Bits

I was suddenly reminded, whilst drawing, of something I used to love doing as a small child; drawing a picture with a sharp pencil, going over it in a fine black pen, waiting impatiently for the ink to dry, checking it occasionally with an intrepid index finger then rubbing out the fine pencil traces that remained under the ink. This way it seemed to have just grown like that, clean, out of the page. Then I'd rub hard and try and keep the rubbing out in a snake instead of watching it break into bits then blowing it away but it inevitably sticking to the table.

We enjoyed at school the debris of stationary. Pencil sharpenings were a hit with almost everyone. The smell, the pretty coloured ones you got when you sharpened coloured pencils. People used to line up whole bouquets in the dip you used to keep your pencils on your desk on those old wooden lift-up-lid desks.

The ink well baffled us all. How old were these desks?

Another favourite was picking the paint off the edge of the stage/raised bit at the front of the assembly hall. Forced to sit at the front, cross legged, skirts riding too high for decency, what else was there to do aside from pick shapes and names and notes and swearwords into the grey, chipped paint in front of you. Human compulsion. If you sat back in the same place sometimes you'd see that another girl had foiled or embellished your statement, for this you would love her or hate her and yet never know who she was. If she had done something good you'd fall in love with her and think every pretty girl could be her. You'd be wowed by her artistry and try and fail to scrawl similarly in your notebook, hoping some day she'd see you and you'd become BFFs. If she'd rubbished your work however, you'd have to carry all that seething resentment around all day and never know who to blank.

Glue. Too meek to sniff we covered our hands in it and peeled. This was excellent. An exercise in concentration, dexterity with satisfying and pleasurable results. I have now upgraded to candle wax.

Two recent encounters with shadows

'I am writing only for my shadow, which is now stretched across the wall in the light of the lamp. I must make myself known to him'.
from The Blind Owl (1937)
Sadeq Hedayat

Mac with Shadows (1981)
Maggi Hambling
Southampton Art Gallery

B S Johnson

I've been meaning to read B S Johnson for a while having heard of him here and there as a late 20th century British experimental writer. Coming across a copy of Christie Malry's Own Double Entry (1973) at a friend's house recently I promptly borrowed it and read it in a night and a morning. I haven't read so fast in ages!

So, Christie Malry, our protagonist, is followed by the author (who converses with him occasionally) along his strange path of moral reckoning, what he calls his Great Idea. Having learned about double-entry book-keeping in a bank he works at, Christie decides to balance out injustices faced by himself or his loved ones by debiting as he sees fit from the wrong-doer (who is often society in general) in accordance with his own moral system. For example the 'General diminution of Christie's life caused by advertising' or 'Chagrin at learning no secrets' may be balanced by things like 'Aldwych theatre bomb hoax' and 'Paper clips removed'. He moves from the petty to the downright murderous...

Suffice to say it's hilarious and excellent and you should read it.

David Simon...

to Nick Hornby *full body shudder* in a 2007 interview in The Believer:

'Fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell'

Two new favourites: Robert Frost and Edna St Vincent Millay

Quandary
by Robert Frost

Never have I been glad or sad
That there was such a thing as bad.
There had to be, I understood,
For there to have been any good.
It was by having been contrasted
That good and bad so long had lasted.
That's why discrimination reigns.
That's why we need a lot of brains
If only to discriminate
'Twixt what to love and what to hate.
To quote the oracle at Delphi,
Love thy neighbor as thyself, aye,
And hate him as thyself thou hatest.
There quandary is at its greatest.
We learned from the forbidden fruit
For brains there is no substitute.
'Unless it's sweetbreads, ' you suggest
With innuendo I detest.
You drive me to confess in ink:
Once I was fool enough to think
That brains and sweetbreads were the same,
Till I was caught and put to shame,
First by a butcher, then a cook,
Then by a scientific book.
But ' twas by making sweetbreads do
I passed with such a high I.Q.


The Penitent
by Edna St Vincent Millay

I had a little Sorrow,
Born of a little Sin,
I found a room all damp with gloom
And shut us all within;
And, "Little Sorrow, weep," said I,
"And, Little Sin, pray God to die,
And I upon the floor will lie
And think how bad I've been!"

Alas for pious planning—
It mattered not a whit!
As far as gloom went in that room,
The lamp might have been lit!
My little Sorrow would not weep,
My little Sin would go to sleep—
To save my soul I could not keep
My graceless mind on it!

So I got up in anger,
And took a book I had,
And put a ribbon on my hair
To please a passing lad,
And, "One thing there's no getting by—
I've been a wicked girl," said I:
"But if I can't be sorry, why,
I might as well be glad!"

Roland Barthes

'It is under the pressure of History and Tradition that the possible modes of writing for a given writer are established; there is a History of Writing. But the History proposes - or imposes - new problematics of the literary language, writing still remains full of the recollection of previous usage, for language is never innocent: words have a second-order memory which mysteriously persists in the midst of new meanings. Writing is precisely this compromise between freedom and remembrance, it is this freedom which remembers and is free only in the gesture of choice, but is no longer so within duration...And written trace precipitates, as inside a chemical at first transparent, innocent and neutral, mere duration gradually reveals in suspension a whole past of increasing density, like a cryptogram.'

Writing Degree Zero (1953)
p17