... for my profile
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Given that you'll read this before my explanation, which is now way down below somewhere, I've pasted in my latest efforts at creative writing class. We each got to pick off one of the yellow post-it notes which had previously been passed around, with one person jotting down a name, then another an age and another a place. I got the second-last post-it note attached to the wall and thus took on the mantle of a certain Margaret Ann, 14, of New York. I've hoped to avoid doing what Jack Nicholson's character in 'As Good as it Gets' said he did when 'writing' women; something along the lines of 'well I think of a man, then I take away all reason and responsibility.'
I don't really imagine people actually reading my blog, certainly these days when my online presence is practically non-existent but, one never knows. For what it's worth, I'd really appreciate anyone's comments...
Margaret Ann is 14 and lives in New York City. The particulars of her life that I jotted down include that her mother is Lavinia, whom Margaret Anne considers to be embarrassingly bohemian (forever name-dropping second-rate artists of tentative acquaintance and dressing in bumfly patterned boho-chic [not].) Father is Brett, a largely absent and Park-Avenue-based ‘futures consultant’.
What follows is Margaret’s diary.
Thursday 6th
Have been reading Nabokov’s Lolita. It’s a great book; top fives material, but Lolita is a real cow. I mean, I suppose it would be cool to have a sophisticated older lover like Humbert Humbert, even if he does have a well-creepy, or at least darn silly, name but gawd, what a… trollope! Anyways, sex is sooo over-rated. Lise talks like she’s done it, too. I hope I’m not the only one who sees right through her. Mind you, apart from being haughtily taciturn (in general demeanour, since I’m using big words here)… Yeah, well, apart from being a bit too quiet Carol does have big(ish) breasts and maybe has done it. She looks older. Big thighs too, so there.
Had art class today. We had to draw this stuffed rabbit. That must break some bylaw or another, but Mr. Symanowski’s like that, poor man. I bet he started off wanting to be the next Francis Bacon and now his concession to being outrageous is to scare the young people of Greenwich Village with taxidermy.
Oh. Oh. Mother has just appeared with ‘something yummy’ she says, in a collection of pale green card boxes from that Korean macro-biotic deli on __ and Eighth. Sometimes I wish we’d just sit at a proper dining table and feast on veal escalopes. With chips, maybe, but no green beans…
Friday 7th
I have a new top! It’s in a sorta washed-out deep pink. Wide neck-line, those short sleeves that don’t quite cover the shoulder and short enough in the body to expose that de rigeur inch-and-a-half of flesh at the waist… I’m such a slut, heh. What makes it really fab is the sequin trim. I’m wearing it with my faded jeans cut off just below the knee but hélas! the only matching footwear to hand is my red converses. The trouble with being fourteen is that one has enough cash to develop outfit aspirations and never enough to go the distance. I see me in Dorothy-red heals. To fill you in on the detail, I got the top at Sam’s, the vintage store, on --.
You, my dear reader, may wonder (it’s my diary, so wonder you shall) what I think of being called Margaret Ann. By the way, this diary has KEEP OUT written in big letters (in invisible ink) all over the covers so, like, dear reader, SCRAM!! It just sounds better than Dear Diary. I mean, just cos I like to write down my thoughts doesn’t mean I intend to make imaginary friends with inky paper. Anyways, Dad tells me that Margaret Ann is the heroine of a short story by William Faulkner that he never finished. ‘Her youth was too fresh (in the old sense) for fiction, so you had to be born,’ which, I suppose is kinda sweet if it isn’t kinda too squirmy too. Strangely enough, I like the name, even if I sometimes wish I could be called something shorter, zippier, modern (‘though modern’s a tad nineties and passé, heh.)
I don't really imagine people actually reading my blog, certainly these days when my online presence is practically non-existent but, one never knows. For what it's worth, I'd really appreciate anyone's comments...
Margaret Ann is 14 and lives in New York City. The particulars of her life that I jotted down include that her mother is Lavinia, whom Margaret Anne considers to be embarrassingly bohemian (forever name-dropping second-rate artists of tentative acquaintance and dressing in bumfly patterned boho-chic [not].) Father is Brett, a largely absent and Park-Avenue-based ‘futures consultant’.
What follows is Margaret’s diary.
Thursday 6th
Have been reading Nabokov’s Lolita. It’s a great book; top fives material, but Lolita is a real cow. I mean, I suppose it would be cool to have a sophisticated older lover like Humbert Humbert, even if he does have a well-creepy, or at least darn silly, name but gawd, what a… trollope! Anyways, sex is sooo over-rated. Lise talks like she’s done it, too. I hope I’m not the only one who sees right through her. Mind you, apart from being haughtily taciturn (in general demeanour, since I’m using big words here)… Yeah, well, apart from being a bit too quiet Carol does have big(ish) breasts and maybe has done it. She looks older. Big thighs too, so there.
Had art class today. We had to draw this stuffed rabbit. That must break some bylaw or another, but Mr. Symanowski’s like that, poor man. I bet he started off wanting to be the next Francis Bacon and now his concession to being outrageous is to scare the young people of Greenwich Village with taxidermy.
Oh. Oh. Mother has just appeared with ‘something yummy’ she says, in a collection of pale green card boxes from that Korean macro-biotic deli on __ and Eighth. Sometimes I wish we’d just sit at a proper dining table and feast on veal escalopes. With chips, maybe, but no green beans…
Friday 7th
I have a new top! It’s in a sorta washed-out deep pink. Wide neck-line, those short sleeves that don’t quite cover the shoulder and short enough in the body to expose that de rigeur inch-and-a-half of flesh at the waist… I’m such a slut, heh. What makes it really fab is the sequin trim. I’m wearing it with my faded jeans cut off just below the knee but hélas! the only matching footwear to hand is my red converses. The trouble with being fourteen is that one has enough cash to develop outfit aspirations and never enough to go the distance. I see me in Dorothy-red heals. To fill you in on the detail, I got the top at Sam’s, the vintage store, on --.
You, my dear reader, may wonder (it’s my diary, so wonder you shall) what I think of being called Margaret Ann. By the way, this diary has KEEP OUT written in big letters (in invisible ink) all over the covers so, like, dear reader, SCRAM!! It just sounds better than Dear Diary. I mean, just cos I like to write down my thoughts doesn’t mean I intend to make imaginary friends with inky paper. Anyways, Dad tells me that Margaret Ann is the heroine of a short story by William Faulkner that he never finished. ‘Her youth was too fresh (in the old sense) for fiction, so you had to be born,’ which, I suppose is kinda sweet if it isn’t kinda too squirmy too. Strangely enough, I like the name, even if I sometimes wish I could be called something shorter, zippier, modern (‘though modern’s a tad nineties and passé, heh.)
Sunday 9th
A quiet sorta Sunday morning. Oops, afternoon. But you know what I mean: all relative to the time you one wakes up. Mother and Dad are at large in the apartment so I’m fortified up here in my fluffy little bedroom kingdom with Barney the alligator (pure fake green fur; we’ve been buddies since I was seven.) I’m listening to Anne Hvidsten. The wonders of the internet. It’s Swedish, I think; kinda bland, poppy, slouchy, girly (ugh… pass me another adjective.) After last night I had a rather dull head first thing. Nothing a can of diet pepsi which is really mostly Peach Schnapps isn’t slowly fixing. From the parental drinks cabinet, it must have been a gift from some particularly clueless visitor. Mother drinks martinis mainly and Dad has his Chivas Regal. They won’t notice that the Schnapps is now 50% tap water. I don’t think they know I drink the hard stuff (‘perish the thought!’ as Grandma Carter would say). The perils of drink! The evil demon, hah! I suppose it was a bit much to snog Matt at last night’s party, but I couldn’t resist getting one up on my best friend Victoria, who’d been making eyes at him all evening. I think she forgave me, because she paid for our cab home after things started to go a little blurry (luckily it was only Magdalena who was in when I got back.)
So, Matt and Justin approached Victoria, Lucy and me so we had the perfect opportunity to try out our scheme, called the ‘uber-turtle manoeuvre’ heh. Y’know, uber-cool, uber-babe yada yada. It means you play mock-coy (geddit? we’re so literate us lot. The Vintage English Girls we are!). Maybe it worked a little too well. He kept on trying to paw my non-existent breasts, so I had to, gently but firmly, clutch the wrist of his erring hand and place it somewhere more suitable. One of my hips, as it happens. Then he started… you can guess where his sleazy li’l hand started going. I had to resort to an ‘oy!’ after detaching my lips from his. He put on that faux-innocent look, which is really quite cute, but one has to be firm, heh. (Victoria, Lucy and I have decided to go the whole retro trans-atlantic vibe and use full names and the Queen’s English wherever possible. I blame the screening of Brideshead Revisited on cable myself, although we’re all pretending to be absorbed in Jane Austin novels at the moment.)
The peach stuff is quite nice for about five minutes and then it starts to make one just sleepy. I must have been a dipsomaniac English Countess in a former life; a girly version of Sebastian Flyte, getting tipsy at the Ritz. Lucy thinks he’s lush but I don’t see it.
Time for some beauty sleep.
Aargh! Mother is yodelling about going out for lunch. How to get out of this one. Sunday lunch is for fat people, anyway. And I bet she’ll want to drag Dad and me to some pacific rim fusion place, which is just not the sort of scene for a Young Lady.
Lunch wasn’t so much of a trial. I persuaded Dad to take us along to the Raquet Club. It was all I could do to stop skipping down the pavement after this minor victory as I figured it would be a giveaway to spite all my toothbrushing efforts before leaving the apartment. Mother seemed pacified after the first aperitif. Their soup a l’oignon is genuinely French, which means it’s all blobby and bitty. The salad was better. To reply to Victoria’s text I had to excuse myself to the Ladies Room. Phones are slightly verboten in the club’s dining room. At least I had it on vibrate mode. Talking of ‘phones, I’ve been campaigning to get one of those Ericsonn ones. The Nokia’s are just too naff and jejune (which means ‘intellectually unsatisfying’, heh.) I played ‘Daddy’s little girl’ with Dad and spun a thing about keeping track of me with Mother. I can’t believe they then went and held a conference on the subject behind my back or at least I assume they did because they both used the same line on me when I launched into a second offensive; some typically parent-fluff about radiation, as if that wasn’t true of Nokias too. But sufficiently specific to suggest they’d had a talk. Well, at least I’ve got them to bond over something, I suppose, and Lucy’s threat to make the brand change in the ‘near future’ (as if she were in control of the telecommunications consumer choices chez Lehmann) is all just front. Hopefully.
