Happiness in my hand,
That elusive substance
Runs swift like sand
Gently blowing out
To sea. Under my feet
- I try to reach,
But the waves deplete
My strength and I am
Sunk in the substance:
Temporaryism, old friend.
Mutability, munificent
In its caress, its press
Against my skin,
Its insistence on
Sinking in
And drowning out
The hollows of sound.
But I can rise,
With strength abound,
Found on some coast
With happiness stuck
Between my toes
And the water drying
While I roast.
Monday 28 December 2009
Sunday 27 December 2009
I
In life I had feared what it meant, when that last electric pulse strained out, to cease to be and to never be again. Not like being unconscious, or asleep, in that faint dimness of cognition... but utterly gone, absent, and unable to comprehend or be an "I" ever again. But here I am, still an I. I had not feared that in death I would be an I: that is far worse than becoming mud, than being absorbed, than surrendering to the womb of the Earth. Scattered Is, all looking up and into themselves and into everything. I am woodwo, I am seeing, I am blind; there is no scent, no taste. My blood: a river runs through it, and it runs through the river, and the blood of other boys' bodies scattered. Their own isolated Is. We have no mouths anymore. A branch took my arm, on its way down. Despite fear, I did it. Fear was less than the other thing. Now I've got the other thing in spades: a crippling sense of self, the self in chunks, all a self all the same.
Sunday 13 September 2009
Just a doodle
Split the atom, cracked half-shells
Split the infinite, "To dutifully love";
Love the yolk pouring out, dutifully
Tear down the walls, strip matter
Away.
Open the box, cracked china ballerina
Opening her dance, around-around;
Symmetrical-circular-here-we-go
Stop-start music, starts going
Again.
Lift the carriage, roll on tarmack
Lifting and falling, Wheel of Fate;
Progress to the highest, predict
Falling when the same joules shunt
Around.
Close the door, Chevy saltseaview
Closed beats ajar, indecisive hinges;
Swing closed hard, your red finger
-tips catch, this time I sound the
Alarm.
Smash the egg, more yolk to love
Smash the heart, more bloodyolk;
Blood-oak trees and bone white
Eggshell, shattered and scattered
About.
Choose the first, survey wreckage
Choose a second, begin restoration;
Buildings in Tokyo with wheels on
foundations, earthquakes happen
Alot.
Etcetera
Split the infinite, "To dutifully love";
Love the yolk pouring out, dutifully
Tear down the walls, strip matter
Away.
Open the box, cracked china ballerina
Opening her dance, around-around;
Symmetrical-circular-here-we-go
Stop-start music, starts going
Again.
Lift the carriage, roll on tarmack
Lifting and falling, Wheel of Fate;
Progress to the highest, predict
Falling when the same joules shunt
Around.
Close the door, Chevy saltseaview
Closed beats ajar, indecisive hinges;
Swing closed hard, your red finger
-tips catch, this time I sound the
Alarm.
Smash the egg, more yolk to love
Smash the heart, more bloodyolk;
Blood-oak trees and bone white
Eggshell, shattered and scattered
About.
Choose the first, survey wreckage
Choose a second, begin restoration;
Buildings in Tokyo with wheels on
foundations, earthquakes happen
Alot.
Etcetera
Thursday 6 August 2009
Ani's Worlds (2)
Ani had to reach over to her phone. The girl in the bed had been there a week. Returning from work, there she'd be, in some new lingerie, in eager await. She was less appealing sleeping face down like this, however, with a spot of drool on the pillow the size of a sweat patch. Her hair, the dark, reddish and wiry sort, curled about itself in the air like arthritic hands. She mumbled to the vibrations on the wood surface by her head, but the girl could sleep through anything.
'Who is it?'
'Ani,' said the voice on the other end. There was an affectation of casual about the voice. 'It's just me, Marti. Had a day off. Here at home with Jeremy Kyle and thought I'd give you a ring. I can't remember if I was supposed to call you or if you were supposed to call me. Sorry.'
Gulp. 'Hey, I've been meaning to call you.' In truth, she really had been meaning to. Her voice went up an octave, a signal to drop pretences. We can let ourselves be excited, can't we? "I'm so sorry, I've just been' - her eyes fixed on the back of the girl's head, the wiry hair reaching onto infinity - 'a bit preoccupied.'
She slipped out of the bed, wedging the phone between her shoulder and her right ear, sweeping her legs out from under the white sheets and letting the bed slowly adjust. The weight shifted ever so slowly; she watched the girl's face twitch, her nose fidgeting about, near lips which look so much more beautiful in moonlight. A strip of sun broke through the blinds, straight across the mouth, down the middle as if teasing. Crapola. In a cosmic sense.
While they talked about the date, the quays, how the new jeans fit, she flitted her legs gently down the stairs in fluffy slippers. Every step was a performed move, to herself, revelling in the femininity she could assert when no one was looking. The private woman just the same as the outer one; whether this was true worried Ani somewhat from time to time, the careful dance of girliness was a never-ending waltz, afraid to stop and change the nature of her mannerisms forever by forgetting the moves. Being is seeing, or seeing is believing, or believing is seeing what you're being. It isn't important.
'Ani,'
'Marti,'
'Is it weird to say I've missed you?'
Of course not. Of course not. Of course it's weird. Of course it isn't. 'No, I've missed you too.' That she had. She tried to perceive the pretty, ginger-haired lady on the other side, straining her eyes through the cables and across the charcoal barrier and conjure up a woman in mens' pyjamas, with an empty bowl of cereal balanced on her lap. Without lipstick, they looked just the same, just as red; this was imagination, she was sure. The same little waltz, in a sort.
'Thank god,' (exasperated with relief, it seemed), 'You don't have work either today, do you?'
The bedroom was just above her now, looking into the TV, into Jeremy Kyle's soulless face. Craggy like the moon. In the movies, lovers looked into the moon at the same time, as if their longing could reach up to the satellite and back. Stellar love networks mapped through the heavens in ribbons and bows and knots of invisible cables reaching out from earth and back. Such a time may have never existed; now, whether in emulation of tradition or fiction, we simulate this with televisions and text messages. The bedroom, directly above her. There was the girl. The other beautiful girl. The betrothed, lying, unawares. One must be good about these things.
'I'm busy today, actually,' she said, at once hating and congratulating herself. Swallowing down a fingernail.
'Oh!' The insufferable 'oh', the one word, the one sound, a letter O, a single letter which reaches up to Heaven 'O Lord' and into Ani to stab at her with guilt, with pangs of longing, the desire to reward herself. To bite the apple.
'But I'm free Saturday.' The fireworks wanted to go off, but they just scorched the ground and burnt out slowly.
'It's a date.'
'Who is it?'
'Ani,' said the voice on the other end. There was an affectation of casual about the voice. 'It's just me, Marti. Had a day off. Here at home with Jeremy Kyle and thought I'd give you a ring. I can't remember if I was supposed to call you or if you were supposed to call me. Sorry.'
Gulp. 'Hey, I've been meaning to call you.' In truth, she really had been meaning to. Her voice went up an octave, a signal to drop pretences. We can let ourselves be excited, can't we? "I'm so sorry, I've just been' - her eyes fixed on the back of the girl's head, the wiry hair reaching onto infinity - 'a bit preoccupied.'
She slipped out of the bed, wedging the phone between her shoulder and her right ear, sweeping her legs out from under the white sheets and letting the bed slowly adjust. The weight shifted ever so slowly; she watched the girl's face twitch, her nose fidgeting about, near lips which look so much more beautiful in moonlight. A strip of sun broke through the blinds, straight across the mouth, down the middle as if teasing. Crapola. In a cosmic sense.
While they talked about the date, the quays, how the new jeans fit, she flitted her legs gently down the stairs in fluffy slippers. Every step was a performed move, to herself, revelling in the femininity she could assert when no one was looking. The private woman just the same as the outer one; whether this was true worried Ani somewhat from time to time, the careful dance of girliness was a never-ending waltz, afraid to stop and change the nature of her mannerisms forever by forgetting the moves. Being is seeing, or seeing is believing, or believing is seeing what you're being. It isn't important.
'Ani,'
'Marti,'
'Is it weird to say I've missed you?'
Of course not. Of course not. Of course it's weird. Of course it isn't. 'No, I've missed you too.' That she had. She tried to perceive the pretty, ginger-haired lady on the other side, straining her eyes through the cables and across the charcoal barrier and conjure up a woman in mens' pyjamas, with an empty bowl of cereal balanced on her lap. Without lipstick, they looked just the same, just as red; this was imagination, she was sure. The same little waltz, in a sort.
'Thank god,' (exasperated with relief, it seemed), 'You don't have work either today, do you?'
The bedroom was just above her now, looking into the TV, into Jeremy Kyle's soulless face. Craggy like the moon. In the movies, lovers looked into the moon at the same time, as if their longing could reach up to the satellite and back. Stellar love networks mapped through the heavens in ribbons and bows and knots of invisible cables reaching out from earth and back. Such a time may have never existed; now, whether in emulation of tradition or fiction, we simulate this with televisions and text messages. The bedroom, directly above her. There was the girl. The other beautiful girl. The betrothed, lying, unawares. One must be good about these things.
'I'm busy today, actually,' she said, at once hating and congratulating herself. Swallowing down a fingernail.
'Oh!' The insufferable 'oh', the one word, the one sound, a letter O, a single letter which reaches up to Heaven 'O Lord' and into Ani to stab at her with guilt, with pangs of longing, the desire to reward herself. To bite the apple.
'But I'm free Saturday.' The fireworks wanted to go off, but they just scorched the ground and burnt out slowly.
'It's a date.'
Friday 17 July 2009
Ani's Worlds (1)
Ani kissed goodbye to Marti just once on the lips. The fireworks she imagined over the bay were made up of potential energy. The sea and the sky were both mirrors to this magical happening, catching the light and sharing it with the birds and the fish. Their lips parted slowly, regretfully. This was, at once, a beginning and an end. It was a door, ajar. The lights glimmered on the water for a second after they'd dissipated in the air. Trains tore them apart. The concrete floors in the station still pattered with feet, as they had before, but now Ani could only hear the roaring of the train as it cut through the air and tore a line across the South coast. The journey was to her, leaving a charcoal line in its wake, a separating of A from B.
The phone jumped, and lit up, as she had hoped. The small table on the train buzzed against its back.
'I really like you', is all it said.
Ani arrived back to the Hove apartment, dropped her keys into a shoe by the front door and slid off her heels and put them under the desk in the foyer. As she hung up her bag on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, she noticed the light. The kitchen was lit up, as was the living room; the whole house was bright enough to see, apart from the creeping darkness at the top of the stairs. She walked through the house unafraid - it couldn't be burgulars - and found Lorrie on the couch, watching a DVD on her DVD player.
'Still have my key', she said, in monotone but with a smile reaching out. Her body was rigid, facing the TV, only the neck poised to Ani. They both sat on the couch, watching the twentysomethings playing teenagers in love, and slowly their bodies gave way and relaxed and conversation became more fluent. Laughs and wine later, it had been like nothing was ever the matter between them. The red-head princess and the guy from the wrong side of the tracks got it on, and that barrier broke all theirs too. Kissing seemed natural. Like they had kissed yesterday, or the day before.
The charcoal line widened.
