POPPING A LOZENGE INTO HER MOUTH

Scale

2012-02-29T19:07:00.002Z

Sick of being big. Wanting precision, regardless of shape or sound. No longer hungry for tumult though always a little. No more wishes.

A slant; tiny, ineffectual, aware.

An oi from the back of the crowd.

A deceptively small door leading to cavernous insides.

Alice. Wide as a yawn. Even my big gaping mouth, open as possible but still a tiny little nothing. Bunch of cells and wet stuff. Mostly invisible. Free as mud. No matter. Woven in. Sensitive skin, osmosis. Smallest form of life. Still breathing, turning pages, blowing out flames, inhaling, ageing, shedding skin.

Rag

2012-02-29T18:56:00.003Z

Headlines confuse me. Half the words are missing. Series of nouns. Been inside too long. Oily one hit wonder ex pop star ex husband ex father ex heart throb ex star fucker turned children’s author advocates literacy. In the photo his hands are open and spread because he is communicating.

Slave

2012-02-25T08:49:00.002Z

Cheokov’s most positive statement about himself was make in 1889 when he was twenty-nine and had already achieved a considerable degree of self-mastery. In a characteristically impersonal way he suggested bitterly to his friend Souvorin that Souvorin should write a story about him, “a story about a young man, the son of a serf, schoolboy and university student, brought up to fawn on rank, kiss the hands of priests, accept without questioning other people’s ideas, express his gratitude for every morsel of bread he eats, a young man who has been frequently whipped, who goes to give lessons without goloshes, engages in street fights, tortures animals, loves to go to his rich relations for dinner, behaves hypocritically towards God and man without the slightest excuse but only because he is conscious of his own worthlessness – could you write a story of how this young man squeezes the slave out of himself drop by drop, and how, on waking up one morning, he feels that the blood coursing through his veins is real blood and not the blood of a slave?”

quoted in Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story

p77-78

Peep show

2012-02-23T17:06:00.001Z

Reading porn in stony silence of waiting room of suburban train station. Everyone in black and grey. Feel like a giant throbbing stupid clit in my red jacket. In the story a girl details just how much she enjoys her job. Peep show. People lean against the ledge outside the waiting room windows. Their backs and coats and straps and necks and hairs are pressed against the glass. The only other spot of colour in the room is the fuschia of the pursed lips of an old lady. The colour looks obscene on her mean face. I imagine her big white pants drying on the line. I imagine her folding them and placing them in a lavender scented, pouched and lined drawer. I want her to surprise me. I don’t want to think old people never screw. The fading on the floor shows the perfectly predictable motion of other people.

Decision

2012-02-16T13:02:00.000Z

To take a step towards, or away from? To go forward into a new world where I do not speak the language; or to retreat into something which, while it looks still and stale, is actually tiny, potent, quiet and precise. Begin again, build better or both? Manifold personalities, multiplying communities, hungers, interests, desires, questions; or obsessions, Brontes, solitude, no scenes, no scripts, just digging for gold in one spot.

How to speak poetry/Leonard Cohen

2012-01-30T13:35:00.000Z

Good day/bad day

2012-01-28T13:29:00.000Z

Good

Good days comes from walks.
From not hating people on sight.
From smiling stupidly at the squirrel hot-footing it across the road.
From feeling the happy illusion of home everywhere.
From watching green spaces tessellate across London.
From finally feeling hungry.

Bad

The twenty-something boy in front of me picks his nose. He retracts the finger and wipes it on his trouser leg pretending not to. He holds a kindle in his free hand. It's so fucking grey. I see his fingers. The tips are pink from the cold and the nails are bitten down. The fingers are chubby in a way that disgusts me. I imagine him as a fat little kid covered in jam. His mother dotes on him and loves Princess Diana. He is wearing one of those fake Burberry padded jackets like he is going shooting in fucking Dulwich. He goes back for more picking and repeats the wiping process oh so casually. He turns to the side, he has smug piggy eyes like a cartoon mayor.

from Chekov's About Love (1898)

2012-01-21T14:31:00.000Z

I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

full story here.

Miscellaneous phone photos/South London

2012-01-10T22:07:00.001Z

Sunset over Peckham Rye

Train graffiti

Dead mouse in Camberwell

How about that song, bro? London Bridge

Still life with objects from my aunt's house

2012-01-05T13:34:00.002Z

Embroidery of Jesus: Byzantine folds, shining Oaxacan heart. Rococo bedspread, fake bronze statues of angels, pictures of blonde, blue eyed cherubs. Photographs of wedding days from the late ’60s to 2005. Romance novels and MegaCorp, Danielle Steel and The Little Book of Calm. Locked drawers, labelled medicine cabinet (antibiotics, anti-anxiety meds, pain killers, sleep aids). Defunct fax machine, ornate light fixtures, misaligned ceiling moulding, mechanical reindeer, racially diverse wise men. Soduko, crosswords, laptop tables, a collection of lighters, raw cauliflower heads in a bowl. Gifts from a colleague, gifts from a mad girl, gifts from a maiden aunt. Scented sachets, drawer liners, secrets to wrinkle free skin. Three hairdryers, eight Christmas guests, two packs of Silk Cut Silver, one pack of Kent, one pouch of Golden Virginia, Kleenex, Vicks, Flake, four remote controls. A half eaten orange, three cups of water, crocheted doilies, chew toy, knitting needles, rogue decorative bauble.

Inside out

2011-12-23T18:45:00.000Z

My mother turns her coat inside out and asks me which side is better.

I flick through the rare book of photographs my brother has bought for my father, Jerusalem through my father’s eyes.

A photograph of a Bedouin family in 1935.

The caption: The woman is wearing her jacket inside out. This meant. “I am in a hurry; don’t stop me to talk.” People seeing her dressed like this would realize that she intended no rudeness by not pausing to greet them.

Obvious signs.

Clear symbols.

Strange ritual.

Old

2011-12-09T22:30:00.003Z

He said it would be easier to just let the old people die in the heat. Those in charge were secretly glad of the heat wave. So were their tanned daughters. These are the people who are afraid to use their own things. They are people who are fastidious in their own homes but slobs in other people’s. They want things to be abrupt and clean. These are the people who use sleep aids and know they are 'doing well' only when something is being lost. They want to be alone but not because they value privacy. They prefer lakes to oceans. If lots of pensioners die over a short period of time many practical changes can be made and everyone will save a bit of money. The tanned girls will always have thick hair because they will cleverly regulate their crash dieting.

Park

2011-11-25T18:11:00.000Z

At once too much and never enough.

My favourite bench is vacant.

A man stands in a sunbeam breathing hard through his nose. Perhaps close up his nostrils are flaring.

Mothers wait at school gates, happy to have something to fill the afternoon with. On a nice day like this anything is possible. Frightened children whine at crossings. Bold ones stamp and crush the leaves.

From here I can see so much of London. The Shard, the Millennium Wheel, the Gherkin. But I am glad to be far away.

I can tell now the scarf she gave me is acrylic not wool. The tell-tale plasticy sweat.

This bench is for R.K. Never being boring. Great hair. Big smile. 1974-2011. Only nine years my senior.

I am so sorry to only be able to see things from where I stand. I do not want to be involved. I do not really live here.

It is no longer an interesting situation.

S.N. 1955-2008. She loved this park. Stop and rest a while.

Caught between young and old I no longer yearn for travel. I am almost unbearably fond of this place. The longer I stay the more I uncover.

A white dog streaks along the black path.

From here the world is safe. No blood and shit behind those windows. No medications, dead pets, insomnias and good intentions. No tiny Christmas tree in the window. I want so much to be all these people. I want so much to be that cat slinking along the wall.

Maryse

2011-11-14T19:58:00.002Z

J's maryse has not arrived from Nisbetts.

What does this mean?

My housemate has ordered an object. I do not know what the object is. I know it must be for food. J is a chef. To me a maryse sounds like something that will shred or finely slice. It has a silly, fiddly, French feel wouldn't you say? This sentence cracks me up. What nonsense words. The most important parts of the sentence sound hilarious to me. Nouns. So self-important. I don't intend to mock J or the objects but rather myself. How funny it is when you don't know a word. I like the chain it sets up: laughter, puzzlement, then deduction - what does it sound like? It sounds a bit French, Latinate. Or maybe Italian, but do they have all those soft s's? I really know very little about Italian. Most of my knowledge comes from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mario Kart and menus. I strain to make connections, my mind is weak today. I miss the sea.

My friend and I once heard an American teenager in Italy turn to his friend and say, let's go get some gelato. He extended the a for what seemed like a very long time. A surfer? A parody of a surfer? A joke? A Californian? We still laugh about it when we see each other. It is one of those things that is now embedded in my mind. I can't think about, see or eat ice cream without thinking of that one word said in that one way. Gelato.

What of other associations? It sounds like bain-marie. (I never know if the glass bowl is supposed to or not supposed to touch the edges of the pot.) But of course it doesn't really. No s.

I always feel sorry for s when I hear time and time again that e is the most used, the most popular and important letter of our alphabet. Poor s. I am always rooting for s. And also r (though I know better).

Anyhow, maryse. I am controlling myself with a will power I didn't know I had just to not look it up.

This is becoming a problem for me: you are talking to a friend, you are batting something back and forth, like: I absolutely think Liza Minelli is really short, I've seen Cabaret a million times and I absolutely think Liza Minelli is really short. Well, your friend replies, I've seen it too and I think she's really tall. I can feel it in my bones. Now obviously this could go on. The scope for argument is minor but it would make for an amusing spar. But while you are still scratching your head trying to remember the last time you saw Liza Minelli your friend has looked it up on their phone and told you you in fact are right. Well, you think, that's all well and good but I don't much care about Liza Minelli's height. That's the least interesting part of this exchange. Phones have eliminated nonsense. They are eliminating wondering, pondering, musing, making things up. In short: imagination.

Obviously this is quite a claim. I'm sure it's not quite true. But there is something in it...

On the other hand, I was thinking sadly about banter a few days ago. People like to banter because you don't have to say anything but you are still talking, still having some human contact. Nothing too personal. In theory I am in favour of banter. To me it is (or used to be) a 'sign' of either: a good relationship or potential for a good relationship. It says: we're just learning the scales, in a few months there will be symphonies. But it is striking me more and more that banter is replacing relationships. You can have perfectly fun and in a way stimulating relationships with someone you 'just' banter with. Banter must be regulated and indulged in carefully.

Anyhow. Maryse. I hope I will never know.

There is a wonderful short story by Shirley Jackson called 'Colloquy' in which a woman falls into loneliness and fear because she can no longer understand what anyone is saying because everyone is speaking colloquially. Language has not fallen apart but has rather split into too many specialisations, idiosyncrasies, colloquialisms, dialects and so on.

I think the idea of a universal language is beautiful - if frighteningly religious. The story of the tower of Babel has always fascinated me. The idea that the lack of a universal language is a curse, different languages are a punishment. What could be achieved with one tongue between us all? I dread to think.

Woman

2011-11-08T16:50:00.001Z

The woman opposite me is pretty like a cheap magazine. Her husband keeps referring to them as 'we'. He is proud to be with the girl the drunks say have perfect teeth. How did you get teeth like that they ask her. Just born with them she giggles. She must have spent a long time on her make up. Her husband has hair which is totally ordinary. There is nothing about him at all.

Birthday

2011-11-04T17:15:00.003Z

I try to write the past but there is already too much of it. Excuses are all always in place, hanging between my eyebrows. A vice. My shoulders ache from holding up my own weight. I don’t want to go out tonight...

He spray paints the gun silver. Andy has realised his own weapon and I am a traitor again.

I cake their hair in flour over the tub. Really, they have come as themselves. I am a crazed and violent person who occasionally wears make up.

J and I watch the leaves turn red. Leathery and slick, trees should always be maroon. We never see them from this angle, from above. We’re on the fourth floor and we can see from the top down into the structure.

I am here for 24 hours. A woman across the green put a chair out and sat on her balcony all evening. She wore a pink sleeveless top. She was alone. The next day she put her chair out again and sat again. I love to see the rhythms of other people’s lives. For time to run on habit and deduction. Ritual.

When I get home I open the big blue bag. Inside it is the world’s smallest jack-o-lantern. It is a tennis ball with a ghoul drawn on it. A had presented it to me earlier in the night with a tea light on top of it for me to blow out. She came all this way for us and I am pleased.

There is a slight but noticeable difference in the sound the pencil makes when it crosses the grid lines on the squared paper I currently favour.

I am given books full of pictures.

He has cut an old skirt of H’s into squares. He has cut some of these squares diagonally in half to make triangles. He has followed the instructions and sewn together the squares and triangles to make a quilt. He has given me the quilt.

We walk. Sick of the heat of home, sick of the small space, sick of seeing trees through windows. I am grateful for the cold air and the wild orange leaves spreading all over this part of town. Even in the smallest places...

Silhouettes of witches are framed in the warmly lit doorways of suburban houses. I feel sick and happy. I want to walk all night but I am expected somewhere.

My thoughts are less coherent than ever. But every clause is lucid. As usual I can only see close up.

Tonight is a family meal in a family restaurant for families coalescing for special occasions. Everyone will try. The waiters will smile. We will talk about politics and babies. I hope to leave half drunk and smiling.

Doctor/Choir

2011-11-04T13:10:00.004Z

There are no pictures on the wall. We sit opposite each other in comfortable matching chairs. They say: there is no judgment here. There is a box of off brand tissues on the table just out of reach. The chairs are pushed right up against the wall. I don’t know why. He is gentle but interested. He looks tired, he looks like he wants to go home. He says I look ill. I am offended. He says I have a lot of dilemmas. You are between so many things he says. But I think it is simple really. Eliminate the gap.

L told me she is going to quit choir. She doesn't want to sing with the half-hearted and still-sleeping. She wants to hear her own voice streaming out of her skinny body like smoke. In games she always wins. She is still but vibrant, vibrating within a home-made framework. She would hold a lit match until it burned off her fingertips if it helped her prove her point.

from Thomas Bernhard's On the Mountain (1989)

2011-11-01T16:52:00.001Z

...we all live at least three different lives, a real one, an imaginary one, and one we're not even aware of
p8

...even though it's a crime to undertake anything at all, everything is a lie, every comma is a lie, all of it nothing but an appalling babble, trivial, degrading, humiliating,
yet I cling to these few thoughts, and every letter matters, it comes down to every last letter and to recognizing the stupidity of it all
p19

Observation

2011-10-26T19:01:00.004+01:00

Slowly I am unsubscribing from every mailing list I have ever signed up to.

Two jumpers and a blanket and I’m still cold.

Eight open documents. Eleven tabs.

Fret not lovely, the leaves are finally turning orange. (Yesterday’s favourite colour.) Time is passing as promised. I worried about you so much when you refused to jump with me into a pile of leaves, or even to kick them about really. Some squirrel-like mischievousness has returned to your eyebrows.

L gave the finger to the stupid indoor joggers, she likes to see her breath.

I am thinking about Anne Carson again, and Sappho, about fragments and distant friends, about all things turning inside out.

