thoughts. pictures. ideas. lusted after objects. maybe stories. sometimes poems. and anything else in between.
being a total book junkie i used to fall in love all the time. with other people’s words. then the fixes got harder to find, i’d read too much maybe, i don’t know, but i got jaded, and then, then when i began to write seriously i couldn’t read anything at all other than the newspaper, and, since the newspaper generally tends to make me sad, too much reading of it wasn’t good for my brain.
last year on july 31st (i know this because i write the dates in books, always), we had a perfect day of snooping around second hand bookshops, drinking beer then later rum, and on that day i stumbled across a book, it’s title was enough to grab me, it was called ‘the book of disquiet’, but i didn’t buy it. and then, on tuesday lunchtime, i was walking home when the sky blackened, and began to fall, hard, cold rain. i ran then to the nearest shelter, to the same bookshop we’d been in that day, and the book was still there. two editions, and i stood for a long time weighing them both in my hand, checking the translation, the introductions, the notes, before settling on the fatter one, even tho i liked the font the least. and although the weather hadn’t lifted i took my chances and found a cafe, whereupon i was firmly in love by the second page. it’s not a story, as such, but the use of language to describe thoughts and the state of being a person, of being an artist, is so close to perfect. i doubt i’ll ever read anything like it again.
today is holocaust memorial day. i think most of us struggle with the holocaust. it’s not something that can, or should, be easily understood. that something so horrific could happen so close to our lifetimes is close to incomprehensible. and not just that it happened, but that it was since been denied, and that genocides have happened since, in rwanda, darfur and bosnia, that we, as a species haven’t yet learnt is close to baffling. i’m not jewish, but that doesn’t matter. my father is, and his father before him, and he was lucky, he fled poland before the german invasion, but his sister perished in the concentration camps. it doesn’t matter though, what i am, the holocaust isn’t a jewish issue. the holocaust, and subsequent genocides are human issues and as such they should matter to each and every single one of us.
i’m sitting here thinking what do i want my daughter to learn from this, how do i help her take something good other than a weight of sadness. i know it sounds glib to say how can we get something good out of something so terrible, so incomprehensible, but there are lessons to learn. lessons that need to be learnt to stop the same mistakes repeating.
and the answer is it has to be tolerance. and most of us claim to be tolerant, but in practise it’s far harder not to judge. just because we’ve chosen to live a certain way doesn’t mean it’s better than the choices of others. it’s just the life that is right for us. or one that suits us at this point. but to extol one way of living, one set of thinking, whether it be religion, or anything, large or small, as right or in some way superior, is a dangerous game, and once started, where is the line drawn?
we might call it moralistic, or being part of something, but everything, once taken to the extreme, becomes exclusive, and wow, how that word is bandied about. exclusive this and exclusive that, and what the hell, is anyone actually thinking that it might not exactly be the best word choice. exclusive being to the exclusion, and therefore shutting out of other things, or as is all too often the case, the shutting out of other people, other opinions, other ways of seeing the world. and when we start doing this then we are, whether it is meant or not, elevating ourselves. and more than that, we are depriving ourselves of ways of seeing and opportunities for learning. people are amazing, the whole human race is, fundamentally flawed, and this lends us much of our beauty, humanity comes from the fact we’re all in this together, and we none of us really know how to do it. people are just people, no more, no less. there is no one way to live, and the sooner we all learn and embrace that then the sooner we can learn to live together, without the need for exclusivity or barriers based on arbitrary markers. and once that’s done then at least we’ll be trying to make a world we can explain to our children, one we don’t need to edit expertly, one we can be proud of leaving them.
trawling through illustrations on trendland.net. liking this a lot, for a monday. you can view more of manuel rebollo’s work here: http://elgatoazul.carbonmade.com/
loving felder felder spring/summer ‘11 lookbook a lot. whilst their aesthetic is still emerging, there are a lot of strong lines in their latest collection, and good silhouettes.
photo via http://www.felderfelder.com/
the past two weeks it snowed. and snowed some more. and then i got sick. i spent a long time just looking at it fall, thick and fat. watched the sopranos. listened to j.tilman. shopped online. the days kind of blurred, the way they do this time of year. i dreamt fever dreams. crazy things and although i knew i dreamt they seemed too vivid not to be real. in one a voice repeated over and over like it meant something special ‘walk far enough and you will bleed the colour right out of these streets’. i woke with the phrase stuck in my head and even now it’s there. i don’t have a clue what it means. if it means anything at all. but i love the sound of it.
