February 2011
2 posts
“i weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them they will be...”
– The Book of Disquiet. Fernando Pessoa
two days ago i fell in love....
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...
January 2011
3 posts
3 tags
and breathe girl....
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...
“life becomes bearable only when one has come to terms with who one is, both in...”
– Sandor Marai
December 2010
2 posts
3 tags
3 tags
walk far enough and you will bleed the colour...
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...
November 2010
4 posts
5 tags
where we come from
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...
4 tags
3 tags
thankyou, Will Oldham
‘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...
forgetting
i’d totally forgotten about this thing. and when i woke up remembering this morning it took a while to log in, i couldn’t remember emails or passwords, and went round in circles for a while trying.
it’s been more than a while since last i wrote on here. and i guess now i want to use it in a different way. most of the summer was taken up with writing. and then i got accepted...
July 2009
2 posts
After three days of driving it seems like the road does take away lots of things, everything makes sense, everything that felt real or pressing recedes, diminished until it almost wasn’t there at all, everything belongs to the road, suspended in this time it doesn’t matter, you might feel half out your mind going crazy with everything you remember or the future that scares you cos suddenly you...
The road is silver somehow and then without warning the clouds thicken and fall and I keep driving with the windows rolled down, the rain soaks first my arm then my hair as it whips rounds my face then my dress right through to my legs, I turn the music up and drive faster and faster until I might be flying, until I think for the first time that I might like a bike, it would be purer, freer, that...
June 2009
6 posts
presents in toothpaste boxes
It is my most, and yet least; favourite of things. A paper fan with a blue metal handle, dented where I threw it at the wall, sometime later, before I hid it deep in a drawer. The pleated body folds over and over and back again on itself, painted with a buttercream yellow bird, plumed blue feather tail stretching out behind it and there are two fat roses, too fat, all out of scale. 22 years ago it...
Outside it is so still and quiet and beautiful, dusk, somewhere in between sunset and darkness, to move would be to break it. I sit watching it, it’s my favourite time of day as slowly the dark begins to settle, soon lights will need to be switched on, but not yet, not yet. And as I am sitting, looking at nothing, thinking nothing, I notice a light, bright, glowing in the distance, in the...
When the phone goes at four in the morning I know it’s him. He’s drunk again; he only ever calls when he’s drunk. He only ever says what he means when he’s drunk. We only ever say what we mean when we’re drunk. We spent one summer once drunk half the time, or most of the time, and in the evenings and long nights that rolled into days we’d say what we meant and the way...
mixtapes
Listening to some mix of someone else’s favourite music after a phone call with my mother, and I’m shaking, since that’s what I do when I’m angry and yet can’t say it and so instead I’m here, listening to I know not what and writing it down instead of saying, because when it comes to saying things that matter I’m stunningly inarticulate. Hell, I can write it to the wind, but...
Another Memory (and then there will be no more)
Listening to Bat For Lashes; Two Suns, on the headphones and I remember that early spring afternoon more than a year ago now, we’d split up maybe 6 months before but his Dad had just died and I said I’d go to the memorial so friends drove me through and it was packed and there were no seats and then I found one and I pulled my fringe down low into my eyes so no one would see me and...
Friday eating ice cream
We meet up after he finishes work and sit there in that over hot neutral space, later it thunders, and he looks over at me, the him that used to be mine, with that quizzical look I came to know so well. He opens his mouth to speak, and out it comes, like the rain after it’s been dry for too long, it pours on and on and all I can pick up from it is the bit where he says; ‘you know you...
May 2009
4 posts
Because the train takes five hours...
For two days I was locked up, having to do life things, things people call real, I didn’t write, I hadn’t realised until now just how much I need to do this, how I can’t not write. I don’t know when I crossed that line, when it changed from being some kind of hobby into the newest of all my addictions, and when I don’t write them down I see the words seeping out,...
The Confessional
Three days ago a wood pigeon woke me with all it’s cooing, then later I bought geraniums and planted them out in an old steel window box. I’d put it off, scared they might make me look like I was staying or feel like an unmanagable commitment or make this place look like home. As I brushed against their rust coloured leaves I remembered how my Grampa used to grow them, how he’d...
Saturday night; Glasgow
We leave the gig by the back stairs. Inside everyone is still lost in the excitment of the aftermath. Outside seagulls hang like white paper cutouts against a cobalt blue sky. We sit drinking beer on the cold stone wall and I tell him how it never really gets properly dark here at this time of year and he tells me how touring is a good time to get through a ton of books and I ask him what...
Foxes
I’m still looking for that street. The one I found that night when I sat straight up next to him in bed and knew, I had to tell him before it got light, otherwise I never would. I shook him awake and even as I was saying it I was thinking this isn’t me, this is someone else talking, but they tumbled out those words anyway, like something out of a poorly scripted film I told him;...