhythms, megaphone distortion and shattered beats, filling a room with intention and edge. But it ended long before that with mixes and breaks, glitches and beats. It started of course with balkan genius buffonery.
Previously we were haunted, stalked and driven to the shallows by pop epithets, tranquil lacerations upon a Daily Express Sunday, reprimanded juvenile sex and odes to mental health. We had drawn previously upon stand-up basses, twirling the mics and moustaches, a joyful frenzy, a rise and a breakdown, a breakdown and a rise, into glory and euphoria, all the measure of a train hitting upon blues and ecstacy, and a banjo elegy roaring at us from beautiful round man with a giant voice.
In the day we sat and waited and took filmed breaths between dulcet guitar absence-and-loss complexes, and a man with a black and white rickenbacker (but not a website), a scottish edge and a purring intonation. There were others of course, but names were never my forte. I drop them all too often.
Thankyou to all. x
05:40 Posted in Sonic | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Thursday, 19 January 2006
Invisible jukebox.
Square-eyes and times-new-roman retina. Too long spent in front of dim screens and shrunken type, trying to learn about the world. The paper is full of radioactive scaremongering, informed decisions about secondary schooling and exposes into data addicts and high-street hunter-gathers. Meanwhile, the light fades and another evening prepares itself, hoping for dim lights and glasses of beer.
A lull before the storm, preparatory talks and mails completed, everyone briefed. There can be no more to do, just arrange and cajole and hope. The festival is in its final hours and all seems quiet. No alarms, no surprises. Lost of a couple of days somewhere, not too keen to get them back. Last night my drinking was curtailed by a sodden walk home, sobering up amongst the clouds of damp, the city’s moors held supine by a close set of skies. Still, we talked and resolved, earlier having drunk briefly and spoken of post-MA study, its benefits and focuses. Restricted to three pints, the conversation halted and we were up and out into the night, close in contact with those low, dark skies.
And before that even, we had talked of the poetry night, erroneously starting the evening with a sheet headed ‘concerns’ but gradually pulled the talk back, away from snapping and sniping and into the realms of constructive thought. Discipline was the centre, establishing a mind-set of respect and experimentation. We must think of the tiny things first, the openings and environs, think of a gloved control, velvet revolutions.
Now however, now to the streets, walking amongst the squawks of schoolchildren and lines of cars, off to deliver two sets of keys, having been relieved of my duty. I shall pace the streets and listen to music, setting the urban off against an invisible, inaudible soundtrack for me, and me only.
16:52 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, 17 January 2006
Avoidance techniques.
Avoidance, that pleasured discretion. At this moment, according to schedule and reason, I should be overlooking my essays, crossing the ‘i’s and dotting the ‘t’s, pulling out the strands of a bibliography and weaving in the footnotes. I have become meticulous, a learned response that saves time. Just so much as a secondary glance requires me to note the author, date, publishing house and title of the book at the top of the A4 lined sheet. Similarly when writing essays, the footnote is the first to go in, before the formatting or the quotation marks even. A tiny number, then a page number and an abbreviation, my shorthand unreadable to the outsider.
I skim the paragraphs, looking for clumsy over/undersized sentences, run ons, tautologies, and the reuse of adjectives. A thesaurus is the most important book I have. Today though, I am avoiding.
I will complete this task before lunch, but with the main body of the essay done, with the intellectual hurdles and hoops passed I can relax into my day for the first time in weeks. It is for the best that I know none of my tutors or students have found this writing. So much time spent lamenting, circling and discussing. It functions as a window into my boredom at times, or a playground for plagiarists at others. Then again, perhaps they have found it. I have no way of knowing, or caring.
In the mean time, I refresh my browser waiting for a mail. Outlook Express refuses to work, so to the internet it is, with all its potencies of avoidance; the newspapers, the music reviews, the mp3 downloading sites, the endless endless weblogs, the submission guidelines for publishing houses. In deed some of these are my next pursuits – buy some music, construct a manuscript from my recent body of poetry, write an article or two. In their own way, all avoidances of writing the necessary, flawed novel, the novel I know lies somewhere between the type and the floorboards.
