Friday, 29 June 2007
Updated
Links and design updated.
Lifejackets are links to my projects.
Crew are friends and interested/ing parties.
Have a look around.
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Friday, 29 September 2006
...
WRONG WAY
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Tuesday, 01 August 2006
Moving out.
Stripped rooms, bare as a back in which we comfortably lie prone. Things are changing for the two of us, worlds are slowly turning in upon themselves. Inevitably, our waters rise as growing tensions, tidal arguments are measured out upon calendered charts. High tide approaches at noon.
Clinging, holding fingers are stiff cold and yet holding you, the last beautiful refuge, warms me to my core. The room is strange and the house is strange, our voices throw in peculiar ways and many times I mistake your voice for my own. Even the silence speaks. When we murmur, we do so out of turn.
Occasional downpours dampen nothing in our street. The anxiety prevails through like the perpetual summer dawn, a sun always pulling up above the horizon but never quite reaching that point of full exposure. I am sorry for your tiredness, everything will settle. I promise this and many other things. Promise making is all I have to hold me secure to people, to hold me fast to you.
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Monday, 31 July 2006
Outlines.
How do you draw yourself when given a pencil, what margins do you sketch? Charcoal grins and blackened finger tips prevail, but for all the muggy smiles, there is no work here
This space, the passing of ships, is a total bore. The wrench to actually press keys and engage brain overawes. I can barely walk let alone spell. Immediately, now with urgency, I want to finish.
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Saturday, 29 July 2006
Referee.
Apparantly 1.8% of all my referers (that is to say links from external pages), arrive from disney.com. The toons are onto me.
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Intermittant.
The mechanics of forced writing pull slowly, sorry, sorry and sorry although only apologetic to myself; I have expired reminders and goodwill. I am always nearly leaving.
So you find an abandoned lifeboat, and posit reasons - laziness stretched out at the top. However, there is more, and we all are always nearly leaving.
The house above has seen its walls straightened and coloured, dynamic blueprints, cups of tea thrown across a ragged carpet and the bleach bleach bleach smell of newness.
In here there is nothing but boxes. Out there, early heat.
The yard is fat with colour, reminding me that I need to photograph the plants. I should like to make some money from these photographs, I should like to make to some money at some point of my life. I am tiring already.
Kafka spurs me though, Blanchot just behind, screaming and whispering about the process of reading. For me, that damn process takes too long and just won't stop.
Visit elsewhere.
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Tuesday, 25 July 2006
Time and again.
See what happens?
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Wednesday, 19 July 2006
Dust.
List upon lists upon the wall, these walls still covered by scraps of paper and postcards, dog-ear slides of adhesive staining the plaster. Upstairs, no such thing. After hours of priming and scouring, sunshine streaming in through the north window, the room is prepared, white and straight.
Of course the focus must be dual now, rising to both challenges. The first is the very physical, that is to say packing into cardboard and rearranging and transporting out of doors and indoors, upstairs and down - the movement process, of changing a house once again. It is eleven in five years.
The second is much the same but with books - infinite regress, the impossibility of finishing, and the internalisation of the external act, the externalisation of the internal act.
It is all very unsettling.
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Wednesday, 12 July 2006
Vamos!
The incontinuity of the event, being - as it is - miraged by pain. Today's wakening was like yesterdays times ten. I ache for the math of it. Jawline electricity, the ripped thud of every beat through a face's tired vessels, the tender gauges in the fleshy gum. I am driven to the pharmacist.
Of course illness has become a theme, has become a urgent comma desperate for the next clause. But this is not illness per se, but pain.
Yesterday in the schoolmaster heat of the Lit & Phil, we verged on a debate between two writers from the Dominican Republic. Diaz with sharp-lined suit and occasional 'fuck' pitted against Valerio-Holguín's deeper, more insistent voice - no contest. As one friend said, Diaz was the charmer, he had the stories of the 'hood, the contact with the youth, the adopted "y'all"s and the swift rise into intellectualism that audiences love. The true loss of the evening was that we rarely heard from Valerio-Holguín and that the two rarely engaged.
Valerio-Holguín's refusal to write in English, his self-imposed economic exile, his demands for reappropriation of the American canon were never explored. I wanted to hear more about distinctions between diaspora and immigration and I wanted further definitions of his violence of alterity. Postcolonialisms for sure, but from a vantage point.
After the lecture, we lost the crowd and avoided the sponsored bus, later spotted from our quiet, unassuming bar parading around town like a gross fairy-lit lemon.
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Tuesday, 11 July 2006
One careful owner.
Page ninety-seven of the second-hand book heralds the beginning of his resistance towards interrogation. What is the most important aspect here? Which sentence provides a vantage point from which we might look forwards and back, towards and against? The circumference of sight puts paid to linearity.
Perhaps the aspect is approached through character, the naming of people, the titles given within greetings? Could it be the physicality of food and drink, the sheer beauty of imbibed alcohol inked out upon the page? Architecture though, what about architecture? The buildings are covered in snow, as too are the courtyards. Here there are surely stories?
Perhaps, however, the real narrative of the page is not to be found within the text, but in the slight smudge of blood that trails from the centre to the deep crease in the far corner.
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Monday, 10 July 2006
Flip to centre.
So what of these empty rooms, their bare walls and unhinged doors dominating all thoughts of cityscape? As all slowly comes together, like a relapsing universe, ideas upon ideas, we begin to wonder. One begins to draw structures, another teaches about psychogeography, another roots up the flaneur and leaves it to dry in the sun. Things do not fall apart.
In the meantime, I boldly stack records, case upon case, sleeve upon sleeve and rotate my listening hours. So much new material, so much genuine excitement in the music of today. Yesterday, the heat and murmur of internalised South-American anthropological musician made my limbs go. My head has not fully returned. I feel like a reversed photograph, the difference going unnoticed unless you saw me the first time.
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Sunday, 09 July 2006
S'avant.
The Avon lady, with her case of tiny lipsticks, lives in a transitive state. She goes from house to house.
I rarely open the door these days, but there is hardly ever a need to. Reams of paper flood the carpet in the dim hallway daily. The aftermath of the weekend's events continues, slowly, a stalker beyond a timeframe. These are echoes.
Today, hopefully, I'll witness something anthropological, the sourced within music. Ramifications of a desire to become more engaged, more belittled, more of a witness to extraordinary events leads my journey somewhere untold.