Tuesday 11th
I’ve no particular desire to fill my diary with ‘I said’ ‘she said’ ‘he said’ ‘they said’ and so on through all the pro-nouns gossiping but, safe to say, there was a fair bit of it going ‘round on Monday. Frankly, it can get a little tedious, not to mention embarrassing. Now I realise why Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive is so popular amongst older women, hah. Today, social stress was replaced by work stress. I’ve a pile of math to do, but for Thursday, plus (plus, plus!) Ms. Browning has set us a ‘character profile of Abraham Lincoln’ to write. Yuk! Dad has supplied me with some words: ‘You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.’ He was a political economist back in his days as an academic. That’s when he met Mother. Gramps Grenfeld was Dean of his college and so they met at a soiree. Mother had just returned from working in a gallery in London. I think I’d prefer it if they’d met there; it sounds more romantic, but there you go.
I can’t make up my mind about Christina Aguilera (I have MTV on.) She’s not really that pretty but she seems to have more going on up top than, say, Britney, so even when she’s going through her whole dirty routine at least it gives the impression that she’s doing it partly for the sisterhood and isn’t just a shakin’ booty muppet like you get on MTV Dance. Hmm. I was just sorta thinking that and now I’ve found I’ve written it down, for posterity. It will no doubt come in handy when my biographers wish to ascertain my early views on Feminism, not. If only it was so easy to pass judgement on Abraham Lincoln. Unfortunately, he doesn’t appear on neat three minute segments on MTV, bleh. If it were an English assignment, at least I might get some milage from a pop-culture take on the man, but Browning’s a bit of an old skool strumpet. Yawn. At least Dad says he’s got some books I could look at. I might try a way to smooth him into pointing me to specific passages thereof. If he gets smart to my wiles, I’ll tell him I’m getting into the spirit of political persuasion. He’ll like that.
Thursday 13th
Well it isn’t a Friday. I’ve checked on the computer’s calendar and there are no more Friday 13th’s left in 2005. Still, it gets me thinking of Halloween coming up soon. Lucy has her birthday in November which, she claims, gives her a natural affinity with all the aspects of Fall including, she remarked to me the other day with a wink, ‘more night-time per day.’ Quite what she was implying isn’t lost on me, but I can’t imagine it’s particularly relevant in her case (or mine, for that matter.) Long nights of steamy passion are not exactly on the agenda, even if Matt seems to hope so. Boys my age are just so childish, especially when their aspirations focus on the more adult side of our destinies. How’s this for a line ‘You have such interesting eyes for a poppet [poppette?]’. I mean, really, am I supposed to be impressed by this inner poet in him? And as for poppet well, that’s just taking liberties. I’ll bet he thinks he’s a combination of Humphrey Bogart and Rimbaud: “…Outside, a curious tree / Beat a branch at the window / To see what it could see.” Mmm…imagine a young Frenchman whispering that into your ear of a dark night.
Us Vintage Girls were promenading back from class the other day, ties suitably loosened to bra-level and this guy is approaching. Victoria gave him a lingering gaze and I swear he didn’t even realise his jaw was dropping. What a dork! But, actually, he was cute in a dopey kinda way. Victoria glanced over at me then returned her attention as he approached. I could see her running her tongue over her front teeth but behind her lips and, just as he was walking into the space between us she raised her index finger and jabbed it into his open mouth! His head started back as we collapsed in mirth (okay, so we giggled. Have to work on a more adult version of that…)
A quiet sorta Sunday morning. Oops, afternoon. But you know what I mean: all relative to the time you one wakes up. Mother and Dad are at large in the apartment so I’m fortified up here in my fluffy little bedroom kingdom with Barney the alligator (pure fake green fur; we’ve been buddies since I was seven.) I’m listening to Anne Hvidsten. The wonders of the internet. It’s Swedish, I think; kinda bland, poppy, slouchy, girly (ugh… pass me another adjective.) After last night I had a rather dull head first thing. Nothing a can of diet pepsi which is really mostly Peach Schnapps isn’t slowly fixing. From the parental drinks cabinet, it must have been a gift from some particularly clueless visitor. Mother drinks martinis mainly and Dad has his Chivas Regal. They won’t notice that the Schnapps is now 50% tap water. I don’t think they know I drink the hard stuff (‘perish the thought!’ as Grandma Carter would say). The perils of drink! The evil demon, hah! I suppose it was a bit much to snog Matt at last night’s party, but I couldn’t resist getting one up on my best friend Victoria, who’d been making eyes at him all evening. I think she forgave me, because she paid for our cab home after things started to go a little blurry (luckily it was only Magdalena who was in when I got back.)
So, Matt and Justin approached Victoria, Lucy and me so we had the perfect opportunity to try out our scheme, called the ‘uber-turtle manoeuvre’ heh. Y’know, uber-cool, uber-babe yada yada. It means you play mock-coy (geddit? we’re so literate us lot. The Vintage English Girls we are!). Maybe it worked a little too well. He kept on trying to paw my non-existent breasts, so I had to, gently but firmly, clutch the wrist of his erring hand and place it somewhere more suitable. One of my hips, as it happens. Then he started… you can guess where his sleazy li’l hand started going. I had to resort to an ‘oy!’ after detaching my lips from his. He put on that faux-innocent look, which is really quite cute, but one has to be firm, heh. (Victoria, Lucy and I have decided to go the whole retro trans-atlantic vibe and use full names and the Queen’s English wherever possible. I blame the screening of Brideshead Revisited on cable myself, although we’re all pretending to be absorbed in Jane Austin novels at the moment.)
The peach stuff is quite nice for about five minutes and then it starts to make one just sleepy. I must have been a dipsomaniac English Countess in a former life; a girly version of Sebastian Flyte, getting tipsy at the Ritz. Lucy thinks he’s lush but I don’t see it.
Time for some beauty sleep.
Aargh! Mother is yodelling about going out for lunch. How to get out of this one. Sunday lunch is for fat people, anyway. And I bet she’ll want to drag Dad and me to some pacific rim fusion place, which is just not the sort of scene for a Young Lady.
Lunch wasn’t so much of a trial. I persuaded Dad to take us along to the Raquet Club. It was all I could do to stop skipping down the pavement after this minor victory as I figured it would be a giveaway to spite all my toothbrushing efforts before leaving the apartment. Mother seemed pacified after the first aperitif. Their soup a l’oignon is genuinely French, which means it’s all blobby and bitty. The salad was better. To reply to Victoria’s text I had to excuse myself to the Ladies Room. Phones are slightly verboten in the club’s dining room. At least I had it on vibrate mode. Talking of ‘phones, I’ve been campaigning to get one of those Ericsonn ones. The Nokia’s are just too naff and jejune (which means ‘intellectually unsatisfying’, heh.) I played ‘Daddy’s little girl’ with Dad and spun a thing about keeping track of me with Mother. I can’t believe they then went and held a conference on the subject behind my back or at least I assume they did because they both used the same line on me when I launched into a second offensive; some typically parent-fluff about radiation, as if that wasn’t true of Nokias too. But sufficiently specific to suggest they’d had a talk. Well, at least I’ve got them to bond over something, I suppose, and Lucy’s threat to make the brand change in the ‘near future’ (as if she were in control of the telecommunications consumer choices chez Lehmann) is all just front. Hopefully.
Tuesday 11th
I’ve no particular desire to fill my diary with ‘I said’ ‘she said’ ‘he said’ ‘they said’ and so on through all the pro-nouns gossiping but, safe to say, there was a fair bit of it going ‘round on Monday. Frankly, it can get a little tedious, not to mention embarrassing. Now I realise why Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive is so popular amongst older women, hah. Today, social stress was replaced by work stress. I’ve a pile of math to do, but for Thursday, plus (plus, plus!) Ms. Browning has set us a ‘character profile of Abraham Lincoln’ to write. Yuk! Dad has supplied me with some words: ‘You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.’ He was a political economist back in his days as an academic. That’s when he met Mother. Gramps Grenfeld was Dean of his college and so they met at a soiree. Mother had just returned from working in a gallery in London. I think I’d prefer it if they’d met there; it sounds more romantic, but there you go.
I can’t make up my mind about Christina Aguilera (I have MTV on.) She’s not really that pretty but she seems to have more going on up top than, say, Britney, so even when she’s going through her whole dirty routine at least it gives the impression that she’s doing it partly for the sisterhood and isn’t just a shakin’ booty muppet like you get on MTV Dance. Hmm. I was just sorta thinking that and now I’ve found I’ve written it down, for posterity. It will no doubt come in handy when my biographers wish to ascertain my early views on Feminism, not. If only it was so easy to pass judgement on Abraham Lincoln. Unfortunately, he doesn’t appear on neat three minute segments on MTV, bleh. If it were an English assignment, at least I might get some milage from a pop-culture take on the man, but Browning’s a bit of an old skool strumpet. Yawn. At least Dad says he’s got some books I could look at. I might try a way to smooth him into pointing me to specific passages thereof. If he gets smart to my wiles, I’ll tell him I’m getting into the spirit of political persuasion. He’ll like that.
Thursday 13th
Well it isn’t a Friday. I’ve checked on the computer’s calendar and there are no more Friday 13th’s left in 2005. Still, it gets me thinking of Halloween coming up soon. Lucy has her birthday in November which, she claims, gives her a natural affinity with all the aspects of Fall including, she remarked to me the other day with a wink, ‘more night-time per day.’ Quite what she was implying isn’t lost on me, but I can’t imagine it’s particularly relevant in her case (or mine, for that matter.) Long nights of steamy passion are not exactly on the agenda, even if Matt seems to hope so. Boys my age are just so childish, especially when their aspirations focus on the more adult side of our destinies. How’s this for a line ‘You have such interesting eyes for a poppet [poppette?]’. I mean, really, am I supposed to be impressed by this inner poet in him? And as for poppet well, that’s just taking liberties. I’ll bet he thinks he’s a combination of Humphrey Bogart and Rimbaud: “…Outside, a curious tree / Beat a branch at the window / To see what it could see.” Mmm…imagine a young Frenchman whispering that into your ear of a dark night.
Us Vintage Girls were promenading back from class the other day, ties suitably loosened to bra-level and this guy is approaching. Victoria gave him a lingering gaze and I swear he didn’t even realise his jaw was dropping. What a dork! But, actually, he was cute in a dopey kinda way. Victoria glanced over at me then returned her attention as he approached. I could see her running her tongue over her front teeth but behind her lips and, just as he was walking into the space between us she raised her index finger and jabbed it into his open mouth! His head started back as we collapsed in mirth (okay, so we giggled. Have to work on a more adult version of that…)
Saturday 22nd October
On occasions like these I thank my diary for being here. OK, so I said I wasn’t going to make friends with inky paper, but it might come to that, given the duplicity duh-you-pli-see-tee of my real friends. I can’t or simply don’t want to believe so much stuff right now and I don’t know if I’m angry or pissed or hurt or confused or what. Well, Victoria. I’ve said it. Vick: no longer worth the dignity of a true Vintage Girl.