12:44 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
In The Reins
Calexico and Iron & Wine combine with a pastoral scene that mimics the title. Bordered, edgily and untidily by white, it is not a border as such but unpainted canvas. The impression of the piece is formed in primary colours, bled out into various shades and textures by over indulgent watercolours. A red, translucent horse stands behind a viciously perspectived, In The Reins, by a mottled wooden fence, jagged and slanting. The horse’s mane is detailed, brush strokes of coarse hair, but everything else is left to outline, a mistake of green obscuring part of his front leg. A startling, luminescent white rein bridles his head and leads into the hand of the man.
The man is blue, framed by thin wavers of tight red, immaculate detailing given to the pockets and curt of his shirt and collar and also his hands, the grasp of the fingers highlighted above the lumpy, playful ridges of the hills in the background. The varied, darkening of the blue background is dominated by two large, pale circles. One surrounds the man’s head, or rather the absence where his head should be, and the other surrounds the sliver of a quarter moon lazing in the centre of the sky, propped in its position by concentric broken circles of small, curved pink lines.
12:43 Posted in Sonic | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Summer In The Southeast.
Summer In The Southeast is a beauty. Dirty glaciers in the foreground fall away onto rising, icy slopes with crags of rock, blackened by shadow piercing into the freshness of the air. The mountains sit in the distance, hugged by loose cloud, the wind almost evident in their shape. Deep, scores in the hardened, frozen ground pull the ye towards the peaks and on the far side, a tall lone finger of blurred height, a scratch upon the photograph itself circling its uppermost taper. That is not the first thing of course. The first thing is the blue of the sky, it always is. And then, shortly after, in the journey that all great visual art forces us to make, we travel to the clean lines of the title and artist: Bonny ‘Prince’ Billy in gentle pink, a heavy sans-serif font, and then Summer In The Southeast in bold neon. A stement, an irony both in positioning, choice of photograph, the title, all of it seeks to defy construction and expectation, the snow tumbling in passages and peaks, an effort of distraction and preparation.
12:40 Posted in Sonic | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Fires In Distant Buildings
In collecting digital music, one obviously loses the aesthetics, the clutch of LP sleeve. The purchase of records happens steadily around here, one for each month perhaps. The stack lies of the floor, terrible I’m sure for shape and condition, but it sits there end on waiting to be searched, propped by a line of shoes. The pictures mean something; the sounds are to be written about by someone else, somewhere different.
For now, it suffices that Gravenhurst, as the newest, is the first. Textured skyscrapers, at night as though printed on cloth, a blurred fabric edge to the pinpricks and rectangles of light that emanate from their towering forms. They distort though, like Fires In Distant Buildings, and are collaged with close ups behind a neatly scrawled type, impressions made through careful repletion, stencilled white on black. Disparate and subdued, the lines of construction are obvious, but the timeframe is not. Layered and overlapped, one is unsure of perspective, of which came first and what should dominate. A row of small dot-matrix letters, the end of a linear sequence running to thirteen, sits in the bottom left corner upon what looks like a strip of fabric. Occasional daubs of ochre, vague stultified pinks seep through the transparent areas of the cover and a horrid white tear runs from the centre to the bottom of the square, ripping straight down in fissures from the ‘a’ of distant.
12:38 Posted in Sonic | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Monday, 16 January 2006
Banville, Kundera, intertextuality.
It seems that both the author and the narrator in Kundera's Laughter And Forgetting and Banville's The Newton Letter have lost faith in the primacy of text. Kundera acts in a different, more transparent way to Banville, referring openly to texts by authors such as Thomas Mann and Breton, even going so far as to include a chapter with characters named Voltaire, Petrarch, Lermontov and Goethe. Banville is more subtle, employing undertones of and references to Goethe and Von Hoffmansthal.