Finding the end is like finding the end.
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Saturday, 08 July 2006
Last night she said.
Boundaries laid and forgotten; last night's performance held this uncomfortable position, the drugged halfway house for poetic vagrants in a cobbled back lane. Divisive remainders, confront and admonish, the room offered pearls for thought, a brief exhortation, the sense of anonymous alcoholics circled, encircling and seated. Terrorist acts represented and drawn apart, corrupted at seam and juncture, torn limb by limb until the evidence was destroyed and rows upon rows of people had backed away. The lights went out and then up, filmic blasts with intermittent word arrangement, the click of noise.
Then into town for milkshakes.
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Tuesday, 04 July 2006
I am enveloping you.
To begin the day writing letters, a man of correspondence, sketching out paths and remedies within copied lines and remittent advice. So many points of focus these days, the locus of things spreading like ink. Root it in an physical movement, return from the non-figurative to the representative. Think concrete.
So those walls look like they wish to crumble, as much resolve as foundation. The squarecircle blurs. My resolve however, does not. Visitations and hauntings, splurges and retrievals, polyphonic foldback, the drop of voices, torn pages - all are there, held in pages and pages of application. Return to focus, circumference and aperture, move in upon the idea, stake it all upon the idea.
Possibly over to warehouses again later, not the one on the constant looping video but at the top of the hill. To photocopiers and postal revenue, the petit smudges and firmed watermarks not held within the tonal rendition but the organised frame of words, poems are paragraphs without punctuation, we present an argument.
Meanwhile, summer continues and the true sound of July continues unabated, urging in through the window crack. Men are digging the road.
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Friday, 30 June 2006
Symptoms and treatments.
How many times have I written of illness? Does it punctuate and order my sentences? These times, stretched across three cities, are they pioneered and held upon a balance, only just a movement away from illness?
You look at me again, kindness in eyes. A recognition and reluctance eases the words toward me. You have been here before, this is where you are.
This time it is easier, there are symptoms and treatments. Steam, essential oils, baskets of fruit, the dull tingle of spiced lentils, the lemon slices and honey, paracetamol. There is a period of retraction and growth afoot and you are coping beautifully, making me both sure and unsure. It is like holding my hand and covering my eyes, a dual action of comfort and discomfort, resting upon trust.
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Monday, 26 June 2006
Done dance.
And of course we all give excuses as a blur. Days ago, I offered anything - bread, women, souls - for a purpose. And now I have one, all I see is lists.
Monday is a refuge and by arriving into it late upon the wake of dreams I render it unnecessary. Too many things, not enough somethings. So I abstract dissertations, present calls for submissions, saunter around the dim supermarket and drink tea, lots of tea.
Words here have been unapologetically poor. I must take root in the performances of Friday night, all the blushings of contemporary dance, the fascination with bodies but without the haughty pretensions. These were amateurs and showed and endeared themselves to the audience because of it. Within the flexed limbs and crooked torsos was a fluidity, a pacing and movement that I can only wish was present in these stilted, jolting grammars. It was here, but is lost.
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Monday, 19 June 2006
Scree & pine.
To wake with aches and a lifting happiness, can only the consequence of walking in hills.
The circumference of a dale, paced and climbed with a little trepidation, lagging at the rear of the group, looking obsessively at the short slide and drop onto the crags where the smudged carcass of a sheep lies, decomposing.
Handfuls of friends, a descent into scree and bracken, the dark charcoal line of incoming weather - all is lost upon Patterdale. And what joy in a name! The location of something, here things exist; our pass is called Hartside.
Now I sit watching the house opposite shift furniture into a tall van. Croydon, Dilston, Brighton, Sidney. These are our own grids and movements, we experience this for ourselves.
Back to the weekend, to great arches underground and the constant, consistent fall of water through bareheaded thread moss and slate, the dampened branches of a fallen tree proividing limbs to climb. A memory rests, hidden, something of which we cannot speak, something which became a resolution and a reminder. The constant, consistent drip into an awareness will not end. Every tree and rocky spur, each cloud snagging atop the peninsulas, each lake slant and watery beck - all become features.
Somewhere in a place that a poet is unable to locate, the legions of pine, racked against the wind, touch tips.
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Friday, 16 June 2006
Green & red fingers.
Despite busyness, tonights poetry reading, the uptake of another blog-project, dissertation research and humid streets, I still found time to do the gardening and was bitten by an ant.
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Thursday, 15 June 2006
Pushing nouns.
To approach anything after the inactivity of yesterday seems foolhardy. Today, a long day of work ahead, finishing just before sundown no doubt. The heat has begun to stir life into the air, and I wake with astute timing and a sense of needing to get up. Immediately out of the house into the warming, fresh air. To the local shop, butter and milk.
Yesterday, I pushed nouns around and got nowhere. Taking genius modern poets as stable and hay, I thought long and hard about location and leaving, the dynamics of a twosome, your feint sleeping breath. All was abandoned under the heat of eleven though and instead I turned to losing myself in wound plot and tightened narrative, the antidote of poetry's permeable fences.
A walk in the park, sat awhile watching people exercising across the newly mown moor, a little haze propped up over the racks of houses stretching away, firstly up to the west road and then down towards the river. Three towers stood solemn, shimmering. People played in teams and rode bicycles, fathers grew competitive.
Then an evening of listening. To each other, to guitar and drums, to droning IDM, to comment and speculation. Interruptions aside, the heat fell from the night. We continued to listen, slow and with intent. The road rose occasionally with the sound of tires. The diagonal scuffles of a night-walker dropped in through the held window. He, drowsing by street-light, faltered at each kerb and held his hands up to the sky, approaching nothing.
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Tuesday, 13 June 2006
To leave.
Bereft on interest and respect, where are we left standing? The crumbling hallway should be a site, is a site, of reflection and contest. The subject has been chosen. The carcass is prepared, careworn adjectives bleed the nouns dry. A piece is formed.
But actually, the battlefields of carpet have grown tiresome, the thrill for the chase has diminished and now these age old disputes rankle and murmur. The house stands alone on a row of identical terraces, near the corner and the park. We are the ones who are diminished.
In leaving, coming back is denied as an option. Drastic measures are spoken. There is no possibility of return; what has not been remembered and carried forward, will be forgotten.
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Monday, 12 June 2006
Wild flowers.