Yesterday I was still and good.

from Kandinsky's Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911)

2011-10-23T10:55:00.002+01:00

The unbounded warmth of red has not the irresponsible appeal of yellow, but it rings inwardly with a determined and powerful intensity. It glows in itself, maturely, and does not distribute its vigour aimlessly.
p40

We stand and gaze fascinated, till all of a sudden the explanation bursts suddenly upon us. It is the conviction that nothing mysterious can ever happen in our everyday life that has destroyed the joy of abstract thought.
p50

Conventional beauty must go by the board and the literary element of "story-telling" or "anecdote" must be abandoned as useless. Both arts [literature and painting] must learn from music that every harmony and every discord which springs from the inner spirit is beautiful, but that it is essential that they should spring from the inner spirit and that alone.
p51

Kandinsky, Colourful Ensemble, 1938

Bus stop

2011-10-23T10:37:00.001+01:00

An old lady smokes and nods at the other old ladies at the bus stop. She squints in the sun, her forehead is smooth but her cheeks are craggy.

I misread my bus number, get up, lose my seat.

A fat Spanish woman wears a pink t-shirt with a faded picture of a silver butterfly stretching across her chest. It says Ultimate Catch.

A different old woman with puckered lips smokes and licks her top lip. She’s holding a can of K and making jokes with her friend.

Every kid I’ve overheard says they’re going to be a vampire for Halloween.

I am hollow and hungover, things are flooding in. I am late and I haven’t brushed my teeth.

All the old ladies wear purple.

A pair of teenage girls drink pink and blue slushies and argue over whether they should go to Brixton or Crystal Palace. One of them keeps telling the other one she has to buy some cocoa butter lip balm today. I’ve seen two boys wearing the same overpriced backpack from American Apparel. The girls stop then start arguing again.

I count yuppies.

My friend’s friend is moving to Singapore. She needs someone to take her two cats. She doesn’t want them to live in a skyscraper and she doesn’t want them to be separated. I wish I could take them.

My bus doesn’t come for another twenty minutes. At least I get my favourite seat. There are too many misplaced apostrophes on the way home.

An old man, also in purple, gets on. He has small cuddly toys clipped to his shopping trolley. There’s a puppy, a monkey, a gollywog and Hello Kitty. Everybody loves Hello Kitty.

Lanzarote

2011-10-20T20:14:00.001+01:00

Half way thorough we realise we are suffering caffeine withdrawal. We drink three caff sized cups in a row. This still only amounts to one and a half normal sized mugs. My preferences for honey in tea are unpredictable. Though always yes in the morning.

A complicated politics, but it keeps the conversation going. I feel like a traitor sometimes, not having one preference above all others.

We switch to rum and coke.

At the same time we are struck to go into the white silence of notebooks, heads down, breath heavy, black marks straining towards shape. To dip out of the world and into life.

I am re-reading a book I have long stood by as a favourite, while only remembering glimpses of why. M reads it for the first time and I am so jealous.

Wanting to disappear, wanting to appear, stuck always in between. It is overcast and we are secretly relieved.

On Tuesday we will be cooked for. Meat will be barbecued on the living heat of the earth’s core. The leaflets say it is a lunar landscape. To me it is a black desert.

The criss-cross pattern of a wicker chair has imprinted itself onto the back of the skinny thigh of the girl walking in front of me. I watch it change slightly back and forth as she walks.

The black cat in front of the white wall arches its back as I approach it. I look into the green eyes in its small, almond-shaped skull and think about holding its head in my palm.

Black sand eroded into temporary shapes by the sea that will rush into and fill it like breath in lungs. Flooding the tiny bay and stretching its capacity, forcing it to change.

Do you suppose the cats eats lizards? I am too fond of both to imagine it happening. T says maybe some do but perhaps others just catch them and play with them then go in for their dinner. We wince.

I finish my book and reread the last ten pages obsessively for an hour or so. Each time something happens. I will never have you pieced together entirely. I put it in a specific list in my mind. I must write to M.

We come home, we hear the Coronation Street theme tune from next door. We take pictures of the moon and zoom in to marvel. After beer, after tea, after another card game, we go in for our dinner.

We hear Professional Widow playing from a beach side cafe where bocadillos are 2.50, the same price we paid for the ice creams we ate by the sea the day before.

Climbing over red rocks the next day, across hills like desert mountains in flip flops and swimsuits, doubt returns, filling the gaps like water. We climb down tight crevices, jumps that seem steep to me. I say I’m in flip flops, this is extreme walking for someone in flip flops. Let me take your bag he says. I insist on carrying it myself, proud. Tiny stones of black volcanic residue and grey slate shift fast under our feet. We press about for steady ones. Lean into the cliff, for – like – balance. Down into a narrow gap he goes, looks up and says mind the shit. His face squirms as he smells baby shit. Someone has left numerous soiled nappies right here in this purple crack of cliff. Who would do that? What kind of people would ever think this was ok? I rant and rave about the State of Things until I feel better.

I stare at an obese half-naked woman from behind dark glasses. I have to look hard to find her crotch, hidden as it is under rolls the size of bread loaves. There is something impressive in it. The man beside her has a big round barrel belly covered in tattoos I cannot make out. They stretch over his skin like patterns distorting on an expanding balloon. Every day I see him by the pool reading The Farmers’ Guardian and drinking small plastic cups of cold free beer.

The workmen sweat through their overalls, shirts becoming fluid and see through. Young girls in empty bikinis read magazines and dangle their feet over chair arms. A tanned old man rakes away dead red flowers. I love the sound of the rake against the black gravel.

The other fat woman taps a rhythm onto her thigh with one hand and adjusts her cap with the other. She has a tattoo of a diamond on the top part of her left arm. She is restless, she picks up a book and puts it back down. She smokes a cigarette.

Later I tell him I am sick of trying to be well-adjusted. I plan on a full and true maladjustment very soon. He tells me to take it easy.

Yesterday

2011-10-13T06:53:00.001+01:00

Sentences break apart, into adjunct clauses I cannot follow. Rules of grammar so ingrained they apply themselves without context. The bus changes its destination, people shuffle and curse. Local councils fund dim decorative lights, attempts at cheering the municipality. The next step is knocking it down. I heard there was an empty high rise they'd reinforced the walls of and filled with water, now you can scuba dive there and look out of the windows at the dry city and the pigeon shit on the window sills. Windmill Row. Butterfly Walk. Hordes of eager cyclists. Words break into syllables, then letters, then just the alphabet out of order, wanting to line up again. There is too much noise to read. Post office, town hall, cinema. My home town is a story book. I remember about abandoning ideas of success. A page, a paragraph, a sentence, a word, a letter. To you, to say: last night I swore I had tinnitus in my left ear. A distant high pitched constancy. I opened my mouth and talked to myself until I fell asleep.

from Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays (1970)

2011-10-11T18:53:00.002+01:00

By the end of the week she was thinking constantly about where her body stopped and the air began, about the exact point in space and time that was the difference between Maria and other. She had the sense that if she could get that in her mind and hold it for even one micro-second she would have what she had come to get. As if she had a fever, her skin burned and crackled with a pinpoint sensitivity. She could feel smoke against her skin. She could feel voice waves. She was beginning to feel color, light intensities, and she imagined she could be put blindfolded in front of the signs at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo and know which was which. "Maria," she felt someone whisper one night, but when she turned there was nobody.
p170-1

Devon

2011-10-11T15:48:00.000+01:00

Behind the clouds the perfect circle of sun is visible. This is the sort of mood I am in: optimistic. The surface of the pool is covered in hairs and dusty skin, brown leaves (remember, it is Autumn) and coral coloured geranium petals. I see H in them, all geraniums are for her, our little Joan of Arc. We eke out the last rays of heat, shivering in deck chairs. We keep our water in the (spreading) shade to pretend things must be kept cool.

from Thomas Bernhard's Yes (1991)

2011-10-09T19:56:00.001+01:00

...and at least make an attempt to fix my recollection of her, even though this can only be done in a fragmentary and incomplete way and, like anything written, cannot be done in a complete or perfect manner, now that so many attempts in that direction, made by me lately, have time and again failed. But anything to be written has to be, time and again, begun from the start, and time and again attempted anew, until one day it succeeds at least approximately, if never quite satisfactorily. No matter how unpromising it is and no matter how terrible and hopeless, if we have a subject which time and again, and yet time and again, grips us with the utmost persistence and no longer leaves us alone, it should time and again be attempted. In the knowledge that nothing at all is certain and that nothing at all is perfect, we should, even with the greatest uncertainty and with the greatest doubts, begin and continue whatever we have determined to do.
p35

Apples

2011-09-30T17:35:00.000+01:00

I went searching for my lover’s only jewel. It is made of a sharp and shiny stone. He wears it around his neck and it catches the light. I went searching in the dark under the apple tree with a torch. I knew the real thing would glint. I lunged at every shine. A chocolate bar wrapper, tin foil, snail trails. This is love I think. But it is not. It is, at first, in part, a game. The tree is shining with snail trails. I do not want him to lose a thing. I continue to search until dinner is called once, twice. I plan to go back when he is at work and search with gloves on. This is love. The cat comes to watch me for a while. I shine the torch at him and his crisp shadow falls on the wall. He leaves, bored.

The evening passes. His housemate finishes reading Jane Eyre two seconds before the movie starts. She will be it’s truest judge.

A woman sings. She says take love as it comes. She seems to mean it. I don’t understand her.

We eat carrots. We are extra nice to each other. I give him the power supply from my laptop. He asks how my knee is, (I had bumped it). We eat dinner at the table for the first time in a long time. He looks up, he wants to know how it is. It is good. It tastes like something he would cook.

After dinner my lover wraps each apple one by one in yesterday’s newspaper. It will stop them from shrivelling. It means if one rots they won’t all rot. It will keep them safe. He harvests with his hood up, his head down. He wraps each apple tight, he warms it in his hands as he wraps. He half reads the news as he goes. He thinks about different kinds of apple pie. He says losing the jewel in the apple tree is too heavy with potential symbolism. He tries not to read it into his life.

His housemate comes home and says the break in her mother’s shoulder is the worst the doctor’d seen in his forty year career. And she did not like Jane Eyre. She smokes angrily and tells us why.

In the morning I am determined. I leave the tea to brew and look at the garden in the sunshine. I try to be systematic in my search. I look deep between the cracks of things under the apple tree. A basket, a tricycle, a bin full of worm juice and mulch. I dislodge worms, spiders and woodlice. They come scuttling out. I stare at the mush of compost and use a stick to rifle through it. I climb the tree and my hair tangles in the branches. I look over the fence and see nothing gleaming. I see apples in all stages of decay, I see one that is completely black and still solid. I wonder what has happened to it. A pair of black knickers has fallen from the line into a wedge of tree. I widen my parameters, I search between the mouldy apples on the concrete, I search in the shallow pit of an old fire, I search in the makeshift structure of broken fences covering the compost, I search even where I know it will not be. The cat in his infinite boredom reminds me to attach no myth to this, reminds me that I am ankle deep in warm, fly covered muck on a beautiful day before I’ve even had my breakfast. My lover finds me searching and tells me to stop. The tea is cold, I stink of hot rubbish. I start the tea again and think about my day.

Rave on

2011-09-22T11:58:00.001+01:00

The kind of book that you contemplate taking in to the shower with you, the kind of book that you eat or your meals over, the kind of book that makes you skip meals and coffees and dinner dates and parties, the kind of book that you get off the bus reading – your pupils dilating in the dark, the kind of book you read before you have your morning tea, the kind of book you get up early and stay up late for, the kind of book that changes your mood, the kind of book you bribe yourself with – if I do half an hour of work I can read a chapter, the kind of book that makes you think: maybe I do only really need books, the kind of book that you like more than half the people you know, the kind of book that gives pace to your day, the kind of book where you have to ration out the last few pages, the kind of book that you want to reread immediately...that’s what I’m talking about.

An attempt to get back into blog writing via a stream of consciousness list of stuff I have been thinking about...

2011-09-20T21:33:00.003+01:00

Whether writing reviews of books I know I won't like is worth it, high waisted jeans, Stewart Lee, neglect, my brother, the colour red, planning the south east London 'zine fest, what new books Monster Emporium Press is going to make, meditation, swimming, Mexico, getting places by boat, jobs, milk, raw chocolate, puppies, how it's getting dark and I don't mind, perfect curls, threesomes, aging, disappointing people, cryptic crosswords, Joss Whedon, how I'm not thinking about anything I'm that interested in, holidays, the sea, boredom, flatness, stillness, life drawing, headstands, writing, writing every day, discipline, ball-gags, expensive clothes, matching crockery, whether West Norwood is getting gentrified, how I spend too much money in Tesco, how I can't keep up with what's happening in the Middle East, Mute, how I must watch Night Porter, Ken Loach, social realism, asceticism, isolation, space, Arabic lessons, money, pianos, forgetting everything, missing everyone, the filthy rich, whether Speculative Realism is worth it, the new babies in the family, my family home, leaving, ice cream, new crushes, struggling, money, novellas as a form, the possibility of really exciting contemporary literature, Norway, log cabins, how I have to watch the rest of Twin Peaks season two and I kind of want to see the Othello that McNulty and whatshisname are in, theatre, distant friends, minutiae, Woody Allen's Interiors, Ibsen, melodrama and humour, Justin Kirk, writing for TV, underacheiving, not getting angry enough, Weetos, melamine, moths, smoothies...

Short short story

2011-08-30T18:05:00.002+01:00

Over here...

Prose poetry...

2011-08-25T20:28:00.001+01:00

The Bicycle Review published something I wrote, it's over here (scroll down/read the rest!).

Sic gorgiamuse allos subjectatos nunc

2011-08-16T13:00:00.002+01:00

Doesn't that sound like Latin? Well it's not, it's its porkier and genetically unrelated cousin, pig Latin! And it's also Mute's new strapline. But where did it come from? It came from Charles Addams, creator of the original Addams family cartoons. As we know, the Addams family invert and satirise the social norms of the American family and hilariously reveal the icky, rotten core at the centre of accepted and expected family values. Their loyalty, kindness, bravery, passion and honesty clash with their macabre and bleak (read: brilliant) surroundings as much as the petty nastiness, prejudices, inherited arrogance and stifling narrow-mindedness of their WASPy, 'normal' counterparts clash with their picket-fenced, light and airy suburban mansions. They surmount the notion of blood ties in accepting Uncle Fester into the family although they are not sure whether he is in fact Gomez's brother or a usurper...but this is by the by, he is part of the family and in fact leaves behind his emotionally treacherous and manipulative biologically mother thus overcoming the traditional and stifling notion of family. And this is the great thing about the Addams family, they know what family really is and their motto proves this. 'Sic gorgiamuse allos subjectatos nunc' means 'We gladly feast on those who would subdue us'.

This seemed a fitting motto/by-line for us at Mute especially in the light of our Arts Council funding cut earlier this year, so we used it for the latest issue of our new format print magazine. The destruction of enemies by an incorporation which will ultimately only strengthen the only ever temporary victim...

OK this image is too small to see the motto but it is there!