The purpose of this intertextuality can be shown through the citing of the two critics who helped to popularise and define the term. Whilst employing different definitions and functions for the word, both Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes wish to show how meaning is disseminated or diminished through intertextuality. For Julia Kristeva, who coined the term, intertextuality involves the continual suspension of meaning through and between texts that reference each other, whilst Roland Barthes suggests that it involves a displacement of meaning, usually onto the reader. In either case, meaning and the author’s responsibility to it, is lost.
The role of the author is being lost in the narrator and vice-versa, and as a result a new author-figure is being created. By forcing the reader to consider not just the text itself, but the narrator’s and the author’s role in its construction, they allow the text to shed its definities of meaning. Kundera goes even further, forcing the reader to question even the very language the text was written in. his work being written in many languages – which is the authoritative version? Kundera tells us in one passage, “If I were to write a novel about that gifted and radical generation, I would call it In Pursuit Of An Errant Act.” The translation of this sentence is taken from the modern version by Aaron Asher. However, the earlier translation by Michael Henry Heim has Kundera naming the novel Stalking A Lost Deed. While it is fair to assume that it is not the reader’s obligation to place the two texts alongside each other in order to pore over the nuances of translation, this example (one of many) shows how both time and authorial intervention can drastically alter the weight and meaning of one sentence, as well as an entire novel.
Kundera places an author’s note right at the beginning of the novel, signalling the relevance that a specific translation holds; something that is often taken for granted in an English-speaking country where multi-linguistic understanding is not the norm. In establishing that the two authors utilise a complicated and multi-layered approach to narration, one that defies easy explanation or any claims to authenticity or infallibility, we are able to understand that the subject-matter of their books will be necessarily affected. Banville and Kundera very much take history as a central preoccupation in their works and, naturally, the role of the narrator is vital in their exploration of this topic.
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Neither day or night.
Up at seven and into the day, which is neither day or night, impossible to tell whether things are getting darker or lighter. A feint cloud of spray follows the vehicles, pixellating their twin red brake lights as journeys down the hill and into the city are made. The gloom is accompanied by a chill, held in the movement of the trees and spread through the streets by a dull, insistent breeze. I see nobody walking.
The week ahead features four days and I hope to be done in two, perhaps just one if I can rally round myself and finish these essays. The weekend bordered this transition, featuring a combination of paid work at the public house, and hours of laborious linking and signage, leaves upon leaves of paper falling from my desk every time I turn to get a drink. So now to uniform paragraphs and a burst of creativity.
The house is laid bare, scrubbed to extinction by my housemate the unused sculptor. Often a displacement activity, often a metaphor, he tidied and I left the house unable to be provoked into another bout of decoding. I will go to the greengrocers and the supermarket later, top in at the florists and add my own consolation to the day, to the hours which seem endless in this unlight, truly impossible to tell whether things are getting lighter or darker, darker or lighter. Place a record on the turntable though, as though the action itself was a protest (when in fact it should be the though that is the protest. There is a nausea, a breakfast eaten in both silence and haste and an uncomfortable foreboding. I know not what comes ahead, whether night or day approaches.
09:48 Posted in Confessional | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Quote unquote.
Cannot help but draw up a quote, sketch it out as some sort of context, a reminder of lost literatures, of an author constantly underrated:
A lie is only a lie when the one lied to thinks he is hearing the truth. When the liar and the listener both know it is a lie, then the lie becomes transformed into ritual. Henry James recognised this, which makes him for me the first modern novelist. Society he tells us, lives by, can only live by, necessary falsehoods.
John Banville
There be craft.
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Sunday, 15 January 2006
Banville and Kundera.
Loosening into the routine now, shifted focuses towards Banville. Initially Banville remained alone, capturer of my intellect. Unable to divide or conquer his work I was drawn into spirals of fascination and obsession, endless readings.
There can be no understanding in absorption though and so I needed another. Taking Kundera, I placed The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting alongside The Newton Letter and waited. I had vague notions of history, both are tellings and retellings, a magnifying glass upon craft and forgetting. Gradually (he says, as if the work was not his own or this pseudo-process contained no pretension) shapes emerged, the role of the narrator, the indistinguishability of it all, the creation of new words.