The insurgency of the heat has lifted, and so has my workload. Dispatched with a few cursory glances at references, now is not the time to be asking "have I done my best?".
Legs crosses, a slight ache in the thighs. Three wretched, tumbling, satisfying days of work this week. The daily bore bores us, but when it gets it right, we all wind up at home exhausted and happy. Got robbed, got excluded, got involved, eight nine ten salty hours in a row, each and every day, a million conversations, one or two decisions, infinite sleep.
At the beach momentarily yesterday, watching intrepid idiots wade over the submerged causeway to the white lighthouse, arms aloft, hoping for the sun. We sat in tall dune grass watching the gulls watching us. Two divers rolled to the surface, a bi-plane juddered overhead. Ball games on a cliff-top, an outreaching tide revealing steps, mentions of perfect photographs. Soon I will be able to expose everything.
Now, at home and easy. Trying to avoid football is a chore, so have taken to the back yard. Decided to sabotage the dull greens and greys of the vegetable patch by planting scores of wild flower seeds. The competition will bring the best out in them, no doubt.
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Tuesday, 06 June 2006
The number of the bees.
Summer now, perpetuated by stinging insects. Slow-growing greens now sprouting and taking over, growing up through the hinges of the kitchen door.
The rewriting of a thing, is it an admittance of defeat? To carve out paragraphs and feel that routine, base frustration in the words as they take you in the wrong direction, move you towards an argument you can't substantiate.
Then, picking your way back through the terms and constructs, grasping the sentences like silver thread, you find the anomaly sticking out like a sore thumb, sticking out like a bad simile. A passage of misunderstanding, upon which you rested the progression of your thoughts, its weakness collapses the rhetoric, tunnels beneath it, incongruous.
Yet, this is perhaps a good sign. As Asimov said of truly good short stories, if one removes just a single sentence then the entire piece is comprimised, such is the economy and precision of the argument used.
Today will be both tentative and bold, scaffolding the ideas I have been building for a while now. All the while though, I have journeys in my head and the hope that I will produce something with at least a semblance of impact.
Float like a a lullaby, sting like sleep.
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Monday, 05 June 2006
Seek medical advice.
And what to say of the triedness that lies like cement inside me? I am urged by all to visit a doctor, to seek holistic surgery, to hunt down the apocathary. I am too exhausted to pick up the phone, an admittance of illness would perhaps break the stubborness of spirit. We are not ill, we have never been ill, I am not failing.
I fail nothing but myself.
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Thursday, 01 June 2006
Cry river.
The monotone back-lanes emit an openness, the pockmarks of cobbles are open to the day. Dry rivers of brick-dust trickle downhill, the gentle wind stirring silt into breaks in the road's surface.
Trying to determine the passage of the next few hours, trying to instigate a positive response to what as being an underwhelming week. The lack of writing lies at the foot of a hill; it is a peak rescinded.
What cost these motivations? The driving of oneself to produce, to recognise, to be recognised? At which point does that callous upon artistic pursuit - integrity - begin to burr and harden? Surrounded by invisible targets and floating deadlines, we become disorientated.
Creating the ecstasy of completed work is a must. The means, not the ends, qualify and assist and help to draw the clouds back from themselves and shed light on the processes of living, at which point art and the day become infused like an aspirin in water.
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Tuesday, 23 May 2006
Idea theft.
To the end of the day and to The River, to Disengage. Both contain hours of drone and lull, not always unchallenging but always acting as the creation of a non-silence. They enact bodily processes, ambient environmentals, the sound of the street.
They have accompanied my work and today has been profitable. I have be adapting and stealing from others.
In order to adequately investigate the modern nation we need a writing that transcribes the ambivalence of time & place with a nation's identity. These words are not mine, but they could have been, they are now.
(Still constantly fascinated by the internal/external aspect of language; that is, that language is an external expression of self which the internal self can no longer control. Ironically, this has been better said by others.)
The 'modern' nation is defined by: homogeneity, literacy, anonymity.
The real site in which the ambivalence of the nation becomes manifest is within the discourse of the minority; they are the limits at the limits. The voice of the minority is a recognition, is a beginning, a renewal and so their voice is the one of constant flux.
As a thief of ideas, I surely must exist at some margin.
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Monday, 22 May 2006
One-two-three.
Crook of a spine, legs crossed and in chair but then, and only then, standing and reading from paper. The occasion of an event, John's celebration, unaccompanied voices and the sparse, healthy intonation of space within song. What is said, what is not said.
Then performance from the judges: a short tentative poem, old at the edges but with reticent heart; a ballad stolen from a shanty, echoes of the man himself; finally, the Bach prelude, the philharmonic leader caressing violin fret and urging the room to standing applause.
Finally, the awards given, one-two-three. Tearful, dutiful winners boasting of a complex, claiming of a relationship more real in the moment of things, that in the sense of its terms. We owe a debt that we never knew and things continue to continue.
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The academic coil.
Crowded with light, an intense grey from the window and the sills reflecting as solid white bands. Yesterday's re-memories are close, apostrophed and footnoted and correct.
The academic push, works being completed at a progressive rate; this can be called progress. Three reading lists dispensed with, bibliographies intact and sources referenced. These are the final stages and come easily.
It is, however, the opening of a new chapter, the final research project of this semester, that sings loud. Moving into culture and imperialism once more, facts of nation and fictions of narration piling in, clamouring for weight and discussion. Nine articles to be read somewhere during the ensuing week.
Then to planning and more, the situation of loss, the culling of weak ideas and the promotion of a tight coil at the centre, a circle of linked concepts that turn back on themselves in order top prove themselves; the academic flux that plays at the heart of all my work must retain strength whilst commanding flexibility. The universal applicable, the local remedy, the questioning answer that refuses to lie still.
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Sunday, 21 May 2006
It's not coming together.
A drenching and yet more poetry. Hunger is in sight and the shoes dry on the radiator as slow, computer thought comes into an equation of its own. The end of the street is hazed with water, bust gutters as tap onto concrete yards, and I am waiting.
The daily occurance, keeping up an appearance of sorts has been made today. Judging a songwriting competition, live unaccompanied voices, my remit as poet - look at the words. I listen to the words.
Hurry across the streets, vault the standing water, there are no cars.
Third poetry reading in two weeks, this one impromptu and killed by fortifying, awe-filled preludes of Bach from solo violin immediately after. A follow, followed.