She was evasive as we were leaving last class yesterday. Not that she’s not perfectly entitled to go off on her own sometimes, but it was the way she was acting like, as if she’d been rehearsing what she was saying but had nevertheless not bothered to think about it too much. “Oh, I’ve got to go uptown to Grand Central to meet one of my cousins who’s coming to visit this weekend” she tries to slip in as the three of us (Lucy too of course) step out into the yard. But it came out like blurting it out but, like, sotto voce as if to compensate for its lameness, though maybe that’s me thinking after the fact, I suppose. But, really, if her cousin were coming to visit she’d have mentioned it sometime earlier, huh? We all discover we’ve got cousins a-visiting on Friday afternoons at four pm and not a moment earlier, puh-lease…
So the sneaky bitch Cow! Whore! Trollope! thinks we’re stupid now too, or maybe she just doesn’t care?
So off she goes, like a bad pop song with dumb-ass blonde hair, and not in the direction of any subway station I know of. Not that I really got any of this at the time. That time of comparative innocence… As Lucy and I strolled in the other direction I suppose my head was one big question mark but Lucy was chirpily shooting off on some unrelated topic so I just went along with it on automatic pilot, long enough to reach our customary parting point. Lots of the time we take a detour to the coffee shop but Lucy didn’t suggest it. I wasn’t in the mood anyway but I suppose it was a strange omission. Like, fuck-yeah. Lucy’s in on this too! Fucking burning bollocks in hell she didn’t suggest the coffee shop. That’s where Matt and Vick were. Matt and Vick printed in big dumb letters ahead the windshield of some decrepit automobile with a screamin’ bebe in the back no no no NO!! Oooh luve U 2 sweet nothings bollox with pink fluffy frosting on top. I want to write in fire right now, leaving a trail of deep scorches right through into this melamine desk-top, with flames licking my sad fingers. I need to lie down.
On occasions like these I thank my diary for being here. OK, so I said I wasn’t going to make friends with inky paper, but it might come to that, given the duplicity duh-you-pli-see-tee of my real friends. I can’t or simply don’t want to believe so much stuff right now and I don’t know if I’m angry or pissed or hurt or confused or what. Well, Victoria. I’ve said it. Vick: no longer worth the dignity of a true Vintage Girl.
She was evasive as we were leaving last class yesterday. Not that she’s not perfectly entitled to go off on her own sometimes, but it was the way she was acting like, as if she’d been rehearsing what she was saying but had nevertheless not bothered to think about it too much. “Oh, I’ve got to go uptown to Grand Central to meet one of my cousins who’s coming to visit this weekend” she tries to slip in as the three of us (Lucy too of course) step out into the yard. But it came out like blurting it out but, like, sotto voce as if to compensate for its lameness, though maybe that’s me thinking after the fact, I suppose. But, really, if her cousin were coming to visit she’d have mentioned it sometime earlier, huh? We all discover we’ve got cousins a-visiting on Friday afternoons at four pm and not a moment earlier, puh-lease…
So the sneaky bitch Cow! Whore! Trollope! thinks we’re stupid now too, or maybe she just doesn’t care?
So off she goes, like a bad pop song with dumb-ass blonde hair, and not in the direction of any subway station I know of. Not that I really got any of this at the time. That time of comparative innocence… As Lucy and I strolled in the other direction I suppose my head was one big question mark but Lucy was chirpily shooting off on some unrelated topic so I just went along with it on automatic pilot, long enough to reach our customary parting point. Lots of the time we take a detour to the coffee shop but Lucy didn’t suggest it. I wasn’t in the mood anyway but I suppose it was a strange omission. Like, fuck-yeah. Lucy’s in on this too! Fucking burning bollocks in hell she didn’t suggest the coffee shop. That’s where Matt and Vick were. Matt and Vick printed in big dumb letters ahead the windshield of some decrepit automobile with a screamin’ bebe in the back no no no NO!! Oooh luve U 2 sweet nothings bollox with pink fluffy frosting on top. I want to write in fire right now, leaving a trail of deep scorches right through into this melamine desk-top, with flames licking my sad fingers. I need to lie down.
Margaret Ann is 14 and lives in New York City. The particulars of her life that I jotted down include that her mother is Lavinia, whom Margaret Anne considers to be embarrassingly bohemian (forever name-dropping second-rate artists of tentative acquaintance and dressing in bumfly patterned boho-chic [not].) Father is Brett, a largely absent and Park-Avenue-based ‘futures consultant’.
What follows is Margaret’s diary.
Sunday 29th
Sometimes I wish I could still be content to write about a day with the folks at Coney Island. Or even get excited about the shopping trip Mother dragged me out of bed for around midday. She was trying to make a big thing out of our ‘girls only’ shopping spree like, as if she were a girl and not a grown woman. Dad was no help, hiding behind Cigar Aficionado as I protested ill-health. Mother kept up the false jollity in the cab all the way up to Fifth Avenue, stopping just past St.Patrick’s Cathedral. At one point it seemed that she was about to try and hold my hand. She seems to have gotten it into her head that ‘arty’ types are supposed to be both touchy-feely and unconcerned with the social grace attached to thinking of me as neither her ‘pal’ nor her ‘little girl’ like she’s incapable… ok, so I’m being a bit harsh. I suppose it was her version of tact that our excursion to re-stock my underwear drawer was by way of Takashimaya rather than to the new Bloomingdale’s in Soho where my own ilk might have been prowling. Her artistic side didn’t stretch to me getting anything either red or see-through (ok, so I was teasing her when it came to pulling out that particular pair of knickers) but this tactic paid off in the end as she seemed half-relieved when I offered a compromise in the form of a rather svelte black ensemble, albeit to the sporty rather than the lacy end of the spectrum, flung in with the usual white stuff. At least the Japanese acknowledge that the ‘B’ cups amongst us aren’t all complete children. We went for chai afterwards.
Anyway, as I was saying to start with (I think this is to be a long session curled up with my diary, as I’m thinking out loud with it and my thinking can ramble but. Whatever, hah.)
As. I. Was. Saying. Life just seems to have gotten complex these days. Victoria and I are in a sort of post Cold War semi-truce at the moment, with neither of us exactly sure where to go, except her apologetically tip-toeing off to Matthew (like he’s become her sorta honorary Vintage Girl, heh). I try avoid being anywhere near him as the best I could do is glare at the stupid boy and I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. Lucy, bless her, is doing her best as ambasciatrice-ambassadrice. She realises that Victoria, now confiding in her rather than in me, is something of a step up for her and she’s anxious to use her new status as a means to gaining extra privileges with me, too. We’re meeting ‘just the two of us’ at the coffee shop tomorrow. I’d have told her to sod off except, to be honest, I could do with the company. There’s no point being soi-disant superior if you’ve got no-one to explain that it means self styled to. We really should be plotting over which new boys to target. I suppose there are some tenth or eleventh grade guys that might kick Matt and Vick into some suitable shadow but I can’t yet see myself sitting on the bleachers like those ball-park bimbos whose ambition in the dramatic arts is a captaincy of the cheer-leading squad.
This diary being strictly PRIVATE, I think I’m going to copy something in here that’s rather corny. Or, at least, I’m not sure whether to giggle or blush when I re-read it. I wrote it in a jotter that happened to be lying on the floor beside my bed last night and, since it’s my math jotter, I’ll have to rip it out of there anyway. I don’t know where it came from exactly. Sometimes I’m just in some sort of reverie and it seems like I’m millions of miles or years away. I suppose I have a sort of image of myself that’s like a school uniform then there’s this other, secret part of me. Anyway, here goes…
There was a key to a locked room, and only one person knew which door, by which key, would open into it. Furthermore, within that room was a locked cabinet and to that, she also had the key. In that cabinet were papers on which were written stories, of which she was the only narrator, telling of events in which she was the only player. These tales spun far from this world and yet into no other, for she was Narcissus’ reflection and the watery surface her haunt. One day, however, another came, and looked down into her gaze. “I am the eyes of art” he said. He stretched down a hand and pulled her out, saying “Now feel the soul which beats between our fingers.” She could feel the pulse and gasped the air then, with his other hand, he touched her brow. “Let me stroke these dripping locks away, like as waves leave the ocean. Let the rest of this deep water evaporate and the sun warm your belly. I have ventured long for you,” he said, “For I am the knowledge of art and you are its essence. Lend me your smile and unshadow your thighs. Then hand me the key and show me the door, for then vanish they shall forever more.”
Ergh. As I copied it out I had to change it a bit to make it make a bit more sense. I suppose I was half asleep when I wrote it, you know like random images come into this weird sorta pattern that makes perfect sense at the time. Anyways, I’ve come over a bit dizzy, like I’m battling with this intangible thing from the night that gets me confused. It’s scary. Scary enough, that is, to have me running off to watch Will and Grace.
What follows is Margaret’s diary.
Sunday 29th
Sometimes I wish I could still be content to write about a day with the folks at Coney Island. Or even get excited about the shopping trip Mother dragged me out of bed for around midday. She was trying to make a big thing out of our ‘girls only’ shopping spree like, as if she were a girl and not a grown woman. Dad was no help, hiding behind Cigar Aficionado as I protested ill-health. Mother kept up the false jollity in the cab all the way up to Fifth Avenue, stopping just past St.Patrick’s Cathedral. At one point it seemed that she was about to try and hold my hand. She seems to have gotten it into her head that ‘arty’ types are supposed to be both touchy-feely and unconcerned with the social grace attached to thinking of me as neither her ‘pal’ nor her ‘little girl’ like she’s incapable… ok, so I’m being a bit harsh. I suppose it was her version of tact that our excursion to re-stock my underwear drawer was by way of Takashimaya rather than to the new Bloomingdale’s in Soho where my own ilk might have been prowling. Her artistic side didn’t stretch to me getting anything either red or see-through (ok, so I was teasing her when it came to pulling out that particular pair of knickers) but this tactic paid off in the end as she seemed half-relieved when I offered a compromise in the form of a rather svelte black ensemble, albeit to the sporty rather than the lacy end of the spectrum, flung in with the usual white stuff. At least the Japanese acknowledge that the ‘B’ cups amongst us aren’t all complete children. We went for chai afterwards.
Anyway, as I was saying to start with (I think this is to be a long session curled up with my diary, as I’m thinking out loud with it and my thinking can ramble but. Whatever, hah.)