The phone jumped, and lit up, as she had hoped. The small table on the train buzzed against its back.
'I really like you', is all it said.
Ani arrived back to the Hove apartment, dropped her keys into a shoe by the front door and slid off her heels and put them under the desk in the foyer. As she hung up her bag on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs, she noticed the light. The kitchen was lit up, as was the living room; the whole house was bright enough to see, apart from the creeping darkness at the top of the stairs. She walked through the house unafraid - it couldn't be burgulars - and found Lorrie on the couch, watching a DVD on her DVD player.
'Still have my key', she said, in monotone but with a smile reaching out. Her body was rigid, facing the TV, only the neck poised to Ani. They both sat on the couch, watching the twentysomethings playing teenagers in love, and slowly their bodies gave way and relaxed and conversation became more fluent. Laughs and wine later, it had been like nothing was ever the matter between them. The red-head princess and the guy from the wrong side of the tracks got it on, and that barrier broke all theirs too. Kissing seemed natural. Like they had kissed yesterday, or the day before.
The charcoal line widened.
Monday 29 June 2009
Diagram of Love
It's best to try imagining things in shapes;
Lets you see the whole world on a page
(Inside your head) and look carefully
At the rougher edges, the obtuse bends...
Where the heart has warped. Emotion sends
Its tiresome delays across wilfully
Mis-managed roofs and a cracking stage
Man, within the shape, is reduced to ape.
But shapes are more complex than at first we imagine
So we delve in deeper, forced to re-examine.
And its lines are far longer than first we thought
And its contours less level, but mismatched:
Declines and dips, and sharper relief was attached
And the battle to connect called "love" was fought
With one of us uphill. And your war brought famine,
To an already pestilent heart, now starved compassion.
So outside the shape the ape makes an Apollo,
But also wise, he would like to think of himself.
And he's never truly out of it, always linked by thread:
If only to perceive from greater distance, detachment.
If only to escape the heart's foul entrapment.
Which would dissolve the dying love, make dying dead...
And poor the adornments once revered for their wealth...
Just an empty shape then, a box. Merely hollow.
Symmetry is preferred when the love is anew,
But calculating love is wont to stew,
And boil over into the unpredictable,
As exciting then as it was delectable,
But again we're in some familiar pattern.
Guided by old verses; love's familiar lantern.
This couple will not do for couplets, alas
Their coupling was illusion, now since passed.
Regain symmetry. Regain control,
I beg of the air, the ground, the sea...
I am asking: make fresh and make whole
What is faint and illusory.
I don't fancy going A-B-A-B,
When I know our love I'm told,
Is beyond the letter C,
Forget what you're told, ma chérie,
Let's just repeat. Let's stay with B.
Break free, break free, disregard this echo
Of acoustics from times past, where memory was allowed
To run free and recall some past day, some nearby stanza...
When love isn't confined so easily, when it is best told in blank.
Except when it's perfect. But love is so much greater than the sonnet
That captures one of its facets: an obsession, a bemusement,
A bewilderment at nature, some new sensation...
All these belong to the power of the rhyme but disregard this a moment
If you want to seek the truth. Seek the truth.
Let's escape this construction. Let's shatter the diagram. Break free.
Set me free. Let me go of this! Fine, fine: let's rhyme.
If that's what you require, cruel muse, whose SMS
Shakes with a rumble and a light, when I haven't the time
To fuck with your metre, to put away bad words, to bless
You all over again with some kind new description.
I'm only a man and this is my prescription:
Take one set of perfect diction and throw it to the wind.
Take every thing you've heard about poetry, and love,
And give it to the air, let it all rescind...
And if we have faith in rhyme and poetry, then above
May come at last its return, its repetition, its relevance
To the world that cannot deny its power or its elegance.
So just write something dear, it's called "catharsis",
Get it out of your system, make a point of two,
Drop a reference to the Bible, name-drop Saul of Tarsus,
That's how a poem's made, isn't that true?
So let's clear our heads a second. Let's cool it down.
Regain the rhyme. Regain the structure. Regain the symmetry.
Step outside the Diagram of Love, and your frown
Might recede if it can perceive the divinity...
Of something not in me or in you (but sometimes in our contrivance)
Some other goddamn web rocking with our connivance...
To pretend there ever was a romance at all.
And from the reliefs to the dips, what a fall might befall
The falling lover... trapped again in ABAB...
Trapped again in those sounds, the conformity.
Text me later, get back to me.
Lets you see the whole world on a page
(Inside your head) and look carefully
At the rougher edges, the obtuse bends...
Where the heart has warped. Emotion sends
Its tiresome delays across wilfully
Mis-managed roofs and a cracking stage
Man, within the shape, is reduced to ape.
But shapes are more complex than at first we imagine
So we delve in deeper, forced to re-examine.
And its lines are far longer than first we thought
And its contours less level, but mismatched:
Declines and dips, and sharper relief was attached
And the battle to connect called "love" was fought
With one of us uphill. And your war brought famine,
To an already pestilent heart, now starved compassion.
So outside the shape the ape makes an Apollo,
But also wise, he would like to think of himself.
And he's never truly out of it, always linked by thread:
If only to perceive from greater distance, detachment.
If only to escape the heart's foul entrapment.
Which would dissolve the dying love, make dying dead...
And poor the adornments once revered for their wealth...
Just an empty shape then, a box. Merely hollow.
Symmetry is preferred when the love is anew,
But calculating love is wont to stew,
And boil over into the unpredictable,
As exciting then as it was delectable,
But again we're in some familiar pattern.
Guided by old verses; love's familiar lantern.
This couple will not do for couplets, alas
Their coupling was illusion, now since passed.
Regain symmetry. Regain control,
I beg of the air, the ground, the sea...
I am asking: make fresh and make whole
What is faint and illusory.
I don't fancy going A-B-A-B,
When I know our love I'm told,
Is beyond the letter C,
Forget what you're told, ma chérie,
Let's just repeat. Let's stay with B.
Break free, break free, disregard this echo
Of acoustics from times past, where memory was allowed
To run free and recall some past day, some nearby stanza...
When love isn't confined so easily, when it is best told in blank.
Except when it's perfect. But love is so much greater than the sonnet
That captures one of its facets: an obsession, a bemusement,
A bewilderment at nature, some new sensation...
All these belong to the power of the rhyme but disregard this a moment
If you want to seek the truth. Seek the truth.
Let's escape this construction. Let's shatter the diagram. Break free.
Set me free. Let me go of this! Fine, fine: let's rhyme.
If that's what you require, cruel muse, whose SMS
Shakes with a rumble and a light, when I haven't the time
To fuck with your metre, to put away bad words, to bless
You all over again with some kind new description.
I'm only a man and this is my prescription:
Take one set of perfect diction and throw it to the wind.
Take every thing you've heard about poetry, and love,
And give it to the air, let it all rescind...
And if we have faith in rhyme and poetry, then above
May come at last its return, its repetition, its relevance
To the world that cannot deny its power or its elegance.
So just write something dear, it's called "catharsis",
Get it out of your system, make a point of two,
Drop a reference to the Bible, name-drop Saul of Tarsus,
That's how a poem's made, isn't that true?
So let's clear our heads a second. Let's cool it down.
Regain the rhyme. Regain the structure. Regain the symmetry.
Step outside the Diagram of Love, and your frown
Might recede if it can perceive the divinity...
Of something not in me or in you (but sometimes in our contrivance)
Some other goddamn web rocking with our connivance...
To pretend there ever was a romance at all.
And from the reliefs to the dips, what a fall might befall
The falling lover... trapped again in ABAB...
Trapped again in those sounds, the conformity.
Text me later, get back to me.
Thursday 21 May 2009
Point, counterpoint. Incomprehensible, I should hope.
So, I'm working on this structure. At first, quite unintentionally.
Lala. Red. lal la. ----------------- Blue. //
Lala. Girls. lal la. ---------------- Boys. //
Lala. Fathers. lal la. ---------------- Mothers. //
Di-di-dum lala. Blue. ------------------ Red. //
...but later, I'm starting to think it's one of my key styles... it's obtuse and quite well-hidden but definitely identifiable.
Rubbish description, but vague enough, for my purposes.
But perhaps life decided this pattern for me. It happens, it always happens.
The standard format is:
La-la. Happiness. happyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappy. SAD.
but variations include:
La-la. Love. lovelovelovelovelove. HEARTBREAK.
Di-dum. Girlfriend. girlgirlgirlgirlgirlgirlgirl. SINGLE. (or, perhaps boyboyboySINGLE)
&
Ta-rah. Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes. NOOOOOOOOOOOO.
But then I start to wonder if it's actually a symmetrical event?
Sadnesssssssssssssssssss.------------ > Happiness. ---------> Sadnesssssssssssssssssss.
With the good thing in the middle, obscuring my sight of the bad. Is happiness a tangible emotion, something which can be affected with permanence?
Or need it only ever be the eye of the storm?
Makemeloveyou, makemeloveyou, makemeloveyou, forcemeto... oh there you go?
I'll try this as a poem. Perhaps comprehensible but wilfully obscure is preferable.
Lala. Red. lal la. ----------------- Blue. //
Lala. Girls. lal la. ---------------- Boys. //
Lala. Fathers. lal la. ---------------- Mothers. //
Di-di-dum lala. Blue. ------------------ Red. //
...but later, I'm starting to think it's one of my key styles... it's obtuse and quite well-hidden but definitely identifiable.
Rubbish description, but vague enough, for my purposes.
But perhaps life decided this pattern for me. It happens, it always happens.
The standard format is:
La-la. Happiness. happyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappyhappy. SAD.
but variations include:
La-la. Love. lovelovelovelovelove. HEARTBREAK.
Di-dum. Girlfriend. girlgirlgirlgirlgirlgirlgirl. SINGLE. (or, perhaps boyboyboySINGLE)
&
Ta-rah. Yesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyesyes. NOOOOOOOOOOOO.
But then I start to wonder if it's actually a symmetrical event?
Sadnesssssssssssssssssss.------------ > Happiness. ---------> Sadnesssssssssssssssssss.
With the good thing in the middle, obscuring my sight of the bad. Is happiness a tangible emotion, something which can be affected with permanence?
Or need it only ever be the eye of the storm?
Makemeloveyou, makemeloveyou, makemeloveyou, forcemeto... oh there you go?
I'll try this as a poem. Perhaps comprehensible but wilfully obscure is preferable.
Wednesday 6 May 2009
Oooooh, something to [blog] about. -- A Happy Blog.
Yeah, lame About a Boy / Badly Drawn Boy reference.
But I guess, it is about one.
Then again isn't it always?
Coming back from holidays, to Oxford, my mood has been soaring continually higher and higher. Here's an episode from Brighton, to illustrate how heart-wrenchingly awful it all is.
Scene: Ext. club. Dark, dingey, hazy with cigarette smoke, lit with purple, loud with muffled music.
Me: [spewing out months-old confession] I love you.
Them: I love you too.
Me: Really?
Classical music rises, lighting warms, camera pulls in for closeup.
Them: Yes!
[they kiss]
Music suddenly stops.
Old man drug dealer: Hey.
[other two kiss, and grope]
Black and white.
Anyway. All is well. All is good. Mock exams went smoothly, I think. Real exams are set to go well enough. I am seeing myself positively more often. I haven't actually been sad in a while.
