Being here

 

Walking home from work the other day across North Bridge I saw the sun gleaming on the roof of Waverley train station, and the castle on the hill silhouetted against that sky, and the spire of the Scott Monument to the right. Walter Scott, who I’ve never read, wrote the Waverley novels after which the station is named. Shall I read them, ever, I ask myself. So many more books. Such a profusion.

 

I’ve recently thought to add Ford Madox Ford to the list, after the wonderful (if mumbly) production of Parade’s End. If you haven’t watched it or had the chance to yet, I recommend you seek it out. Not something I’d ever really go for – a landowning Tory statistician trying to live honourably by his philandering wife, despite falling in love with a much more wholesome suffragette and facing the dismantling horrors of World War One. But it’s one of those rare examples of lush BBC drama brought convincingly to life with excellent actors. Little scene-chewing here, just subtle hand movements and flashing eyes and rich draping fabrics coupled with oddly stagey set pieces. Tom Stoppard wrote the script and apparently this is something of an achievement, given the source material’s anti-narrative, Modernist style. Which makes me want to read it all the more. That and FMF encouraged Jean Rhys (after or before their affair, I’m not sure). How does the one feed into and complicate the other?

 

So that’s the week, the last few weeks. Watching this drama of restraint and farce and dizzying luxury. Waiting and working and reading. And being disappointed and carrying my bags and planning. And being anxious about the future of my first book and my current manuscript. Taking long breaths out, stretching my arms in front of me and behind. Creeping inch by inch across the pages and hours. Do I make progress, or do I just hope I do?Time progresses, regardless. The sun burnishes the panels of glass and blackens the old stone buildings, the clouds in the sky arrange themselves like silks and wool. And it is beautiful, and I despite it all, have time to notice.

Mute

 

Because it is hard to speak today, because I need something solid to lean on, let someone else speak well:

I watched an armory combing its bronze bricks
and in the sky there were glistening rails of milk.
Where had the swan gone, the one with the lame back?

Now mounting the steps
I enter my new home full
of grey radiators and glass
ashtrays full of wool.

Against the winter I must get a samovar
embroidered with basil leaves and Ukranian mottos
to the distant sound of wings, painfully anti-wind,

a little bit of the blue
summer air will come back
as the steam chuckles in
the monster’s steamy attack

and I’ll be happy here and happy there, full
of tea and tears. I don’t suppose I’ll ever get
to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least.

 

- from ‘Poem‘ by Frank O’Hara

Of stone

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The River and The Sea

 

 

 

 

Thank you to all for your congratulations and good wishes. Here’s a taster of where we spent our anniversary, at Cramond; the river Almond in the dark, and the tidal island with its row of concrete pyramids like something left over from a lost civilisation. More tomorrow when the photographs are in order.

 

 

 

Love letter 5

A love letter to Edinburgh once again (see love letters 1,2,3 and 4). Now a year since D and I have been living here, and we have felt that time, it has not rushed itself. Every moment felt and lived and hoped through.

 

 

In Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, peaceful and full of herbs and stones of course.

 

 

A detail of an angel from a gravestone on the kirk wall.

 

 

And the sky darkening, pinkish against the solidity of Pleasance houses.

 

And lastly, I recorded a sad little poem about building something, about memory and waiting. Not so much about Edinburgh, but tangentially related to coming back and to leaving Scotland itself. you can listen to it here.

Autumn Endless Reads

 

I look outside and cannot understand why the leaves have not already turned.  I’ve set my mind on Autumn and now I’m impatient for the season to make a clear announcement of its arrival. It’s already cold and damp now, the hours are drawing in (sunset before 9pm, now, a sure sign of the year heading towards late middle age), the festival is winding down, and Winter coats are coming out. Come on, decay, we’re ready for you.

 

In the mood for this chill turn, I begin planning autumnal reads. Not that I stopped reading over the Summer, but I think it’s good every season to pause for a moment to see what’s on the cards. Up for September:

 

 

 

NW, of course. Maidenhead I received today from Canadian publisher Coach House. Lots of people on twitter recommended this book to me after I decried my embarrassing lack of Can Lit reading. Coach House very generously sent it my way. The package brought with it an interview with the author, Tamara Faith Berger, and an insight into the themes of the novel – sexual and political awakening, feminism, slavery, art and pornography. That’s a promotional condom that was included with the book. I’ve just finished The Listeners by Leni Zumas which was, while well written, full of imagery of injury and blood (of which I am very phobic) so Maidenhead, while likely to be graphic and very challenging, is less likely to make me nearly faint every few pages.