As. I. Was. Saying. Life just seems to have gotten complex these days. Victoria and I are in a sort of post Cold War semi-truce at the moment, with neither of us exactly sure where to go, except her apologetically tip-toeing off to Matthew (like he’s become her sorta honorary Vintage Girl, heh). I try avoid being anywhere near him as the best I could do is glare at the stupid boy and I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. Lucy, bless her, is doing her best as ambasciatrice-ambassadrice. She realises that Victoria, now confiding in her rather than in me, is something of a step up for her and she’s anxious to use her new status as a means to gaining extra privileges with me, too. We’re meeting ‘just the two of us’ at the coffee shop tomorrow. I’d have told her to sod off except, to be honest, I could do with the company. There’s no point being soi-disant superior if you’ve got no-one to explain that it means self styled to. We really should be plotting over which new boys to target. I suppose there are some tenth or eleventh grade guys that might kick Matt and Vick into some suitable shadow but I can’t yet see myself sitting on the bleachers like those ball-park bimbos whose ambition in the dramatic arts is a captaincy of the cheer-leading squad.
This diary being strictly PRIVATE, I think I’m going to copy something in here that’s rather corny. Or, at least, I’m not sure whether to giggle or blush when I re-read it. I wrote it in a jotter that happened to be lying on the floor beside my bed last night and, since it’s my math jotter, I’ll have to rip it out of there anyway. I don’t know where it came from exactly. Sometimes I’m just in some sort of reverie and it seems like I’m millions of miles or years away. I suppose I have a sort of image of myself that’s like a school uniform then there’s this other, secret part of me. Anyway, here goes…
There was a key to a locked room, and only one person knew which door, by which key, would open into it. Furthermore, within that room was a locked cabinet and to that, she also had the key. In that cabinet were papers on which were written stories, of which she was the only narrator, telling of events in which she was the only player. These tales spun far from this world and yet into no other, for she was Narcissus’ reflection and the watery surface her haunt. One day, however, another came, and looked down into her gaze. “I am the eyes of art” he said. He stretched down a hand and pulled her out, saying “Now feel the soul which beats between our fingers.” She could feel the pulse and gasped the air then, with his other hand, he touched her brow. “Let me stroke these dripping locks away, like as waves leave the ocean. Let the rest of this deep water evaporate and the sun warm your belly. I have ventured long for you,” he said, “For I am the knowledge of art and you are its essence. Lend me your smile and unshadow your thighs. Then hand me the key and show me the door, for then vanish they shall forever more.”
Ergh. As I copied it out I had to change it a bit to make it make a bit more sense. I suppose I was half asleep when I wrote it, you know like random images come into this weird sorta pattern that makes perfect sense at the time. Anyways, I’ve come over a bit dizzy, like I’m battling with this intangible thing from the night that gets me confused. It’s scary. Scary enough, that is, to have me running off to watch Will and Grace.
I don't blog very often. To be honest, I have an olden-times-style non-broadband connection distant from my habitual computer eyrie (a nice yellow table with a white-piped red chair in a corner covered with a rambling pattern of framed and unframed images and a strange, new matrix of red and blue LED lights that shifts and glows in a technolologically satisfying way.) So, bloggersville; internetville for yours-truly is in bed, late at night, with the suede duvet strewn with wires for telecommunications, electricity and to whatever other portable devices I assemble to extract earlier-written items that are thus insured against the unstable vagaries of this dial-up purgatory. I have a few reasons for wishing to 'blog' right this minute, twenty four of them past midnight. Firstly, I'm in one of those strange moods in which my customary aloofness, my privately intense but generally cheerful solitude, hankers after some sort of connection with the outside world, even if only at some unnuterable distance of electronica. The second, more specific is that, as part of a writing class I've been landed with the task of writing the diary of a fourteen-year-old girl from New York. Now, I've never been to New York and I've never been a girl, so I'll be making mistakes in tone, in feeling, in fact aplenty. But I'm trying to get at some human reality that gets to something more than that of a bloke peering across the void at something that, even if she doesn't yet have hips to speak of, nor is she often to be found wearing even dresses or skirts... before I get further entangled, I'd be grateful for any feedback before I embarass myself reading it aloud or before I'm deluded into thinking someone like this would actually exist.
As blogger goes backwards through time, I'll post 'her' last entries first. Hmm. Sometimes I really why I do things but, hell, why stop now...
As blogger goes backwards through time, I'll post 'her' last entries first. Hmm. Sometimes I really why I do things but, hell, why stop now...
Monday, August 15, 2005
Three minutes to midnight. Sunday. Don Giovanni blaring out, cooker on with a lamb stew. I’ve tried and failed to achieve several things today and it’s hacking me off. Simple things, like record a line or two of music on my computer sequencer, but no change from the inboard drum-machine whizzo that played on and on and on in an old-style jazz trio beat, crowding out all the computer’s processing ability such as to allow me to STOP the damn thing and get on with something simpler. I get back this evening from something, all fired-up with the energy to do a drawing of a stair tower, urgently required on site. I have all night to do it, I think. I’ve got the energy and enthusiasm but… the base drawing (contours, other buildings, etc.) essential to the task is so damn huge it’s taking a quarter of an hour to open up then another quarter of an hour for every single succeeding command until the computer gives up entirely and I’m reduced to re-booting. I tried again and again but, sorry boss, here was me going to surprise you with my solid and well-intentioned beyond-the-call-of-duty work but… no, but I’m still so fired-up with a buzz that’s turned to mild anger and frustration that I really feel like doing something, anything, that involves me doing something myself, before I head upstairs for the sleep of the just. Sometimes writing stuff helps get my mind on another track and my previous thoughts into some sort of perspective, so here it is. I’ll upload it onto my weblog, which I left off some considerable time ago. I still wrote a journal. But it’s off-line, printed in a wee A5 hard-backed booklet now, on the shelf.
The blog idea came since I checked it out the other day and noticed that a couple of people had written messages. One cheerful if brief, so hello there and another which led me over to the pages of Friendster and into writing an Email to which… well, one hopes for a response rather than expects it. Who knows. My own Friendster profile shows this bearded bloke. The beard is now gone but I’ve grown my hair into a floppy style which I like because, when clean-shaven with the hair freshly blow-dried, I look a little younger than I actually am, which tells you I’m getting older, when I reach the stage of getting a kick out of looking younger but there you have it.
I’m going through a course of solidifying my sense of self at the moment, for the simple reason that, at times in the past, I’ve demonstrated rather unsustainable courses of action, all seemingly in the service of chasing dreams which started off life as genuine possibilities and ended up diluted to the point of insubstance. One of the problems I’ve faced before with the desire to ‘sort one’s life out’ is that one tends to be over-eager to dismiss and discard a great deal of stuff without really looking closely and honestly at it, with the aim of starting afresh with a new, shiny, clean, streamlined personal unit. This is a bit like a new director-general arriving at a corporation and making his mark by selling-off all the non-essential subsidiaries and firing half of the remaining staff. It looks decisive. It looks effective and the shareholders think ‘cool: dynamism at last; this guy knows the bottom line’ and the share price goes up. Problem is, it’s all superficial and it doesn’t last, methinks. I’m no corporate analyst so perhaps the analogy falls a little short, but I do know that I deserve to give my own past foibles, problematic issues, ambitions (realistic and unrealistic alike) the same degree of patience and understanding that I give to most other things. But first I have to start simple. For example, forget the imaginary interview with me as the super-talented pop-star. Just get the bloody sequencer to work. This is the theory, anyway. You’ll no doubt get the chance to see how it all works out on MTV soon enough, heh. I have a back-up plan that should be hanging on the walls of the Grand Palais in Paris, come the end of the decade which I’ll jokingly refer to as my ‘tiger baby colour-munching daubs’ during my Pulitzer acceptance speech, video-relayed to earth from my luxury star cruiser, with some of my new-found friends from my various newly-found species lurking in the background, swapping anecdotes and bodily fluids from places (anatomically and inter-galactically) we haven’t yet heard of.
00:43. This malarkey is beginning to work. Feeling a little tired, even. This is all terribly self-indulgent of me, dear reader (and I refer to ‘reader’ in the singular advisedly. If I actually thought that someone other than me were to read this, I’d shudder, not because I’m not vaguely exhibitionist when it comes to divulging personal issues but … and I have to think a bit here… it might seem that I’m expecting some rather undeserved attention. I’m still plugging away un(or barely) abashed, though. I suppose the idea is that sometimes, if only by accident, someone else can chance upon a connection. It’s a bit of a lottery, I know but you can find big facts about big, important things in bookshops.)
Still, I dread the thought of going upstairs to the internet connection and publishing this thing. I really must be getting tired. I’ll permit myself a change of scenery for a moment and see how the resolve works out…
01:41
Fresh candles lit, the first course of dinner eaten. Desert is a pudding or, pudding is a desert of sponge filled with and soaked-through in fruits appearing to the red end of the colour spectrum, eaten warm with some decent vanilla ice cream. Following that shall be a milky coffee and a cigarillo which, strangely enough, should send me to sleep (it usually has that effect in the mornings, anyway.)
‘thieves, usurers and knaves: they hate the sun and love the moone’ to paraphrase an Elizabethan satirist by the name of Joseph Hall. So it says in the ‘prelude’ to ‘ordinances of the bedchamber’ in a book I have lying open here entitled ‘At Day’s Close: A History of Night-time’. Funny to think these days of a bank that would open only after dark. Usury being the practice of lending money, for those of you unfamiliar with the now rather Biblically-hued term. Now over to the microwave, to a marvellously jolly episode from Don Giovanni.
The pudding, after much persuasion, flops out of the hot plastic tub and into the white china serving bowl with a satisfyingly jellyfish, but heavier and softer than jelly… it flops with a sort of withering resignation, almost ready to squirt juice eyeballwards should it muster the mood. Fittingly, the thunderous and menacing episode of Don Giovanni, the one which, in the Schaeffer-scripted film Amadeus, is used to hint at Mozart himself facing the ghost of his father, perhaps, or even the grim reaper himself, telling him to work to deadline… literally… fittingly, as I was saying, this comes on as I attempt extraction of the ice cream from its owne tube. Rather too frozen, I have to hack it out in flying shards of glittering vanilla. I have some propah Chantilly cream in the fridge, but it’s awfully temperature sensitive and would tend to dissipate on encountering the hot flanks of the sponge into a suspension of fatty globules. Excuse me whilst I actually eat the thing.