Author and narrator are inseparable, a term coined fictional autobiographical narrative, and this stylistic implement, a wonderfully blunt weapon, makes its own marks upon connotations of history and past-present relations. A unique viewpoint – fallible and intrusive – leads to constructions of history and warnings at the moment of interpretation. The loss is meaning.
So Kundera and Banville exist alongside each other as monuments to the major theoretical issues of our time; the reduction and understandng of self-aware, rationalising narrative forms and of the depersonalisation of modes of knowledge and discovery. This is the aim and the direction, and I have others to help me.
23:10 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Friday, 13 January 2006
Academia
Academia affects up to 15% of the UK population and around two thirds of sufferers are women. An essay can last from 4 hours to 72 hours, although academics may feel drained for a couple of days after that. An academic can experience an average of 13 essays a year, but this can vary from person to person.
Academics are completely symptom-free between attacks.
Essay without aura (common essay): An intense, throbbing headache, often only on one side of the head accompanied by 2 or more of the following symptoms:
- nausea and / or vomiting photophobia (increased sensitivity to light)
- phonophobia (increased sensitivity to sound)
- osmophobia (increased sensitivity to smell)
The pain is made worse by movement, and sufferers want to rest and keep still, preferably in a quiet, darkened room.
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Thursday, 12 January 2006
Supreme fictions.
One academic piece down, and immediately now onto the next one. I have five days. The library is surprisingly busy, the clement weather drawing out students accordingly, the morning was pale and clear, a stillness associated with spring. This winter has been endless and unmarked, without any indicators of progression. It has not got steadily colder or warmer, it just oscialltes between all of its predictabilities. It has been a long winter.
The next essay is to feature John Banville and The Newton Letter, a book that took me immediately when I read it and featured heavily in my writing on this blog. The trouble now is converting an innocent interest, the live fascination of a text and its connections, into a honed argument. Upon reading the critical heritage (the library, for once, excelling itself with laminated critiques, summaries and theses), the task immediately becomes more daunting. How to write on what has been written on before? A book that in the first instance is so infinitesimally aware of its pastiche and politics has naturally spawned a whole army of appreciators desperate to provide the study that will unlock the novella’s meaning.
Every single one of them achieves a literary anaemia in light of the others, each of them pulling out the tensions (and pretensions) of nationalism vs. revisionism and Banville’s movement away from his literary heritage (whilst drawing heavily and consciously upon a range of predecessors from Henry James’ The Europeans, to Goethe, to Shelley). They all even feature synopsises of the exact convolutions of his satire and humour, deadening and stifling it in the process. They bore me with their recalcitrant renditions of postmodern self-reference. I get the point.
So, here we are, trying to achieve something different. Impossible. But I have neither the interest nor the time to simply rehash these monuments of criticism. The printing jobs are imminent, promotion for the festivals is required, hiring of equipment is looming – the intricacies and necessities of performance, minute-by-minute, are arising. So, as head back on the metro, juddering up hills and through tunnels, I shall reread the eighty pages of the novella and try to form something. I have put down the guides and summaries.
Think of what first struck you.
It was the sex. It was the urgent, awkward, distant lovemaking, the repetition of the name of another, the blurring of faces and the merging of names. In the moonlight, in the garden, in full view of the family, in the mother’s bed, in the mother’s name, in the mother’s imaginations, all in the light of misconception and false guess-work.
No, it was the displacement. It was the inability to adhere to the project in hand, to write the biography of Newton, to project the intellectual fervour simultaneously encouraged and rejected by the historical study onto a family. The sex was merely a form of displacement. Ah, but was the displacement merely a form of sex. Coitus with the past, intercourse with a history that you’re trying to forget, sex as amnesia?
Now, at long last, perhaps we’re getting somewhere.
13:23 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 11 January 2006
Loyalty scheme.