Naturally, when I am writing (not for blogs, but for possibly commercial end) the entire tone is inflected with a sort of wistfulness, which I'm fond of.
I feel like on the horizon of this beautiful lake I'm sailing on, there is something that I really want to happen. Which is set to happen. Which has the possibility to be magnificent. I'm not like, raving about this in person to people, but I feel like everything is about to Go Right For Me.
So, why am I waiting?
But I guess, it is about one.
Then again isn't it always?
Coming back from holidays, to Oxford, my mood has been soaring continually higher and higher. Here's an episode from Brighton, to illustrate how heart-wrenchingly awful it all is.
Scene: Ext. club. Dark, dingey, hazy with cigarette smoke, lit with purple, loud with muffled music.
Me: [spewing out months-old confession] I love you.
Them: I love you too.
Me: Really?
Classical music rises, lighting warms, camera pulls in for closeup.
Them: Yes!
[they kiss]
Music suddenly stops.
Old man drug dealer: Hey.
[other two kiss, and grope]
Black and white.
Anyway. All is well. All is good. Mock exams went smoothly, I think. Real exams are set to go well enough. I am seeing myself positively more often. I haven't actually been sad in a while.
Naturally, when I am writing (not for blogs, but for possibly commercial end) the entire tone is inflected with a sort of wistfulness, which I'm fond of.
I feel like on the horizon of this beautiful lake I'm sailing on, there is something that I really want to happen. Which is set to happen. Which has the possibility to be magnificent. I'm not like, raving about this in person to people, but I feel like everything is about to Go Right For Me.
So, why am I waiting?
Monday 13 April 2009
I Wish I Was An Eighties Teenager
So, a day later after my "1,920 calories!" freakout I discover that in my food-deprived state I mistook kJ for kcal and got it all wrong. The blog before this one is just an example of my capacity to end the world over nothing. This below is going to be a rant about specific novels and their recent movie adaptations, a stark deviation from my usual emo rants about my life being so terrible, WAH, WAH, WAH.
Finishing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I realise I have never had my heart broken and lifted and broken again quite so many times in one day, all in one novel. I suppose this is probably due to seeing myself in the lead, Art Bechstein, to some extent. And to the other character, Arthur Lecomte. It irritates me wholeheartedly that now, the Hollywood adaptation by Rawson Marshall Thurber of Dodgeball fame complete excises Arthur from the film, compresses his character traits into a supporting character who is brought into the foreground and entirely adds a new love interest, as if to create an excuse to cast the much-overused Sienna Miller. In taking the Cleveland character and making him a bisexual biker kid instead of the devil-may-care straight guy, they destroy the film's message about sexless friendship. In removing Arthur, they make EVERYthing that happens in the novel entirely implausible and impossible. In removing the words of the author for those of the arrogant screenwriter, you alienate the fans of the book. Naturally, what would be (as with the adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys), movie gold has been transformed into a dreck forgettable film that from release day onwards cries out for a remake. I will see it, to watch the train wreck.
Also this month in America, is the movie adaptation of The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis. Due to a combination of backwards American social mores, and (ironically, given Ellis' undeserved controversies) institutionalised Hollywood misogyny, the film we are given is now one about Amber Heard's breasts and soulless debauchery. Thanks to producer mishandling, the film has strayed far from the original premise of the adaptation, while remaining somehow quite similar to the source material. After taking away the director who worked on the script and satirical vision for three years - who had something more like The Rules of Attraction, presumably intended - and replacing him with an Australian director known for boring movies, who has never seen 1980s Los Angeles, they have destroyed this movie beyond recognition. Both movies, while fundamentally very opposed (Ellis' nihilism vs. Chabon's sentimentality), have similarities: pretty American youths fucking around and experimenting in 1980s, and the mutual miscasting of the admittedly delectable Jon Foster. Nevertheless, an Ellis adaptation remains a must-see for me.
I am spurred to read more Michael Chabon by the powerful book, which much like The Informers, has inspired me to no end. Although, I can't imagine the inspirations gained from these two distinct readings as capably coexisting within one attempt at a novel.
Finishing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I realise I have never had my heart broken and lifted and broken again quite so many times in one day, all in one novel. I suppose this is probably due to seeing myself in the lead, Art Bechstein, to some extent. And to the other character, Arthur Lecomte. It irritates me wholeheartedly that now, the Hollywood adaptation by Rawson Marshall Thurber of Dodgeball fame complete excises Arthur from the film, compresses his character traits into a supporting character who is brought into the foreground and entirely adds a new love interest, as if to create an excuse to cast the much-overused Sienna Miller. In taking the Cleveland character and making him a bisexual biker kid instead of the devil-may-care straight guy, they destroy the film's message about sexless friendship. In removing Arthur, they make EVERYthing that happens in the novel entirely implausible and impossible. In removing the words of the author for those of the arrogant screenwriter, you alienate the fans of the book. Naturally, what would be (as with the adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys), movie gold has been transformed into a dreck forgettable film that from release day onwards cries out for a remake. I will see it, to watch the train wreck.
Also this month in America, is the movie adaptation of The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis. Due to a combination of backwards American social mores, and (ironically, given Ellis' undeserved controversies) institutionalised Hollywood misogyny, the film we are given is now one about Amber Heard's breasts and soulless debauchery. Thanks to producer mishandling, the film has strayed far from the original premise of the adaptation, while remaining somehow quite similar to the source material. After taking away the director who worked on the script and satirical vision for three years - who had something more like The Rules of Attraction, presumably intended - and replacing him with an Australian director known for boring movies, who has never seen 1980s Los Angeles, they have destroyed this movie beyond recognition. Both movies, while fundamentally very opposed (Ellis' nihilism vs. Chabon's sentimentality), have similarities: pretty American youths fucking around and experimenting in 1980s, and the mutual miscasting of the admittedly delectable Jon Foster. Nevertheless, an Ellis adaptation remains a must-see for me.I am spurred to read more Michael Chabon by the powerful book, which much like The Informers, has inspired me to no end. Although, I can't imagine the inspirations gained from these two distinct readings as capably coexisting within one attempt at a novel.
Thursday 9 April 2009
A 100g Bag of Mini Eggs
There are 1,920 calories (kcal) in a single 100g, yellow bag of mini eggs. This is precisely the right amount to end my whole world. This is agonising. Let's roll back against the winds of time, let the Earth spin backwards on its axis for a moment, and take ourselves back in time 31/2 weeks. The sky is a brighter shade of whatever ambivalent colour we can conclude this is: greyish, murky, misty blorange, sprinkled with toxic glitter, stagnant like the depressing glitz in carbonated water. My arms and heels are equally tired from taking a long train, carrying all my essential possessions in a suitcase, from the comfort of my green, warm and friend-filled quad in Balliol all the way to my timelost little hicktown of Southwick where no one knows who George Eliot is. My room in Oxford is gutted and bare, and my room in Brighton is by contrast full of the forgotten trappings of youth, and memories of schoolyards and friends who like I did the trapping, forgot about me. It is only when I am nearly at Southwick (catching a connecting train from Southampton to Hove, somewhere on that stretch...) that I begin to realise that my own thoughts on the train have been identical to Neville's hateful inner monologue in The Waves, in a similar scene, and it brings my mood somewhere deep underground to know that I am so easily captured by another's words, unintentionally. I put down Lunar Park, which I have just begun reading, into the bag with The Great Gatsby, which I have just finished on the same journey, and prepare myself for the trudge up Southwick Street, past Southwick Square, back to monotony.
And I am hauled sometime that evening by arms not my own, not even present in a physical sense (the arms of fate, predestination, determinism, inevitability, hopelessness, and inertia, and other words which evoke my preoccupations) upon a cold, white, metallic square and stare down to the glowing, red, digital display of numbers. I am not going to say exactly what the scales weighed me as, but it was grotesque. A stone over my last weight count, 8 weeks prior, which itself was pushing the boundaries of what was considered thin or "normal" weight. My mother says to me, later, that I look like I've put on weight. This is disheartening. This is why I'm single, this is why sometimes I'm sad for no reason, this is why people don't take to me without my effort, this is why things always go wrong. Some terrible, unlucky number. So, I vow to lose (at least) a stone before I go back to Oxford. My other objectives are to finish Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, to start and finish Atomised (Les Particules elementaires) by Michel Houellebecq and À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. (I would later, get distracted by another title, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, and decide to temporarily delay my reading of À rebours.) The results of the weight loss vow were almost instantaneous within a week: something like 8 pounds in a week, just by changing from Coke to Coke Zero and cutting out inessential snacks and seconds. The only gym I can afford is a free one, though, and the only free one is ironically back in Oxford, but problematically below the Pantry and opposite the bar.
However, weight has become stuck at Xst 6lbs, which is still many pounds too many and I cannot see the weight loss in the mirror so I worry I am grotesquely fat still. I worry this, despite knowing all the symptoms of body image dysmorphia, etc. etc. but am comfoted by knowing that my critical awareness when it comes to myself has never been impaired before, so I have come to trust my eyes in this instance. I am not fat, per se, I am not stupid enough to quite contend that - but I miss the skinny me of 14, or the brief time when I was 17 before my A Levels that going to the gym had made me slightly toned. I blame Balliol bar, the sedentiary life of an English student and my discovery of English breakfasts, courtesy of Pantry.
I've woken up and had an ultra-lite breakfast. Ultra. Plum tomatoes on toast, if you must know. Then, skipped lunch, and had dinner - kievs, roast potatoes. Fairly carby, but way under my 2000 calory daily allowance. I'm ill, too, so energy exertion is limited. I treat myself to a bag of mini eggs (curse the season) while I sit back to watch an indie film about kids on prescription drugs (The Chumscrubber) which feels like it's black and cynical enough to garner a few chuckles out of me, and then turn around the bag (now reduced to two or three eggs of vile colours, due to my rapid snacking) and read that each egg contains 65 whole calories. What's more, an entire bag is 1920 calories. What. The. Fuck. Why do they even sell these, when they know a single person is likely to gorge and eat them all? My entire day of practically starving myself (I am a very hungry boy) is ruined for nought, and I have now essentially eaten double my daily allowance.
I am going to get fatter and fatter and it feels like there's nothing I can do. I wanted now to describe in achingly ill-constructed metaphors the problems of my life hatching from chocolate eggs, and the contents of my mind falling like napalms from my head into the bag of Cadburys, and myself strung on the cross and rising days later as an Easter Bunny, but I can't be bothered at all. I have exhausted myself mentally, and this is in itself a worry. I will put it down to flu, or whatever this ailment is, but I cannot be certain.
I am not going to Revenge tonight, much like I didn't go last week, because it is no fun. And because I am not thin enough to have fun in a club like that. And because no matter who I am that night, in what mode of mind or state of soul, nothing ever goes my way. (He says, vaguely contemplating an impromptu reading of a Morrissey ballad.)
I am staring at the yellow bag, full of the evil chocolate eggs, and my eyes are hungry for revenge on some nameless entity which has made me this way.
(He relents.) Please, please, please, let me get what I want, this time.