Poetry is becoming a nice habit.
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Friday, 19 May 2006
Street.
Summer rain in spring, dampening and quietening onto the road and pavements, a residue dimming and fading. The red wooden porch, black wooden porch, blue wooden porch, black wooden porch remain stiff in the wind. Blossom clouds into the air and then settles in doorways and up against kerbs, the brackish & tired plants in the windowboxes exhausted by the wind.
This is the street, and the site of evidence, the case in hand. And whilst contracts are up, time is over and deadlines of mid-August have been drawn between landlord and tenants, the street will remain. Not just in shell and postcode, nor simply in association and topograph, but in the actuality of my everyday.
The annual renewal of house contract has been rendered impossible by crumbling plaster, tipping doors, sparking, shorting electrics and dog-eared walls. We must move, we have to move out. Where to?
The perfect answer: upstairs.
Taking over the flat directly above, the flat with three bedrooms and two other rooms, the flat with the grand sloped kitchen and stepped yard, the flat from where a year of noise and sleeplessness originated. Some have been here longer.
Now however, we have taken a gamble; a musician and a poet, a photographer and a writer, a journalist and a musician, a writer and a composer - the combinations continue, flexing and rotating like Rubik's.
And the new living space will not just portray a kind of placed-in-place but rather a formative dwelling. The plans are afoot for the recording studio, the gallery, a writer's study, artists-in-residence, sub-letting to those who wish to contribute to a series of books, a series of albums all glued together from field recordings, environmental consequences and the chance of who might be passing through.
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Tuesday, 16 May 2006
Trope.
Such slowness, drawling over Freud's uncanny. The ideas fly around inside but any incision is stalled by the momentum of head to mouth to head to wrist to keyboard to screen. Each component of a sentence suffers a physical barrier. The headache I have - its origins desperately unknown, as always - offers the greatest blockage.
I have begun to worry about radiation pouring from my computer screen.
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Monday, 15 May 2006
Anti-photography.
Non-photography is floating around and it is something that hits like a chorus. Many debates over smoky Sunday dining tables - my talk weak with hunger - have resulted in clenched fists and flung paper. A keen friend loves to Lomo. He searches events with his Russian automat, finger beaded with sweat, tension-strained-tensions, a tendon out of place.
Often, during these evenings, he attempts to persuade me to drop my rejection of cameras. I dislike them, I feel awkward taking pictures, they obscure an internal recognition a connection. I cannot write of something I have photographed. He claims our difference is the result of memory; his faltering, mine acute, if not entirely transient. In my head, odd little moments resonate, flight times dissipate.
For me, looking at other people's holiday snaps holds itself as numbing as listening to other people's dreams. And yet everyone takes them, as expert. There must be more amateur photographers than painters, poets and sculptors put together. And they function as dreary documenters, just as weblogs function as amateur Kafkas, manic Blanchots, reticent & shy B.S.Johnsons. The blanketing of standards, the sense of DIY mocks an elite both positively and negatively.
There is no sense of time in a bad photograph.
But of course, the antithesis of this is the reason of a good photograph, it transcends inks and the rectangular borders, moves away from geographies and pulls unapparent relationships into shot. Therefore, unhesitantly, I love the Lomo pictures of my friend. Not of all of the photographs, because not all of them work, not all of them do the work. But the ones that succeed are processes of survival, relationships created and exposed in trays.
I hate to photograph because I, like the majority of photographers, am no good.
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Friday, 12 May 2006
News of the world.
The fascination with news and the reporting of news continues. Alongside, a sense of how I can conjoin my studies with a fictional discipline. The narrative contained within newstype holds a continuous attraction, and yet I cannot see journalism as a vocation. Things are happening, movements of peoples and movements of ideas are being recorded in the innocent serif and institution of daily journals.
The refugees of Chagos end exile from white beached homelands; Andalusian government pays for the demolition for of half-finished tourist monoliths on the graveyard of the costas; the systematic exposure of 4,500 former KGB agents in Latvia threatens to tear at heart of Baltics; alarming Bulgarian stability and market economy questioned in light of ascension to EU; Sri Lankan militants kill seventy as country moves towards fringes of war; anniversary of Chinese cultural revolution and its deep significances; US infringement of privacy issues at stake as telephone data patterns are scrutinised in silence; Escalation in popularity of Russian filmic works banned under previous Soviet regimes, gives rise to remakes and republished samizdats.
The poetry of world news is not to baulked at. Any fool can lay metaphor upon fact, but what we investigate here is not how rhythmical and dramatised reportage may be, but an examination of its techniques and inferences, its relevances and insight. There are narratives buried within, and the media exists as both a representation and a catalyst. These things do not exist for us without the word of another.
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Thursday, 11 May 2006
Nicotine and asparagus.
So must be quick, I have set a curfew of my own - head down and working by eleven. A delightful evening last night with my newly engaged friend last night. We haven't been casual for a while, no expectations or agendas, no forced meetings or structured time, just an ample evening in which to talk, smoke and eat.
She roasted cashews in oil, salt and chilli as we spoke of things, mining the exploits of the underpaid and underfunded while I drew back on the week-that-never-was. I opened champagne, accidentally. Then, asparagus tips drowned in butter and lemonjuice, creamed feta and dark large spinach leaves.
After eating, we drew up lists of music for the wedding, spanning decades, whilst smoking cigarette after cigarette and giving ourselves fierce nicotine headaches into the small hours. The walk home was still and warm, lit by the moon, and gradually as I fell into exhaustion the headaches were released like balloons.
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Tuesday, 09 May 2006
Crimewatch.
On arrival, I realised I had forgotten the thing I arrived for. Soon after, although not immediately, I returned to the house. We sat and talked in the dining room, next to the dismantled piano, an instrument removed of its side panelling and several keys. Strings poured out of the lid, itself propped ajar with newspapers.
The kitchen was freshly plastered and my host left me for a moment to make tea amongst the smooth terracotta walls. Looking out into the yard, I saw descriptions of things; a coiled hose, a broken, unpainted fence, the push of weeds through old concrete.
Another man joined us, having left his work in the next room. The pot of tea was brought to the table and left standing, the spout resting against a bound and laminated pile of magazines, unopened. We spoke of lost things, the element of chance within any lending that might be abused. Earlier the laundrette had misplaced my jumper. The two men offered that it might have been stolen. That would be the place to do it, I said. Steal clothes that is. They have a poster absolving them of any responsibility to any damage, loss or theft. It is signed 'The Management'.
