To equalise the pressure

Currently I am making a huge push on Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts – nearing the end of an endless draft, which will be the second last.

 

In a week’s time, I’ll hand my file over to D, who will give me some suggestions for tidying it up. That will take as long as it takes BUT after that, after I print it out (for symbolic effect more than anything else, and some final red-penning), I will send the whole thing off to my kind and patient agent Drea Cohane.

 

That is the plan for the next month. It looks clean, simple. But I am knee deep in words. Yesterday I heavily edited fifteen pages. Today, after D makes himself scarce, I shall try to do the same. As I lie down to sleep, scenes pummel my brain. Scenes already written and things that must come.  Even after the ms is sent off, I know that there will be more to do to it. But all this is the true work of a novel, as far as I have experienced. It’s grubby and exhausting and painstaking. But it is what makes a writer, what makes a novel.

 

Of course, sometimes I end up fried out and flailing. Of course I need to write here, to hear from you. Sympathy, understanding. I am kept afloat by viewers here and the people in my life who support me in all their different ways. Early in the morning, or right after I finish a huge section I am at my most drained. So I go for constructing pleasant worlds, or, as today, for music.

 

 

‘Puts me to work’ by Cate Le Bon. An appropriate choice, and utterly charming.

 

Now, some tea. Changed from the gym (working out is also keeping my energy up, and luckily I have time for it most days). Then – onwards and inwards and through the white and black until it trembles and so do I.

Writing accessories

 

Sometimes you like to dream a little of the perfect writing life.

 

Sometimes you feel the need to decorate an imaginary wooden house by the sea and its book-lined study overlooking the long pale morning beach. You have your comfy day bed sprawled with cushions and your windows open to let the gentle salt air in. You create a whole world of useful and frivolous objects that would fit.

 

Sometimes you do this in idle moments when you should be writing (none of these photos are mine, you can find a link to the source by clicking on them) -

 

First the desk, right by the shuttered window:

 

 

A grand solid thing with room for legs underneath, clutter up the top.

 

In one of the drawers (next to reams of paper and spare pens for chewing on):

 

 

A pile of pre-stamped cards. Because in this writing life, you meet people who might want to know your details and who don’t care much for tapping things down on their phones. Who might appreciate rounded corners and a mid century aesthetic. Put it right there in their copy of your book and say, hope to be in touch soon.

 

Back to the cabin, back to the desk. On it, well, notebooks. Everyone has their favourite notebooks, but I like them plain and plentiful. A mug of tea and a few big shells. An anglepoise lamp. A tiny aquarium:

 

 

Your laptop of choice. Mine would be small and sleek, dark green. With none of the keys missing and not at all prone to crashing, like this one I write on now. On the other side of the desk, a friend to watch over you:

 

 

And downstairs your loved ones are calling you to breakfast. You’ve bashed out five hundred words and it’s only ten o’clock. Later you can go walk on the beach and skip stones. Or stay and watch the rain fall against the gorse in your garden. And more writing, and the murmur of music. And more than objects, this particular controlled, scenic happiness.

 

Though life as it is right now has more happiness than I can just about stand, without cabin, without sea. The only thing is not enough papier mache owls, perhaps.

The art of destruction

 

These photos show two sides of the same street in Glasgow. I love the chaos of greys in the top image. The city being edited, the innards of girders and wires on display. Positioned opposite Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, I’m all the more tempted to think of it as art itself. On a grand and messy and impermanent scale. Take your pick of metaphors: Metaphor for creation and recreation. Metaphor describing the limitlessness of art. Snapshot of a day now sealed off (the people hurry on in the picture below, in the top image the wires are slowly carted away. In another hour everything is diminished, differently shadowed, more empty or something has begun).

 

A juxtaposition is trigger for all sorts of thoughts. The child in me just wants to hop the fence and roam around in the rubble.

 

Where have you found art this week?

 

[All this inspired by Hilary Smith's post on mushroom hunting, here]

 

Love Letter 6 – ‘Edinburgh, Scotland’

‘Edinburgh, Scotland’ appeared in ‘I <3 _____: Everywhere is the New New York’. Here it is in full, with pictures from previous posts:

 

To begin with, every city is about the people, of course. But in Edinburgh, the city is more about the interplay of stone, weather and light. The people have coursed through this space in its various forms for at least twelve centuries, but the stone and the weather and the angle of the sun outlast them all.