And I am hauled sometime that evening by arms not my own, not even present in a physical sense (the arms of fate, predestination, determinism, inevitability, hopelessness, and inertia, and other words which evoke my preoccupations) upon a cold, white, metallic square and stare down to the glowing, red, digital display of numbers. I am not going to say exactly what the scales weighed me as, but it was grotesque. A stone over my last weight count, 8 weeks prior, which itself was pushing the boundaries of what was considered thin or "normal" weight. My mother says to me, later, that I look like I've put on weight. This is disheartening. This is why I'm single, this is why sometimes I'm sad for no reason, this is why people don't take to me without my effort, this is why things always go wrong. Some terrible, unlucky number. So, I vow to lose (at least) a stone before I go back to Oxford. My other objectives are to finish Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, to start and finish Atomised (Les Particules elementaires) by Michel Houellebecq and À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. (I would later, get distracted by another title, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, and decide to temporarily delay my reading of À rebours.) The results of the weight loss vow were almost instantaneous within a week: something like 8 pounds in a week, just by changing from Coke to Coke Zero and cutting out inessential snacks and seconds. The only gym I can afford is a free one, though, and the only free one is ironically back in Oxford, but problematically below the Pantry and opposite the bar.
However, weight has become stuck at Xst 6lbs, which is still many pounds too many and I cannot see the weight loss in the mirror so I worry I am grotesquely fat still. I worry this, despite knowing all the symptoms of body image dysmorphia, etc. etc. but am comfoted by knowing that my critical awareness when it comes to myself has never been impaired before, so I have come to trust my eyes in this instance. I am not fat, per se, I am not stupid enough to quite contend that - but I miss the skinny me of 14, or the brief time when I was 17 before my A Levels that going to the gym had made me slightly toned. I blame Balliol bar, the sedentiary life of an English student and my discovery of English breakfasts, courtesy of Pantry.
I've woken up and had an ultra-lite breakfast. Ultra. Plum tomatoes on toast, if you must know. Then, skipped lunch, and had dinner - kievs, roast potatoes. Fairly carby, but way under my 2000 calory daily allowance. I'm ill, too, so energy exertion is limited. I treat myself to a bag of mini eggs (curse the season) while I sit back to watch an indie film about kids on prescription drugs (The Chumscrubber) which feels like it's black and cynical enough to garner a few chuckles out of me, and then turn around the bag (now reduced to two or three eggs of vile colours, due to my rapid snacking) and read that each egg contains 65 whole calories. What's more, an entire bag is 1920 calories. What. The. Fuck. Why do they even sell these, when they know a single person is likely to gorge and eat them all? My entire day of practically starving myself (I am a very hungry boy) is ruined for nought, and I have now essentially eaten double my daily allowance.
I am going to get fatter and fatter and it feels like there's nothing I can do. I wanted now to describe in achingly ill-constructed metaphors the problems of my life hatching from chocolate eggs, and the contents of my mind falling like napalms from my head into the bag of Cadburys, and myself strung on the cross and rising days later as an Easter Bunny, but I can't be bothered at all. I have exhausted myself mentally, and this is in itself a worry. I will put it down to flu, or whatever this ailment is, but I cannot be certain.
I am not going to Revenge tonight, much like I didn't go last week, because it is no fun. And because I am not thin enough to have fun in a club like that. And because no matter who I am that night, in what mode of mind or state of soul, nothing ever goes my way. (He says, vaguely contemplating an impromptu reading of a Morrissey ballad.)
I am staring at the yellow bag, full of the evil chocolate eggs, and my eyes are hungry for revenge on some nameless entity which has made me this way.
(He relents.) Please, please, please, let me get what I want, this time.
Thursday 26 March 2009
The beauty of inaction; 2pn
There is nothing quite so empowering as the option of doing something, and denying it. From the same hand, there is nothing quite so painful as being denied a choice in one's matters. Perhaps this is where all the angst you were going through originates?
Naturally, attending a party should only be fun as long as everyone knows how much better you are than the party. There should be a wave of attendance to your presence, a remark of gratefulness, and maybe attempts to appease. Simply knowing that they are there however, one is happily capable of dissuading attention ("I do remember, it was wonderful. But on with the present...", you say, vaudeville) and getting on with events as they are. Drinking copious amounts, not elegantly but with the same juvenile zeal which took you through your earlier teen years, when alcohol was a new novelty consumed at the beach which in turn, consumed the beach by midnight.
A great sustenance of admiration carries you to eleven thirty at some troublesome affair which took you to arrive early, like some guest of honour denied being fashionably late by Dalloways and Buckets who would have you make a splash. But here comes fun. You are whisked away, with little parting word to your fellow guests ("Goodbye, famous lady" you say to a transsexual with her self-appointed title, "See you" you say casually, to an old friend you'd like to have spoken to, "Be back in an hour" you lie plaintively to the host.) Roads turn you, drunk, in directions unintended, and you must loop your life around on a wonderful callory track get to your destination.
The nightclub! How wonderful. And in paraletic glory, you are as close to God as you care to be, just as you were told in less grandiose words by those boys who broke you. With deft hand movements, you change the song and will strangers across from podiums and flatforms to before you, to press against you, to caress you and share the smoke of their cigarettes with you by taste. And another, and another. Somehow, as if given great status by a night of speculative fame, a chance to relive your youth with the superiority amassed since those days of surface equality ("added value") you are able to carve yourself out in new flesh and new form and be whoever you want.
Delete, destroy? You could, with a mouse, and a keyboard. Cripple, corrupt? You could, with a pen and a paper and a student publication. What's a "bunny boiler"?
The night continues and you tire. No chemicals in your system, other than the one you predict will give you cirrhosis of the liver and may well be killing your brain cells; your creative zeal, your critical faculties, reduced. Kisses. Hugs. More friends, more strength. But as sobriety hits, you lose the power to manipulate others and so, Italian suitors and underdressed strangers are lost to a procession of Thoughts: reclaim power through action. Reclamation begins. But you allow it all to disappear, to bathrooms, the promise you always recall "to be right back", meaning never.
Somehow in an hour or so you're walking home, half to destruction but still on high. The iPod in your ear is playing French synthpop, Death Cab for Cutie, new Morrissey, and from shuffle god-knows-what: Halloween Alaska, All-American Rejects? Tears of power, held and pointedly cast aside. "Cosmic tears", some song reminds you.
In one hand you are holding sex, but it feels like a place to stay that night and nothing more. You are holding several similar orbs of sex in that palm. In the other, you hold a bus journey with tiresome conversations, half-read books and a bitter walk to aggravate a cold sore, in no specified form like an orb but rather a draping ribbon, one also stuck to the back of your shoe and coiled up your arm. But to hold both at once, in your control, to some extent, that is power.
Much like when you sat, deciding whether or not to exact revenge, and some forgiving soul in you (not by religion, not by moral concern, or fondness, you affirm) decides to spare. There will be no exposé. M.S. need not fall like H.H. just because you have spite. But it does not deserve to live, either.
Years of harnessing this power, the tension of the choice suppressed slowly stirring a creative electricity within you, will see you get a greater laugh one day. Those cells lost to alcohol will eventually be obsolete, under this new creative spirit you slowly wean into existence.
But for now, the walk from Portslade station back to Southwick is a bitter one.
Naturally, attending a party should only be fun as long as everyone knows how much better you are than the party. There should be a wave of attendance to your presence, a remark of gratefulness, and maybe attempts to appease. Simply knowing that they are there however, one is happily capable of dissuading attention ("I do remember, it was wonderful. But on with the present...", you say, vaudeville) and getting on with events as they are. Drinking copious amounts, not elegantly but with the same juvenile zeal which took you through your earlier teen years, when alcohol was a new novelty consumed at the beach which in turn, consumed the beach by midnight.
A great sustenance of admiration carries you to eleven thirty at some troublesome affair which took you to arrive early, like some guest of honour denied being fashionably late by Dalloways and Buckets who would have you make a splash. But here comes fun. You are whisked away, with little parting word to your fellow guests ("Goodbye, famous lady" you say to a transsexual with her self-appointed title, "See you" you say casually, to an old friend you'd like to have spoken to, "Be back in an hour" you lie plaintively to the host.) Roads turn you, drunk, in directions unintended, and you must loop your life around on a wonderful callory track get to your destination.
The nightclub! How wonderful. And in paraletic glory, you are as close to God as you care to be, just as you were told in less grandiose words by those boys who broke you. With deft hand movements, you change the song and will strangers across from podiums and flatforms to before you, to press against you, to caress you and share the smoke of their cigarettes with you by taste. And another, and another. Somehow, as if given great status by a night of speculative fame, a chance to relive your youth with the superiority amassed since those days of surface equality ("added value") you are able to carve yourself out in new flesh and new form and be whoever you want.
Delete, destroy? You could, with a mouse, and a keyboard. Cripple, corrupt? You could, with a pen and a paper and a student publication. What's a "bunny boiler"?
The night continues and you tire. No chemicals in your system, other than the one you predict will give you cirrhosis of the liver and may well be killing your brain cells; your creative zeal, your critical faculties, reduced. Kisses. Hugs. More friends, more strength. But as sobriety hits, you lose the power to manipulate others and so, Italian suitors and underdressed strangers are lost to a procession of Thoughts: reclaim power through action. Reclamation begins. But you allow it all to disappear, to bathrooms, the promise you always recall "to be right back", meaning never.
Somehow in an hour or so you're walking home, half to destruction but still on high. The iPod in your ear is playing French synthpop, Death Cab for Cutie, new Morrissey, and from shuffle god-knows-what: Halloween Alaska, All-American Rejects? Tears of power, held and pointedly cast aside. "Cosmic tears", some song reminds you.
In one hand you are holding sex, but it feels like a place to stay that night and nothing more. You are holding several similar orbs of sex in that palm. In the other, you hold a bus journey with tiresome conversations, half-read books and a bitter walk to aggravate a cold sore, in no specified form like an orb but rather a draping ribbon, one also stuck to the back of your shoe and coiled up your arm. But to hold both at once, in your control, to some extent, that is power.
Much like when you sat, deciding whether or not to exact revenge, and some forgiving soul in you (not by religion, not by moral concern, or fondness, you affirm) decides to spare. There will be no exposé. M.S. need not fall like H.H. just because you have spite. But it does not deserve to live, either.
Years of harnessing this power, the tension of the choice suppressed slowly stirring a creative electricity within you, will see you get a greater laugh one day. Those cells lost to alcohol will eventually be obsolete, under this new creative spirit you slowly wean into existence.
But for now, the walk from Portslade station back to Southwick is a bitter one.
Tuesday 3 March 2009
Thankful for everything
It's weird. It's not even ironic that I'm saying this. I discussed this with my spiritual counselor (Tom Phipps, ironically) and I think my conclusions were backed up. Essentially, when you're in the throes of an emotional high or meltdown, two things occur to you.
One: creative overload. I have to thank you for all the things you've done to my writing. I haven't felt the need to post any of the good stuff I've written onto my blog, but I am submitting one long poem for the Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize and I think my Scrawl contributions this term will be superb. I am fairly happy with Darker Angels (Scrawl, HT09) and The Tyrant (Newdigate Prize Entry 09). I have been relatively successful this term on the 'scene' and in terms of boys, if you're counting them. But of course, I attempt conversation with you and am consumed with some sort of resentment. Which is fine. It's not nearly as bad as it was. It will pass. Very soon, I predict, I will be entirely indifferent to you. But thank you, thank you, you've done wonders to my writing in both your roles as a positive and later a negative force in my life.