NB I'm not an expert on Addams Family genealogy, what I say here is based on the film. In the original cartoons it seems Charles Addams didn't get that much into the story (they were single panel drawings). In the '60s TV show Uncle Fester was Morticia's uncle but subsequently he was Gomez's older brother. That's what I'm going with. Wow this is really irrevocably geeky.

Article...

2011-07-20T12:15:00.000+01:00

I wrote with Mme Tlank on parenting, care work and nannying over at Mute (the letter bit is me, the clever bit is Mme Tlank) after going to the Mamsie study day I posted here about a while back.

By the way I'm aware this blog has become a shameless exercise in self promotion of late, I promise to stop this soon. Plus I have very little work pending publication now which means I actually have to (get to!) do some new stuff, which I am excited about.

Short story...

2011-07-13T15:08:00.005+01:00

at Zouch (some of you may have read this before...)

Story...

2011-07-06T17:48:00.001+01:00

published at The Literateur...yes!

Statement in relation to the outlawing of the Copenhagen Free University: All power to the free universities of the future!

2011-07-06T11:02:00.000+01:00

Dear Friends,

Please find below a statement in relation to the outlawing of the
Copenhagen Free University, please circulate and let us know about
conditions for self-organisation where you are!

All power to the free universities of the future

The Copenhagen Free University was an attempt to reinvigorate the
emancipatory aspect of research and learning, in the midst of an
ongoing economisation of all knowledge production in society. Seeing
how education and research were being subsumed into an industry
structured by a corporate way of thinking, we intended to bring the
idea of the university back to life. By life, we mean the messy life
people live within the contradictions of capitalism. We wanted to
reconnect knowledge production, learning and skill sharing to the
everyday within a self-organised institutional framework of a free
university. Our intention was multi-layered and was of course partly
utopian, but also practical and experimental. We turned our flat in
Copenhagen into a university by the very simple act of declaring 'this
is a university'. By this transformative speech act the domestic
setting of our flat became a university. It didn't take any
alterations to the architecture other than the small things needed in
terms of having people in your home staying over, presenting thoughts,
researching archival material, screening films, presenting documents
and works of art. Our home became a public institution dedicated to
the production process of communal knowledge and fluctuating desires.

The ethos of the CFU was critical and opinionated about the
ideological nature of knowledge, which meant that we did not try to
cover the institution in a cloud of dispassionate neutrality and
transcendence as universities traditionally do. The Copenhagen Free
University became a site of socialised and politicised research,
developing knowledge and debate around certain fields of social
practice. During its six years of existence, the CFU entered into five
fields of research: feminist organisation, art and economy, escape
subjectivity, television/media activism and art history. The projects
were initiated with the experience of the normative nature of
mainstream knowledge production and research, allowing us to see how
certain areas of critical practice were being excluded. Since we
didn't wanted to replicate the structure of the formal universities,
the way we developed the research was based on open calls to people
who found interest in our fields or interest in our perspective on
knowledge production. Slowly the research projects were collectively
constructed through the display of material, presentations, meetings,
and spending time together. The nature of the process was sharing and
mutual empowerment, not focusing on a final product or paper, but
rather on the process of communisation and redistribution of facts and
feelings. Parallel to the development of the CFU, we started to see
self-organised universities sprouting up everywhere. Over this time,
the basic question we were constantly asking ourselves was, what kind
of university do we need in relation to our everyday? This question
could only be answered in the concrete material conditions of our
lives. The multiplicity of self-organised universities that were
starting in various places, and which took all kinds of structures and
directions, reflected the diversity of these material conditions. This
showed that the neoliberal university model was only one model among
many models; the only one given as a model to the students of capital.

As the strategy of self-institution focused on taking power and not
accepting the dualism between the mainstream and the alternative, this
in itself carried some contradictions. The CFU had for us become a too
fixed identifier of a certain discourse relating to emancipatory
education within academia and the art scene. Thus we decided to shut
down the CFU in the winter of 2007 as a way of withdrawing the CFU
from the landscape. We did this with the statement 'We Have Won' and
shut the door of the CFU just before the New Year. During the six
years of the CFU's existence, the knowledge economy had rapidly, and
aggressively, become the norm around us in Copenhagen and in northern
Europe. The rise of social networking, lifestyle and intellectual
property as engines of valorisation meant that the knowledge economy
was expanding into the tiniest pores of our lives and social
relations. The state had turned to a wholesale privatisation of former
public educational institutions, converting them into mines of raw
material for industry in the shape of ideas, desires and human beings.
But this normalising process was somehow not powerful enough to
silence all forms of critique and dissent; other measures were
required.

In December 2010 we received a formal letter from the Ministry of
Science, Technology and Innovation telling us that a new law had
passed in the parliament that outlawed the existence of the Copenhagen
Free University together with all other self-organised and free
universities. The letter stated that they were fully aware of the fact
that we do not exist any more, but just to make sure they wished to
notify us that "In case the Copenhagen Free University should resume
its educational activities it would be included under the prohibition
in the university law §33". In 2010 the university law in Denmark was
changed, and the term 'university' could only be used by institutions
authorised by the state. We were told that this was to protect 'the
students from being disappointed'. As we know numerous people who are
disappointed by the structural changes to the educational sector in
recent years, we have decided to contest this new clampdown by opening
a new free university in Copenhagen. This forms part of our insistence
that the emancipatory perspective of education should still be on the
map. We demand the law be scrapped or altered, allowing self-organised
and free universities to be a part of a critical debate around the
production of knowledge now and in the society of the future.

We call for everybody to establish their own free universities in
their homes or in the workplace, in the square or in the wilderness.
All power to the free universities of the future.

The Free U Resistance Committee of June 18 2011.

Practicalities in Denmark: Please send a mail to the Minister of
Science, Technology and Innovation declaring your university
(min@vtu.dk) and cc. to the The Danish Agency of Universities
(ubst@ubst.dk)

Please circulate!

Poetry?

2011-07-01T19:35:00.002+01:00

I wrote some sort of poetry, which I put up here before under 'Writing Restraints'. It's been published by Zouch, which is pretty cool...here it is!

Cinenova interview...

2011-06-28T18:40:00.001+01:00

I interviewed Emma Hedditch and Marina Vishmidt about Cinenova...you can read it at Mute.

It's always time for this song...

2011-06-19T20:18:00.000+01:00

Er...

2011-06-16T20:59:00.001+01:00

Here is a cut-up made from the blurbs of shit descriptions of shit movies:

An ageing World War II veteran guards a rebel leader’s harem at a Catskills resort when a huge snowstorm gets pulled into the virtual world created by a 19^th century inventor and his acrobatic butler. In the unprecedented storm a platoon of marines overcome racial differences by perpetuating rumours that they sleep around. To detach himself from the agony of boot camp and the futility of war a man endangers himself by befriending two locals. He charms and scratches his way through the turmoil of the American Civil War and rethinks his life in the light of his daughter’s pending marriage. Meanwhile the feuding cat and mouse duo turn to a life of crime to pay the bills after a delinquent gang leader weighed down by unfulfilled aspirations makes a pact with the Devil (an insensitive jerk). Embarrassment ensues.

Mary Midgley's 'The Myths We Live By'

2011-06-06T18:58:00.001+01:00

an extract...

'I lately came across a mug inscribed with the following remark, which it attributed to Margaret Mead: 'Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever does.' It struck me at once that this was a mug badly at odds with current thinking; indeed, it cannot lately have been attending to the media as an educated mug should. These days, the message that we chiefly hear is that changes in the world are due to something on a much larger scale - perhaps economic causes, perhaps a shift in the gene pool, perhaps cultural evolution - certainly far grander than a few people worrying in an attic. Is the mug therefore wrong?

This seems to me rather an important issue. We always have a choice about the perspective from which we will look at human affairs, whether we will examine them from the inside, as participants, or from some more distant perspective, and if so, which of many distant perspectives we will choose. Or can we combine these angles? In theory, we know that these points of view are not really alternatives but complementary parts of a wider enquiry. Yet current thinking urges us to find, somehow, one key explanation, a single standpoint that is guaranteed right because it is scientific.'
p75, 2003

This is a really interesting book by moral philosopher Mary Midgley about how that which we consider myth is not the opposite of science...

Hopefully more on this at some point.

Goon writes to snack company

2011-06-02T13:45:00.002+01:00

from	miramattar@googlemail.com
to		jacobsconsumerservices@unitedbiscuits.com
date		17 May 2010 22:33
subject		Iced Gems
mailed-by		googlemail.com

To whom it may concern,

Having been, as many children of the '80s were, a great fan of your product 'Iced Gems', I found myself embroiled in a debate with my then classmates which has yet, after some 15 querulous years, to be resolved.

It consisted of the following disagreement: Your biscuits - a delightful and colourful sugary shape sitting on a biscuit base - suggest that the jewel shaped sugary treat is the 'gem'. However, grammatically speaking, the biscuit base is in fact the gem given that it (the biscuit base) is the noun being described by the adjective 'iced'.

Thus, shouldn't the biscuit base look more gem-like and the icing look less so?

Unless of course the intention is that the sugary shape is the iced gem, presumably an invisible gem that has been covered in icing, that is; iced, and is now resting on a biscuit base which, sadly, has no place in the title. If this is the case the product becomes 'iced gem on biscuit base' or, better; 'iced gems on biscuit bases'. Wouldn't you agree?

Granted, neither of the above are catchy names, but isn't the name 'Iced Gems' somewhat misleading?

I am an editor of various prestigious underground publications and a proud pedant to boot. Plus I have a sweet tooth and would like once again to enjoy your lovely treats but find myself unable to do so when my stomach recoils anxiously from this grammatical error every time I extend my hand towards your product in a shop.

As you can imagine this is, at times, very distressing.

If you could reply with some explanation or solution I assure you of my lifelong custom.

Many thanks,

M. Mattar

Trouble-makers

-----------------

----- Forwarded by Joanne Jones/Technical/UK/United Biscuits on 19/05/2010 11:12 -----

From:	Jacobs Consumer Services
To:	miramatter@googlemail.com
Date:	18/05/2010 12:36
Subject:	20/024263JJ
Sent by:	Joanne Jones

Dear Ms Mattar

Thank you for letting us know about your disappointment with Jacobs Iced Gems.

We thank you for taking the trouble to contact us with your views, as consumer opinion is very important to us. Your comments have been passed to the appropriate quality control personnel at the factory where the product is manufactured.

We acquired this product from Jacob’s over five years ago, and have not considered altering the name or product.

It is very important that people let us know their opinions, as they help us to continue to look at ways of improvement and for us to ensure that each and every one of our products reaches our consumers in the best possible condition.

Many thanks for taking the trouble to contact us.

Yours sincerely

Joanne Jones
Consumer Services Coordinator

-----------

from	mira mattar miramattar@googlemail.com
to		jacobsconsumerservices@unitedbiscuits.com
date		3 June 2010 10:49
subject		Re: Fw: 20/024263JJ
mailed-by		googlemail.com

hide details 03/06/2010

Dear Joanne,

Many thanks for this reply. I appreciate it. I would like to know about the current status of my query, and if it has been passed to the appropriate person.

Regards,

Mira Mattar

--------

from	jacobsconsumerservices@unitedbiscuits.com
to		miramattar@googlemail.com
date		4 June 2010 09:44
subject		Re: Fw: 20/024263JJ Iced Gem enquiry.

hide details 04/06/2010

Dear Mira
Thank you for your E-Mail, as previously stated we have referred your comments relating to the product to the appropriate personnel. However, the product has always been branded as 'Iced Gems', and is the name known and recognised by Consumers. Our interpretation of the product is, that the icing is the gem not the base.
Thank you once again for taking the time to contact us.
Regards
Joanne

----------

THE IDIOTS WIN AGAIN...but at least we have an answer...

‘Keep your mind in hell and despair not’

2011-05-30T17:35:00.003+01:00

I know I may be somewhat biased but I think Mute’s recent publication of three conversations between Alfred Jaar and Simon Critchley are really worth reading – if you’re interested in the intersection between art and politics (which obviously you are if you’re a mutant).

1 2 3

I am going to try and pull out what I find most pertinent (perhaps the broader argument), mostly, as ever, because it will be useful to me – perhaps I will remember/engage/commit more if I talk, write and tell about it – but maybe it will be of some interest to others. Or you could just read the actual texts. Anyway.

The dialogue starts with convenor David Morris drawing on the connection between SC’s recent work on 17th century heretical groups and their relation to the contemporary avant-garde, and AJ’s work which ‘probes the limits of art as a political activity’. I should say here that I am familiar with neither the work of SC or AJ (let alone DM).

Right, so DM wants these guys to discuss art and philosophy (vague I know but let’s run with it), approaches them, they say yes, time passes...Arab Spring springs, Japan explodes, both finally have time to respond to DM’s brief and it seems daft not to frame the discussion (at least to a degree) within, as they say, the light of recent events. Framing is done and AJ has to ask, under these extraordinary circumstances ‘Can art make a difference? Even a small one?’ He answers himself, ‘It can, of course, but the complexity of it all seems overwhelming and the challenge enormous.’

At this point the thing I call my heart is screaming yes! And everything else is doing patronising-one-raised-eyebrow-coffee black-no dessert face plus small-puff-of-derision-from-nostrils sound. All savvy and cynical-like, I read on (little heart beating faster).

But SC’s response is interestingly thought out:

What can art do in such circumstances? I completely agree with what you say, Alfredo, but let me add something. I'm obsessed with tragedy at the moment as I'm teaching a course with Judith Butler on the topic and it's great fun, in a rather macabre way. Anyhow, I was reading Anne Carson's introduction to her translation of Aeschylus' Agamemnon this evening, and she finds this quote from Francis Bacon when he reflects on the purported violence of his painting. Bacon says, 'When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality.' He goes on, 'We nearly always live through screens – a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that I have been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.'

Existence seems to me ever-more screened and distanced, a shallow shadow world whose ideological patina is an empty empathy. None of us is free of this. Maybe art, in its essential violence, can tear away one or two of these screens. Maybe then we'd begin to see. Because the whole problem turns around what is seen and not seen. We think we see what happens ‘there' and make pronouncements about ‘them'. But we do not see as we are seen because we are wrapped in a screen. There are tyrants here too. Art might unwrap us a little through its violence.