last night i went to a discussion by ian rankin and gunnar staalesen. and, despite the countries of each author being separated by the north sea, their characters bear more than a passing resemblance to each other. the two writers seemed to be puzzling this as they spoke, then rankin, almost as a throw away suggested that maybe the dark nights and long winters common to both norway and scotland have something to do with it. i didn’t think much about this at the time, then after i went home, ate, drank, talked, watched the first snow fall, fell asleep far too late and woke, barely four hours later with a mind going crazy with story ideas and this thought of geography.
for a while now i’ve been trying to find a link between some of my favourite writers. and now i think i might have it. geographically there is no cluster at all, but now it seems to make sense. a high proportion of them come from the american midwest. then there’s germany, austria, poland, ireland, norway, scotland. and the connection seems obvious now, but the thing binding them all has to be the weather. all of these spots have relatively bad winters, with drawn out evenings. i guess if the weather were better then there’d be more choice. maybe this is where the tradition of storytelling comes from. at home, warm, with hours to fill, there is not much else to do save to create something new.
it’s just a thought i had. my feet are cold now. i need to sleep some more. and hope this weather holds.
there are some days you feel like your tongue’s been cut out. you can’t find words, and the ones that find you come out all wrong. days like that music is the safest option. nothing happens in this video. but the narrative is beautiful. the felice boys have a real knack of telling a story. of making a song so much more than something just to listen to. there’s a mournfulness underlying most of their work, something wistful, uncapturable. they remind me of being a kid, dreaming of running away with huck finn and tom sawyer, playing outside ‘til dusk falls, scratched knees and berry stained fingers and trying to reconcile all of that with growing up, the losing and gaining of freedom all at the same time.
‘i feel strongly about protecting my ability, enthusiasm, energy and desire to continue making music, and it seems, as with every walk of life, there are a lot of forces constantly acting against you to make you feel like it might be easier and better to stop. it’s a regular checks and balance system, when things do seem stupid or futile or wrong, there’s a need to not necessarily get claustrophobic, but to decide, ok, this just means turn left or turn right. just because you’re not moving straight, it doesn’t mean you’re not progressing.’ - Will Oldham
i’ve had this quote taped to my wall for ages now. but recently i’ve been thinking about it a lot. i’ve been writing a piece reflecting on myself as both a writer and a reader, and i think that; spending time considering this duality has led me to question exactly what it is i need to protect in order to continue writing, and writing well.
throughout my life i’ve turned left and right many times, i’ve never been one for straight lines and i’ve always seen this as a bit of a failing before. whereas now i think that my inability to sit still or to keep my mind in the one place for very long has actually turned out to be one of my strengths as a writer. it certainly has been key to my development, it is an integral part of who i am and where i write from. and it’s also shaped my belief system to a certain extent i guess, i’ve come to realise that life is additive, it can be easy, and tempting at times, to try and simplify it, and see it as a series of endings and beginnings when in actual fact life seems to me to be additive. it’s a long series of parallel continuations and sure things change, but endings are hard to come by. as are beginnings, always we carry something with us. and this is a good thing. i think this seeing life in this way allows me to write in the way i do. i don’t like structuring my work around a beginning, middle and end, instead i like zooming in and writing a kind of snapshot of a moment. trying in some way to capture something that is common to all of us. when i read i like recognising something that i have seen or felt or experienced, and it is this that i aim to recreate when i write.
i like the idea too that he throws in when he refers to creativity as a regular checks and balances system. what works one day might not work the next, as people we are continually learning, growing and developing, and so should the methods we use to create. it isn’t any use to say i’m a writer or a musician or an artist, it’s a constant case of becoming, and i’ve not always realised this enough in the past, that it’s work, and hard work at that, there is no magic formula. in a sense it is a little bit like recovery, it’s learning to manage a behaviour, and to adapt that management as life changes.
central to the enablement of all of this is the protection of the inner self. i think that at heart i am quite a private person, and it has taken me a long time to realise that this needs to be protected if i am to write. of course writing has to come from somewhere, and yes, to a certain extent writing is autobiographical, but at the same time that doesn’t mean it has to be revealing. experience can be drawn upon whilst still remaining implicit. i think it is important to be as close to your core self as possible during the writing process. this means taking the time to learn who you really are, to be selfish in a way and to prioritise whatever it is that you’re seeking to create. it might mean that you end up with a life that doesn’t always make sense to people looking in and it might mean that there are several facets of that life that you value and love and seek to protect because all of these combine to make you who you are and enable you to create what is uniquely yours. all of that is fine, so long as you’re being true to whatever it is that drives you to create, and to exist and essentially to make sense of the world.