Home security is an issue round here, we must all double-bolt our back-doors and reinforce our gates. Each front access point is heavily grilled or double glazed. The door has a deadlock, a yale lock, a mortice lock, a chain and bolts. You can barely get out.
Eventually I remembered what I had arrived for, and I returned to get it. It took a while longer than I thought, but very soon I was moving back up the street, past the numbers, with a slide projector in my arms.
I knocked on the door, offered both apologies and thanks, although I'm not sure why. He took it from me and I wanted to be invited in for a second time, but there was very little to talk about. We protracted and prolonged upon the doorstep. I offered a weak movement down the street and indicated at the trees, now in bloom. We agreed on their appearance so I made a vague invitation and left.
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Monday, 08 May 2006
China heritage.
The guilt/non-guilt writing of 11:57. Having known that I rose at 10:02, and that this is my first ink of the day, then you might scorn. But I have been cleaning and eating and rearranging things, and washing too, both myself and my clothes. The dust and damp have been flung out into the hazy intimacy of early May winds.
The dream of a burning house, the razing of my home was a traumatic one. There was no drama inherent, that is to say I did not experience first hand the fire, but heard about it by proxy. The consequences however, were all mine to deal with, attempts to mourn and rebuild, the reacquisition of music collections and houseplants and paintings. Those years of papers lost - what would happen if you lost your heritage, if the silent projects that you had unknowingly been working on were terminated?
Yet this perhaps is what happens daily. We drop ideas, intellectual pursuits and academic leanings just as we drop a saucer or china plate. And perhaps one of these blind, invisible concepts was a conceit of our own making, perhaps it was a valid and entirely beautiful mode of enquiry, now totally abandoned, now totally irredeemable. We stray from that particular path through the everyday, just by picking up another book, concerning ourselves with yet another fiction or the dearth of poetic constructs that seem to fill our days.
It is gone forever, the king is dead. Long live the king. We must solace and relax in regeneration, adoption of the new, the faith of words and times, the - ever more vital - assimilation of influence. The hallmark of our century, after the ease of the nineties where all was dumb expression, is a sensitivity; a sensitivity to histories (always plural) and subjects (always plural). We dwell within the climes of 'post-', meaning not after but over, on and on, layers and layers, echoes and shivers.
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Saturday, 06 May 2006
Politricks.
The decline of weather, an opening and shutting of clouds upon Saturday. Last night's poetry reading was tamed, organisers as horse whisperers, calming the influence, hoping for a break. When fatigue strikes at the emotions, all is held in suspense like oil floated in water.
Minor panics abound. Woke to brawling youths cracking each others temples across parked cars and pavements, the rush of blood and scuffing of fists. After all had died down, tried to sleep but was too frantic about futures lost and gained. My lemon-tree was appalled. The middle-class conundrum doesn't quite wash, playing my fears out as the result of some position of social privilege does not suffice. That argument - the irrelevance of the English voice - is only valid in cases of failure. I do not plan to fail; this may well be my problem.
Trial and teething experienced on a family level has tired and worn me, and left me longing for a revelation, a beautiful surprise that acts simultaneously as flattery and vacation; the ego from the normative, the diamond on the kitchen floor, the Ginsberg journals at the back of Oxfam.
Feeling an increasing political bent to my enquiries at the moment, wishing to engage with that patchwork of humanity, the manifestation and organisation of co-habitation, both representing and causing affiliates to live. It is the game, the one true game. It is a gentle, playful exhibition of control and movement, of ascension and deliverance. Governments are the maps of our lives, they both guide us and are written by us.
There is no authority contained inherently, nor any relevance, they must seek to address and redress. They fascinate, condone and repel; they are to be studied like books. They are living books. The kind of book I wish to write should function like politics; a despised, chosen, confronting and adaptive movement that chooses its own path.
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#100.
On post number one hundred, we are still not writing to any standard. Infrequent, unfocused idiocy remains the order of the day. The origins of the project have slipped away, to the detriment I think. I was writing better two years ago.
I do, however, have more ideas now. And that is my excuse and my motivation.
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Friday, 05 May 2006
Prickly.
Sun blinding in off streetcars as I sit down, planning the day, allowing for the fact that this word will be the first of many. Abandoning schoolwork feels grand, an important release. This week has been a tempest and the uncurling of things only happens with space and distance.
The levity of my hours are compounded by a raging hangover. Unable to take alcohol anymore, my body rebels. I shall steer away from the wine tonight. The evening will be focused upon heat; a theme of crematoriums, celebrity magazines and long shadows.
Talking of them, long shadows fall from my eyes, horrid bloated face with bloodshine and line, gurgling repetitive stomach and faltering pale limbs - I am to retreat into a correspondence with myself, a hungover indulgence while poetry readings draw closer and I wait, wait, wait for the electricity to be turned back on.
So write me.
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Thursday, 04 May 2006
Local democrat.
The fallout begins, continues and ends today. Sleep-assisted organisation has removed the halo from events, has etched the dream out of the day. I will process with reticence and eventuality, but I am not the type to shed tears. There is a coldness about the happening of an event that I experience, I don't absorb it. The architecture of a room, the inflections of windowed light, the dance of sunshine upon veneer - these are held. Words merely fall.
Today reads as democracy. Local elections numbing all, I try to enthuse others if only to silence the sidewinding BNP. Vote if you can, this is reason enough.
Discussions of poetry events are fruitful too, co-organisers having been distracted but meeting in untidy house over Ceylon and oats. Then, bran and potato omelette. Here be duties. Talk of future and alliterative dates, 42nd birthdays, magazine articles.
All of this reminds me that the location of culture, materialist feminism, colonial resistance and comparative identities in the postmodern climate lie, unsheathed, in great stacks on my desk. But there is no time, must be off to work. They allow me to stare at the sunshine through the window, it's a grace of sorts.
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Wednesday, 03 May 2006
On the way, and there.
Tuesday, full of impassivity, laden with finds and motorway anxiety, heading towards the funeral. In one's head the rewriting of this a thousand times occurs, the endless slips and recoveries fashioned through each thousand, notched upon a milestone, 800 units to there and back. The roadside sets up flashing tempters and recalled splits of mind, all headed into lanes, directed through swerving cones and drifts of tumbling grass spores. Every now and again - there - the carcass of a dilapidated coach-house, skeleton timber and shunted slate, nettles as high as rooms.