Coffee and some Vivaldi trio-sonatas, courtesy of messrs. Manze (baroque violin), North (archlute, theorbo and guitar) and Toll (harpsichord). And some final nighttime stuff, which is also involving of the process known to sixteenth-century physicians as ‘concoction’ : once food has been digested in the stomach, fumes ascend to the head ‘where through coldnesse of the braine, they being congealed, doe stop the conduites and waies of the senses, and so procure sleepe.’ Thanks to A. Roger Ekirch, who’s spent many years trawling up such quotes. And so on to ‘Directory of Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh (with folding map)’, a facsimile edition I picked up last weekend of a surprisingly audacious 1775 publication listing, quite literally, the attributes of a large number of… what shall we say, prostitutes? It has an introduction by an ‘anonymous wit’. A break for coffee and that cigarillo and I’ll pick you out a quotable passage…
“… why shall the victims of this natural propensity, the volunteers of Venus, the fairest, the most able of the creation be hunted like outcasts from society, be perpetually gripped by petty tyranny?
…Clasped in the delicious arms of beauty, the factious malcontent forgets the black workings of his soul…
… In the fair one’s embrace the prodigal escapes from the snares of the gamester… The lawyer in the café of love, forgets his quirks and evocations, and is for that short space honest and upright. Behold the merchant also stealing from business, under the mask of night, to the apartments of his Thais; where, forgetful of carking care, no more remembering the rough sea, the bold wind, nor the dangers of the long expected ship, his heart expands with transports; the list of bankrupts remains unread; and her lovely bosom yields him the highest of sublunary bliss…”
I was telling a good friend of mine that I intended to quote from this in a song, which went on along the lines of
‘Laura was a down-to-earth name,
I suppose.
‘She was wandering down-town:
Down on her luck,
I suppose,
Not enough cash to get high…
The last bit rhymes and seems reasonable but wasn’t, as far as I can recall, true of the real Laura, sometimes of Wellington Street as it meets Cadogan Street, sometimes of the pole-dancing bars of Eire.
Furthermore, there’s something missing in the whole story. The ‘ain’t it cute they’re all so sweet, leave-em be’ is only the story from the male perspective. But it’s too late at night now to go into all that. There’s lots of sides to a variety of stories there.
I’ll probably think up some fine closing paragraph just as I’ve uploaded this much, but it’s 03:25 and my alarm clock goes off in just over an hour. Bleh…
The blog idea came since I checked it out the other day and noticed that a couple of people had written messages. One cheerful if brief, so hello there and another which led me over to the pages of Friendster and into writing an Email to which… well, one hopes for a response rather than expects it. Who knows. My own Friendster profile shows this bearded bloke. The beard is now gone but I’ve grown my hair into a floppy style which I like because, when clean-shaven with the hair freshly blow-dried, I look a little younger than I actually am, which tells you I’m getting older, when I reach the stage of getting a kick out of looking younger but there you have it.
I’m going through a course of solidifying my sense of self at the moment, for the simple reason that, at times in the past, I’ve demonstrated rather unsustainable courses of action, all seemingly in the service of chasing dreams which started off life as genuine possibilities and ended up diluted to the point of insubstance. One of the problems I’ve faced before with the desire to ‘sort one’s life out’ is that one tends to be over-eager to dismiss and discard a great deal of stuff without really looking closely and honestly at it, with the aim of starting afresh with a new, shiny, clean, streamlined personal unit. This is a bit like a new director-general arriving at a corporation and making his mark by selling-off all the non-essential subsidiaries and firing half of the remaining staff. It looks decisive. It looks effective and the shareholders think ‘cool: dynamism at last; this guy knows the bottom line’ and the share price goes up. Problem is, it’s all superficial and it doesn’t last, methinks. I’m no corporate analyst so perhaps the analogy falls a little short, but I do know that I deserve to give my own past foibles, problematic issues, ambitions (realistic and unrealistic alike) the same degree of patience and understanding that I give to most other things. But first I have to start simple. For example, forget the imaginary interview with me as the super-talented pop-star. Just get the bloody sequencer to work. This is the theory, anyway. You’ll no doubt get the chance to see how it all works out on MTV soon enough, heh. I have a back-up plan that should be hanging on the walls of the Grand Palais in Paris, come the end of the decade which I’ll jokingly refer to as my ‘tiger baby colour-munching daubs’ during my Pulitzer acceptance speech, video-relayed to earth from my luxury star cruiser, with some of my new-found friends from my various newly-found species lurking in the background, swapping anecdotes and bodily fluids from places (anatomically and inter-galactically) we haven’t yet heard of.
00:43. This malarkey is beginning to work. Feeling a little tired, even. This is all terribly self-indulgent of me, dear reader (and I refer to ‘reader’ in the singular advisedly. If I actually thought that someone other than me were to read this, I’d shudder, not because I’m not vaguely exhibitionist when it comes to divulging personal issues but … and I have to think a bit here… it might seem that I’m expecting some rather undeserved attention. I’m still plugging away un(or barely) abashed, though. I suppose the idea is that sometimes, if only by accident, someone else can chance upon a connection. It’s a bit of a lottery, I know but you can find big facts about big, important things in bookshops.)
Still, I dread the thought of going upstairs to the internet connection and publishing this thing. I really must be getting tired. I’ll permit myself a change of scenery for a moment and see how the resolve works out…
01:41
Fresh candles lit, the first course of dinner eaten. Desert is a pudding or, pudding is a desert of sponge filled with and soaked-through in fruits appearing to the red end of the colour spectrum, eaten warm with some decent vanilla ice cream. Following that shall be a milky coffee and a cigarillo which, strangely enough, should send me to sleep (it usually has that effect in the mornings, anyway.)
‘thieves, usurers and knaves: they hate the sun and love the moone’ to paraphrase an Elizabethan satirist by the name of Joseph Hall. So it says in the ‘prelude’ to ‘ordinances of the bedchamber’ in a book I have lying open here entitled ‘At Day’s Close: A History of Night-time’. Funny to think these days of a bank that would open only after dark. Usury being the practice of lending money, for those of you unfamiliar with the now rather Biblically-hued term. Now over to the microwave, to a marvellously jolly episode from Don Giovanni.
The pudding, after much persuasion, flops out of the hot plastic tub and into the white china serving bowl with a satisfyingly jellyfish, but heavier and softer than jelly… it flops with a sort of withering resignation, almost ready to squirt juice eyeballwards should it muster the mood. Fittingly, the thunderous and menacing episode of Don Giovanni, the one which, in the Schaeffer-scripted film Amadeus, is used to hint at Mozart himself facing the ghost of his father, perhaps, or even the grim reaper himself, telling him to work to deadline… literally… fittingly, as I was saying, this comes on as I attempt extraction of the ice cream from its owne tube. Rather too frozen, I have to hack it out in flying shards of glittering vanilla. I have some propah Chantilly cream in the fridge, but it’s awfully temperature sensitive and would tend to dissipate on encountering the hot flanks of the sponge into a suspension of fatty globules. Excuse me whilst I actually eat the thing.
Coffee and some Vivaldi trio-sonatas, courtesy of messrs. Manze (baroque violin), North (archlute, theorbo and guitar) and Toll (harpsichord). And some final nighttime stuff, which is also involving of the process known to sixteenth-century physicians as ‘concoction’ : once food has been digested in the stomach, fumes ascend to the head ‘where through coldnesse of the braine, they being congealed, doe stop the conduites and waies of the senses, and so procure sleepe.’ Thanks to A. Roger Ekirch, who’s spent many years trawling up such quotes. And so on to ‘Directory of Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh (with folding map)’, a facsimile edition I picked up last weekend of a surprisingly audacious 1775 publication listing, quite literally, the attributes of a large number of… what shall we say, prostitutes? It has an introduction by an ‘anonymous wit’. A break for coffee and that cigarillo and I’ll pick you out a quotable passage…
“… why shall the victims of this natural propensity, the volunteers of Venus, the fairest, the most able of the creation be hunted like outcasts from society, be perpetually gripped by petty tyranny?
…Clasped in the delicious arms of beauty, the factious malcontent forgets the black workings of his soul…
… In the fair one’s embrace the prodigal escapes from the snares of the gamester… The lawyer in the café of love, forgets his quirks and evocations, and is for that short space honest and upright. Behold the merchant also stealing from business, under the mask of night, to the apartments of his Thais; where, forgetful of carking care, no more remembering the rough sea, the bold wind, nor the dangers of the long expected ship, his heart expands with transports; the list of bankrupts remains unread; and her lovely bosom yields him the highest of sublunary bliss…”
I was telling a good friend of mine that I intended to quote from this in a song, which went on along the lines of
‘Laura was a down-to-earth name,
I suppose.
‘She was wandering down-town:
Down on her luck,
I suppose,
Not enough cash to get high…
The last bit rhymes and seems reasonable but wasn’t, as far as I can recall, true of the real Laura, sometimes of Wellington Street as it meets Cadogan Street, sometimes of the pole-dancing bars of Eire.
Furthermore, there’s something missing in the whole story. The ‘ain’t it cute they’re all so sweet, leave-em be’ is only the story from the male perspective. But it’s too late at night now to go into all that. There’s lots of sides to a variety of stories there.
I’ll probably think up some fine closing paragraph just as I’ve uploaded this much, but it’s 03:25 and my alarm clock goes off in just over an hour. Bleh…
Saturday, April 09, 2005
It’s taken me a long time to get around to it, but I’ve finally bought a CD of old Cliff Richard tracks. This stuff was essentially my introduction to music. I played my mum’s record of it obsessively as a young boy. Close on thirty years later and after not really hearing it for, say, a quarter of a century, it’s like meeting an old friend and I just LOVE it. I daren’t put this on my mini i-Pod for the simple reason that this early English version of American Rock’n’Roll is the only music I can’t help dancing around and singing along to. Yep, Living Doll, Do You Wanna Dance and The Young Ones were where my soul met music for the first time and with their return comes the uninhibited five year old that, apparently, is still in me.
Here we have a Saturday Times TV listing for the FX channel:
11.25 FILM: The Blue Lagoon (1980)
Drama starring Christopher Atkins
Perhaps this movie doesn’t really deserve even a one-liner description but really: if ever a one line description were to miss the point entirely, this is it.
Here we have a Saturday Times TV listing for the FX channel:
11.25 FILM: The Blue Lagoon (1980)
Drama starring Christopher Atkins
Perhaps this movie doesn’t really deserve even a one-liner description but really: if ever a one line description were to miss the point entirely, this is it.