Time grows fast and the days get fuller. Festival work yesterday, sheltering homeless artists. We sat in the office and watched the robotic spiders being born. There is at last a place for me in the office and I believe a capacity that I can fill. Am genuinely looking forward to the chase, the cut, the craft of it all.
Finished essay, concepts what were wrote ages ago, were smoothed today like sea glass. Margins maintained, titles italicised and footnotes reduced. Now I'm ready for the next one. Expect abstracts in the next few days, when I have more time.
There is a swelling concern about the vunerability of blogs, that anyone can find you, reprimand you for your views in relation to your affiliations. You are a representative for us, they say. But the disclaimer, I argue. No-one sees that, they say.
But all the while that publishers are contacting me offering to send me free copies of new works because I write about those authors here (I think specifcally of Paul Auster), I am going to continue writing. Anonymity and abstraction, who needs it. I want free things.
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Sunday, 08 January 2006
A little excitement.
The thread of a lie running through my pre-emptive story of the day. Nothing has happened yet, but I justify its non-happening with an intricate fallacy, a false map, a unqualified narrative.
The streets were made, I made these directions and locations and aims out of the air I inhaled as I woke. I created a schedule for my hours out of the condensation on the inside of my window, created it from the loose hang of the curtain fabric, the lines of dust between the floorboards, the first taste of water against the tongue.
And in doing so, I negate your lack of purpose. It’s not that you do nothing, you just don’t know when you are going to do it. You meander through your waking hour(s) waiting for an input, whereas I set myself non-tasks in my blank day.
The purpose of this? To fulfil myself, to ensure that I achieve something in my day. By creating an unopposable potential for my day, I can only conflict or reach, fall or rise. In doing so, I come upon only mediocrity or disappointment, thus keeping the burn of ambition fiery, its driving sting pursuing a future I’ll never catch.
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Saturday, 07 January 2006
The concentrics.
Concentrics, the game of relations and of remembering names. Pooling and collating greetings and shock remembrances. I remember that you work in Hartlepool, I remember your glamour hi-rise. | recommend a glass of stout, brewed with honey, selling slowly but people are reluctant to try new things. And then another figure from the past, a second you, I recall the unknown birth of your child and that night all those months ago where we sat around the wood as recent acquaintances and scratched thoughts into the floor before walking home in the rising seven a.m. light, under the elevated concrete railway line, through the deserted light-industrial expanses and toward the grid terraces, all slate and shuteye.
But then we abhor those smothered in make-up, butchered and hung from the ceiling with bloody string tied in tightened loops around plastic teeth, peddling their tiny minds and their tiny ideas and their tiny peaks of life. Let me sell you an idea, they say, I’m a frantic overachiever, they offer, I can do all this and more, they beg. Procure me a beverage and I’ll think about it, and get them to polish the glass, I’m not a fucking poverty line. Look at my boyfriend, I cut his hair! That’s the kind of control I apply to my projects. I climb mountains of success in the week, and you’re lucky to hear about it now.
Meanwhile, the oldest of old friends gather in pairs and triplets, gravitating towards la(r)ger numbers as the night continues, an eight or a nine. They sit in silence for times, just listening out for each other, no need to build or fracture or annex or influence. They are towards and they are against and every now and again a member of the acquaintance séance rises and moves, perhaps channelling or mediating, they drift to the bar and get a round, a day’s pay spent on a tray of identical drinks, pale insipid beers, no one will complain. They’ve been here for years and have forgotten how they met. They have been here for years.
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Thursday, 05 January 2006
Simulacra and situation.
To start with fiction is a statement. To start with, fiction is a statement.
Social space, defined, is a deliberate non-entity. It is an implication, definition and complication of an infinite amount of social relationships, relationships which are inherent to ownership/property and the forces of production. Paul Auster’s City Of Glass deals with these relationships, it observes them and presents them.
Think of the passage when he talks about being lost in the labyrinths of numbered streets (where his directions read more like a thesaurus, a list of synonyms, an exercise in language), or where he follows vagrants hoping to become adrift in the circles of repetitions that feature in the lives of the homeless.