The rejection of the grand narrative is brought to the conversation. Dull mumble into swept air, cigarettes through wound down windows. Try not to cry, we're barely there (actually, we've barely left). Nothing read, nobody reads, the resurpassing of the objectionable poet upheld in forlorn junction interchanges, the swoop and flutter of gull and bridge. Great ideas held in the overhead. Violent swatches of rapeseeds filtering over chalky, sliced meadows, the descent into wrought steel running bars which dip and weave alongside the chassis, plunging into black gravel.
Mother, jumpy behind the wheel (later to be involved in a non-blame traffic accident) aging less every day, hunting ghosts with paper. Resuppose the dead poets, speak up into the back, all tone and volume lost as articulated haulage rumbles past, over eager. Stare at the horizon, nausea, then stare at the horizon. Put down the book and the newspaper too. You used to read so much as a child, sitting upon her thigh.
Her, she - of course - was remembered all day. The letter-writer they called her. Woman of epistles, branching into grammar for solace now, sacked the dishonest cleaning lady for breach of trust, moving into correspondence to chase away the quiet. It all started at the shoe factory, then marriage on the Outer Hebrides (the church still holds the record), then support of hospices, lived here all her life (except the parts we forgot to mention). People stirred uneasy, over easy, when they mentioned the hiding of tablets. Tried to implicate her gamefulness, a sense of play. In reality, she had forgotten how to eat.
No one smiled when the vicar repeatedly said her name wrong. She tried four different combinations, none of which fell out quite right. Still, congregation were too bloodshot and grimacing to notice, full of tears, some pressing sticks into the corners of their eyes. And as they left, four uneven men hardly struggling with the weight, they demolished the wreath on the door frame, petals and holly coming dramatically loose but no one noticing until, hoisting her up to heaven, they cracked the lid.
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Friday, 28 April 2006
Battles.
There is so much to do. Yet my closed signs will always be inferior to your immediacy, the potency of your movements, the way you load each turn of your head with a reason. There can be nothing to prepare us.
Time straightens itself out in the end, the kinks stretching away into the distance. There is little more disheartening than the site of you, sitting in the street on a kerb, feet in a drain, staring away into the wilderness. They have taken that image, those impossibles; they broke lights with it.
Here's the remark: try not to listen, but hear. Assuage and engage those with radical minds. Those that are taut and terse in everyday life (seeing the day as something of a antagon) are dull and tired in the theatre. Those that rage and speculate upon stage, display moderation and gentle wisdom throughout their twenty-four hour existences.
People are looking and turning and looking.
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Tuesday, 25 April 2006
Overcast failed me.
So this is how I waste the hours till noon, waking early(ish) but then strolling with a towel round my waist, picking up letters and junk-mail from the hallway. Ease into the kitchen, make a slow carbohydrate breakfast, have a sit down. Return to the bedroom, attempt a languorous effort at tidying up, sit down again. Browse internet whilst reading sports journalism and voting in online art competitions. Check all four email accounts - nothing - think about what I should be doing, remain seated.
It became overcast the moment I woke. The sprites from my dream fell away, but the energy, the incision of my timekeeping seeped back under the bedclothes. I no longer wanted the day, I lay in wait for the evening. That evening, things were to happen, socialities and victories, any excuse to visit a friend. Meanwhile, I find excuses to make what I'm doing more valid, appropriate and understood than it actually is. Where is my activity? Today feels like a day for nothing, grey nothing.
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Sunday, 23 April 2006
Macho incision.
The couple were happy when I visited them. I turned up in the sunshine, unexpecting, and they invited me in. I sat for half an hour, an hour perhaps and ate Spanish cheese and oatcakes. There was an apple on the side of the plate.
Since then, great freedoms have become obsolete. The grand narratives and inclusive, macho explanations of purpose and direction have fallen limp by the roadside.
Instead, I saunter about the house and yard, lukewarm light drilling into the brickwork at intervals, spaced out amongst the pots and planters, the first temptations of green beginning to rise from the soil. Just one sentence, that is all it took to describe something.
And of course, inevitably, consequently, and with fate at my side, I went to work. We all do, some just enjoy it more than others, some get paid more than others, some are blinded by free, motivational flights to New York. I trundle across town on public transport, the wheezing of the bus doors letting in tiny rivers of dust, and then arrive to hoardes and logjams of people, thirsty and hungry.
Upstairs, the glass shattered when I reached down and touched it. The tiny raise of heat contained in my fingertips was enough to break the glass in on itself and the tense clutch of my hand merely grabbed scissors and spears of the glass and – moments later – trickles of blood.
The minute, deep incision was bound.
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Friday, 21 April 2006
Unfulfilled.
How can we not give up on writing? How can we not renege on contracts unfulfilled? What does it bring us? Food? Laughter? A topic of conversation?
Dressing up dolls of culture and periphery, better start making this good because someone is looking. There is a real urgency needed, six weeks until I am needed again. Turn to the page, turn the page.
Eyeing up the specifics having laid down blunt, unshining concepts. Now to sustaining them, to hitting their notes perfect so each paragraph resonates and hums like china. Each block of text in place, each knock at the door ignored, each glass of water sunk without trace.
They are beginning to worry.
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Sunday, 16 April 2006
Blear.
A distanced, balancing purity rested upon the endeavors of last night, and the travails of this. Woke to uncomfortable silences, a lack of region or adaptation; my suitability for the task in hand is seriously questioned by these flurries of forgetting.
Staring into the sun leaves ellipses of plum and cherry stamped into my vision, slowly turning colour, bruising and fading. Looking up from the darkened wood of the desk (and pages of inane biro scribble, naturally) and into the bright, clean street scene is temporarily disabling.
The noise? A stranger in the flat, joking loudly and standing, legs apart, in the kitchen door frame. The sun enters here as well, through another window, illuminating sharp triangles of dust and the way things settle.
Today is a bold retraction, a movement away since you came too close. A vulnerability exposed, you have seen too much, you have said too much, you have been too many places. Hesitantly, there is nothing left to lose.
And yet the lines are the same length, the paragraphs the same construction. Tiny ideas, inked and hemmed in upon lined paper, no room for drawing or even joining the dots. I remember nothing, I create nothing.
A return to form, then.