Saturday, April 09, 2005 (5am or so)
What follows are a series of short passages I’ve drafted as ideas for a novel. Goodness knows how they’d connect, except via me, of course. And they do say that most first novels are autobiographical. The first is based upon a genuine discussion at a meeting I attended the other day:
- actually, if you don't mind, I'll edit this one out: if someone actually at the meeting or someone from Transco or British Gas were to chance upon it, they might get the wrong idea -
This next snippet I actually wrote down at about one am. It’s based upon the experience that to be awoken by the telephone or somesutch at that hour would be really disturbing and yet if one is already up for some other reason (or not in bed yet, I suppose) one is curiously well prepared; one might almost say smugly so. A few nights previously I’d been in bed since ten or so but woke up around twenty-five past one, so I tootled off downstairs for a cigarillo. The phone rang at two and I thought ‘I’d hate to have been woken up by that.’ I didn’t answer it, mind. I write this at five thirty-six am. I woke up from a dream involving being snapped-at by an alligator in a swamp at four. Whilst in the bathroom I heard a distinct knock on the door... I waited for it to stop and went back to bed. Before falling asleep again, however, there was a knock on the door again, so I jumped up and peered through the eyeglass. It being an attractive woman, I opened the door. Her voice was lucid but interspersed with hiccups. She was desperately trying to find flat 4D, so we went through the possibilities of finding it: not a simple task in this block, where only 50% of the doors are marked. I suggested level ‘D’ as there’s no flat ‘D’ on level four to my knowledge, unless it’s in the serviced apartments in the back wing... didn’t think of that... damn.
“Good morning, ?? speaking,” he chirped, having lifted up the receiver.
“Erm, uh... morning?”
“’Tis one am. That makes it morning.”
“Eh... ah, sorry about the time?”
“No point in apologizing now. So what can I do for you?”
?? was a magnificent example of being whatever it was that he was. This, perhaps, understood better in the knowledge that ‘magnificently awful’ is in the canon of magnificents. Not that he particularly fell to that end of the adjective’s compass, just that the superlative aspect; the grand scope of his essence tended to diminish the impact or value of his moral virtue.
The following episode is a trajectory from a real experience, the reality of which begins and ends with the WPC’s comment:
“Tweed jackets are old man’s clothes,” the WPC remarked. Attempting to affect an indifference towards two other policemen rummaging through his wardrobe, he couldn’t help breaking the ensuing pause with the observation, stated with calculated gentleness so as to soften its impact “Generally one prefaces a subjective remark such as that with the words ‘I think...’ thus affording one’s interlocutor the benefit of understanding that one appreciates that whatever opinion is being posited is not necessarily shared by all. This qualification could, I suppose, be considered tautological since to say infers to have thought first but, all the same, it’s a conventional form of some usefulness in smoothing...”
Drifting from his concentration he glanced at her but there was no discernible reaction to his display of verbosity “... over the potential for upset.” he concluded, sotto voce. Perhaps her seeming indifference betrayed a higher degree of intelligence than he’d previously speculated of her. On the other hand, maybe it was just native wit telling her to ignore words collectively shooting over her head.
The act of creative writing is distinguished from the sort one puts in a diary not so much in its differing relation to ‘reality’ but more in the process: the words in a diary are the transcription of thoughts in real time whereas in creative writing one is allowed a mixture of transcription and parallel calculation. One thinks up the idea or the situation then one ‘works out’ how to phrase it. Not an absolute distinction in practice but perhaps tending that way, just as the Truth is not the opposite of a Lie but something leading from the direction one has started in going from Lies to Not Lies.
The passage below tells of a situation I dreamt up whilst walking to the office the other morning. Strange what one can be caught thinking. Strange, also, that there is so little in literature or dramatic script that alludes to such discontinuity of thought and circumstance: it would seem that our world-in-words is more comfortable in the causal mode of being. Perhaps it’s to do with narratives being driven by action: action, distinct from being, is when the imperatives of circumstance preclude other thoughts and that focus is of use to the writer.
Flames in the kitchen sink began to lick the glossy pages of his pornographic archive. Gathering a momentum provided by the interlacing of the pages with cigarette lighter fluid, the brushed stainless steel concavity now framed an increasingly abstracted and infernal tableau of dismembered limbs, gaudily-shining dentistry and lingerie frilled with ashy hems. He was rather enraptured of the peeling, curling scene but couldn’t help thinking that perhaps he’d been a trifle over-zealous on the solvent naptha, light aliphatic (according to the tin) as the flames started to obscure the view and climb ominously ceilingwards.
The smoke alarm sounded. As there was possibly alarm enough for the whole apartment block now rising in his own head, he ventured to silence the plastic beast clinging to the hallway ceiling. This he eventually effected with repeated horse-whips delivered via a tea-towel, originally picked up as he speculated on how to douse the conflagration itself.
It was about an hour later when he found himself sighing ‘what a nuisance’ as he stood in the morning sun, staring up at a snake of soot swirling up from the cracked window pane. At least the other apartment owners would only have the scent of smoke to contend with when the ‘all-clear’ was announced by the Brigade. Delicate though the issue of pornography disposal had been (there is no morality in Art and the law merely a disapproving footnote) he did, however, surmise that the litter bin might have been an easier option.
This final episode is a real-time (I wrote it in my notebook yesterday, along with the other drafts) description of, again, being disturbed in the night. One of those moments of ‘bad stuff’ where, in attempting to transcend the obvious pitfalls of a situation, one pauses to query the inevitability of ‘bad emotions’ to follow. In other words, one thinks ‘this could be an opportunity for a display of calm dignity, kiddo,’ or ‘let’s say this could be considered amusing in its awfulness.’
To be fair on whatever species of chimpanzee it was which resided on the level below, it wasn’t too often that its whoops, snatches of tone-deaf ululation and arrhythmic hand-claps percolated discernibly upwards via a weak-spot in the curtain walling. Perhaps it was the din of traffic navigating a loose manhole cover further below and during the day that masked the potential for sonic intrusion, for it was only in the dead of night that the creature seemed to stir. On this occasion, it being what was now a Friday morning in mid April, it seemed fitting combine defence (loud enough to blot-out) and attack (that loud) in the playing of a recording of Silent Night from the Rat Pack Christmas Album whilst setting an antiquated Hoover to work on the laminate flooring.
What follows are a series of short passages I’ve drafted as ideas for a novel. Goodness knows how they’d connect, except via me, of course. And they do say that most first novels are autobiographical. The first is based upon a genuine discussion at a meeting I attended the other day:
- actually, if you don't mind, I'll edit this one out: if someone actually at the meeting or someone from Transco or British Gas were to chance upon it, they might get the wrong idea -
This next snippet I actually wrote down at about one am. It’s based upon the experience that to be awoken by the telephone or somesutch at that hour would be really disturbing and yet if one is already up for some other reason (or not in bed yet, I suppose) one is curiously well prepared; one might almost say smugly so. A few nights previously I’d been in bed since ten or so but woke up around twenty-five past one, so I tootled off downstairs for a cigarillo. The phone rang at two and I thought ‘I’d hate to have been woken up by that.’ I didn’t answer it, mind. I write this at five thirty-six am. I woke up from a dream involving being snapped-at by an alligator in a swamp at four. Whilst in the bathroom I heard a distinct knock on the door... I waited for it to stop and went back to bed. Before falling asleep again, however, there was a knock on the door again, so I jumped up and peered through the eyeglass. It being an attractive woman, I opened the door. Her voice was lucid but interspersed with hiccups. She was desperately trying to find flat 4D, so we went through the possibilities of finding it: not a simple task in this block, where only 50% of the doors are marked. I suggested level ‘D’ as there’s no flat ‘D’ on level four to my knowledge, unless it’s in the serviced apartments in the back wing... didn’t think of that... damn.
“Good morning, ?? speaking,” he chirped, having lifted up the receiver.
“Erm, uh... morning?”
“’Tis one am. That makes it morning.”
“Eh... ah, sorry about the time?”
“No point in apologizing now. So what can I do for you?”
?? was a magnificent example of being whatever it was that he was. This, perhaps, understood better in the knowledge that ‘magnificently awful’ is in the canon of magnificents. Not that he particularly fell to that end of the adjective’s compass, just that the superlative aspect; the grand scope of his essence tended to diminish the impact or value of his moral virtue.
The following episode is a trajectory from a real experience, the reality of which begins and ends with the WPC’s comment:
“Tweed jackets are old man’s clothes,” the WPC remarked. Attempting to affect an indifference towards two other policemen rummaging through his wardrobe, he couldn’t help breaking the ensuing pause with the observation, stated with calculated gentleness so as to soften its impact “Generally one prefaces a subjective remark such as that with the words ‘I think...’ thus affording one’s interlocutor the benefit of understanding that one appreciates that whatever opinion is being posited is not necessarily shared by all. This qualification could, I suppose, be considered tautological since to say infers to have thought first but, all the same, it’s a conventional form of some usefulness in smoothing...”
Drifting from his concentration he glanced at her but there was no discernible reaction to his display of verbosity “... over the potential for upset.” he concluded, sotto voce. Perhaps her seeming indifference betrayed a higher degree of intelligence than he’d previously speculated of her. On the other hand, maybe it was just native wit telling her to ignore words collectively shooting over her head.
The act of creative writing is distinguished from the sort one puts in a diary not so much in its differing relation to ‘reality’ but more in the process: the words in a diary are the transcription of thoughts in real time whereas in creative writing one is allowed a mixture of transcription and parallel calculation. One thinks up the idea or the situation then one ‘works out’ how to phrase it. Not an absolute distinction in practice but perhaps tending that way, just as the Truth is not the opposite of a Lie but something leading from the direction one has started in going from Lies to Not Lies.
The passage below tells of a situation I dreamt up whilst walking to the office the other morning. Strange what one can be caught thinking. Strange, also, that there is so little in literature or dramatic script that alludes to such discontinuity of thought and circumstance: it would seem that our world-in-words is more comfortable in the causal mode of being. Perhaps it’s to do with narratives being driven by action: action, distinct from being, is when the imperatives of circumstance preclude other thoughts and that focus is of use to the writer.
Flames in the kitchen sink began to lick the glossy pages of his pornographic archive. Gathering a momentum provided by the interlacing of the pages with cigarette lighter fluid, the brushed stainless steel concavity now framed an increasingly abstracted and infernal tableau of dismembered limbs, gaudily-shining dentistry and lingerie frilled with ashy hems. He was rather enraptured of the peeling, curling scene but couldn’t help thinking that perhaps he’d been a trifle over-zealous on the solvent naptha, light aliphatic (according to the tin) as the flames started to obscure the view and climb ominously ceilingwards.
The smoke alarm sounded. As there was possibly alarm enough for the whole apartment block now rising in his own head, he ventured to silence the plastic beast clinging to the hallway ceiling. This he eventually effected with repeated horse-whips delivered via a tea-towel, originally picked up as he speculated on how to douse the conflagration itself.
It was about an hour later when he found himself sighing ‘what a nuisance’ as he stood in the morning sun, staring up at a snake of soot swirling up from the cracked window pane. At least the other apartment owners would only have the scent of smoke to contend with when the ‘all-clear’ was announced by the Brigade. Delicate though the issue of pornography disposal had been (there is no morality in Art and the law merely a disapproving footnote) he did, however, surmise that the litter bin might have been an easier option.