Why do I like this? A response:

On a superficial level it bolsters me in a personal way. That is: I write. I want to always write. It’s pretty pointless in a myriad of ways. I often feel it is a luxury I don’t deserve. But hey maybe it’s not.
What’s superficial here is both the ego-soothing this train of thought ends with, and (more interestingly) my feeling of the essential pointlessness of art.
So I’m saying while I sort of think art is pointless, I am suspicious of that thought, otherwise I wouldn’t have been moved by that last paragraph. (And: what is meant by pointless? Why is usefulness valuable? Why judge art by its productivity/output? I guess I mean: how can I legitimise sitting around pontificating when I could be doing something ‘useful’ like building bridges or curing cancer? The answer to this question is long and not for now but is to do with prioritising action over thought. Also I am a recovering Christian. Let’s just say I obviously value art enough to be bothering to do this).
It is fair then to say that I agree with AJ and SC – I do want art to do something (other than entertain, other than affirm our bloated, arrogant lifestyles etc.). Whatever it does can be seen as political in the same way anything and everything can be, but it doesn’t have to have overtly ‘political’ content...although everything is political.
Back then, to the original question: what can art do? Does it have political potential? Yes but only in a small way and not if it thinks it is solving a problem instead of posing one. SC on the violence of art makes sense: a small, sharp tear in the fabric, the flagging of a problem, a question where there shouldn’t be one.
So the point is not whether or not art is useful or can change the world, but that simply not-being-deceived (which is different to ‘truth’) is something to strive towards (and it happens to be useful). And I mean that in every way possible, from the barely perceptible betrayals between people to international conspiracies. Art doesn’t have to solve anything and cannot; if it thinks it does, it is closed and wrong. But it can show a different pattern or shape within an existing facade. So in some sense it is a necessary deployment of illusion, magic or imagination to see what is also there, right in front of you, but not seen. You can see the bark of a tree, but the rubbing you make of it reveals something else that was also always there. In that way it has to do with learning through experience, through feeling, through the action of thought, through the senses and the body. It is irrelevant if the experience is not real (fiction!), because the feeling is.

In the next part of the dialogue between the two AJ picks up from this point and suggests that this tearing-away of screens will not ‘reveal’ some hidden or true ‘reality’ underneath – but rather he sees the artist’s job as to instead create a new reality, which knows it is not real. He continues:

Under these circumstances what do we get when we tear away a couple of screens? More screens. As Antonioni once said, ‘We know that under the revealed image there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one there is yet another, and again another under this last one, down to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see. Or perhaps, not until the decomposition of every image, of every reality.’

To create art then is perhaps to decompose a given reality and create a new one, and that new one is for me just a proposition, a model of thinking that given reality, a model of thinking the world.

Thus the creation of images and fictions is important. I am reminded of a poem I posted here before by Emily Dickinson:

A doubt if it be Us
Assists the staggering Mind
In an extremer Anguish
Until it footing find.

An Unreality is lent,
A merciful Mirage
That makes the living possible
While it suspends the lives.

But, SC reckons:

if art - as Bacon says - strips away one or two veils or screens, then do we approach something like ‘reality'. To be honest, I don't know. I guess the philosopher in me wants to respond, ‘it depends what you mean by reality', but that sounds cheap to me. I do not think that there is any cognitive access to the Kantian Ding an sich that lies behind the image. Yet neither do I think that we are condemned to never-ending inescapable forest of simulacra à la Baudrillard...The world is a plurality of fictions, and truth is one of them.

So far so good, I’m loving this and now getting really excited at the mention of Wallace Stevens’ essay ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction’ (which I’ll get back to no doubt) of which the point is, ‘Namely, that the acceptance of the constitutively fictive or - in our case - imagistic constitution of ‘reality’ does not condemn us to a cave of simulacra.’ (That’s still SC not WS by the way), rather, ‘a kind of descent towards the real which can only be adumbrated indirectly, sequentially and obliquely.’

What is most interesting to me in this discussion is yes, where I started, the intersection of art and politics but more specifically in my world, the intersection between truth and fiction. This is what I attempted to but failed spectacularly to start thinking through in my dissertation. But this has reminded me...something about the necessity of illusion...

So far we have established that maybe art can do something; through its medium of fiction maybe it can show us something ‘real’. And it follows that the better i.e. more-believed-in the fiction, the more apt the ‘reality’ will be (c.f. Joss Whedon and characterisation, plus Barthes and the reality effect).

OK so what next? In the third part of this conversation AJ responds to this idea of needing to believe in a fiction by adding ‘that supreme fiction, in order to work, requires imperatively a new language’. But even if such a creation is possible, it is still a failure and being an artist is a failed position:

I became an artist because I believed that in the realm of art I could create my own system, invent my own language. Create a new vocabulary of truth. Of course I have failed, miserably, but I have tried hard. I was condemned to fail, I am afraid. What is the truth of a genocide that claimed a million lives in Rwanda? What is the truth of the criminal indifference of the so-called world community? Is there an existing vocabulary to express that?

To be honest I think this is a bit of a self-conciliatory move. AJ then moves on to, as he puts it, find refuge in poetry. Yes. But also no. I may well not understand his point but it seems strange to me to suddenly see this interesting project in terms of success and failure. It seems to cut short the discussion. It seems suspicious to seek comfort. It seems mistaken to think art can solve, cure or save in any way but a small one and then be disappointed when it doesn’t. Maybe SC thinks this too as his response is:

The goal, in my view, should be the exit from the terrain of the state as the political territory par excellence. Empty utopianism is not the answer, I agree, but there is a ‘topianism', as Landauer would say, where new forms of political assemblage are taking shape, here and there. What should be imagined (a supreme fiction?) and promoted are local forms of politics linked together in federated, trans-local alliances. The question of politics today is the question of the formation of alliances outside the state.

While I like the idea of an exit from the state, I’m not sure about how he frames the solution...[I haven't quite figured out my precise problem or confusion here...]

He continues:

I remember sitting in the back of a minibus outside Coventry and in early 1990s and Gillian Rose saying to me, ‘Keep your mind in hell and despair not'. It seems to me that we need an utterly clear-sighted, analytical diagnosis of the present that doesn't fall into a form of transcendental miserabilism, and which retains a sense of the possible, even and especially in circumstances where the impossible seems to face us and face us down.

I like this. It feeds well into the above ideas about fiction in terms of its necessity, and the lucidity it can offer. I think it is more than enough for art’s political contribution to be ‘an utterly clear-sighted, analytical diagnosis of the present’. It is valuable when it is done well. In this way it is not (overtly/recognisably) political because it is showing what’s there, opposed to doing anything more/offering a solution. Perhaps art that tries to do more is doomed. Obviously there are many other things art and writing do, but trying to give answers is not one of them. At best they can try and see clearly through the mess and say something small and honest. This reminds me of Harry Crews and his thoughts on problems and solutions within fiction (from about 8.07)...though the whole thing is interesting...

And finally I don’t think anything’s wrong with a bit of transcendental miserabilism...

More soon!

Lots of Monster Emporium Press news...

2011-05-27T15:01:00.000+01:00

(OK this is cross posted from the MEP blog...apologies)

Hey there Monster lovers, so here are a bunch of dates you *may* want to note down. How else will you get your fix of MEP goodness? Exactly. So...

We will be of course at the International Alternative Press Fair this weekend! It's going be very exciting and is the first time Alt Press are going international. It's a mere £2 to get in and it takes place at Conway Hall (25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL) from 10am - 4pm on both Saturday 28 and Sunday 29 May.

There may even be cake...

ALSO We will be at the Sassoon Gallery on Sunday 5 June as part of their show, Holy Sh!t: The Visions of the Walworth Jumpers which sounds awesome and is in Peckham (yes! South London 4 eva).

AND there is a zine festival at the Women's Library (East London) on Saturday 25 June which looks pretty exciting...we're not organised enough to have applied for this yet so we will confirm closer to the date. But still...

FINALLY (and similarly we have yet to apply but sounds very interesting...) on 22-24 July there's a slightly more literary/academic event taking place at Galerie 8 (Hackney) where many Chris Marker films will be shown and there will be all sorts of artists' book and self-published goodness.

WOAH!

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve by Adrienne Rich

2011-05-23T16:04:00.000+01:00

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid

later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere

Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing

now diagram the sentence

The Frogs, Gather Round For Saviour #2

2011-05-19T20:44:00.002+01:00

The Frogs

'The first fiction is your name'

2011-05-10T21:57:00.003+01:00

I *really* want to read Inferno by Eileen Myles.
“I’m not an exclusively emotional poet, but I start with a problem and I keep returning to the feeling of it, not the idea. I don’t replace it. It seems if you stay in an actual groove (a non-verbal pot) then the poem never really gets lost or boring.”

from the great OR Books

Here is a sort of weird 'advert' for it but it's good because it's mostly her speaking, and boy is she cool. She is a hero in the sense that she says what she fucking thinks. So hard to find.

There is also a very interesting piece on her, Bruce Benderson and Gary Indiana over at 3:AM...which then led me to this mind-blowing manifesto by Benderson - Toward the New Degenerate Narrative...

(extract)
'Today, for the first time in a long time in this country, the literary discourse of the Outsider has been diluted and deformed. In place of true Outsider narratives or manifestos like Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Ellison's The Invisible Man, Algren's A Walk on the Wild Side, or Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn are sentimental researches into mythicized ethnic histories. Obscure facts about lost African civilizations or neglected female artists are supposed to fill the enormous gap left by deconstructing the canon. In humanities departments, women and ethnic minorities are taught to see their present existence as a socially mediated hallucination. Everything they experience has been reduced to being a symptom of their oppression.

This is depressing in lieu of the fact that America produced some of the world's most powerful voices of alienation: the postwar Beats. In the late 1950s, when the Beats burst onto the American scene, audiences and writers were less ghettoized. The fact that Hubert Selby, Jr., a straight man, was able to create a powerful portrait of a drag queen in Last Exit to Brooklyn brought him accolades instead of censure. The fact that macho, white Jack Gelber could portray black or gay junkies in his minimalist play The Connection was not looked on with suspicion. Nowadays conferences on gay, feminist, Chicano, or Black literature demand that the voices for these groups come from within. No one is allowed to write about Chicana lesbian experience except a Chicana lesbian.'

It is quite a rich and complex piece but I think I'm excited by it because he is saying that the voice of the outsider is not exclusive to the outsider. And similarly the outsider is not defined simply by his outsider status. Read it! It's way better than I made it sound.

This links in part also to Howard Slater's work on the notion of Walter Benjamin's 'affective class' which I think I have clumsily spoken about before. A little explanation via a quote from Real Phôné:

'If it could be said that the working class was formerly in the position of the excluded and seeking access to representation, then, the reframing of its anger and suffering into the language of politics, has to a degree made it a consensual figure. Its visibility by means of representation has made it into a “figure possessing a specific good or universality” upon which a hoped-for practice is based. Is this maybe why Rancière asserts that “politics cannot be defined on the basis of any pre-existing subject” (p.28) for the pre-existing subject, one that ‘possesses’ the logos, is already a representation made visible, made perceivable, by the currently operative ‘distribution of the sensible’ and as such cannot effect a new “dissensual reconfiguration of the common experience of the sensible” (p.140)? This may go some way to guessing at Rancière’s reasons for the abandonment of class struggle politics, but it does not explicitly explain what ‘supplement’, what non-existent subject, could come to take its place and effect what could take on a pro-revolutionary hue: the ‘redistribution of the sensible’.

Monster Emporium Press: New project, open subs

2011-05-10T10:28:00.001+01:00

The monsters are planning a new fanzine, taking a different object of obsession / adoration each issue.

The first issue will be dedicated to JOSS WHEDON, creator of more good things than I can list without making this sentence too long.

Open submissions. We’d like fan fiction, articles, drawings, blurred stalkery pictures of the man himself or affiliates, etc. etc.

Deadline: 20th June. No money made will go to any individuals, just back in the pot for more zines. Contributors will get a free copy.

Images should be .jpg, minimum 300dpi, maximum 10mb file, suitable for B&W printing. Documents should be .doc (please, no .docx files), maximum 1500 words.

Send to hive@monsteremporiumpress.co.uk

Talk at the British Academy/Neuroscience and neuromania

2011-05-10T10:23:00.001+01:00

Blurb:

Neuroscience is making astounding progress in helping us to understand how the brain works and this will deliver advances in the management of brain disease. Unfortunately, it has a Dark Companion - Neuromania - which is founded on the belief that brain activity is not merely a necessary but a sufficient condition for human consciousness and that consequently our behaviour in every day life can be entirely understood neural terms. This has resulted in wild claims about the potential of neuroscience to cast light on art, to explain economic behaviour, to inform social policy and the justice system, and even to account for religious belief. The talk will show why such hype is bad for the reputation of neuroscience and may have dangerous consequences

Go here for more info.

(More personal updates to follow soon!)

On Reading

2011-04-19T18:18:00.002+01:00

Almost as soon as I finished writing the post dated 5^th January 2011 about reading I deviated from that plan. It was akin to an aspirational attitude of constant but essentially pointless acquisition of riches. I remembered Franny...

What happened was, I got the idea in my head – and I could not get it out – that college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven’s sake. what’s the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping – and it still does! Sometimes I think that knowledge – when it’s knowledge for knowledge’s sake, anyway – is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly...I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while – just once in a while – there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time!’

(J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey)

I remember Deleuze and Guattari, I looked at the trees outside and everyone around me and thought, duh!? What about a rhizomatic mode of knowledge and life? The reason I started writing more in the past few years is because I removed all barriers and plans. What emerged instead was some sort of natural rhythm, albeit a combination of bullying myself (come on write something you good-for-nothing nobody) and blind, happy desire. Why could the same non-plan not apply to reading?

What seems to be working for me is responding once again (like I did when I was a child) to urgency, passion, curiosity and chance. I lived and breathed all kinds of books when I was little and when I was satisfied with say, having read thirteen Sweet Valley High books in a row, I’d say to myself, OK I think I’m done with this now, and by the by Francine Pascal isn’t real. I never used to stop myself. I knew when I was small that it was important to give yourself what you want (within reason) as soon as possible. Only when you were sated could you move on to the next thing. This has secretly been the feeling all along, the stupid joy of enjoying reading a book so much that you almost can’t wait for it to be over so you can read the next thing, but at the same time you never want it to stop...

What brought this on was trying to get hold of Moyra Davey's The Problem of Reading which John Waters talks about in Role Models. Anyhow, I haven't been able to find it yet so thought I would try to delineate my own problems with reading. Allowing myself to think it through as a problem has made the confusion/angst a lot more interesting.

I did find this quote from Davey's book, if you're interested:

So how are we to draw up those reading lists finally? I have been fascinated to note how many writers invoke chance and randomness as guiding principles in choosing their books. I am talking about Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who, citing 'the John Cage-ish principle that if randomness determines the universe it might as well determine my reading too,' spent a winter reading the Greek tragedies because she happened to find a discounted set in a mail order catalogue. I'm talking about the serendipitous findings of Virginia Woolf, the little pamphlet from a hundred years ago that she comes across in a second-hand bookshop that stops her in her tracks and rivets her to the spot. I am talking about the happenstance of Georges Perec, who, while engaged in the tedious task of arranging his bookshelves, comes upon a book he'd lost sight of and writes: 'putting off until tomorrow what you won't do today, you finally re-devour [it] lying face down on your bed.' He further speculates that in our pursuit of knowledge, 'order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.' And finally, I am talking about the passionate book collector uncrating his treasures after a two-year hiatus, as portrayed by Walter Benjamin in his autobiographical essay 'Unpacking My Library,' for whom 'chance and fate . . . are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these book.'

A beautiful and endless question...

N.B. I stand by the questions posed in post 5 Jan, just not by the method of answering them.

Amazing sounding study day although annoying you have to pay...