 

The other book is one I’ve had for a while and have yet to get to – Now Trends, a collection of stories by Karl Taro Greenfield. The cover design and portability is meant to imitate a travel guide, and the stories themselves range across the world. Armchair travel for a dreichit time of the year.

 

I hope to review the latter three books on PANK in due course, and NW some time later here.

 

What do you have lined up to see you through the warm weather’s disappearance? That’s if it’s ever Autumnal in your part of the world.

Summer on the out

 

 

I love hydrangeas for their colour, for the fact they hold that colour into Spring some times, for their hugeness and sturdiness, for the fact they are not a single flower on a stalk but a profusion. The picture above was taken on a street that is near us, full of honeysuckle and yellow rose growing everywhere, and lavender. A summer street.

 

Sometimes it’s hard here to tell when Summer is closing down. The weather so variable that it fools you into thinking the end has come. A day of white sky and damp cobbles. Or a cold sweeping wind from the North East. But I think that time has come. It is a matter of perspective, but I think so.

 

I’m making plans for the Autumn, and craving it. Not colder weather – since the drop off is from the dizzy highs of 19c to more like 13, 14c – but crisper air. Gales coming in. I like a buffeting wind. I like to see the leaves crickling down the street. Hydrangeas remind me of this cusp-time, before the proper cold of late Autumn. Remind me of our wedding, in the beginning of September three years ago, when we were in the North of the country, in a wooden lodge by the silver-sanded sea with family and friends, and flowers and wedding cake homemade by my mother.

 

September only has this one date to brighten it,  though October is full of plans. October will see us having another go at the 48 hour short film contest, see that flash fiction of mine published, and me heading London bound on an overnight sleeper, to meet my agent and catch up with good friends. London is like another world, a city state, and I  always look forward to visiting, and always to leaving it again.

 

But what will fine September bring?

 

What is worth reading?

What is worth reading?

A book that expands the universe, or shrinks it?

A book that hints at what we have not explored?

Or at the demarcations of what a human is and what a human cannot be?

A book that leaks blood out its corners, and pain, and gorgeous words?

A book with each word precious like a golden pin?

A book that answers, brooking no question?

A book that defies gender?

A book that defies the market?

A book that wants to seed your mind?

A book that thinks it knows your mind to seed it?

A book that is funny, just that.

A book that is cruel but honest and unflinchingly so?

A book that is trying?

A book that has failed better?

A book by a humble man?

A book by a woman who maps whole continental socio political shifts?

A book of furious ecstasy which will be read by 100 people?

A book of stolid depthless good-enough consistency which will be read by a million?

A book with a message?

A book studiously without a message?

A book too in love with language to care if there is a message, though look long enough there might be?

A book with weather inside?

A book that will love you back?

 

With a debt to ‘What is worth knowing?’ by Sujata Bhatt.

 

August like a sharp intake of breath in a field of bright yellows and something like wheat

 

 

It is already August, it’s never August in Edinburgh until suddenly the streets are full of revelers for the festival, for the comedy, the book, the music, the children’s festivals and the populations swells and butts up against one another in the street, or else wanders drunkenly about, or else begs or juggles and we get a tiny break in the clouds, once or twice a day, that shows a scorching blue.

 

I have been having great fun reading the submissions for the Thresholds Project. Stories of imminence, of tension, of waiting at the doorway of life or simply a window, looking out. I really would love to read more. If you’d like to send me a poem or a flash piece, please do!

 

This, along with my Share Your Spaces project, are tentative attempts at something bigger. I might not be able to create a literary journal just yet, but I can wobbly step in the direction, here on the blog. I can look at the spaces within which you write, and be inspired. If you want to inspire me, and the readers of my blog further, and you have work that fits the criteria of ‘thresholds’ (a wide, and welcoming criteria of simply, a point of boundary, or a breaking of boundary, or traversing), please email me your work, or questions if you have them to: wheresthebread[@]hotmail.com

 

It all really began this year with the Endless Reads project, which lead to me reading some amazing, challenging works, to expansive and though-provoking connections with their authors via various social media, and to my becoming a reviewer on the online arm of a really fabulous magazine, which was something I had for a long time dreamed of doing.

 

The year is still young, even if the sun is setting earlier and earlier. Now at nine, it’s growing darker. Now the gloaming is thinning, and the nettles in my neighbour’s garden are dusty. New flowers grow all the time. Big-eyed daisies, bright orange things I cannot name. The reek of honeysuckle. I am hopeful.

Nostalgia Post

 

 

 

 

 

Scans of some of the images I found today in my parent’s garage. Strong nostalgia, but a sense, too, that life has been just as rich since they were taken. And will continue to be. I end on a note of travel, and of solidity, despite the lean.