Two: critical faculty dissolution. Here we see where Hilary Term and Michaelmas are opposites. My Michaelmas nightlife was depressing, but academically I felt I was doing well. Now I churn out terrible essays about Crow in Ted Hughes, or half-formed theories about aestheticism in James Joyce or literary techniques in the Old Englies elegies and I get bizarre looks from my tutors. My entire reading of Crow became informed by the Emily Bronte connection supposed in a later poem ("The Wind on Crow Hill was her darling," Emily Bronte by Ted Hughes). While I enjoyed that part of my essay, a comparison of Bronte and Hughes, it fell outside any usable function in Oxford terms (Victorians and Modernists don't mix!) and distracted me from the actual set question. But Emily Bronte is a poet I can deal with. My blogs come from that same voice as hers, that address of a nameless you who is not solely one person. If you're reading this, don't flatter yourself thinking you're the only "you" contained in "you". Point being, it's hard to focus on essays when you've completely rewired your mind and are sitting in your own little autistic Palace of Art half the time.
I've started drawing again. Haven't done it in years. I used to be good. I'm not anymore. I sat down, one lonely Sunday Balliol morning when everyone in college was in bed with a hangover or trapped in that neverending Sainsburys queue buying hummus and I decided I would draw the college. I stopped for my own embrassment because the world I was drawing was slightly less real, slightly idealised, slightly distorted like a vision of land seen across desert sand and swaying in the sweltering heat. I tried drawing a person, a beautiful vision of a face I imagined, but it came out a sinister gypsy stereotype staring back out of the pad at me and making me uncomfortable. I later, in the throes of my the emotional epiphany the otehr night, where I stayed up till six in the morning writing my Newdigate poem, I discovered my aptitude for drawing caricatures. There's something suitably childish about my style and the unironic annotations placed around the drawing.
I've started sticking things to the tack board in my room. Besides my unfollowed Routine (wake up, stretches, 30 crunches, etc.); there is the Homage to Assholes (a reminder to stay away from heartbreakers); there is the drawing I found in my pad that I did when I was 14 (it is in blue, pink and purple pencil and it indicates I should "Taste the Rainbow" like I am some Skittles salesman); there are two Toni & Guy business cards (the cutter, the dyer); Vacation Residence form with useful dates; post-it note listing books I'm meant to have read; two poems I wrote ("Candles" and "Church Siren") and a poster for our bop of my friend Ronan dressed as the Heath Ledger Joker with the declaration "Ronan Is Not The Only Fruit". Bizarre literary references are just one wing of my Bop campaign (Georgina and I are in charge of the Week 8 LGBT Bop, and promote accordingly. There's also a poster of Me as Uncle Sam declaring "Liam Wants YOU To Come Out (nearest recruiting station, Bop Friday 8th week)" and one of Georgina comically with cigarette-in-mouth beckoning "Treat yourself, have a fag."
I've got endless ammounts of work to do. Tomorrow I have a commentary due for the Old English poem "The Wanderer" (subject of my last dreadful essay) which I will have to do today if I want to go out tonight. I don't know if I can face PopTarts at Babylove tonight though, I still feel tired from Rainbow! at Thirst Lodge last night. I have set myself the topic of Graham Greene for my Friday 8th Week (familiar date...) essay, although I haven't really thought of a question and I still have 2 and a half books to read in the next week and a half if I am to accomplish this. Which reminds me, I'd best be finishing Brighton Rock.
One: creative overload. I have to thank you for all the things you've done to my writing. I haven't felt the need to post any of the good stuff I've written onto my blog, but I am submitting one long poem for the Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize and I think my Scrawl contributions this term will be superb. I am fairly happy with Darker Angels (Scrawl, HT09) and The Tyrant (Newdigate Prize Entry 09). I have been relatively successful this term on the 'scene' and in terms of boys, if you're counting them. But of course, I attempt conversation with you and am consumed with some sort of resentment. Which is fine. It's not nearly as bad as it was. It will pass. Very soon, I predict, I will be entirely indifferent to you. But thank you, thank you, you've done wonders to my writing in both your roles as a positive and later a negative force in my life.
Two: critical faculty dissolution. Here we see where Hilary Term and Michaelmas are opposites. My Michaelmas nightlife was depressing, but academically I felt I was doing well. Now I churn out terrible essays about Crow in Ted Hughes, or half-formed theories about aestheticism in James Joyce or literary techniques in the Old Englies elegies and I get bizarre looks from my tutors. My entire reading of Crow became informed by the Emily Bronte connection supposed in a later poem ("The Wind on Crow Hill was her darling," Emily Bronte by Ted Hughes). While I enjoyed that part of my essay, a comparison of Bronte and Hughes, it fell outside any usable function in Oxford terms (Victorians and Modernists don't mix!) and distracted me from the actual set question. But Emily Bronte is a poet I can deal with. My blogs come from that same voice as hers, that address of a nameless you who is not solely one person. If you're reading this, don't flatter yourself thinking you're the only "you" contained in "you". Point being, it's hard to focus on essays when you've completely rewired your mind and are sitting in your own little autistic Palace of Art half the time.
I've started drawing again. Haven't done it in years. I used to be good. I'm not anymore. I sat down, one lonely Sunday Balliol morning when everyone in college was in bed with a hangover or trapped in that neverending Sainsburys queue buying hummus and I decided I would draw the college. I stopped for my own embrassment because the world I was drawing was slightly less real, slightly idealised, slightly distorted like a vision of land seen across desert sand and swaying in the sweltering heat. I tried drawing a person, a beautiful vision of a face I imagined, but it came out a sinister gypsy stereotype staring back out of the pad at me and making me uncomfortable. I later, in the throes of my the emotional epiphany the otehr night, where I stayed up till six in the morning writing my Newdigate poem, I discovered my aptitude for drawing caricatures. There's something suitably childish about my style and the unironic annotations placed around the drawing.
I've started sticking things to the tack board in my room. Besides my unfollowed Routine (wake up, stretches, 30 crunches, etc.); there is the Homage to Assholes (a reminder to stay away from heartbreakers); there is the drawing I found in my pad that I did when I was 14 (it is in blue, pink and purple pencil and it indicates I should "Taste the Rainbow" like I am some Skittles salesman); there are two Toni & Guy business cards (the cutter, the dyer); Vacation Residence form with useful dates; post-it note listing books I'm meant to have read; two poems I wrote ("Candles" and "Church Siren") and a poster for our bop of my friend Ronan dressed as the Heath Ledger Joker with the declaration "Ronan Is Not The Only Fruit". Bizarre literary references are just one wing of my Bop campaign (Georgina and I are in charge of the Week 8 LGBT Bop, and promote accordingly. There's also a poster of Me as Uncle Sam declaring "Liam Wants YOU To Come Out (nearest recruiting station, Bop Friday 8th week)" and one of Georgina comically with cigarette-in-mouth beckoning "Treat yourself, have a fag."
I've got endless ammounts of work to do. Tomorrow I have a commentary due for the Old English poem "The Wanderer" (subject of my last dreadful essay) which I will have to do today if I want to go out tonight. I don't know if I can face PopTarts at Babylove tonight though, I still feel tired from Rainbow! at Thirst Lodge last night. I have set myself the topic of Graham Greene for my Friday 8th Week (familiar date...) essay, although I haven't really thought of a question and I still have 2 and a half books to read in the next week and a half if I am to accomplish this. Which reminds me, I'd best be finishing Brighton Rock.
Saturday 14 February 2009
The Day Compels Me
Yesterday, Holly signed into her old myspace and I saw and was like WOAH, blast from the past much. Signed into mine. Yeah, this takes me back. Pretentious "about me" section, check. Lack of colour, coding etc. so as to seem like a guy with an "I-don't-care" attitude, check. Image to conceal the stupid "In your extended network" box which recalls a line from Less Than Zero, check. Oh, what a twat I was. Am. My about me has been updated sufficiently to say I'm at Oxford studying English, I slip in some melodrama, mention eternal my hair colour concern ("I used to have blonde hair, but it got darker") and brilliantly contrast that with the staccato "I don't know if I've ever really been in love." I think I was literally channeling Bret Easton Ellis when I designed my myspace, that day. I think I wanted more than anything to be Clay from Less Than Zero: sexy, blonde, bisexual, passive, expressionless, mechanical. There's something ironic about trying really hard to embody that jaded, indifferent '80s LA aesthetic.
"Oh, you've got BLOGS, you're one of those guys" she observes, noticing that literally half of my myspace is the tiny little box which links you to my most recent blogs. Myspace was my old blog site, but I decided that as Myspace got younger and younger and I got older and older maybe I should just get an actual blogsite, perhaps interlink it with my Facebook. Cynical, I feel like I'm working for ratings. I'm constantly selling my emotional outpouring for some vague, half-hearted admiration of my prose style. Bleed all over the page, all over the keyboard. So yes, I was one of those kids. Boy, I haven't changed that much. Certainly I'm a lot healthier than I was: a lot less depressed, a lot less lonely, a lot less insecure. But really, I'm tracing all my old blogs back to when I was 15 and first wrote a blog where I bitched about the universe treating me unfairly and here I conclude that the same themes have haunted me as far back as I can really remember. All my teenage angst has not been properly jetissoned. I'm so emotionally retarded.
Cue my looking over the comments as much as the actual blogs. Ones from my first ever boyfriend, a girl I thought I fancied, a friend at school who wasn't my friend. All to the same effect: "everyone feels this way" or "you shouldn't feel like this" or "you're only fifteen/sixteen/seventeen, you shouldn't be thinking about your life this way." I tend to write in a style which emulates the way I think but it conscious of a listener, an edited account of my thoughts, a streamlined and much truncated adaptation of this maddening, harrowing, neverending life narration. It's even worse when I have headphones in, and I'm silently going somewhere, because everything is interpreted as the movie of my life and this is the song that's currently playing and I'm the director all of a sudden asking the actor playing Liam, "is this how Liam feels though? Maybe you should try and be reflective of the surroundings. Try and BE Liam." I blame Bret Easton Ellis for that, too. Stupid but throughly amazing Glamorama. And yes, where was I? My conversations with people who I cannot properly interpret take yet another mode, one where I'm trying really hard to speak to them in monologues and convey the reality of my experience but I do not account for their input (or at least, one which deviated from how I would imagine it) and it all goes wrong and I find myself just repeating "I'm having trouble finding words which can accurately express what I'm trying to say. But I know exactly what I mean, Ok." Reality is so much more complicated, especially when it's all going wrong.