2011-04-08T10:06:00.000+01:00

Motherhood, Servitude and the Delegation of Care

plus the presentation of the winners of the

'Maternal Subjectivities: Care and Labour' Digital Media Competition
Birkbeck, University of London 

Friday 20th May 2011: 9.30-6.00pm

Keynote: Stella Sandford

Panel speakers: Rosie Cox, Lucy Delap, Alison Light, Mirca Madianou, Daniel Miller, Jenny Mitchell, Kate Pullinger, Imogen Tyler, Rachel Thomson, and Helen Wood

This study-day focuses on the interrelations between labour, capital, care and the maternal. In particular we would like to consider the diverse ways 'maternal care' has been, and continues to be shared, and the implications for our understandings of maternal subjectivities and the labour of care. The study day will open up 'maternity' as a term that includes the paid and unpaid work of a diverse range of social actors. It aims at generating a dialogue between two rich and substantial bodies of feminist scholarship; work on the social histories of domestic labour, service and servitude, and current debates about globalism, migration and the care industries, recasting existing scholarship through the lens of maternal studies.

Key Questions:
* How do we understand the (maternal) subjectivities of a range of care workers and what might a consideration of such subjectivities contribute to our understandings of the maternal?
* What are the political, economic, affective and subjective effects of sharing maternal labour?
* How do histories of class, servitude, service, gender, ‘race’, and ‘care’ interact with contemporary neoliberal patterns of migration?
* What are the potentials for new relations that might emerge from specific constellations of maternal subjectivity and modes of care work?

For more information or to reserve a place please contact mamsie@bbk.ac.uk<http://uk.mc295.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=mamsie@bbk.ac.uk>
<http://uk.mc295.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=mamse@bbk.ac.uk>Cost: £60/£30 (unfunded).

John Waters’ Role Models

2011-03-30T20:41:00.002+01:00

I bought a copy of John Waters’ new book when I (drop it like it’s hot) met him at the launch party at Dover Street Market (no less). It was excellent, there were many free, black-vodka cocktails and beautiful people poncing about. I felt like a poseur and I liked it. Anyway, I queued up with the rabid, well dressed masses and got my copy signed and John, with perfect control, gave me and the group I was with five minutes of his time – but in a lovely, not at all diva-ish or rushed way. He was basically super nice and totally on top of the situation. He seemed completely genuine in his performance of himself because that’s who he is. Anyway, I shelved the book when I got home thinking I’d save it for a rainy day. Time passed. Rain fell. I realised I was avoiding it. I knew I shared many of Waters’ role models - Jane Bowles, Rei Kawakubo, depraved local lunatics, Denton Welch etc. and I think I was a little nervous coming to this book, especially given that he’s a role model of mine.

Comme des Garcons - now imagine it on me. That's better.

It’s been a complex reading experience. I absolutely adored Crackpot and Shock Value (though haven’t yet read the others) – pure joy from cover to cover. But this one felt different. It felt older, more mature, and I guess it is, he’s 63 (or so), he’s figured some shit out, he’s less crazy – or rather he knows what to do with his crazy, it’s become more complicated. What I love about this book is that it encapsulates John Waters’ beautiful, sick taste perfectly – that is: without shame of perversion or obsession. He’s made a career out of what might otherwise be cause for moderate medication or institutionalisation. He uses things other people may discard as disgusting, pointless etc. and he finds them joyful (and also finds these things joyful in his heroes e.g. Kawakubo’s stained tops, Moyra Davey’s nondescript still lifes). But he doesn’t simply glamourise the shocking (see Outsider Porn), disturbing (Baltimore Heroes) or downright criminal (see Leslie, Manson girl)...it’s more than that. He’s not afraid to say this-is-fucked-up, but perhaps he loves these curious and crazed people because they don’t (or no longer) see their situation or themselves as a problem or illness. They refuse to think of themselves as freaks, or rather, the label doesn’t bother them, they feel no need to ‘normalise’ or repent (any more than necessary). The problem is always from the outside, how they are perceived. These are the people I admire most too.

Still life by Moyra Davey. Boring. Gorgeous.

A passage I particularly like, or that rings true for me which I’ve been trying to not be embarrassed by for maybe my whole life is this:

‘Damaged people make the best warriors, so get busy. I’m a fascist about my work habits and I expect you to be, too. Never have a spontaneous moment in your life again. If you’re going to have a hangover, it should be scheduled on your calender months in advance. Rigid enjoyment of planning can get you high. Militant time-management will enable you to ignore how maladjusted you would be if you had the time to notice it in the first place. Discipline is not anal compulsion; it’s a lifestyle that breeds power’.

Maybe what I was concerned about before reading it was that he’d somehow have compromised, perhaps because I really didn’t like A Dirty Shame – but he’s still John. I can forgive him a bad movie, I can forgive him some rambling passages. When you really love someone/thing you don’t balk at the first (or second or twentieth) flaw. I think Waters’ could’ve used a bit more editing (I could help! We’d discuss verbal minutiae over endangered, over-priced sushi, he'd laugh at all my jokes, he'd pay me for my cut-throat expertise in Commes des Garcons' new line which obviously I pull off effortlessly...) in places and maybe some cutting but who the fuck cares? This isn’t a Morrissey’s-a-blatant-racist type flaw which you (well, I) have to worry about and purposefully ignore time and time again...it’s no biggie. He’s never really compromised or tried to please anyone, he lives alone and likes it that way – he hates the thought of someone else’s art on the wall or taste all over the place – and somehow this entire way of life, doing whatever the fuck you want regardless of anyone/thing (this explains the fascination with the criminal) is bad taste. But good bad taste. I haven’t quite got my head round the philosophy of bad taste yet but I feel a little closer.

Monster Emporium Press updates...

2011-03-29T21:52:00.000+01:00

Over here...in the news section...

RIP Smiley Culture 10.2.63 - 15.3.11

2011-03-21T00:30:00.001Z

Story

2011-03-15T09:29:00.002Z

New. Well sort of old. Over here.

Interesting interview with Ray Brassier

2011-03-07T14:42:00.001Z

I am interested in the challenge Brassier's theories pose to narrative/narratology and how this affects fiction and its place, and the relation of neuro/science/technology to aesthetics...

Of course, many thinkers, including some scientists, persist in trying to wrest some sort of psychologically satisfying narrative from elements of the modern scientific worldview. But this effort is doomed because it is the very category of narrative that has been rendered cognitively redundant by modern science. Science does not need to deny the significance of our evident psychological need for narrative; it just demotes it from its previously foundational metaphysical status to that of an epistemically derivative ‘useful fiction’.
[full text here]

New review of Unthank Books'...

2011-03-07T13:21:00.002Z

first Unthology over here.

Writing restraint 2 and 3

2011-02-28T13:05:00.002Z

My friend gave me a writing task.
It was:
1. Using the prompt word 'simplicity', write a very short piece (about 100 words) using only words containing four or less letters.
2. As above but prompt is 'balance', words are five letters or less.
3. As above but prompt is 'complexity', words are six or less.

I posted 'simplicity' ages ago, and have now done the other two. I'll post all three so it seems complete:

4: Simplicity
Gram by gram heat rose, soft like fur or hair over cold skin to warm it only when it asks. To warm up here we have to burn book upon book. It is safe and easy and and we stay dumb and good. We cook eggs in pans over the fire and eat them with salt. We pour the salt in a form to keep us from harm and dig our toes into the dirt for fun. Each page bows down into the fire and each word like love goes away with a char on your brow as you lean in to read.

5: Balance
His body has been made. From thigh and knee to thick, white wrist. Even the water which coats his eyes is there, older than its Latin name. Under heavy stone he waits. Men come. They think their role is great. They try and fail, they fight and lose. They did not see his body in the block. With tools too sharp or hands too heavy they break and split the cube into only crumb and ash. They think they must make his veins, guts, hairs and nails. He waits in the quiet to be seen. Even he who will chip with care and grace at the block will in the end carve only his name into it in bold. The body's name will be faint and small on the edge of the stone. But it will stay.

6: Complexity
My hands fall open in doubt. Palms arch up hoping the wind will shape the frayed lines into clear paths. They are pushed and peaked into new forms and like sand dunes or cliff faces, eroded and formed over time. Then they buckle into guilty fists. The head line caves in with fear. The heart line bleeds over its border. They form no myth. No secret is there. I am lured by too many roads. One: sweet and plain as home, pulling with bribes and tears. Two: rich and deep as oceans, braced for new logics. Three: light and fine as skin pulled tight over pale, hollow-boned wings, void of the weight of effort, clean and high. Soon the white pillow and sweet tea I met each day with will be a happy blank. Then I will step out only with desire.

On diary writing

2011-02-25T13:54:00.010Z

Yesterday night I got out of bed to write for the first time in ages. Now, I used to do this all the time as a teenager, I used to write for hours every night, sometimes I wouldn’t even bother turning the light on for fear of disturbing those thoughts that come best in the dark. On a clear night I would draw the curtains and through a magical combination of moonlight and light pollution I could see just about enough to write.

That urgency rose again last night. And it was for journal writing. I have been keeping a (private) journal since I can remember, and have boxes of them at my parents’ house. A few years ago I was going to do a project where I burnt them all and filmed it. But part of me held back. Being the sort of person who sometimes can’t tell the difference between inherent laziness and actual hesitation I didn’t do it and I’m glad. It wasn’t just about the unwillingness to start a fire, or sentimentality - but something else.

I still keep journals. I still get through them pretty quickly, but I write less in that capacity then I used to. Partly because I am doing more ‘actual writing’ (reviews, stories, this), partly due to being busy and in a lot of ways having less privacy than I did when I was a teenager - I share a bed most nights and have less time alone. As a teenager I didn’t go out on school nights so basically had the whole day after school to myself - my family made no major demands on my time. There seemed infinite time for reflection and I didn’t have the added worry of practical concerns (housing and feeding myself). So, all those things plus the fact that as an ‘adult’ I am supposed to somehow be ‘less in my head’ and more in the ‘real world’, bolsetering whatever nonsense I went to school for my entire young life to learn how to bolster, means journal writing sort of took a back seat. All that adolescent feeling gets in the way of going to work/being ‘normal’ – but that’s the best, most honest, truest stuff. It’s just that it can never correlate with progress, productivity, capitalism – which is why it is seen as indulgent and relegated to teenagers (as though they are somehow less real/worthwhile/human/capable of emotion).

'It's as if the homogenising effects of capital, its reduction of disposable time and its guiding of the meanders of sensuality, have effected a colonisation of the sensorium...'
Howard Slater, Real Phôné

But it is important to have a private space that is just yours. Away from the noise of the world. Where there is no shame or guilt or trying to make sense or sound good or further your career. When I wrote in journals I never thought about anyone reading them, I didn’t even think about myself re-reading them, it was just the process. And I think I’ve lost something important and feel like I’ve betrayed a loyal friend. I used to write in different ways too – notes, diagrams, poems, ever expanding and detailed mind maps. I didn’t care about whether I wrote in sentences, whether it would be coherent or even legible later. I developed my own shorthand, a sort of code (which meant it couldn’t be deciphered by others anyway, an extra bonus). I had to because this was the only way I could keep track of all my thoughts; and the faster I wrote, the faster I thought and so on and so on. It was exhilarating. I always felt free afterwards, like something was out of me that needed to get out, but in having a record of it, was also not forgotten or expelled. Rather…reinforced. By writing it all down I was both getting it out and further solidifying it. It was like shedding skin and freeing up space for more life. My process of writing meant that I didn’t need to write in clear sentences/structures because having thought/written it was the same thing. I suppose this is why I didn’t burn the diaries. It would’ve been like burning away part (most!) of my private inner world.

I was ashamed of this world for a while. Guilty about the indulgence. But this strikes me now as totally absurd. It’s like saying to think/feel/react/act for or in relation to yourself is an indulgence. It’s intertwined with middle class guilt: should I really be doing this when people are starving etc (like the Woody Allen joke about how he can’t have fun if he knows one other person in the world is unhappy). This is wrong for three reasons. 1: It suggests that people have more or less psychic pain/self-consciousness/subjectivity according to their class/social situation. This is just plain insulting to everyone (not to mention really neurotic, ungrateful, self-obsessed and patronising). So those little girls in Palestinian refugee camps – just because they have a lot of shitty material circumstances – can’t feel anything, like they are somehow immune to all the nuances of feeling we lucky few can access all the time because they have ‘bigger problems’. If anything it seems quite the opposite: that the more you get materially the less you have inside because you have to spend so much time trying to safeguard and protect all your shit, including your mental and emotional stability – you wouldn’t want things to get too messy. If you have nothing (or fear nothing), everything is possible*. 2. It is important to have a strong sense of self in relation to the world, no matter what kind of world you live in. You have to develop this independence so you are less malleable by all the conflicts/attractions/possibilities around you – but of course you must also stay open (otherwise I would a. be a hermit b. definitely not have a blog!). 3. Everyone is allowed to talk. It is not only for the oppressed. And we are all oppressed anyway. And not only communication about 'bad stuff' is valid/noble. Quite the reverse - let's fucking celebrate!

Some other things happened too. I tried consciously at one point to experiment with writing in a diary less as in some ways I think it reinforced some destructive/boring/habituated modes and patterns of thought; it became a snake swallowing its tail. But what I forgot is that I also used to write in it whenever I was so overwhelmed/ecstatic/excited about something I had to express it/get it out immediately. I found this easier to do by writing than by trying to tell anyone about it. It always felt watered down, translated and less immediate if you have to go through the barrier of trying to communicate with another person. This was and is important. What would happen in this process is by writing it down/out (like I said above) I would also be writing in, into myself, it would become part of me and that me would then, in the public sphere, communicate successfully with other people. Immediate feeling is so hard to express precisely to someone else in words as it is happening. But writing it down meant it was indelibly there and then I could step out and try and talk to people on their terms, in other languages, free of that personal urgency and secret language which, when I try to communicate it as it is happening, always fails, falls short and leaves me isolated both from the feeling itself and the person I’m trying desperately to communicate with. Like when you see a movie and before you’ve had time to think your movie buddy starts expounding their views all over the place, crushing your half-formed, delicate thoughts. I know lots of people can do this, and in a lot of ways I’m jealous, but I can’t. This is obviously why sex, dancing and other (mostly) non-verbal forms of communication are so liberating.

It is important, vital even, to maintain a private dialogue with yourself and only yourself. This may mean you seem anti-social or neglectful to your friends and family – but in the long run it is quite the opposite. In any case, if I’ve given any of you who may read this that impression, I am truly sorry. But I’ll always come back.

So why am I publishing this? Because firstly this is not a journal entry, this is a meta-commentary on diary writing. I would be truly mortified if anyone were to actually read my diaries (though I do kind of want to do a project where I publish hilariously painful extracts…). Secondly, I am trying to explain myself/my absences (which will continue) and ask for understanding. I also want to say it breaks my heart because I want to be with everyone I love all the time. Thirdly, to make a simple plea: watch Pump Up the Volume - Christian Slater says all this, and better. Finally, while it seems odd to write publicly about the value of privacy, it also helps me delineate the difference and say this is not a journal, but journals are necessary too. It is a necessary part of my practice, it is vital for fiction. Anais Nin's fictions are famously drawn directly - often word for word - from her diaries. It's not the same with me because I'm not so directly autobiographical in fiction but the link is clear, and I've neglected it.