This final episode is a real-time (I wrote it in my notebook yesterday, along with the other drafts) description of, again, being disturbed in the night. One of those moments of ‘bad stuff’ where, in attempting to transcend the obvious pitfalls of a situation, one pauses to query the inevitability of ‘bad emotions’ to follow. In other words, one thinks ‘this could be an opportunity for a display of calm dignity, kiddo,’ or ‘let’s say this could be considered amusing in its awfulness.’
To be fair on whatever species of chimpanzee it was which resided on the level below, it wasn’t too often that its whoops, snatches of tone-deaf ululation and arrhythmic hand-claps percolated discernibly upwards via a weak-spot in the curtain walling. Perhaps it was the din of traffic navigating a loose manhole cover further below and during the day that masked the potential for sonic intrusion, for it was only in the dead of night that the creature seemed to stir. On this occasion, it being what was now a Friday morning in mid April, it seemed fitting combine defence (loud enough to blot-out) and attack (that loud) in the playing of a recording of Silent Night from the Rat Pack Christmas Album whilst setting an antiquated Hoover to work on the laminate flooring.
Monday, March 28, 2005
Easter Weekend, 2005
Phantom companions and obviously sitting in front of a computer (but she was... 'real'! I did write this there!) I don't suppose anyone cares except me anyway.
Morar Sands
It was rather a desperate scramble up here, to the summit of a rocky outcrop, but I reckon it’s the only way back with the tide in other than a neck-high wade via the sandy path which brought me to the white-golden cove below. It’s not so bad at all up here, contemplating the vertiginous descent down the other side: physical drama pre-occupies me to counter the heightened feelings I had before: powerful emotions brought on by longing and gesture and landscape... Rossini’s Thieving Magpie overture plays on the stereo whilst I lie nestled in the heather, the warmth of the setting sun on me and shimmering a path out to the islands on the horizon. Way down below, rocks shard out at 45deg. to the vertical and at the same angle to a lacy band of submarine seaweed edging turquoise depths beyond. It’s beautiful and Rossini’s toy soldiers rattle up a joyous drum role for the melody and for this day.
The Merc is parked several hundred by now tricky yards back along the inlet major. This morning it was parked there too, with me in it, dozing, wondering how to pass the day. Still yawning, I engaged ‘drive’ and wakened by means of the throttle, peaking around 90 before the long deceleration and descent into the port town of Mallaig. There, I bought a monstrously fluffy fleece labelled ‘Weird Fish’ and a thermos which I requested a fine cafe to fill for me with mocha whilst I lunched on some superb prawns in a jacket potato. Not prawns to be compared to those fiddly pink squiggles one is apt to pick up in a city supermarket.
I then returned to the beach, now insulated and awake. I strolled past clutches of parents and children and soggy dogs to the farthest extent of the sands. Perhaps it was the loneliness, but I didn’t feel at all lonely as my subconscious prepared for me a phantom companion nonetheless as I gazed out at the silvery ocean’s edge. Not wishing to be caught speaking aloud to no visible interlocutor, I dug out my notebook and wrote her a poem instead. Reaching a trailing-off point in a second stanza, it occured to me that the place for the verse was not in my notebook but on the sand, so I set to work carving the lines there with the intention that the more promising opening lines should trail off into the rising tide, as if nature itself were commenting upon my audacity and her future which I’d penned as glorious yet knew I had no control over (one takes phantoms seriously, if only as hypotheses):
SHE was a tan dolphin;
Dirt-blonde,
Salty-wet.
Through her eyes she’d seen
the World forming,
And that world
Found her SEXY
Yet apart from that,
Like the blood rushing through her limbs,
Like the water lapping her thighs,
She was an innocent
And the sun held her shoulders
In protection,
Whilst a summer’s breeze
Dried her hair.
-- then, notionally, sub-marine --
Time will make her famous,
Time will make her old,
Yet not freeze this moment:
be Bold,
For though you are innocent
And perfect to see
Far from now you’ll be wise
And still the sun shall hold your shoulders
And still shall you be.
Now, as I look down on the cove, I notice that nature has decided to erase the lot. Any hopes I had of generating some curiosity in tomorrow’s passers-by, once this part of the shore again becomes available, are washed away. The phantom taken back home, only for me to have seen. (Okay, okay, bear with me...)
I’ll transcribe the second stanza. It was broken from the first, which I’d thought to be self-contained, by more thinking. A re-consideration of the encounter, if you like. If the first part is, in its deepest sense, slightly patronising the second is more questioning. Both might be considered trite but, then again, you could ask of beauty: is it an exercise in intellectually sophisticated perception or is it a deeper but simpler instinctual thing for which words are mere pointers and, like road signs, say, clear for all to see even if the places there-marked are not?
As I long for you now,
Then you shall long for you now,
But what way is around it?
But for you to see your eyes
In my eyes
And hear the waves on this sand
Applaud their fellow Creation.
Let it resound through your body
And charge up your soul and,
Most of all,
Hold it there:
For the years ahead will be
Wild,
And you could be the Siren
Of these rocks,
Or the Light-house,
Of this shore.
My experience is that the most potent statements are simplicities uttered by complex individuals. I feel slightly abashed that, in saying so I imply claims for this writing here; the charge of pretentiousness could be brought to bear. To hell with that, heh. I feel quite the nineteenth century Romantic couched up here amongst the heather cluttering the high rock, in the sun. Amen! to that, I say, amen!
Phantom companions and obviously sitting in front of a computer (but she was... 'real'! I did write this there!) I don't suppose anyone cares except me anyway.
Morar Sands
It was rather a desperate scramble up here, to the summit of a rocky outcrop, but I reckon it’s the only way back with the tide in other than a neck-high wade via the sandy path which brought me to the white-golden cove below. It’s not so bad at all up here, contemplating the vertiginous descent down the other side: physical drama pre-occupies me to counter the heightened feelings I had before: powerful emotions brought on by longing and gesture and landscape... Rossini’s Thieving Magpie overture plays on the stereo whilst I lie nestled in the heather, the warmth of the setting sun on me and shimmering a path out to the islands on the horizon. Way down below, rocks shard out at 45deg. to the vertical and at the same angle to a lacy band of submarine seaweed edging turquoise depths beyond. It’s beautiful and Rossini’s toy soldiers rattle up a joyous drum role for the melody and for this day.
The Merc is parked several hundred by now tricky yards back along the inlet major. This morning it was parked there too, with me in it, dozing, wondering how to pass the day. Still yawning, I engaged ‘drive’ and wakened by means of the throttle, peaking around 90 before the long deceleration and descent into the port town of Mallaig. There, I bought a monstrously fluffy fleece labelled ‘Weird Fish’ and a thermos which I requested a fine cafe to fill for me with mocha whilst I lunched on some superb prawns in a jacket potato. Not prawns to be compared to those fiddly pink squiggles one is apt to pick up in a city supermarket.
I then returned to the beach, now insulated and awake. I strolled past clutches of parents and children and soggy dogs to the farthest extent of the sands. Perhaps it was the loneliness, but I didn’t feel at all lonely as my subconscious prepared for me a phantom companion nonetheless as I gazed out at the silvery ocean’s edge. Not wishing to be caught speaking aloud to no visible interlocutor, I dug out my notebook and wrote her a poem instead. Reaching a trailing-off point in a second stanza, it occured to me that the place for the verse was not in my notebook but on the sand, so I set to work carving the lines there with the intention that the more promising opening lines should trail off into the rising tide, as if nature itself were commenting upon my audacity and her future which I’d penned as glorious yet knew I had no control over (one takes phantoms seriously, if only as hypotheses):
SHE was a tan dolphin;
Dirt-blonde,
Salty-wet.
Through her eyes she’d seen
the World forming,
And that world
Found her SEXY
Yet apart from that,
Like the blood rushing through her limbs,
Like the water lapping her thighs,
She was an innocent
And the sun held her shoulders
In protection,
Whilst a summer’s breeze
Dried her hair.
-- then, notionally, sub-marine --
Time will make her famous,
Time will make her old,
Yet not freeze this moment:
be Bold,
For though you are innocent
And perfect to see
Far from now you’ll be wise
And still the sun shall hold your shoulders
And still shall you be.
Now, as I look down on the cove, I notice that nature has decided to erase the lot. Any hopes I had of generating some curiosity in tomorrow’s passers-by, once this part of the shore again becomes available, are washed away. The phantom taken back home, only for me to have seen. (Okay, okay, bear with me...)
I’ll transcribe the second stanza. It was broken from the first, which I’d thought to be self-contained, by more thinking. A re-consideration of the encounter, if you like. If the first part is, in its deepest sense, slightly patronising the second is more questioning. Both might be considered trite but, then again, you could ask of beauty: is it an exercise in intellectually sophisticated perception or is it a deeper but simpler instinctual thing for which words are mere pointers and, like road signs, say, clear for all to see even if the places there-marked are not?
As I long for you now,
Then you shall long for you now,
But what way is around it?
But for you to see your eyes
In my eyes
And hear the waves on this sand
Applaud their fellow Creation.
Let it resound through your body
And charge up your soul and,
Most of all,
Hold it there:
For the years ahead will be
Wild,
And you could be the Siren
Of these rocks,
Or the Light-house,
Of this shore.
My experience is that the most potent statements are simplicities uttered by complex individuals. I feel slightly abashed that, in saying so I imply claims for this writing here; the charge of pretentiousness could be brought to bear. To hell with that, heh. I feel quite the nineteenth century Romantic couched up here amongst the heather cluttering the high rock, in the sun. Amen! to that, I say, amen!
Friday, September 24, 2004
Thursday, September 23, 2004
The Land of Enormous Passion, Lusts and a Hellish Cast
He lay back for a few moments whilst the pain subsided and then mustered his resolve. He attempted to ignore its further intimations as he manoeuvred himself off the bed and past the door into the ensuite but, in the process of filling the jug again it slammed back and the jug went flying, shattering, as he dropped to a crouch. Mouth still parched and him panting shallowly, he managed to regain the bed. Yowch. Ooh, aargh… gently, gently. Fuck.
There was something distinctly weedy about the garden of her soul. However, she liked the wild flowers and their stems and the dense, rapid foliage and the fleetings of insects both winged and long-legged-gravity-defying in the interstices of the scene: her soul. Behind the tropes of a good upbringing there was something distinctly unselfdisciplined about her; not in the way she chose (choose! fatale-est moi!) to comport herself (alas! I walk well on two feet and my mind and diction are lithe!) but in the Evidence. Her life kept getting back on track from disasters of one sort or another. It was as if Hell itself were gasping somewhere around her pretty, well-tended and scarcely overindulged lips. Those pesky burning coals requiring of oxygen again. And again.