"The Day Compels Me." Blog title. What day? Valentine's, of course. If I did one for Christmas, why not one now? The Christmas one was a really sort of malicious one where I took out all my anger about stupids friends of mine who think it's not utterly transparent that they're both lonely at Christmas despite being entirely incompatible, but also malicious that someone I fancied but was respectfully giving time to get over their ex and someone I used to fancy had coupled up. Over it, not bitter. Anyway, THIS blog instead has taken the form of a rant perhaps. An account of my day, in a sort of non-linear fashion as I seem to be recalling various events from 2005 to now, and am running them parallel with allusion to various episodes from last December to last week. GOD: last week. Hellish. ANYWAY. Anyway. I keep saying "anyway" like this will help me spit it out. Anyway ... spit. Doesn't? Doesn't. My prose style is getting more INTENSE as if I think I'm doing this intentionally, but it doesn't portray how I really think in the best light. I am genuinely quite a sane individual. Where was I? Anyway. Yes, I find a blog lamenting Valentine's Day which I wrote when I was 15 and I couldn't help but feel I could have been writing this -- I like my style of writing at that age -- I could have written as much last year or this year or any other. It was like, WOAH. Liam's big concerns are just not going anywhere. They are essentially thus: Liam wants a boyfriend; sometimes, Liam wants a girlfriend; Liam feels like no one looks at him in clubs, like no one fancies him; Liam feels he's deserving of far more than he gets. So yes, today has compelled me to write a sequel, I suppose. I feel like I've completely exorcised the ghosts of my Not-My-Ex. All the Never Weres are Never What?
I worry that I'm becoming consumed by all the vanities and superficialities of the world that I used to look down on. For example, the major counterpoint to Valentine's-Day-Sucks is I-Got-A-New-Haircut which puts me in a majorly good mood and I balance out around normal. I feel like being the kind of student who gets a Toni & Guy haircut is probably a bad thing. I feel worse today that I went to Boots to get that platinum shampoo that makes your hair slightly lighter every time you use it. I don't know what I'm becoming. Maybe one day I'll be happy because I'll have become one of those monsters who I hate and perhaps envy in equal measure. Then I can do monstery things without remorse.
"Oh, you've got BLOGS, you're one of those guys" she observes, noticing that literally half of my myspace is the tiny little box which links you to my most recent blogs. Myspace was my old blog site, but I decided that as Myspace got younger and younger and I got older and older maybe I should just get an actual blogsite, perhaps interlink it with my Facebook. Cynical, I feel like I'm working for ratings. I'm constantly selling my emotional outpouring for some vague, half-hearted admiration of my prose style. Bleed all over the page, all over the keyboard. So yes, I was one of those kids. Boy, I haven't changed that much. Certainly I'm a lot healthier than I was: a lot less depressed, a lot less lonely, a lot less insecure. But really, I'm tracing all my old blogs back to when I was 15 and first wrote a blog where I bitched about the universe treating me unfairly and here I conclude that the same themes have haunted me as far back as I can really remember. All my teenage angst has not been properly jetissoned. I'm so emotionally retarded.
Cue my looking over the comments as much as the actual blogs. Ones from my first ever boyfriend, a girl I thought I fancied, a friend at school who wasn't my friend. All to the same effect: "everyone feels this way" or "you shouldn't feel like this" or "you're only fifteen/sixteen/seventeen, you shouldn't be thinking about your life this way." I tend to write in a style which emulates the way I think but it conscious of a listener, an edited account of my thoughts, a streamlined and much truncated adaptation of this maddening, harrowing, neverending life narration. It's even worse when I have headphones in, and I'm silently going somewhere, because everything is interpreted as the movie of my life and this is the song that's currently playing and I'm the director all of a sudden asking the actor playing Liam, "is this how Liam feels though? Maybe you should try and be reflective of the surroundings. Try and BE Liam." I blame Bret Easton Ellis for that, too. Stupid but throughly amazing Glamorama. And yes, where was I? My conversations with people who I cannot properly interpret take yet another mode, one where I'm trying really hard to speak to them in monologues and convey the reality of my experience but I do not account for their input (or at least, one which deviated from how I would imagine it) and it all goes wrong and I find myself just repeating "I'm having trouble finding words which can accurately express what I'm trying to say. But I know exactly what I mean, Ok." Reality is so much more complicated, especially when it's all going wrong.
"The Day Compels Me." Blog title. What day? Valentine's, of course. If I did one for Christmas, why not one now? The Christmas one was a really sort of malicious one where I took out all my anger about stupids friends of mine who think it's not utterly transparent that they're both lonely at Christmas despite being entirely incompatible, but also malicious that someone I fancied but was respectfully giving time to get over their ex and someone I used to fancy had coupled up. Over it, not bitter. Anyway, THIS blog instead has taken the form of a rant perhaps. An account of my day, in a sort of non-linear fashion as I seem to be recalling various events from 2005 to now, and am running them parallel with allusion to various episodes from last December to last week. GOD: last week. Hellish. ANYWAY. Anyway. I keep saying "anyway" like this will help me spit it out. Anyway ... spit. Doesn't? Doesn't. My prose style is getting more INTENSE as if I think I'm doing this intentionally, but it doesn't portray how I really think in the best light. I am genuinely quite a sane individual. Where was I? Anyway. Yes, I find a blog lamenting Valentine's Day which I wrote when I was 15 and I couldn't help but feel I could have been writing this -- I like my style of writing at that age -- I could have written as much last year or this year or any other. It was like, WOAH. Liam's big concerns are just not going anywhere. They are essentially thus: Liam wants a boyfriend; sometimes, Liam wants a girlfriend; Liam feels like no one looks at him in clubs, like no one fancies him; Liam feels he's deserving of far more than he gets. So yes, today has compelled me to write a sequel, I suppose. I feel like I've completely exorcised the ghosts of my Not-My-Ex. All the Never Weres are Never What?
I worry that I'm becoming consumed by all the vanities and superficialities of the world that I used to look down on. For example, the major counterpoint to Valentine's-Day-Sucks is I-Got-A-New-Haircut which puts me in a majorly good mood and I balance out around normal. I feel like being the kind of student who gets a Toni & Guy haircut is probably a bad thing. I feel worse today that I went to Boots to get that platinum shampoo that makes your hair slightly lighter every time you use it. I don't know what I'm becoming. Maybe one day I'll be happy because I'll have become one of those monsters who I hate and perhaps envy in equal measure. Then I can do monstery things without remorse.
Sunday 8 February 2009
The Speculative Wildnerness
This is a poem I wrote several weeks ago and was extremely disappointed in because it did not convey what I wanted it to. I deleted it in a rage. I later discovered that Blogspot autosaves everything you enter into it, and I found it incomplete. I haven't bothered to edit it or even finish it, because I realise it has no conclusion and that was part of what I was struggling to find with it. I think it stands now as much about the futility of unexpressable emotion and about the feigned attempt at looking for love where you never really felt it. It's also something about my attempts at trying to work certain sets of imagery into my writing and accidentally imbuing some contrary images, which I think itself encapsulates the dyad between expectation and reality.
So here it is, under the original title I gave it which now I think could mean anything (perhaps not entirely related to the poem's content, but more to the feeling to which the lyrics sprung from). The poem's title is "The Speculative Wilderness."
The tide is splashed upon the shore
Which saw the closing of my heart,
Wherein the thought remained no more
of love which could inspire art.
Each frothy bubble, born anew
Bursts or breaks at fresh horizon,
And to air and touches true
Union of unrivalled poison.
And I sit fiercely, perched atop
These rocks which have seen many pairs,
Who felt in themselves no strength to stop
Nor care to count the whys and wheres.
This beach, along the coast it stretches,
For many ones to contemplate
How men and women alike make wretches
Of the loves they cared to half-create
Against the sea I see and saw,
The eyes within the water's blue.
Against the rocks I hoped to paw,
The cracky lips and heart of you.
No nature remains at all consistent,
The beach to forest, and then to desert
They're all but nought within this instant;
Manifest of just desserts.
And wild woods, I look upon
Just as I might have done the shore,
And cannot find alas the one
Who I have been looking for.
He sits acrowd, as one rock,
The one I have misplaced.
And time the fiend, the ticking clock
Makes worry that I've lost a race
For other men on other beaches
Are looking for one not dissimilar to you
And falling away and out of my reaches
Is everything I claimed was true.
So I reach into this endless ocean,
And find myself aloss,
With hope that swimming through emotion
Will return me what I want.
I cry to sirens, "Let the this ship sail!
That mistakes might not repeat",
Your siren song steals away all,
That ever docked before beside this seat.
My voice carries some seven seas:
"Oh cruellest creatures of saltwater,
Release this man! I beg on knees,
As you would a widow's only daughter.
I beg, condede. I bleed, I plead."
And
So here it is, under the original title I gave it which now I think could mean anything (perhaps not entirely related to the poem's content, but more to the feeling to which the lyrics sprung from). The poem's title is "The Speculative Wilderness."
The tide is splashed upon the shore
Which saw the closing of my heart,
Wherein the thought remained no more
of love which could inspire art.
Each frothy bubble, born anew
Bursts or breaks at fresh horizon,
And to air and touches true
Union of unrivalled poison.
And I sit fiercely, perched atop
These rocks which have seen many pairs,
Who felt in themselves no strength to stop
Nor care to count the whys and wheres.
This beach, along the coast it stretches,
For many ones to contemplate
How men and women alike make wretches
Of the loves they cared to half-create
Against the sea I see and saw,
The eyes within the water's blue.
Against the rocks I hoped to paw,
The cracky lips and heart of you.
No nature remains at all consistent,
The beach to forest, and then to desert
They're all but nought within this instant;
Manifest of just desserts.
And wild woods, I look upon
Just as I might have done the shore,
And cannot find alas the one
Who I have been looking for.
He sits acrowd, as one rock,
The one I have misplaced.
And time the fiend, the ticking clock
Makes worry that I've lost a race
For other men on other beaches
Are looking for one not dissimilar to you
And falling away and out of my reaches
Is everything I claimed was true.
So I reach into this endless ocean,
And find myself aloss,
With hope that swimming through emotion
Will return me what I want.
I cry to sirens, "Let the this ship sail!
That mistakes might not repeat",
Your siren song steals away all,
That ever docked before beside this seat.
My voice carries some seven seas:
"Oh cruellest creatures of saltwater,
Release this man! I beg on knees,
As you would a widow's only daughter.
I beg, condede. I bleed, I plead."
And
Wednesday 28 January 2009
Brand New Day
I'm not going to mention Babylove last night too much. I had fun dancing for the first part of the night, but there weren't enough hot people there so I weighed the odds and just decided to leave.
I'm over my daytime drinking/spiritual crisis/Death-Cab-for-Cutie-on-iPod-on-repeat fetishes now and am feeling pretty darn fine. A conversation with the Devil Himself sorted me out (figuratively).
Party coming up, so that should be good. Tonight is LGBT Film Night so I think I'ma show 'Transamerica', which promises to be a hit; I might buy popcorn. I realised that I looked really good last night which is good, because it was really important that I did. I bought some new clothes and wearing them also picks up my mood. I met this really attractive girl yesterday, and I plan to find her again and ask her if she's going out that night (Kukui, Bridge, Lava/Ignite?). I realise that all the dead weights I have clung to in the past are just that: lifeless, soulless, not quite monstrous or detestable but certainly not worthy of any profound affection. I have a massive Virginia Woolf essay approaching, but I love her so it should be vaguely enjoyable. OH, and I got an email from Spilt Ink this morning and my poem "Silent Love Song" (which debuted on this very blog) got accepted for the anthology of the best poetry at Oxford University, which I'm happy about.
Life will be good. I make it so.
I'm over my daytime drinking/spiritual crisis/Death-Cab-for-Cutie-on-iPod-on-repeat fetishes now and am feeling pretty darn fine. A conversation with the Devil Himself sorted me out (figuratively).