Perhaps this blog is for the space in-between private and public. In a way it functions like a letter. I got through most of my teenage years by writing giant, epic letters to my pen-friend, who I’d never met. We are recently back in touch. Similarly, a very close friend is now indefinitely out of the country, so we’re writing – and it feels sort of like diary writing, which is what reminded me of all this in the first place. So, leaving is sometimes better than staying, and distance often makes you closer.

Never under-estimate the value of a voice in the wilderness.

*This is why I dislike a lot of 'political' writing, it often seems patronising or simplistic. Yes, I am interested in stories set in specific political circumstances (as they all inherently are) but I don't like it when that is the only thing that defines a character or story, especially when it's 'look at the humanity that remains despite all the shit'. Maybe this is because I haven't been in that circumstance myself. But my father has, bombs literally dropping on his doorstep, and he was a political activist but he was still defined by so much more than that, or better: not defined by anything at all. I prefer dystopian novels to explore problematic political situations. They seem more specific precisely because they are not based on anything concrete. Art and life..will get back to this!

Robert Mapplethorpe

2011-02-21T19:20:00.002Z

'It was a good place to come from in that it was a good place to leave'
-- RM on his home town

Don't Be Afraid, You're Already Dead/Akron Family

2011-02-12T15:36:00.000Z

Patti Smith's favourite books

2011-02-10T14:10:00.001Z

“The Master & Margarita” by Mikhail Bulgakov
“Journey To The East” by Hermann Hesse 
“The Glass Bead Game” by Hermann Hesse
“Heart Of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad 
“Moby Dick” by Herman Melville 
“Billy Budd” by Herman Melville
“Songs Of Innocence” by William Blake
“The Wild Boys” by William Burroughs 
“Howl” by Allen Ginsburg 
“A Season In Hell” by Arthur Rimbaud
“Illuminations” by Arthur Rimbaud 
“Wittgenstein’s Poker” by David Edmonds & John Eidinow
“Villette” by Charlotte Bronte 
“The Process” by Brion Gysin
“Cain’s Book” by Alexander Trocchi
“Coriolanus” by William Shakespeare
“The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde
“The Sheltering Sky” by Paul Bowles
“Against Interpretation” by Susan Sontag
“The Oblivian Seekers” by Isabelle Eberhardt
“Women Of Cairo” by Gerard de Nerval
“Under The Volcano” by Malcom Lowry
“Dead Souls” by Nikolai Gogol
“The Book Of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa
“Death Of Virgil” by Herman Broch
“Raise High The Roof Beams Carpenter/ Franny & Zooey” by J.D. Salinger 
“The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
“A Night Of Serious Drinking” by Rene Daumal 
“Swann In Love” by Marcel Proust
“A Happy Death” by Albert Camus 
“The First Man” by Albert Camus
“The Waves” by Virginia Woolf
“Big Sur” by Jack Kerouac 
anything by H.P. Lovecraft 
anything by W.G. Sebald 
“The Thief’s Journal” or anything by Jean Genet
“The Arcades Project” or anything by Walter Benjamin 
“A Poet In New York” by Garcia Lorca
“The Lost Honor Of Katharina Blum” by Heinrich Boll
“The Palm Wine Drinkard” by Amos Tutuola 
“Ice” by Anna Kavan (or anything by her)
“The Divine Proportion” by H.E. Huntley 
“Nadja” by Andre Breton

p.s. I know the book titles should be in italics not speech marks but I copied/pasted the list from Somewhere Else and couldn't justify spending 20 minutes italicising...even though I am quite upset by it. However, this is the sort of shit I'm trying to rise above.

‘Wars come and go, bugs are forever.’

2011-02-09T15:17:00.002Z

Mary Gaitskill on writing, Nabokov, MFAs, rejection, mystery, her early career, pointlessness...

Mary Gaitskill, 1989

Her writing essentials:
1. willingness to be lonely
2. maniacal persistence
3. courage
4. and then something else that makes it impossible to quit, even when, rationally, you really ought to
5. let go of the idea of success

The full text (I think it's from a talk/speech) is worth reading, honest and brave - over here.

Mary Gaitskill, recent

Women, writing and MSCL (links of love!)

2011-02-09T12:39:00.001Z

"Obsessions are the only things that matter. Perversion interests me most and is my guiding darkness"
-- Patricia Highsmith
A good piece on her from The Paris Review here.

Short article on women writers and reviewers being published less than their male counterparts at The New Republic. This piece from Slate is also responding to the same stats that VIDA produced re male/female writers in literary magazines and reviews...

And a excellent essay by Toril Moi on women, writing and theory. READ IT! I plan on responding to that piece properly sometime soon...

Plus thoughts on women and criticism from Bookslut.

Also for fun:

"All teenage girls are at least half-lesbian"
-- Emma Straub on My So Called Life also at The Paris Review here.

George Orwell on the im/possibility of political literature

2011-01-25T14:11:00.001Z

Here is part of Orwell's brilliant Inside the Whale (1940), which is worth reading in full, but a taster:

However, there is more than one kind of irresponsibility. As a rule, writers who do not wish to identify themselves with the historical process at the moment either ignore it or fight against if. If they can ignore it, they are probably fools. If they can understand it well enough to want to fight against it, they probably have enough vision to realize that they cannot win. Look, for instance, at a poem like ‘The Scholar Gipsy’, with its railing against the ‘strange disease of modern life’ and its magnificent defeatist simile is the final stanza. It expresses one of the normal literary attitudes, perhaps actually the prevailing attitude during the last hundred years. And on the other hand there are the ‘progressives’, the yea-sayers, the Shaw-Wells type, always leaping forward to embrace the ego-projections which they mistake for the future. On the whole the writers of the twenties took the first line and the writers of the thirties the second. And at any given moment, of course, there is a huge tribe of Barries and Deepings and Dells who simply don't notice what is happening. Where Miller's work is symptomatically important is in its avoidance of any of these attitudes. He is neither pushing the world-process forward nor trying to drag it back, but on the other hand he is by no means ignoring it. I should say that he believes in the impending ruin of Western Civilization much more firmly than the majority of ‘revolutionary’ writers; only he does not feel called upon to do anything about it. He is fiddling While Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face towards the flames.

In Max and the White Phagocytes there is one of those revealing passages in which a writer tells you a great deal about himself while talking about somebody else. The book includes a long essay on the diaries of Anais Nin, which I have never read, except for a few fragments, and which I believe have not been published. Miller claims that they are the only true feminine writing that has ever appeared, whatever that may mean. But the interesting passage is one in which he compares Anais Nin — evidently a completely subjective, introverted writer — to Jonah in the whale's belly. In passing he refers to an essay that Aldous Huxley wrote some years ago about El Greco's picture, The Dream of Philip the Second. Huxley remarks that the people in El Greco's pictures always look as though they were in the bellies of whales, and professes to find something peculiarly horrible in the idea of being in a ‘visceral prison’. Miller retorts that, on the contrary, there are many worse things than being swallowed by whales, and the passage makes it dear that he himself finds the idea rather attractive. Here he is touching upon what is probably a very widespread fantasy. It is perhaps worth noticing that everyone, at least every English-speaking person, invariably speaks of Jonah and the whale. Of course the creature that swallowed Jonah was a fish, and was so described in the Bible (Jonah i. 17), but children naturally confuse it with a whale, and this fragment of baby-talk is habitually carried into later life — a sign, perhaps, of the hold that the Jonah myth has upon our imaginations. For the fact is that being inside a whale is a very comfortable, cosy, homelike thought. The historical Jonah, if he can be so called, was glad enough to escape, but in imagination, in day-dream, countless people have envied him. It is, of course, quite obvious why. The whale's belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are, in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens. A storm that would sink all the battleships in the world would hardly reach you as an echo. Even the whale's own movements would probably be imperceptible to you. He might be wallowing among the surface waves or shooting down into the blackness of the middle seas (a mile deep, according to Herman Melville), but you would never notice the difference. Short of being dead, it is the final, unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility. And however it may be with Anais Nin, there is no question that Miller himself is inside the whale. All his best and most characteristic passages are written from the angle of Jonah, a willing Jonah. Not that he is especially introverted — quite the contrary. In his case the whale happens to be transparent. Only he feels no impulse to alter or control the process that he is undergoing. He has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting.

It will be seen what this amounts to. It is a species of quietism, implying either complete unbelief or else a degree of belief amounting to mysticism. The attitude is ‘Je m'en fous’ or ‘Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him’, whichever way you like to look at it; for practical purposes both are identical, the moral in either case being ‘Sit on your bum’. But in a time like ours, is this a defensible attitude? Notice that it is almost impossible to refrain from asking this question. At the moment of writing, we are still in a period in which it is taken for granted that books ought always to be positive, serious, and ‘constructive’. A dozen years ago this idea would have been greeted with titters. (‘My dear aunt, one doesn't write about anything, one just writes.’) Then the pendulum swung away from the frivolous notion that art is merely technique, but it swung a very long distance, to the point of asserting that a book can only be ‘good’ if it is founded on a ‘true’ vision of life. Naturally the people who believe this also believe that they are in posssion of the truth themselves. Catholic critics, for instance, tend to claim that books arc only ‘good’ when they are of Catholic tendency. Marxist critics make the same claim more boldy for Marxist books. For instance, Mr Edward Upward (‘A Marxist Interpretation of Literature,’ in the Mind in Chains}:

Literary criticism which aims at being Marxist must... proclaim that no book written at the present time can be ‘good’ unless it is written from a Marxist or near-Marxist viewpoint.

Various other writers have made similar or comparable statements. Mr Upward italicizes ‘at the present time’ because, he realizes that you cannot, for instance, dismiss Hamlet on the ground that Shakespeare was not a Marxist. Nevertheless his interesting essay only glances very shortly at this difficulty. Much of the literature that comes to us out of the past is permeated by and in fact founded on beliefs (the belief in the immortality of the soul, for example) which now seem to us false and in some cases contemptibly silly. Yet if is ‘good’ literature, if survival is any test. Mr Upward would no doubt answer that a belief which was appropriate several centuries ago might be inappropriate and therefore stultifying now. But this does not get one much farther, because it assumes that in any age there will be one body of belief which is the current approximation to truth, and that the best literature of the time will be more or less in harmony with it. Actually no such uniformity has ever existed. In seventeenth-century England, for instance, there was a religious and political cleavage which distinctly resembled the left-right antagonism of to-day. Looking back, most modern people would feel that the bourgeois-Puritan viewpoint was a better approximation to truth than the Catholic-feudal one. But it is certainly not the case that all or even a majority of the best writers of the time were puritans. And more than this, there exist ‘good’ writers whose world-view would in any age be recognized false and silly. Edgar Allan Poe is an example. Poe's outlook is at best a wild romanticism and at worst is not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense. Why is it, then that stories like The Black Cat, The Tell-tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher and so forth, which might very nearly have been written by a lunatic, do not convey a feeling of falsity? Because they are true within a certain framework, they keep the rules of their own peculiar world, like a Japanese picture. But it appears that to write successfully about such a world you have got to believe in it. One sees the difference immediately if one compares Poe's Tales with what is, in my opinion, an insincere attempt to work up a similar atmosphere, Julian Green's Minuit. The thing that immediately strikes one about Minuit is that there is no reason why any of the events in it should happen. Everything is completely arbitrary; there is no emotional sequence. But this is exactly what one does not feel with Poe's stories. Their maniacal logic, in its own setting, is quite convincing. When, for instance, the drunkard seizes the black cat and cuts its eye out with his penknife, one knows exactly why he did it, even to the point of feeling that one would have done the same oneself. It seems therefore that for a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity. Even Mr Upward would not claim that a writer needs nothing beyond a Marxist training. He also needs a talent. But talent, apparently, is a matter of being able to care, of really believing in your beliefs, whether they are true or false. The difference between, for instance, Céline and Evelyn Waugh is a difference of emotional intensity. It is the difference between genuine despair and a despair that is at least partly a pretence. And with this there goes another consideration which is perhaps less obvious: that there are occasions when an ‘untrue’ belief is more likely to be sincerely held than a ‘true’ one.

Palestine Papers

2011-01-24T12:33:00.001Z

Scrap that last post.

Lux Interior

2011-01-17T12:58:00.001Z

I really like this excerpt from an interview with The Cramps' Lux Interior:

'We're just people who remain ever-curious. We're just attracted to whatever comes in handy. Again, like the Surrealists, anything you run across is actually beautiful; within a single city block, you can find miraculous things. It's a good planet - and good things can happen.'

(Thanks Tom)

I am done with pessimism.
Even though almost everything is terrifyingly shit.
The time is now.

Self-hatred/self-help: Ten Commandments

2011-01-15T17:12:00.001Z

1. Write every day.
Even if it's not the story I'm working on at that time: exercises, blog, 10 minutes. The aim is to get rid of the fear of starting, get rid of the fear of writing badly (by writing badly sometimes) and incorporate it into my life - like eating or teeth brushing. Also to 'learn' writing as you would an instrument - here is this big thing I have no idea how to manipulate in order to make it work how I want it to work, maybe I should start with scales and arpeggios etc.
Things that don't count: shopping lists, emails that end in 'All the best', imaginary letters to wrong-doers...e.g. Dear Nestle...Dear The Government etc.

2. Read every day.
'Nuff said.

3. Dress like you mean it.
Even if it is leisure wear.

Jimmy Savile shares my birthday. Coincidence? I didn't think so either.

4. Tea = good
Proof.
(Thanks Peep!)

5. Remember to eat properly.
This is turning into a somewhat embarrassing list of very basic things that most other humans know/do - get up, eat, drink, work...but sometimes it's not obvious to me...*blush*

Hello seven percent! Have we met?

6. Understand the difference between useful fear and stupid fear.
Useful: I'm drowning and I don't like it! or: Shit! That bear is a lot closer when I use these binoculars the right way! or: But how did he know my name...?
Stupid: Anything I write will be horrific/derivative/pretentious shit that no one will publish/like/read ending in my inevitable demise into writing copy for Argos catalogues (if I'm lucky) and using my 15% staff discount to buy my few remaining friends birthday presents for parties I am not invited to but show up at anyway. I buy them the same gift every year and write (in what I think is a funny way) in the card, 'I don't know if you already have one of these but...'

What?! Nobody reads instructions.

7. Succumb to desires. Do not justify.
This will lead to better, less resentful work.
Again - know/figure out the difference between 'good' desire and 'bad' desire e.g. I think today is the day I will finally start training for the marathon or: You know what, I don't want any of these things. It's all going to The Needy (commence getting rid of all material possessions aside from passport/computer/clothes on my back) vs. I literally want to rip that baby limb from limb then use said limbs to beat its mother into a bloody pulp, but not kill her so she always remembers the consequences of her child's behaviour and forever feels the pain of its loss.