Auster sees a space, but is not content to simply see a space, he must conceive of it as well, always refusing to draw it into a larger reality, into any kind of schema. His deliberate postmodern postulations (the endless self-referring, the stories within stories, the amorphic reductionism of his faux-criticism) are an act of simultaneous clarification & nullification.
The narrator’s absurd knowledge of The Tower Of Babel, his four pseudonyms, and his geometric diagrams are obvious ploys but effective nonetheless. We give up, we stop searching in the face of overexposure.
And yet, for Lefebvre in particular, this is not enough. This is merely a description, a clever, aware description, but a description nonetheless and therefore it does not enter into the core of social space. It does not truly experience the conflicts and impossibilities, the homogenous, rationalising, constraining, dislocation abstraction of it all.
So Auster fails? Not quite. Not at all.
Auster - and the elucidation and mapping of this is tomorrow’s task – manages to provide a true simulation, he creates a representation so real that it replaces the original, a simulacra that calls into play all the nuances of social space, all within literature, within the space of literature.
Tomorrow beckons though and I get ahead of myself. The usefulness of this as a synopsis before I prepare to commit to paper tomorrow is inestimable, but the argument... weary and unstable. That is tomorrow's real task.
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A new age.
Pen to paper then, an inking. Tired, tired eyes barely focus between paper, page and screen – the joke is that this was supposed to be the start of it. These words were meant to be the initial inscription of the essay.
As it happens, today has gone beautifully. A couple of short walks have been my only experience outside of books and music, the air was low and damp, a cautious countenance about the streets, as though the sky and the afternoon were inseparable. Chases of wind filled every turn and corner, while the inevitable rain threatened and stayed.
I have a new toy. A sleek, black music-player filled with thousands of songs. All day I have been converting compact discs (ever so slowly the word becomes an archaism in the hands of the new-year, an elegy to materialism) into a format that the device can store and relay.
First to be captured were those CDs without boxes, the ones waiting to be scratched or lost, all too often neglected because they do not sit in racks, spines out, but in columns of toppling silver.
Then, new CDs. These have been left behind with a combined progression & regression; a love for vinyl has led focuses to be upon the turntables, CDs too invisible to be in vogue, but not nearly as comprehensible or to-hand as the stores on my computer, easily accessed while working, moods easier to appease with libraries and playlists – CDs seemed not classic enough, not easy enough, not enough effort, too much effort.
(Music purchasing is never in vain though, regardless of the format. All those albums which were bought and never initially loved invariably suffer a beautiful renaissance, their continual presence upon the shelf silently infusing with the everyday. You grow to love, and the longer the period of growth, the greater the love. This is the way it often is.)
Third to be placed onto the mp3 player were CDs that belong to other people, just in case they come looking for them.
Fourth were bought. Downloaded. I had 50 free downloads included with a trial offer on a subscription site, no obligations, and so I duly accepted. It appears to be without the impulse and aesthete of record-shopping, none of the colours or touching, but there is a durable, excitable edge to clicking YES and receiving them instantly. Browsing too, that is extended and intensified, decisions managed and fought for and thankfully the notion of a surprise, stumbling across something, still occurs albeit through side bars and pop-up recommendations, but the hum of recalled fondness (oh yeah, I love that band) still vibrates in the heart.
Pen to paper, music to pocket, a thinking. The age of synchronicity comes, subtly, into my vision, closing my eyes for me. Today has been like the first day I got my own dual-deck tape player and I would spend hours making compilations, not doing my homework. Nothing has changed, the apparatus just gets smaller.
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Found in translation.
Must complete thought today, must paragraph and extend, explain and quote.
Time is running out but the bills are getting paid, well all except the electricity and the gas and the council tax and the rent. But time is running out and the bills are getting paid.
Endless words ended a long time ago and I’m down to dry cognition, the bones of discourse as I pull apart a text and reconstruct it with another, a theoretical frame, Lefebvre’s illusions of transparency, the negation of realism – our live is dominated by a falsity of free intellectualism and so our environment builds us.