Party coming up, so that should be good. Tonight is LGBT Film Night so I think I'ma show 'Transamerica', which promises to be a hit; I might buy popcorn. I realised that I looked really good last night which is good, because it was really important that I did. I bought some new clothes and wearing them also picks up my mood. I met this really attractive girl yesterday, and I plan to find her again and ask her if she's going out that night (Kukui, Bridge, Lava/Ignite?). I realise that all the dead weights I have clung to in the past are just that: lifeless, soulless, not quite monstrous or detestable but certainly not worthy of any profound affection. I have a massive Virginia Woolf essay approaching, but I love her so it should be vaguely enjoyable. OH, and I got an email from Spilt Ink this morning and my poem "Silent Love Song" (which debuted on this very blog) got accepted for the anthology of the best poetry at Oxford University, which I'm happy about.
Life will be good. I make it so.
Saturday 24 January 2009
Today I went to a faith healer
Last night, Tim suggests to me, I go to a faith healer. Implicit in this, maybe I'm broken, I don't know. I don't feel right, but I'm not sick and I'm quite sane (which at times I'm afraid is precisely the problem).
After a restless night, a wonderful pasta which took ages to cook, and a brief shopping session with Rhiannon I make good on my promise and head from Balliol to Cornmarket Street where this faith healing thing is beind held.
I get there and I can't go through with my shallow plan, my utilitarian views of religion are blasted away by a sudden guilt and selflessness which directs me to ask them to pray for my mum instead. And it's all fairly harmless, they're good people and it's a good strategy to convert people to religion. You can't knock them. One man suddenly however puts his hand on my shoulder and places his Christian magic spell whammy on me: 'I pray that the Holy Spirit can enter Liam's heart and fill it with love.'
Boy, I wish he didn't send that. So, in my hand is a flyer about faith healing and a pack about healing at home and about finding Jesus. Great. So I wander into Boots, and my nose is thick with the scents of vanities and I find myself really finding it sinful. Nevertheless, I buy some hairspray. The irony pangs a little. I consider momentarily if maybe the selflessness of my wish will have some sort of spiritual payback: will God reward me? Maybe I'll get some good karma - wait, wrong faith. I'm really not good at this this. I'm supposed to be a fervent athesist. No, wait. I am one. I AM.
Convicing rhetoric in this pamphlet, I decide, flicking through it in the JCR. Like Stephen Dedalus, I have nothing to lose in religion but some sane rationality and pride lead me to abstain. I step outside and see Orlando, great name, and I can't help but spit out all about my spiritual crisis. I don't know what I feel but I know it sucks. I wonder if the pain is boy trouble manifesting as spititual emptiness. That's how churches operate, of course: you've vulnerable, they comfort you. Or perhaps, you ARE empty and Jesus DOES make you feel better. Kinda fairytaily, too much baggage. The book commands I give up all my wrongdoings and the things I know to be wrong in a Biblical context and DO cause me immense day-to-day pain I KNOW to be things I can't change. So I feel this pressure, and wander past tourists as if guided by an invsible path to the chapel.
I had no idea where the chapel was, but I found it almost instantly. I walked straight down to the giant phoenix, with Britney Spears playing "Gimme More" out of my headphones and here I interpret this as "give me that thing I need, to fill that void." That excess of life's pleasures, that emptiness of spirit, keep it coming baby. The headphones fall out of my ears and I suddenly hear this amazing churchy music, but I guess the magical quality of it is ruined by my knowledge that it's playing automatically from some sort of CD player on a loop. A bit like the Soul Scrolls in The Handmaid's Tale, it feels like it's pointing out some ludicrous hypocrisy. I put back in Britney, I take her out, I try and balance the headphones in my ears so I can hear both and decide between the two all the while I well up with tears and feel like dropping to my knees, speaking in tongues and crying to the phoenix.
On my walk back to my room, I hear these words come into my head. They're beautiful and speak about so many different things, different crises in me, simultaneously. I try to go remember them when I get to my laptop a bit later, but they don't quite fall the same way. I don't give the poem a title, but I dedicate it to loads of names and to 'the old me' and I suppose that could be its title, but then the words 'darker angels' repeat enough times so that that essentially becomes its title. It's saved as darkerangels.otf, so I guess that IS its name. I'm going to save it as a PDF and send it to Scrawl, even though it sucks compared to the original idea I had.
The poem won't be complete until my phonecall a bit later, so I'll decide what to append or change or if even to send it later.
After a restless night, a wonderful pasta which took ages to cook, and a brief shopping session with Rhiannon I make good on my promise and head from Balliol to Cornmarket Street where this faith healing thing is beind held.
I get there and I can't go through with my shallow plan, my utilitarian views of religion are blasted away by a sudden guilt and selflessness which directs me to ask them to pray for my mum instead. And it's all fairly harmless, they're good people and it's a good strategy to convert people to religion. You can't knock them. One man suddenly however puts his hand on my shoulder and places his Christian magic spell whammy on me: 'I pray that the Holy Spirit can enter Liam's heart and fill it with love.'
Boy, I wish he didn't send that. So, in my hand is a flyer about faith healing and a pack about healing at home and about finding Jesus. Great. So I wander into Boots, and my nose is thick with the scents of vanities and I find myself really finding it sinful. Nevertheless, I buy some hairspray. The irony pangs a little. I consider momentarily if maybe the selflessness of my wish will have some sort of spiritual payback: will God reward me? Maybe I'll get some good karma - wait, wrong faith. I'm really not good at this this. I'm supposed to be a fervent athesist. No, wait. I am one. I AM.
Convicing rhetoric in this pamphlet, I decide, flicking through it in the JCR. Like Stephen Dedalus, I have nothing to lose in religion but some sane rationality and pride lead me to abstain. I step outside and see Orlando, great name, and I can't help but spit out all about my spiritual crisis. I don't know what I feel but I know it sucks. I wonder if the pain is boy trouble manifesting as spititual emptiness. That's how churches operate, of course: you've vulnerable, they comfort you. Or perhaps, you ARE empty and Jesus DOES make you feel better. Kinda fairytaily, too much baggage. The book commands I give up all my wrongdoings and the things I know to be wrong in a Biblical context and DO cause me immense day-to-day pain I KNOW to be things I can't change. So I feel this pressure, and wander past tourists as if guided by an invsible path to the chapel.
I had no idea where the chapel was, but I found it almost instantly. I walked straight down to the giant phoenix, with Britney Spears playing "Gimme More" out of my headphones and here I interpret this as "give me that thing I need, to fill that void." That excess of life's pleasures, that emptiness of spirit, keep it coming baby. The headphones fall out of my ears and I suddenly hear this amazing churchy music, but I guess the magical quality of it is ruined by my knowledge that it's playing automatically from some sort of CD player on a loop. A bit like the Soul Scrolls in The Handmaid's Tale, it feels like it's pointing out some ludicrous hypocrisy. I put back in Britney, I take her out, I try and balance the headphones in my ears so I can hear both and decide between the two all the while I well up with tears and feel like dropping to my knees, speaking in tongues and crying to the phoenix.
On my walk back to my room, I hear these words come into my head. They're beautiful and speak about so many different things, different crises in me, simultaneously. I try to go remember them when I get to my laptop a bit later, but they don't quite fall the same way. I don't give the poem a title, but I dedicate it to loads of names and to 'the old me' and I suppose that could be its title, but then the words 'darker angels' repeat enough times so that that essentially becomes its title. It's saved as darkerangels.otf, so I guess that IS its name. I'm going to save it as a PDF and send it to Scrawl, even though it sucks compared to the original idea I had.
The poem won't be complete until my phonecall a bit later, so I'll decide what to append or change or if even to send it later.
Saturday 10 January 2009
The Pursuer
This relates more to the past than the present, I should think. I write and publish as testimony and expulsion of the things I have thought, may continue to think, but hope to be rid of one day.
Why do I have to work so hard for so little reward? Why don't people think "Ah, that Liam's a catch, let me show him I'm interested." Where's the nightingale to press her heart against the rosebush thorn, and sing for her faith in love? Why does that faith immediately prove as much vanity as religious faith: fear-based, consolatory, mythical? I watched a cartoon of the Wilde short story that goes with it and was like, wow, love sucks. So I then went up to my room and read it - "The Nightingale and the Rose" - and in all I went about doing, thought about it, all day. Why am I the pursuer, and not the pursued? What distinguishes me from those catches, those elusive beauties and non-beauties whose hearts men like me pine for? And if I sit and think about THAT, I start to worry. It all becomes painfully clear why this happens to me again and again. Why men crush my heart to dust. Because these are the qualities of the pursued:
Beauty. I can't begin to start explaining how many ways I fall short of this by any objective measure, but I can safely assure myself - especially in mind of worry and whatnot - that clearly no one in the world finds me attractive enough to want to keep around.
Grace. From casual clumsiness, to not being au fait with the ways of romance (all I know, I know from books and failed romances), to a stupified understanding of the workings of the world. The pursued appear like angels in the wind, delicate and elusive but as if they might be carried away at any moment.
Mystery. There is nothing mysterious about a man who is honest. Every aspect of my personality is exposed either casually, in confidence or in fact of sight. I don't believe in harbouring secrets, in lying to casual strangers about whether or not they're fat or making pleasantry on the phone where I have no pleasant sentiment. Truly, the pursued are naturally of a countenance which implies there is something to be discovered!
Wealth. Of so many respects. The wealth of money, of knowledge, of experience. I have none. I have little to my name, I have aptitutdes that are unexpressed but no true wisdom, and no experience in tender age or in life lived. My life is hollow with absences which pervade its fragile structure. The pursued give off a charm of limitless potential, of such interesting facts and memories and so much to share. What do I have?
Irreverence. The most important one, and within it, all of the above. They don't care about anything but in this is the illusion that they might harbour some deep-abiding passion, or potential for change which as experience (what little I have) had told me will always fail to materialise. And it's always apparent from the beginning. I have none: I express motivation in my calculated apathy, I express desire in my every glance and inquisition, I express hope in my every sorrow that all is lost.
So am I "special" this time, or any time? Time will tell. My enemy, time. That word: inevitability, haunts me from before I knew what I was writing about when I wrote about the boy at the window those days and days ago. The boy I had never conceptualised as one (and was, inspired by one in the past). The boy I do not know and will never know, every one of them.
Why do I have to work so hard for so little reward? Why don't people think "Ah, that Liam's a catch, let me show him I'm interested." Where's the nightingale to press her heart against the rosebush thorn, and sing for her faith in love? Why does that faith immediately prove as much vanity as religious faith: fear-based, consolatory, mythical? I watched a cartoon of the Wilde short story that goes with it and was like, wow, love sucks. So I then went up to my room and read it - "The Nightingale and the Rose" - and in all I went about doing, thought about it, all day. Why am I the pursuer, and not the pursued? What distinguishes me from those catches, those elusive beauties and non-beauties whose hearts men like me pine for? And if I sit and think about THAT, I start to worry. It all becomes painfully clear why this happens to me again and again. Why men crush my heart to dust. Because these are the qualities of the pursued:
Beauty. I can't begin to start explaining how many ways I fall short of this by any objective measure, but I can safely assure myself - especially in mind of worry and whatnot - that clearly no one in the world finds me attractive enough to want to keep around.