8. Exercise is a friend.
Dressed as a foe.

9. Keep going.

10. Make the bed.

Reading/Writing

2011-01-05T18:49:00.003Z

The time has come to stop looking backwards. It is time to stop automatically hating everything published after 1980. This prejudice needs to die now. I need to come out of hiding and engage with what is happening now. This is partly why I forced myself to start writing reviews. The whole small press thing is also extremely interesting and useful in this respect - I find myself fascinated by what my contemporaries are doing, and rightly so! My attitude to reading is changing and I am excited. I am currently reading Malcolm Bradbury's The Modern British Novel 1878-2001 which is exactly the kind of overview I need - to start placing myself. I am reading with an open mind and without multiple layers of pre-existing judgment/opinion/hatred that have formed for no real reason and become crusty and dull. This is way more fun! Generally my attitude has been to read what I like and form my own writing from a combination of that and myself. Since finishing my degree I have not thought about a chronological approach - but it seems suddenly appealing. Ancestry. Lineage. To know what I am rejecting before rejecting it. Or even accepting something (!). This is an archeological approach perhaps. Roots. Origins. Maps.

It turns out I have a lot of questions. Here are some:
- What is my literary heritage? Looking at British, American, Middle Eastern and everywhere else...
- Where/do I/want to fit in?
- Who (else) might I like and why? What can I learn from them?
- What is popular now? Why?
- What is critically acclaimed/prize winning blah blah blah? Why?
- Can something contemporary have the same effect on me as something older - what current writers can I like? Love?
- What are current trends in fiction? What is their history?
- How does current literature relate to other disciplines?
- Is there a avant garde now? Who? Why? Where? Etc.
- Is every/anything written now traceable? In terms of traditions, styles, influences...Is this approach necessary? (I suspect it is useful but not the key thing).
- Why do I write the way I write? How do I want to? Should I be pre-occupied with issues of style/form or focus on content?
- Why the need for stories?
- How is my work un/consciously influenced and by whom?

How?
- Stop being a bitch about overviews/summaries - obvious flaws in many ways but try it?
- Read outside my comfort zone
- Read 'key' texts/classics - to satisfy curiosity and try and map lit history/ies. Both re The Canon and other grouped texts...histories and contexts of 'the experimental', 'feminist' 'gothic' etc. etc.
- As much as I love Janet Frame, Jane Bowles, Denton Welch, Patricia Highsmith - try some new people! OR: Read an author's oeuvre and really indulge/engage/learn/respond/write a decent piece about them--> build projects around the writers I love most/can't contain - for example reading lots of Nabokov and Mary Gaitskill together would not only be totally joyous but he is one of her 'major influences' - I could see why, how she uses him, why they both appeal to me so much...
- Continue to write reviews, even though it is painful...
- Read more reviews/essays/lit press both mainstream and otherwise
- Read more journals and online magazines. Yay for Ambit and 3:AM! Plus more...Try and see whether there are trends/movements/groups and whether there are groups of writers aligning with each other...are there any self-conscious 'groups'? How do they define themselves? Manifestos?
- Explore digital innovations
- Read more myths and epics!
- Read more lit theory
- Write every day, an exercise if nothing else
- Write my own Exercises in Style after Raymond Queneau
- Write regardless of all the above and see what happens, see what style/tone/form I 'naturally' take/use...play with this
- Know it is a process with no start or end

Roslyn Taber

2010-12-21T16:44:00.000Z


Marilyn in The Misfits (1961)

'You have the gift of life Roslyn. The rest of us are just looking for a place to hide and watch it all go by'.

New review

2010-12-21T12:25:00.003Z

Out today over here.

More than you think

2010-12-14T12:14:00.000Z

H E A R T

Monster Emporium Press

2010-12-07T15:03:00.002Z

The small press I am part of has some news, you should check it out over here.

In short -
Tom Moore's new book is out and available for sale and free download!
Girls Who Fight 1 & 2 are now for sale at Housmans!
And we are now taking contributions for Girls Who Fight 3, check it out!
[You can see GWF1&2 and all our other books on the website]

A ramble...

2010-12-01T20:01:00.004Z

I've recently finished Patricia Highsmith's Found in the Street. Like many of her other books, this one is obsessed with details. She tells us almost everything about her characters – where they live, what they do on a day-to-day basis, what they eat, how they take their coffee, when they drink alcohol and what they drink, the colour of their eyes at different times of day, the way their hair looks darker after they shower...I could go on. You'd think this would be boring, maybe it is to some people, but given that this is what her books – particularly this one – are (often) primarily made up of I want to try and figure out how this obsessive attention to detail helps create a terrifying atmosphere of suspense. There is something mysterious in leaving nothing out, in exposure.

Highsmith - great jumper

Some initial ideas:-

This much detail helps create an inescapable sense of realism which makes the moments of suspense and psychological tension all the more realistic which is of course necessary in this sort of writing.

Excessive detail humanises the outlandish/unusual/deranged/criminal characters to such an extent that you can totally understand their motives. They are not made monsters in any way – this is brave and exciting to read. Tangent: this narratorial point of view is one of my favourites see Humbert Humbert (Lolita) and Mother Firefly in Rob Zombie's fantastic House of 1000 Corpses. I suppose the point here is obvious: in humanising 'monsters' we can identify with them more, thereby seeing them as human and seeing a dormant-but-not-impossible monstrousness in ourselves. This way we become frightened/excited on two counts (and I suppose if the monster is humanised we can more easily separate ourselves from them – but this is boring to me).

Karen Black as Mother Firefly. Homely.

While in itself this is not that interesting or original, it contains the seeds of...how not to say 'masterpieces' or 'great works of art'...I'm going with: contains the seeds of some of my favourite stuff. For example: The Vanishing* and Crime and Punishment. I'll expand; what I like about these efforts is that characters have no particular passion or compulsion to commit a crime/atrocity/whatever but simply want to see if they can. If they can be a Napoleon in Raskolnikov's case or as in Raymond's case if they counter an act of 'pure good' with an act of 'pure evil' – if it is possible to act in an equal but opposite direction. What's different about this sort of action and a 'personal challenge' like bungee jumping or climbing a big mountain is that (obviously) far more is at stake. It is about balancing things out – taking from one place to add to another, opposed to simply adding to your sense of self (I jumped off a crane etc.). Believability in such cases is vital, so no detail is excessive. Complexity is necessary, therefore not annoying, (as in Harry Potter where you just know too much about Harry's shitty, boring life. I won't dignify that with an italicisation).

I am feeling a bit weird now as I am remembering the quote I came across the other day from Mirbeau's The Torture Garden, 'I honestly believe that murder is the greatest human preoccupation, and that all our acts stem from it...'.

This is going to become one of those documents they read out in court after I've annihilated a village to prove my inherent insanity...

However...I got off the point, (me? no...really?). In George's Marvellous Medicine his nasty Grandma asks for some tea, George does her bidding. This is where I came across one of my favourite lines in literature, ever. It is this: 'George went into the kitchen and made Grandma a cup of tea with a teabag'. With a teabag. This completely floored me on a recent re-reading. But why? WHY? It is so unnecessarily precise, totally unimportant, a detail you would never normally notice, something you've done a million times without considering it. Like Highsmith, I think the inclusion of such superfluous detail makes the characters more real. It makes George - George, a real little boy not only a projection of Dahl's imagination. It makes a him a child i.e. someone who probably does not normally drink tea, someone to whom tea-making is a process to be considered and thought through instead of a reflex (as it is to me or other serious tea drinkers).

In Joss Whedon's Dollhouse Topher knows this too – in an episode early on in the first season (I think) he is asked why he gives Echo (or whoever she is embedded with, can't remember exactly) glasses. He answers that though it is unnecessary, she has to be realistic to be believable. Obviously this is all said in an stylish Whedon-esque way which I can't even contemplate replicating right now. What's interesting here though is that she has to be believable to the client opposed to us – the viewer, so watching Topher at work is like watching a writer create characters, and therefore Whedon create characters (arguably). And to become realistic/believable/loved/hated, to invoke an emotional response in the reader the characters have to be full people (if you are writing realist fiction).

Echo (echo echo echo echo...sorry)

Three things: one - the last point may not make sense if you haven't seen Dollhouse, but I think both my readers have. Two – there is a counter argument to all this which I will write one day. Three – this only concerns a certain type of fiction.

*The original not the shitty Kiefer Sutherland/Sandra Bullock one!

More Roald Dahl

2010-11-23T12:34:00.002Z

Show on Radio 2 about how Dahl inspired pop music...remarkably un-insightful musings from Kate Nash and other beacons of mediocrity but still...can't hate a Dahl lover...also Marilyn Manson features!

I'm reading Donald Sturrock's biography of Dahl at the moment, slowly on purpose. It's a heavy motherfucker and I keep it by the bed for luxurious bedtime reading. It's such a joy to read, I keep being overwhelmed with love/excitement/inspiration/horror/sublimity etc that I have to put it down a lot. I love him so much that I have become too enamoured to say anything intelligent, or interesting really, um...more soon! Full literary swoon. He's so awesome! Bah!

I am inserting this image of Dahl at his writing board to bulk out this fan-girl post.

Story

2010-11-22T18:55:00.003Z

Another story over here.

Handmade & Bound: Art & Zine fair

2010-11-16T11:57:00.002Z

Monster Emporium Press will be selling many glorious books, zines, posters and maybe more this Sunday at St Aloysius Social Club, on the corner of Eversholt St and Phoenix Rd, London NW1. It's from 12-6pm and it is free and will be wicked. COME!

Mammals

2010-11-10T21:35:00.001Z

Yesterday I went to visit my mother. I found her watching Animal Planet and doing her nails. We watched some sort of animal rescue show which featured wholesome types finding a dead dog in a bin. We cried. Through our tears we tried to trace back when we had both gotten 'into' animals (not that you have to be 'into' animals to be upset by the whole family pet/plastic bag/wheelie bin episode...). We blamed my mum's sister and her affable puppy ('He likes cucumber! OMG he likes CUCUMBER guys! He's like a PERSON ohmigod take a picture!). Now we want dogs. Lots of them. And cats. I think liking animals is making me a nicer person; which is useful to know in case I need to become mean(er) anytime - like if I one day have to dump/fire/kill someone I can harden up by torturing kittens for weeks beforehand as training. I would never do that. Here is a big picture of a cute and happy kitten to prove (I love law) how much I love the felines and wouldn't hurt them:

Although I did once say I'd kill a kitten with my bare hands to be able to sing and dance and act in a BIG FAT WEST-END MUSICAL*. Not that kitten though. Maybe if there was a Nazi kitten (I'd 'just know') or one who really wanted to die so it could join its kitty family in dead kitty heaven where everything is made of tuna and mice...

Anyway. My point was initially supposed to be this: because I like animals now I have been watching some Attenborough series about mammals and during the 'Rodent' segment I learned a very interesting fact which perhaps can be used in a complex argument for abortion. Basically, Attenborough films some marmots which look like this:

Apologies for the crappy 'frame' and the not-very-endearing-picture-of-gormless-marmot but bear (haha) with me. So, I'm watching Atty, reaching for the tissues, remembering what it was like to be cool and suddenly the mum marmot starts attacking its pregnant daughter marmot child. Shocked I think Atty is a sick fuck and not a national treasure after all, but his voice reassures me that all will become clear. And clear it does become, basically - because it gets super cold where these little guys live, only so many babies between the gang will survive the cold winter (imagine Atty saying that). In Winter they hibernate under ground and all the adult marmots huddle around the baby marmots to keep them warm/alive and it is super cute and very effectively explained via thermal imaging guff. The adults know they can only support so many babies, so the mum marmot viciously attacks her pregnant daughter marmot in order to induce abortion. This makes perfect and natural sense - they can't protect the babies so are going full cruel-to-be-kind. I like this a lot. Surely this could shut pro-lifers up.

Or maybe the pro-lifers will then take to the marmot world and start separating pregnant marmot females from their mums and letting them 'rest' and not lift things up and feed them organic milk and really nice bits of grass and then the baby comes out in a nice incubated cell-pen somewhere in southern California. Then we can all go poke and play with the baby marmots in the marmot 'sanctuary' and there will be plaques on the wall explaining why abortion is bad and baby sanctuaries are good.

ANYWAY. I really don't know how to end this so I'm just going to back away slowly.

OH NO I FORGOT MY ASTERIX! (Can you believe it?)

*I wouldn't do it for just any musical, I especially wouldn't do it if my costume was 'rags'.

An overexcited reminder to myself...

2010-10-29T16:10:00.002+01:00

ERGODIC LITERATURE

p.s. yes I know I'm a few decades late...but I can catch up!

Secessionist Outernational

2010-10-28T22:39:00.001+01:00

I am currently interning at Mute Magazine and came across this text by Howard Slater as part of my work. I would recommend reading it though it is a little tough to summarise here (and in the five minute break I've given myself). It discusses those excluded from a collective/group and how to mobilise that exclusion through the potentially transformative power of language. I think. More info on the Secessionist Outernational here.

The Literateur & The Literary Consultancy Competition

2010-10-22T18:53:00.001+01:00

Well...I wasn't one of the three shortlisted fiction writers but apparently I did make the top 30/longlist, which is frickin great given that it was a speedy write.

They are having a party which I think I will go to...free wine/check out the competition/get out the fucking house. Anyone want to come?

Literature at Ladyfest Ten

2010-10-22T13:19:00.001+01:00

I am very excited about all the brilliant looking writing related stuff that will be going on at Ladyfest this year. There is a whole bunch of things going on but this handy link details the literature only events/workshops. I will be ashamed of myself if I don't go.

Anne Sexton revival starts now...

2010-10-20T15:16:00.003+01:00

Hornet
Anne Sexton

A red-hot needle
hangs out of him, he steers by it
as if it were a rudder, he
would get in the house any way he could
and then he would bounce from window
to ceiling, buzzing and looking for you.
Do not sleep for he is there wrapped in the curtain.
Do not sleep for he is there under the shelf.
Do not sleep for he wants to sew up your skin,
he wants to leap into your body like a hammer
with a nail, do not sleep he wants to get into
your nose and make a transplant, he wants do not
sleep he wants to bury your fur and make
a nest of knives, he wants to slide under your
fingernail and push in a splinter, do not sleep
he wants to climb out of the toilet when you sit on it
and make a home in the embarrassed hair do not sleep
he wants you to walk into him as into a dark fire.

A response to Variable 4, from May 2010

2010-10-16T18:09:00.002+01:00

NB: Variable 4 was a piece devised by a friend of mine (and his friend) back in May. See the link for real info but briefly and bluntly it was a living musical composition which responded to the weather around it (Dungeness, Kent) forming an unpredictable and magical 24 hour sound piece. Below is a few personal thoughts I noted on the day.