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Friday, 14 April 2006
Diary burst.
Feeling lost on things, the prescience that accompanies doubt is fading. Instead, bloated on ideas of idolatry, redefinitions of refuge and amalgams of the postmodern, I just give up. Rose early - late though, as always - and hurtled into town for reclamation of promised breakfast. Pushed pens around diaries, sauntered in the sun, drank twelve cups of takeaway coffee trying to get warm.
Then to the Nun St and to tattoo parlour, inf(l)ections and ink spatters. All sharp haircuts and tight trousers (girls and boys); my role was documentation and greeting. I am writing a press release and the master of ceremonies is a devil with a needle, apparently, but upon meeting him my mind was changed. Elusive, captivating, spiritual and coherent - he recited a poem from memory to an awed audience. Fingerless gloves and a hop down the stairs later and we were back onto the street, visiting closed post-offices, dead libraries and queued bus stops. Curse the bank holiday.
Thinking of last night, in the ten sided concert hall I exhausted myself. There can be no one else left to love. I saw Bonny 'Prince' Billy.
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Wednesday, 12 April 2006
Away and back again.
When there is nothing written here for hours, days and weeks, where do I go? Have I other, more pressing, commitments? Does time tempt me away, am I constructing, converting, conversing?
Perhaps I have been making train journeys through moorland, around stream and vale, chasing refracted sprays of light above the reservoir.
Perhaps there have been deaths in the family; short, thrifty ends of lifelines causing unrest and consternation within those left to tie the bureaucracy.
Perhaps work is taking its toll, the struggle for a wage tempered against the balance of voice and fiction.
Perhaps the list of books on the wall, the shelters of hardback are hour destropyers, swallowing days as I they throw indecipherable type into the mind.
Perhaps I smoked too much. All quality is gone.
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Monday, 03 April 2006
Halting rememory.
A Sunday perfect with rest, laying-about in covers with occasional stirring for water or air. Then, across town in downpour, to the supermarket for cash and then downhill, into the valley, ignore and stepover the gulleys and streams tumbling down the steps.
Into the converted warehouse, with air-conditioner expanses gleaming and fresh Sunday faces, beaming and drunk. Tired still - have been exhausted now for a week and more despite adequate sleep - we plotted our ways to seats and then tables and ate our way through the menu and drunk our way through the glasses. Silently we undertook observation of communication.
Then, as the rain cleared, we strode out into the faltering light and ambitiously rose up through hills and for a while along the tiny, flooded river. We fell down into a church, clutches of daffodils and sunken headstones, the big river swollen and steady below.
Moving down onto the quayside, we pitched ideas over the tide's surface, spoke of surge and return, all the while looking at the great steel spans and thinking of dates. Visiting art-gallery, an even non-committal look at pieces, managing to enjoy the Freudian as such, as presented.
Finally, under low-skies with fatigue ebbing at leg and limb, we climbed listening to kittiwake call and the gentle stir of traffic before -
I've had enough.
Descriptive passages are nonsense, these bogus clipped ideals and images slid in all upon each other like the template of a day, pledging rescue, claiming a renewal of things forgotten. This is no retrieval, this is no memory. A carefully duressed construction owes nothing to the reader or to the writer. We become exercises, reasons to write.
This is a punishment for being lazy yesterday.
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Amazing grace.
Amazing Grace! how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me;
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I’m not blind.
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Friday, 31 March 2006
Distracted by a fridge.
Preparations roll as slowly as the day, drawling off my tongue, drop-by-drop, each word, each assonance deliberately stilted and reclusive. Imagining an audience, the introduction and reception - none of this works.
Instead, a return to the computer and opening the file named Draft. Set about a structuring, a return to form. Ideas have been plotted in days and weeks past, a rough narrative drawn, but the peculiarities and purposes of each chapter have yet to be determined. Each must serve a purpose and the first are often the most difficult. They are the stall-setters, the ones in which the primary concerns - themes as existential enquiries as Kundera says - are raised.
But then a knock at the door and the thing I stayed in for; new fridge. Fluorescent-jacketed men (in case I lose them in the house?) lug in bulky white weight and abandoned it in the centre of the lino in the cold kitchen. Barely need for refrigeration in this climate. And, of course, it is up to me to dispose of the old, to walk the dead appliance out through the back door and it the yard where it'll probably sit for the next couple of decades. Return to the kitchen, hot water and vinegar, set about the surfaces.
On coming back to the open document, Draft, I have lost it. The opening descriptive passage with its simplicity and statement has been going well but is now lost to the afternoon. It is gone three and there is nothing for me here. An encouraging start but no doubt one that I will renege on once I have reread and consequently rewritten.
Countdown begins, and the only nervousness comes from the curl of smoke at the end of my cigarette. I am hungry too, and so it is off to the kitchen to empty the fridge, to render it useless again, holding nothing and just eating up the electricity. The kitchen is the birthplace of economics.
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Thursday, 30 March 2006
Everyd---- page not found---ay.
Server irrationality; the fickle connectivity of my home computer. Any work, brought to bear upon my mental salience, shattered and lost within the anonymities and loose ends of Telewest's network. Where does the web go when it disappears?
Today spent traipsing, over the hill and past the Palestinian olive shops, stolen bike refitters, Chinese coca-cola imitating cash-and-carry to the community furniture outlet. Have been without a fridge for a month; my courgettes are furry.
Boldly strode around sub-zero living room, reciting. Poems have been divided and conquered. Two sets named and partitioned; Excursions and Everyday. Excursions are semblances of escape, momentary loss of climate and location. These will be read first. But of course, and it always happen like this, I will finish tomorrow's recital with the everyday.
The seat you sit in is as important as the concept and relations you posit. Context is all. The everyday is the modern existence, transcending socio-political inevitability/ambition - it is where we are at. And so it is fitting that I return to it, start from it, take from it. Tomorrow's poetry reading -however irrelevant, out-of-touch and isolated - will at least take solace from that.
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Wednesday, 29 March 2006
Toll and demand.
Accusations of the toll are fading fast. An early morning cigarette in the sunshine and a saunter through the terraces provide a bleak, roomy beginning to the day's writing. The usual breakfast, a skimming of the day's news and opinion, revelling in the disintegration of yet another governments claims to imperviousness, another glorious sporting victory, another stanch fact of the world.