Grace. From casual clumsiness, to not being au fait with the ways of romance (all I know, I know from books and failed romances), to a stupified understanding of the workings of the world. The pursued appear like angels in the wind, delicate and elusive but as if they might be carried away at any moment.
Mystery. There is nothing mysterious about a man who is honest. Every aspect of my personality is exposed either casually, in confidence or in fact of sight. I don't believe in harbouring secrets, in lying to casual strangers about whether or not they're fat or making pleasantry on the phone where I have no pleasant sentiment. Truly, the pursued are naturally of a countenance which implies there is something to be discovered!
Wealth. Of so many respects. The wealth of money, of knowledge, of experience. I have none. I have little to my name, I have aptitutdes that are unexpressed but no true wisdom, and no experience in tender age or in life lived. My life is hollow with absences which pervade its fragile structure. The pursued give off a charm of limitless potential, of such interesting facts and memories and so much to share. What do I have?
Irreverence. The most important one, and within it, all of the above. They don't care about anything but in this is the illusion that they might harbour some deep-abiding passion, or potential for change which as experience (what little I have) had told me will always fail to materialise. And it's always apparent from the beginning. I have none: I express motivation in my calculated apathy, I express desire in my every glance and inquisition, I express hope in my every sorrow that all is lost.
So am I "special" this time, or any time? Time will tell. My enemy, time. That word: inevitability, haunts me from before I knew what I was writing about when I wrote about the boy at the window those days and days ago. The boy I had never conceptualised as one (and was, inspired by one in the past). The boy I do not know and will never know, every one of them.
Wednesday 7 January 2009
Why do I do what I do when I do the things I do
I can't now conceal my thoughts in verse. Which I can never do very well, anyway. It's exactly 2.30 as I begin writing this and I'm awake for no good reason. Well, the reason was good. But no, but yes, but let me continue. Ulysses is beside me, still lodged on page sixty-six. I have to reach page seven-one-eight by Tuesday. I was supposed to be reading it, but I let myself get distracted. I turned to face away, and the song I set to play, spun me down the stairs, and cast me unawares. I returned to this chair and sat and spoke.
The silent words we say in fingers against a keyboard. Why do I say them here when I wouldn't say them if I had to press them through my lips? Lips. I long for lips. That is part of the problem. I sit and am stirred ("for a bird,--the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!"), and should learn to quell the tell-tale beat. Because games are played by the few, but still there are rules to life which transcend toying. I define my life by trying to break its fourth wall. I was told this once, in my mock-Oxford-interview. And it has stuck with me. I'm pushing reality as if I were a fictional character and I am simply toying with its meanings and its words. I am the product of an internal struggle to get the things I want in 'reality', the safe way, and this other timeless desire to make everything mean nothing by pressing upon meaning.
I feel like I've come to some great cathartic epiphany and write without certainty that I will publish this. The things I never publish are always the best. Do I destroy the quality of the pouring of my soul if it's edited to suit an audience? Could some terrible disaster - worse than the one which awakens my existential crisis - be incited by its genesis? ("Poets are not so scrupulous as you. Nowadays, a broken heart can run to many editions.") I think, I think, I think. I sit and think and think too much but never enough about the things I should be doing but rather I think to analyse the words in ways they were never meant to be. And then, the attached issue, is that I hope the other person can read words as I write them and see in them what I want them to see. The double-meaning, the no-meaning, the differing meaning - and then further still do unlike me and answer with conviction; "Yes! And where these meanings contrast, dissolve and collide, I say yes to all."
What is man if not the product of his fears, his desires, his attempts at being something else and efforts to stifle the thing within. The love that dear/dare not speak it's name, Joyce tells of Wilde's; but none dare speak any name, Wildean or Shakespearian. Never for me, anyway. In the act of naming we do so wrong! Naming takes identity. Naming takes the truth. Naming bubbles the meaning to the surface and adds so much to what was there before. How often a poem is changed by its title to some other twisted meaning not in its text - the title is only to place this thing, this thing (THING! the best word in the English language, I DECLARE!) within a box of glass, at an arm's length, in particular lighting and with tinted spectacles. The distortion does not affect our comprehension of the reality if we focus! But focusing brings us in closer to the reality. REALITY. WHERE DO I STAND? (In reality.) I mean, am I here, toying with words and asking the unaskable and because I wish to change the course of the novel, to make Dharma & Greg of what could be Dickens?
Oh salty, vague, and deliberate. HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU.
But here, with your company again, I remember why I was so glad you disappeared from my heart.
This is the blog of pain! Pain I cannot describe.
Pain owed to no particular, no man, no woman, not even myself but certainly mine. Its genesis, my own. GENESIS: said twice before now. Why does this word sit in my skull? WHY DO I ASK IF IT DOES? WHY AM I TAKING MY THOUGHTS AND TRYING TO FIND OUT "WHAT IS LIAM THINKING?" I am thinking my own thoughts but I wish were two people. One on the couch and one in the chair. One to listen and one to speak and then afterwards, make silent.
I am elated with a joy, or was, or can be. I am now not in the throes of time. But now I am, because I glance to the clock; how time has taken my mind to its corner for these constant numbers: 2.53. Where comes the four? Now. As if sensing my expectation of it. Do people think like clocks? So rhythmically yet circular, mechanical and unthinking yet with so much unintended profundity? Do we mean the things we say we mean? Life, brings life, brings life. What of death? What is death?
I need a drink. 2:55.
The silent words we say in fingers against a keyboard. Why do I say them here when I wouldn't say them if I had to press them through my lips? Lips. I long for lips. That is part of the problem. I sit and am stirred ("for a bird,--the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!"), and should learn to quell the tell-tale beat. Because games are played by the few, but still there are rules to life which transcend toying. I define my life by trying to break its fourth wall. I was told this once, in my mock-Oxford-interview. And it has stuck with me. I'm pushing reality as if I were a fictional character and I am simply toying with its meanings and its words. I am the product of an internal struggle to get the things I want in 'reality', the safe way, and this other timeless desire to make everything mean nothing by pressing upon meaning.
I feel like I've come to some great cathartic epiphany and write without certainty that I will publish this. The things I never publish are always the best. Do I destroy the quality of the pouring of my soul if it's edited to suit an audience? Could some terrible disaster - worse than the one which awakens my existential crisis - be incited by its genesis? ("Poets are not so scrupulous as you. Nowadays, a broken heart can run to many editions.") I think, I think, I think. I sit and think and think too much but never enough about the things I should be doing but rather I think to analyse the words in ways they were never meant to be. And then, the attached issue, is that I hope the other person can read words as I write them and see in them what I want them to see. The double-meaning, the no-meaning, the differing meaning - and then further still do unlike me and answer with conviction; "Yes! And where these meanings contrast, dissolve and collide, I say yes to all."
What is man if not the product of his fears, his desires, his attempts at being something else and efforts to stifle the thing within. The love that dear/dare not speak it's name, Joyce tells of Wilde's; but none dare speak any name, Wildean or Shakespearian. Never for me, anyway. In the act of naming we do so wrong! Naming takes identity. Naming takes the truth. Naming bubbles the meaning to the surface and adds so much to what was there before. How often a poem is changed by its title to some other twisted meaning not in its text - the title is only to place this thing, this thing (THING! the best word in the English language, I DECLARE!) within a box of glass, at an arm's length, in particular lighting and with tinted spectacles. The distortion does not affect our comprehension of the reality if we focus! But focusing brings us in closer to the reality. REALITY. WHERE DO I STAND? (In reality.) I mean, am I here, toying with words and asking the unaskable and because I wish to change the course of the novel, to make Dharma & Greg of what could be Dickens?
Oh salty, vague, and deliberate. HOW I HAVE MISSED YOU.
But here, with your company again, I remember why I was so glad you disappeared from my heart.
This is the blog of pain! Pain I cannot describe.
Pain owed to no particular, no man, no woman, not even myself but certainly mine. Its genesis, my own. GENESIS: said twice before now. Why does this word sit in my skull? WHY DO I ASK IF IT DOES? WHY AM I TAKING MY THOUGHTS AND TRYING TO FIND OUT "WHAT IS LIAM THINKING?" I am thinking my own thoughts but I wish were two people. One on the couch and one in the chair. One to listen and one to speak and then afterwards, make silent.
I am elated with a joy, or was, or can be. I am now not in the throes of time. But now I am, because I glance to the clock; how time has taken my mind to its corner for these constant numbers: 2.53. Where comes the four? Now. As if sensing my expectation of it. Do people think like clocks? So rhythmically yet circular, mechanical and unthinking yet with so much unintended profundity? Do we mean the things we say we mean? Life, brings life, brings life. What of death? What is death?
I need a drink. 2:55.
Sunday 4 January 2009
"Write about me instead"
A darkling thrush says not too much,
About the rhymes of life,
Nor whitish pages on loss, and love,
Of those who liked to write.
Woman much loved, you I wonder
How did he make you feel?
Could you see his eyes, and big cracked lips
And know they make him real?
Oh bugler boy at first communion, I say
The smartest boy in Wales,
If only you were sat beside me
My heart might seem impaled...
For what was the feast followed the night
Thou hadst glory of this boy?
Libido drained yet not asleep
I played, I touched, I toyed
It little profits that an idle king
Should sit upon a throne
When sat on princely poof beside him
Is not a poof to call his own?
Alas! for this grey shadow, once a man-
The unsightly son of souls
Could do a deed with you in hand
And do it till grown old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep
Your voice will be the same
I will kiss each and every bit
Be you blind or deaf or lame
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
So let's not talk of age
Let's talk of bright and happy things
So we might set the stage
The night is darkening round me
But at least your lamp is on
Toucha-toucha-touch me
Before the night is gone
I know not how it falls on me
This feeling of transcendent grace
But when it falls away from me
I long to see your face
Fra Pandolf's hands would work busily a day
Should you they have to paint
I'm running out of quotes to bring
My manner losing quaint
I hunt the house through,
And here I find, this final, final rhyme
So let's not delay, let's just smile
I'm seeing you in nine days time
About the rhymes of life,
Nor whitish pages on loss, and love,
Of those who liked to write.
Woman much loved, you I wonder
How did he make you feel?
Could you see his eyes, and big cracked lips
And know they make him real?
Oh bugler boy at first communion, I say
The smartest boy in Wales,
If only you were sat beside me
My heart might seem impaled...
For what was the feast followed the night
Thou hadst glory of this boy?
Libido drained yet not asleep
I played, I touched, I toyed
It little profits that an idle king
Should sit upon a throne
When sat on princely poof beside him
Is not a poof to call his own?
Alas! for this grey shadow, once a man-
The unsightly son of souls
Could do a deed with you in hand
And do it till grown old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep
Your voice will be the same
I will kiss each and every bit
Be you blind or deaf or lame
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
So let's not talk of age
Let's talk of bright and happy things
So we might set the stage
The night is darkening round me
But at least your lamp is on
Toucha-toucha-touch me
Before the night is gone
I know not how it falls on me
This feeling of transcendent grace
But when it falls away from me
I long to see your face
Fra Pandolf's hands would work busily a day
Should you they have to paint
I'm running out of quotes to bring
My manner losing quaint
I hunt the house through,
And here I find, this final, final rhyme
So let's not delay, let's just smile
I'm seeing you in nine days time
Thursday 1 January 2009
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