I remove these thoughts, patently not my own, and seam them with Paul Auster’s means and scope. City Of Glass is its own labyrinth and consciously so, denying criticism, even the banalities of postmodernity. It knows too much. The only recourse is to take it as an example of social space in itself, mirroring to an extent Blanchot’s L’espace litteraire (Auster has translated his work previously), a vessel and a gospel, a carrier and producer.
So that is the day yawning ahead, once again behind itself. I really should have finished by now.
13:20 Posted in Literary | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Wednesday, 04 January 2006
Graphic
Bars of colour and fluctuations of type, the work is taking place. I subscribe to a calm geometry, a redolent jigsaw of lines and blocks, the symmetries of hue flooding their confines with one draw of the hand.
All this perfect sketching is a measured distraction, I use it purely as a necessary avoidance technique but one that I love, one with a result. The weather has warmed and it is time to get back to work, time to drive on for the pastures.
Back and forth with the communication and my mixed messages are subdued beneath the words, conversations failing to actually orate anything, just a meaningless set of symbols containing their own code, birthed at conception, the tautologies that they are. My writing, full of pedantic tautologies.
Leaving it to dates and promotion, excursions into venues, radio appearances and word-of-mouth. I cannot stop thinking of it, I cannot gain a perspective, I whine and I whine and I whine about the pressures I have encumbered whilst failing to approach anything near a level of competence or functioning or efficiency. For the time being I simply wait for things to fall into place, waiting for a design.
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Monday, 02 January 2006
Trying to write more.
The day after the year before and not knowing how to start. The first sentence as a pressure point, a hare racing ahead of the dogs, setting a course. So throw it away, pretend you didn’t start and it matters not. Butter the bread on both sides.
The vagrant is out of the house and spears of ice block the overflows still. Our u-bend cracked when temperatures plummeted three days ago. No-one has come round to fix it, I’ve no-one to ask. Surrounded by comparative luxury – music, books, computer – we are lucky but low-earning. Often I walk past houses with corrugated plastic FOR SALE signs and just wonder for a moment about that ladder, that hike up, those stalled repayments. That is supposed to be my realistic dream, everyone needs a realistic dream.
But the house provides a nice frame as it is. My middle-class hunger abates, charity-shop chic cutlery unbent, the jar of pimento-stuffed olives left, abandoned in the deep recesses of the fridge-door. My life dominated by lunches constructed from left-overs. Thank god for French soft-cheeses. Here I write, forge plots of A to B, try and hunt down Bachelard’s meditative poetics, strain them and trauma their joints until I am able to wrap them around Auster’s City Of Glass. True poverty.
After this, and it’s always the same, I commit to a casual rereading, suspending focus or purpose and then lined paper and a neutral room, noting quotes and soundbites. Tie them together, group the nouns, arrest three/four/five – no more - conflicts in their places and draw out their relationships. Ignore all thoughts of sandwiches.
Then, and it’s always the same, I turn to the theory, the grid beneath and read the structures that surround, always the fiction first so that it dictates to the criticism and schemas not vice versa. Make notes, more notes, spread the papers out upon the dark wood of the desk and try and view paths, jumps, strands, baguettes and webs. From here to here, to here to there, keep moving my argument towards the narrative towards the point you always knew when you were reading the text but never understood.
Consequently, and it’s always the same, you write in concentrated bursts centred around a theme or topic, a filling and a side-salad, on separate pages having moved to the word-processor, you can afford to. Non-sentences, occasional directional shouts in CAPS LOCK, reminders of an undisclosed quotation, a stolen idea needing to be remoulded, plagiarism of my own ideas.
Now, and it’s always the same, you see it differently, but not reduced or destroyed, just reshaped and understood to a point of absorption. Make people see, including yourself, start to seek originality, move towards newness, a fresh outlook. This is your resolution in the new year, that and trying not to eat so much brie in the freezing cold. Get a heater, or at the very least some fucking Camembert.
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