A few days earlier it had been reported in the vicinity of Manchester, “Who’s that smartly dressed young man?”
A few days after that the young man, clad in the same delicate grey shade of moleskin was also covered in acrylic paint. He had attacked his big bright-orange canvas with rays of white and runny splatters of blood-vermillion. And, to boot, filled-in the marker pen scrawl of ‘Lost/LUST, darned… the rest being unintelligible hieroglyphic now rendered in strikes of blue, fingered onto virgin orange.
Back in Manchester, he’d fallen asleep at the staff seminar and instantly became a figure of some gossip. He interviewed his boss’ boss with reasonable efficiency using a natty new gizmo digital voice recorder and then the latter part of the evening in the airport was a blank, until the taxi to the ‘best hotel in the area’ and thence to ‘the best room’ which was a suite. A bit soulless, but who gives a damn about anything?
Apparently he didn’t as he plonked himself down on a chair by the pianist in what should have been a jazz piano bar but which was, for some reason, a restaurant. The waiter came to take his order.
“Actually, I’ll just have a drink thanks. I’d like to listen to the piano.”
“I’m afraid this is a restaurant sir.”
“I’ll order food if you want, but I shalln’t eat it.”
“The bar is through there…”
“The piano is here.”
Moments later, the maitre d’ was eyeing him, in a not unfriendly way, from the steps descending into the dining area.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the restaurant sir.”
“But the piano…”
“I’m afraid if you refuse to leave I’ll have to call the police.”
“Suit yourself.”
He spent most of the night in the police station, returned to his suite, somehow boarded an aeroplane around midday, was driven by his parents back to the apartment for aforesaid art demonstration. Late in the evening he was talking to some strange bloke there. They went out on a search for something. He got mugged and robbed of his fake/’hot’ Longines etc. and muddled for days and… fell down the stairs.
The p?tillance wanted out. It was in her shoulder bag. Expensive enough to allow herself avoid feeling like a bum; a derelict; she’d purchased a pina colada from Marks & Spencers’ on the way into work, pausing by the canal on the way to explain in silent but embracing tones to the new goslings of the duck that swam about there, oblivious (somehow the goslings were more receptive: imprinting by telekinesis? Yes you wee things you may evolve human-wise or, erm, like me. Oh you pretty, pretty cute little fluffy barges on this lapping dark water!)… pausing to be late enough for work to be in time for the opening of aforesaid shop. And then mixology in the hut. The hut was in a small square park in a smallish (the prices are bound to rise but, for now, it’s generally a rain-on-19th-century-brick sort of seedy) square. Kindof a band-stand in former times, perhaps. Wood. Just kinda yucky. But dry enough to translate canned goods into sports-top plastic ‘health drink’ receptacle.
Until now. The sports-top was hissing. She made a sideways frown with her lips addressed, safely enough, towards an A1 detail of a building on her drawing board then sniffed (-- Nostrils!--) to see if the errant molecules might be discernible to all and sunder, i.e. her colleagues.
He lay back for a few moments whilst the pain subsided and then mustered his resolve. He attempted to ignore its further intimations as he manoeuvred himself off the bed and past the door into the ensuite but, in the process of filling the jug again it slammed back and the jug went flying, shattering, as he dropped to a crouch. Mouth still parched and him panting shallowly, he managed to regain the bed. Yowch. Ooh, aargh… gently, gently. Fuck.
There was something distinctly weedy about the garden of her soul. However, she liked the wild flowers and their stems and the dense, rapid foliage and the fleetings of insects both winged and long-legged-gravity-defying in the interstices of the scene: her soul. Behind the tropes of a good upbringing there was something distinctly unselfdisciplined about her; not in the way she chose (choose! fatale-est moi!) to comport herself (alas! I walk well on two feet and my mind and diction are lithe!) but in the Evidence. Her life kept getting back on track from disasters of one sort or another. It was as if Hell itself were gasping somewhere around her pretty, well-tended and scarcely overindulged lips. Those pesky burning coals requiring of oxygen again. And again.
A few days earlier it had been reported in the vicinity of Manchester, “Who’s that smartly dressed young man?”
A few days after that the young man, clad in the same delicate grey shade of moleskin was also covered in acrylic paint. He had attacked his big bright-orange canvas with rays of white and runny splatters of blood-vermillion. And, to boot, filled-in the marker pen scrawl of ‘Lost/LUST, darned… the rest being unintelligible hieroglyphic now rendered in strikes of blue, fingered onto virgin orange.
Back in Manchester, he’d fallen asleep at the staff seminar and instantly became a figure of some gossip. He interviewed his boss’ boss with reasonable efficiency using a natty new gizmo digital voice recorder and then the latter part of the evening in the airport was a blank, until the taxi to the ‘best hotel in the area’ and thence to ‘the best room’ which was a suite. A bit soulless, but who gives a damn about anything?
Apparently he didn’t as he plonked himself down on a chair by the pianist in what should have been a jazz piano bar but which was, for some reason, a restaurant. The waiter came to take his order.
“Actually, I’ll just have a drink thanks. I’d like to listen to the piano.”
“I’m afraid this is a restaurant sir.”
“I’ll order food if you want, but I shalln’t eat it.”
“The bar is through there…”
“The piano is here.”
Moments later, the maitre d’ was eyeing him, in a not unfriendly way, from the steps descending into the dining area.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the restaurant sir.”
“But the piano…”
“I’m afraid if you refuse to leave I’ll have to call the police.”
“Suit yourself.”
He spent most of the night in the police station, returned to his suite, somehow boarded an aeroplane around midday, was driven by his parents back to the apartment for aforesaid art demonstration. Late in the evening he was talking to some strange bloke there. They went out on a search for something. He got mugged and robbed of his fake/’hot’ Longines etc. and muddled for days and… fell down the stairs.
The p?tillance wanted out. It was in her shoulder bag. Expensive enough to allow herself avoid feeling like a bum; a derelict; she’d purchased a pina colada from Marks & Spencers’ on the way into work, pausing by the canal on the way to explain in silent but embracing tones to the new goslings of the duck that swam about there, oblivious (somehow the goslings were more receptive: imprinting by telekinesis? Yes you wee things you may evolve human-wise or, erm, like me. Oh you pretty, pretty cute little fluffy barges on this lapping dark water!)… pausing to be late enough for work to be in time for the opening of aforesaid shop. And then mixology in the hut. The hut was in a small square park in a smallish (the prices are bound to rise but, for now, it’s generally a rain-on-19th-century-brick sort of seedy) square. Kindof a band-stand in former times, perhaps. Wood. Just kinda yucky. But dry enough to translate canned goods into sports-top plastic ‘health drink’ receptacle.
Until now. The sports-top was hissing. She made a sideways frown with her lips addressed, safely enough, towards an A1 detail of a building on her drawing board then sniffed (-- Nostrils!--) to see if the errant molecules might be discernible to all and sunder, i.e. her colleagues.
Shakespeare wrote tradgedies and comedies. A dialectic, no? Same person wrote both. Distinguished in linguistic logic they are: the same thing.
A friend of mine has posted after a long time so, here am I, on her coat-tails, but it's all work in progress. That means, apart from everything, always, in life, being such, it means here that I'm sort of exposing myself with stuff that is, as yet, slightly unsatisfactory and unfinished but, the hell, so far I'll say it's OK but it can't be judged for sense (will it ever? me on the edge of Reason?) ; it can't be comprehended for the fraction it represents except to those who know me better than I do myself. Aherm, so good luck to them and you. I can string you theories, of course. Lots of them. As a critic (and I paraphrase) once suggested to me, my talk is more convincing than my stuff (the one jury session I failed to attend, owing to my high-flying ways in Genoa, Italy) I failed. The plot-by-numbers highly competent academic utterly failed, in his turn, to distinguish my obsession with 1) wallpaper 2) pastiche Georgiana and 3) orange with an elan which would be an elan if I didn't see right through the guy's grandeur jeune, which may or may not be a French near equivalent but crucially distinct from follie de grandeur: bright though he was and steelily ambitious, he was, to his credit, not grand. He was too young to want to know me: too protective of himself. On this line of thinking, I love Jack N in As Good As It Gets. Younger women, heh. So sweet and pretty. Adoreable. Sex. But love? That's something in the mind. Of course, I'm being prejudiced here and, if there's one thing I really, truly feel, it's that prejudice is simply a protective mechanism. I like danger; I like to discover and, I'm open to intimations of the hinted truth which unfolds as sincerity.
I love that, unconditionally.
At this juncture, I was going to upload a picture, but my picture thingy must have expired or something.
I can, however, post a bit of what I wrote last night. It's just a combination of items that, later in the story I'll bounce (methinks so far and if my attention expands to unprecedented lengths) together in a sort of tango. An unhinged, out-there, love story: a confession; an analysis: the mechanics of fog...
A friend of mine has posted after a long time so, here am I, on her coat-tails, but it's all work in progress. That means, apart from everything, always, in life, being such, it means here that I'm sort of exposing myself with stuff that is, as yet, slightly unsatisfactory and unfinished but, the hell, so far I'll say it's OK but it can't be judged for sense (will it ever? me on the edge of Reason?) ; it can't be comprehended for the fraction it represents except to those who know me better than I do myself. Aherm, so good luck to them and you. I can string you theories, of course. Lots of them. As a critic (and I paraphrase) once suggested to me, my talk is more convincing than my stuff (the one jury session I failed to attend, owing to my high-flying ways in Genoa, Italy) I failed. The plot-by-numbers highly competent academic utterly failed, in his turn, to distinguish my obsession with 1) wallpaper 2) pastiche Georgiana and 3) orange with an elan which would be an elan if I didn't see right through the guy's grandeur jeune, which may or may not be a French near equivalent but crucially distinct from follie de grandeur: bright though he was and steelily ambitious, he was, to his credit, not grand. He was too young to want to know me: too protective of himself. On this line of thinking, I love Jack N in As Good As It Gets. Younger women, heh. So sweet and pretty. Adoreable. Sex. But love? That's something in the mind. Of course, I'm being prejudiced here and, if there's one thing I really, truly feel, it's that prejudice is simply a protective mechanism. I like danger; I like to discover and, I'm open to intimations of the hinted truth which unfolds as sincerity.
I love that, unconditionally.
At this juncture, I was going to upload a picture, but my picture thingy must have expired or something.
I can, however, post a bit of what I wrote last night. It's just a combination of items that, later in the story I'll bounce (methinks so far and if my attention expands to unprecedented lengths) together in a sort of tango. An unhinged, out-there, love story: a confession; an analysis: the mechanics of fog...
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