A pair of lonely blue knickers pegged to the line outside a black wooden house. Pegged by three pegs against the sea wind, which even now in summer is remarkably strong. I pull the collar of my trench coat up, hold it against the back of my neck, a spot sure to attract flu mother always said. G sets up his video camera - shaky on shingle shore - to document the day. Twenty four movements responding to the weather – dependant on wind, rain, humidity, sun...the swoop of clarinet at the border between wild and tame, skirting the forest, dipping a toe in wondering whether to enter and let go of what it knows. But intelligent and keen it senses the border is its only home. Tense and tender. Crisp horizon formed by neat plucks of violin strings. T comes and jams two black sticks into the stones next to me. It is his way of reminding me of him while I am writing and he does not want to or fears interrupting me. Smooth but nervous loops of Ds and Gs on piano make me tense, on edge amongst the sunshine and swearwords drifting up to me from my friends' conversations below. It is a sound that makes me want to be underwater, holding my breath for a little too long then giving in to oxygen. You look like a detective in that coat, T says, breaking the silence between us, wanting a touch, a link. I need a newspaper with holes in front of my eyes, I say. He smiles broad and silly and I sidle towards him a spell. The day is bright and the sea crashes behind me and is translated.

Something I meant to post in July when I was in Copenhagen...

2010-10-13T11:42:00.002+01:00

I'm so high on sugar right now it's a JOKE. And there's a fly buzzing around in my peripheral ruining everything. Ate a lot of churros, forgot about them being a superfood - fried dough in twirly sticks covered in sugar with additional chocolate sauce. Feel another chin coming on. Like the feeling of teeth squeaky from sugar. Feel rabid and teenage again.

Fried joy.

Visited Tivoli gardens, high quality novelties, rides and wicked lit gardens. Aunts arrived to much genuine squealing and hand holding, prompt investigation into my career/hair/'love life'/figure.

Ooooh shiny!

Gay couple asked Ma to take picture of them, most liberal I've ever seen her. Came mouthing back 'I think they're gay'. Yes Ma.

Narrowly avoided Pa explosion. Hunger struck but the others weren't hungry. Agitated he drank beers in the hotel bar and ate peanuts from a martini glass. Eventually found place in Tivoli gardens but said kitchen was closed. Pa became thin lipped and bulgy eyed, the waitress didn't flinch and offered him a cheese plate. He calmed. She introduced the cheeses: this one is from France, this one is from Sweden, this one is from a cow....zoiks! Charming enough to pull it off. Immediate girl crush.

Breakfast featuring Danish pastries (had to eat one, would be rude not to), fruit 'chef's special fruit salad', many Americans eating sausages and wearing white sports socks pulled up to mid calf and bum bags. Sometimes I love American tourists. You can rely on them. They are a constant like the north star.

Went to Freetown. Ma told Pa to 'be careful' when he went to the loo and feared all the dogs were high, 'what if they've been injected?'...um. WHA????


Dangerous.

Many Ken-dollish Danes all blond hair and big teeth, evenly tanned girls with long legs and high ponytails. I am reminded of the article about the human race separating into two types - blonde and strong vs squat goblin like creatures. Knew once again which side I'd be on.

But one day the underclass will rise victorious!

Quizzed barman about Christiania. Disappointed to see Coca Cola on the menu. Revolution = over. Presume I as tourist am part of the problem. But Danish government surely more threatening than eager English girl with half-fro. Nonetheless amazing...(will post about this properly one day).

Anarchy.

Danger.

Horror.

Crime.

An old man said a special hi to Ma. His wife looked cross and would surely use the moment with 'the redhead on the boat' against him forever. Proud Ma is hot, a little crushed she gets more attention than me.

Abandoned control to aunts, allowed them to sing Arabic songs in hotel lobby and didn't balk at intimate discussions of bowel movements.

tbc...

My favourite things

2010-09-29T09:45:00.003+01:00

When Frauline Maria was feeling blue she would list her favourite things and make clothes out of 'nothing but some old drapes!'. This gave her a sense of control in an otherwise chaotic world. The Von Trapp children looked pretty spiffy and despite Papa's admonitions everyone felt better.

Nun - defiant.

Similarly, a recent episode of RuPaul's Drag Race challenged the contestants to make fabulous outfits out of old curtains. And while the aim of the task wasn't an emotional pick me up in response to a new boss not providing you with material to make 'play clothes' for his seven children, the theme is clear: making clothes out of curtains can lead to joy - be it prancing around Salzburg, leaning over bridges and dropping tomatoes or dicking around on a catwalk while evil queens judge you and your two-bit fantasies of temporary global fame.

Sonique née James Leonard. Let's play spot the pelmet!

Now, my curtains and I would make shit clothes, so when I'm feeling blue/American I simply look at this picture and am reminded that somewhere there is sense - stupid as it is.

Above - logic.

Oh dear

2010-09-21T17:09:00.003+01:00

In a fit of vanity I've been looking at my blog stats and have discovered that 2 people found this blog my searching 'pent pornies house girl video free' and 'come into her mouth'.

No such thing as bad publicity...

I am fighting the urge to use an emoticon of an upside down smile.

Medicine cabinet

2010-09-17T14:50:00.001+01:00

I recently visited a friend's new house. He showed me around and I oohed and ahhhed appropriately. Being good friends, I didn't feel it was rude to open the medicine cabinet in the bathroom for a little nose around. So I did. And to my delight I found a neatly folded piece of card saying 'Hi Mira!' inside in his small, smart scrawl. My day was made.

Nefesh B’Nefesh

2010-09-17T13:03:00.004+01:00

I just stumbled upon this site which exists to encourage, assist and promote Jews (Zionist Jews) from the diaspora to move (or as they'd have it exercise their right of return) to Israel from the UK, USA and Canada, thus strengthening their hold on occupied Palestinian land. The Hebrew word for this immigration is Aliyah.

The site/company provides financial assistance (up to $25,000 per family) both for the move and upon arrival/settlement, help finding jobs, houses and schools, university subsidies, one on one mentoring pre and post Aliyah 'with the goal of helping each individual integrate smoothly and successfully into Israeli society', social events and that bastion of American hope - the singles' night.

I am a bit overwhelmed/scared/embarrassed I didn't know recruitment to become an Israeli citizen was so organised (so this post may not make much sense/reveal swathes of ignorance, but I am trying to understand this situation which only intimidates me more daily) and am interested in how they're selling it. There are sections for Families, Retirees, Singles, Students and Teens (sporting the lovely signs above) all promising a better life in Israel both materially, spiritually and even romantically - the singles section cites many partner-finding websites, my personal favourite being the 'Israeli dating site for modern Orthodox divorcees'.

I am trying to find details on what qualifies you to go there and have found this step by step guide to the process. Aside from all the practicalities you/your family have to be approved by the Jewish Agency (a different body to Nefesh B'Nefesh) which involves fulfilling the requirements laid out in the Law of Return.

I see how this could be very tempting.

Meanwhile the Arab Palestinian 'citizens' of Israel (who are ethnically excluded from the status of 'citizen')...

Too depressed to carry on for now.

FUCK!

2010-09-16T08:52:00.003+01:00

I've been longlisted for something very exciting. OK. I'll stop showing off now. EXCITED!

Another small thing

2010-09-16T08:45:00.000+01:00

On Beirut over here.

Something small

2010-09-14T19:06:00.002+01:00

Over here.

Hairspray

2010-09-04T12:24:00.003+01:00

In case you were wondering how it feels to win 'Best Costume' at Dulwich Picture Gallery's outdoor screening of (the new) Hairspray, it feels good. Damn good. Especially when you win the original (and superior although the new one is actually pretty good, and you know what (rhetorical) I'm not ashamed of liking John Travolta, I'm just not, I don't care if he is a Scientologist pilot - he's the only one in the whole film who put some Bal'mor into his accent) on DVD.

Lots of Dulwich Mums and urban hippies (yetch! wash your hair you pork eating hypocrite) and yuppies look at you and clap and you feel proud that you went out in a miniskirt with no tights on and also slightly guilty that the old couple beside you look so upset they didn't win even though the lady's costume was way more accurate but my man friend did look superior to hers; then you and the 5 year old girl who won best costume in the under 18s lean in almost simultaneously to your companions and say 'I knew I would win'. Then you eat a hot dog and get indigestion. ANYWAY. I love John Waters so much. This post is going nowhere. Fast. But what I like most about John Waters is:

1. that he is really, really happy that Hairspray is now a super big deal (well put Mira, seriously you should do this shit for a living) and doesn't feel like he's sold out at all, rather he feels he has successfully integrated.

2. that he likes Margurite Duras and Jane Bowles who are two of the finest writers in all the land. And that his taste in general is broad and surprising but precise and always articulated with passion, pride, humour and general inimitable style, (style in a way I mean specifically but which I won't get into now).

3. that he said this, "I had more fun when it was illegal to be gay" and this, "I don't want to get married and I don't want to go into the army and all that stuff, though I understand people's right to want that. I am for gay trouble. I like gay troublemakers. I am most gay when I am in a voting booth."

4. that he has a new book coming out (haha), Role Models.

And many more.
Geek out complete.
For now.

Translated Arabic expressions written in English alphabet, inaccuracy will reign today...

2010-08-24T16:21:00.003+01:00

NB: '3' refers to an Arabic letter to which there is no equivalent in English. It is a sort of 'a' sound but from half way down the throat. If that helps.

1. Baadha mish tal3a min il bedah: She's barely out of the egg!
Meaning: She's too young to be doing...

2. Draat 3l balaat: Farts on marble.
Meaning: To dismiss something as utterly pointless. (This is a fun one to visualise).

3. Waja3 ikhla3 nee3ak: May pain rip off your (masc) jaws.
Meaning: This is self explanatory. (So is this).

4. Mitil adda'l musta3jil: Like fate in a hurry.
This one confuses me, very awkward translation.

5. Min rakab al nas maat a haman: He who watches people/compares himself, dies in worry.
Meaning: A warning...

6. Min tumak la baab al samaa: From your (masc) mouth to the gates of Heaven.
I'm still not sure how to use this one, but I think it is in instances of well wishing.

Judith Ravenscroft

2010-08-24T14:21:00.001+01:00

'...And although she rarely sits and stares out of the window, or hesitates when asked to account for her day, since she always has a pile of books to read, letters to answer, neighbours to receive, sometimes it's as if fear catches up with her: she goes to bed with mysterious symptoms, pulls the blankets up over her face, refuses all medicines and comfort until - as suddenly as she succumbs, she recovers, jumps out of bed, throws open the windows, and runs through the house as if astonished to be alive...'

from My Life with Belle

Alicia Ostriker

2010-08-23T16:17:00.005+01:00

Ostriker is new to me, but dear to Kurt Cobain, with whom I am newly and for real this time in love. He quotes from the below in his journals.

A Young Woman, A Tree

Passing that fiery tree—if only she could
Be making love,
Be making poetry,
Be exploding, be speeding through the universe
Like a photon, like a shower
Of yellow blazes—

She believes if she could only overtake
The riding rhythm of things,
Of her own electrons,
Then she would be at rest
If she could forget school,
Climb the tree,
Be the tree,
Burn like that.

She doesn’t know yet, how could she
That this same need
Is going to erupt every September
And that in 40 years the idea will strike her
From no apparent source,
In a Laundromat
Between a washer and a dryer,
Like one of those electric light bulbs
Lighting up near a character’s head in a comic strip—
There in that naked and soiled place
With its detergent machines,
Its speckled fluorescent lights,
Its lint piles broomed into corners as she fumbles for quarters
And dimes, she will start to chuckle and double over
Into the plastic baskets’
Mountain of wet
Bedsheets and bulky overalls—
Old lady! She’ll grin,
beguiled at herself,

Old lady! The desire to burn is already a burning! How about that!

Edward Said

2010-08-23T15:07:00.004+01:00

Last two paragraphs of Michael Wood's obituary, full text here.

...Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Edward liked to quote Gramsci’s aphorism, and with good reason. But he wasn’t a pessimist of any kind, either of the intellect or the will. He was the deepest, most devoted, most unalterable kind of optimist, the optimist who can look despair in the face and keep on hoping. I remember a long argument we had at the time of the signing of the Oslo Accords. The thing went on for about four hours, Edward pacing up and down in his apartment drinking glass after glass of orange juice. I was looking for hope but looking in the wrong place. In the end, I said: ‘But Edward, you’ve got to believe that some day, somehow, things are going to get better.’ He looked at me as if I was mad, and said: ‘Of course I believe that. If I didn’t believe that I wouldn’t be doing any of this.’

I’ve thought of this exchange often as the days have become even darker in Palestine and Israel, and I have come to understand what it means to be an optimist, and what an imperishable optimism looks like. I thought I was an optimist, but I’m just a utopian. Edward was an optimist. A few days before he died he called to talk a little – he had come back from the edge of death, and knew he had, but none of us knew how close the end was – and although rather hoarse and weak in voice, sounded very much like himself, making jokes, insatiably curious and full of spirit. I said: ‘Edward, you’re invincible.’ He said: ‘I’m not invincible, but I’m not giving up.’

Wade through blood

2010-08-23T15:04:00.000+01:00

'As for my division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, that I agree was a little arbitrary, but I do not insist on exact figures. Only I do believe in the main principle of my idea. That consists in people being, by the law of nature, divided in general into two categories: into a lower (of ordinary people), that is, into material serving only for the reproduction of its own kind, and into people properly speaking, that is, those who have the gift or talent of saying something new in their sphere. There are endless subdivisions, of course, but the distinctive characteristics of the two categories are fairly well marked: the first group, that is the material, are, generally speaking, by nature staid and conservative, they live in obedience and like it. In my opinion they ought to obey because that is their destiny, and there is nothing at all degrading to them in it. The second group are all law-breakers and transgressors, or are inclined that way, in the measure of their capacities. The aims of these people are, of course, relative and very diverse; for the most part they require, in widely different contexts, the destruction of what exists in the name of better things. But if it is necessary for one of them, for the fulfilment of his ideas, to march over corpses, or wade through blood, then in my opinion he may in all conscience authorize himself to wade through blood - in proportion, however, to his idea and the degree of its importance - mark that.'

from Crime and Punishment
- Dostoevsky

Top three arguments

2010-08-12T19:03:00.002+01:00

1. What qualifies as a condiment.

2. Whether black hair exists or can only ever be the darkest brown.

3. What differentiates a town from a village.

A collection

2010-08-09T15:22:00.002+01:00

My father recently confessed to me that both his father and his father-in-law returned letters he had written to them a long time ago with the spelling and grammar corrected in red pen.

My aunt once threw a pear at one of her sisters in pure rage.

Almost everyone I know has been in a class who has driven a teacher to insanity.

I overheard someone say they knew a man who - finding no toilet paper in the bathroom - wiped his arse with cake instead.

I have a friend who hula hoops exceedingly well. She said, 'I should think so too, my mother was her school's hula hooping champion'.

One of my friends, after having worried her parents and teachers by not speaking in her early years, surprised her mother one day with these first words whilst looking at a plane in the sky, 'shiny like a marble'.

I once taught a little boy who would only write the letter 'x' and the number '0'. His nihilism was astounding.

Women in my family use Andre Agassi stickers on their sliding doors to communicate their being closed after my mother once ran through one of these glass doors thinking it was open.

I recently found out some nicknames of men I love.

I won't share them here.