The toll cares, and it moves you. The build-up of all that had gone before. Drawn out to a wider plane, we look at our own influences and stocktake. These four walls and endless months of poetry - to what? To the now, the present exclamation, the rise to mediocrity? To disillusion, protestations of a fractured, diluted modernity? A claim to assailability; no-one can touch us because we cannot even reach ourselves.
I write with a voice as much as I speak with a tone. These mornings are mine again and the lists of articles, the bold sketches of assignments, the elusive plans of dissertation and novel, poetry collections and readings are a blueprint of sorts.
The window is open and despite the sunshine it is still cold. A warming-up is to be enacted, this medium and anonymous flow is the tragedy and necessity of the day's purpose; a chance to begin and forget, produce in order to forget, forget in order to begin. The toll disappears. The endless rains of yesterday evening have long evaporated from the pavements and the gutters have distantly spilled into the drains. The brickwork of the houses and the slate of the roofs are beginning to get hot under the spring sun and regeneration is no longer but a password.
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Sunday, 26 March 2006
The build-up.
Found whilst browsing in stubborn market, girlfriend off buying pockets of seeds and cereal: a book!
No time for reading, or writing. Just thought I'd let you know.
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Wednesday, 22 March 2006
The diary of a novel.
Ha ha, so this is what it is all for! This solemn gradient, this imperceptible, irreparable haul up a slope unknown, it is for this!
Weeks, if not months, of leaden, impenetrable weight within the confines of my head. It was as though clouds, great swathes of storm, had gathered around my temples and anchored themselves. It is not a suffering, but a dampening and a smothering - breathing, let alone talking, is rendered impossible in its immediacy.
But last night, restless and freezing, the revolutions began and the climate of unease, frustration and impotence began to clear. I dreamt, solidly and irrationally, all night, never managing to quite slip beneath the lines of consciousness into a truly restorative, blind sleep. It remained light throughout the duration of the night and dawn.
Upon being woken by the alarm clock at quarter-to-eight, there was nothing but confusion exhibited upon my face, and in my thoughts. A series of untied strings, frayed ends slowly unravelling, removing the strength of form, reducing everything to individual threads.
My girlfriend left for work, she abandoned a docile, muddled man and left him to sleep - a practice well-worn and practised, for sure. Her levels of exasperation at this particular time bear no comparison to the vigour of her disillusionment brought into play by my erratic and entirely singular modes of behaviour in weeks past. March had been dark and difficult.
A second sleep ensued, warmed by the radiator, which had spluttered into action, the cold pipes creaking with pockets of air and gurgling fluid. The curtains had moved into the night and triangular slips of daylight began to fall into the room. It is perceptibly brighter at an earlier hour these mornings, and waking is so much more pleasant for it.
And so I slept a healthy, bold sleep for at least another two hours. And in that time, in the time it took to fall and rise, all the confusions and disparate elements of not just the previous nights attempts at rest, but also all the confusions and elements of the previous months, came to fruition, came to bear relevance and message. First, an untangling occurred and secondly, a bringing-together, a delicate weaving.
For months I have thought of theory and discourse, movements in intellectual climates, academia bowing to political pressures, the processes of learning, the frustrations of learning, generations of substandard education, the effect of a city, post-industrial reclamation, the power of immigration, the story of the émigré, the role of community, the establishment of concepts in relation to social space, notions of the underground, freemasons, the history of the novel, the calculations of institution, the vagueness of relationships, the hidden sexualities within communication, and - inevitably - the validity of the written form.
All came together, all were brought forward in the dream. And when I woke, I had only a single concept in my head - not even a concept, to be truthful, but a place, a location. But this place, high at the top of a doglegged flight of dusty stairs with windows overlooking two sides of the street, was at the centre of everything. Or, rather, is at the centre of everything. It is the arena and playground in which the concepts enumerated above can duel and joust. The characters are in the room, three of them, and their pursuit is set. The discovery is also balanced and ready, as is the relationship, the counterpoint.
Of course, the room ties in my theoretical with my fiction - how could it not in the contemporary age? - and, of course, there are books and echoes of books because, unavoidably, last night the novel came into being, the lines of research and enquiry were set and five people, previously unthought, began to breathe.
It is untitled, impure and undistilled - but it lives.
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Tuesday, 21 March 2006
Hours spended.
Great dirty slabs of ice lie upon the cars, a mockery of the slowly warming night previous. There is a genuine suspicion that our climate is irreparably fucked. This appears to be not just a simple observation of a slight change in temperatures or periods of prolonged rain or sun, but a genuine, clear indication that something is very wrong. Things never used to happen like this, not even ten years ago. The weather never used to behave like this, not even my childhood.
With the rise in satellite technology, the predictability and accuracy of weather reporting also rose. The feelings of safety provided by new systems of guesswork appear to have obscured the fact that something is wrong; just because you can guess at something around the corner, doesn't mean it should be around the corner.
But all this talk of water-tables and late daffodil blooms is getting me down. I have lost interest in the paper, lost faith in undisclosed loans, lost faith the teaching of creationism, lost faith in probation crises and executions, trials and denials. I am trying to find ways to spend my hours.
I place import upon the here and now. Received kindly raise of my ego yesterday, firstly through the kind words of friends, distant kind words, and secondly through an academic appraisal. The marks held, the waters subsided and the lines left were of sufficient height. Despite my reticence, my stifled anger and my abstinence (all of which have been documented incriminatingly and foolishly right here) I managed to keep my head above water. Despite all the tides, the two full-time jobs, the two part-time jobs and despite preoccupations of spirit and creativity, I blushed and bluffed my way through.
Which leads me to the here and now, and to what must be done. An inquest, as I have said, will be held into my whereabouts, my total disappearance, but when they find out where I have been, or rather what I have been doing then the clamour and fervour will die down. As I always threaten, criticise not the method until the product has been dismissed.
My hours must now be spent feverishly (to keep out the cold) tearing my way through books, absorbing concept after concept, story over story. Even then it will not all be told. Even then there will be blind alleys and dark pockets into which meaning will escape. I will root it out, flush it from its occluded hideaway with dogs. My hours will be spent burrowing.
Reconciliations are afoot. The bringing together of theory and text, grounding myself in more direct connection with the narratives and forms that I approach. I must make myself relevant to the work, not the other way round. But I am nothing if not a learner, I exist not if I do not learn. So, the next few weeks are to act as a mirror, a direct re