 

It’s easy to say we don’t have four seasons here, that we lack definites. Summer is cardigan weather most days. Winter, umbrella. Spring is much the same, and Autumn. But we do have two distinct seasons: the season of light and the season of dark.

 

In Winter, we wake to dark at eight, to bluish haze and the egg-yellow glow from the windows across the shared back green of our tenement.

In Summer, morning is at four, striking against the cliffs of Salisbury Crags. Stark outlines, warm tones against a keening pale blue, like a 1930s hand-drawn postcard version of itself. Dusk at eleven.

In Winter the dark comes knocking at four om, and some days it feels never light at all.

This is how we know our year, by the way the light or dark shapes our buildings, our volcanic rock.

 

From the summit of Calton Hill; Arthur’s seat, Salisbury crags (the long diagonal cliffs) and at their feet the Scottish Parliament (among other structures)

 

There’s something mournful about the city. I remember reading the writer AL Kennedy calling it a sad place, saying that she couldn’t live here through all that restrained sadness. I understand, yet here I am.

 

 

It’s cold and the sky lips the hill of Arthur’s Seat. The commuters walk down the blue and red North Bridge from the high-leaning higgledy of the Old Town over to eighteenth century New Town. The Crags and the Seat overlook them, leaning back in their mist. The commuters keep their hands in their pockets, their scarves neatly tucked at their throats.

 

Below, the train station, jimmied Victorian, glass encased, wonders if there will be another jumper from the bridge, remembers the days of steam and of ‘North Britain’. The grey shipwreck of the Scottish Parliament, off by the cliffs, whispers, wheesht. Shhh. Says, now really. We’ve more to show than those days.

 

It’s sometimes easy to get lost in the layers of the cake. How do we live here? It’s true that in Edinburgh, people are polite and reserved. That they won’t fight you so much as shake their head at you, judging. They are conservative in ways that defy the modern notions – socially progressive, politically too, they will purse their lips at someone speaking loudly in a cafe, wryly say, “oh that lot, there they go again.” The goth and punk kids stalk their limits of territory on Cockburn Street and Hunter Square. The arts fall within certain limitations, though artists are always there, pushing quietly back.

 

Festival time, in August, is the carnivalesque, the moment of sanctioned release. Here come the Irish, English, North Americans to tell us jokes and paint themselves silver. Here are the writers with books coming out, and issues to shuffle and spark. Then, when the month goes, most of them go too, and the grey stone re-solidifies, and the sounds muffle til the New Year. Hogmanay. A Viking longboat is dragged down North Bridge on a river of burning torches, then set alight by the unfinished pillars on Calton Hill. The dark is there, pressing tightly round us. History, of another part of the country altogether, really, pressing too. Dark at 3:40, that last first day of the year.

 

 

Beyond the feast days, it is a quiet city. Sometimes the breweries tang the air, bagpipes play on the street corners in the centre. Sometimes it’s a fraction of a scent or a reedy song you hear. Passing as you are under a wide dark bridge, up a cobbled narrow wynd, you become liminal, neither in one year or another. Adrift between the walls. The cities is entirely itself. It has grown and fossilised and now all that can change it is the weather, the light. Forces greater than human endeavour.

 

 

You could go into a kirkyard to see the gravestones, think: did you all feel the same? How little and how great a space you had to slip yourself within? The green, black stones are silent, it’s one-thirty and there is no sun. A great inevitability. But you’re already here, within the weather, breathing clouds. A narrow space in your own body. A line in the book of history, though your name itself might not be reported.

 

Right now. Here. Edinburgh. A yolk-yellow light beams from your own window, charming a rain-harried passer-by.

 

Imaginary art

I sometimes in idle moments think up art projects I’d like to do. Usually on a grand scale, with near impossible elements. Something way beyond my reach, but that compels me, anyway, to ponder their logistics.

 

My latest imaginary art project is one that I think might be feasible, though I’ve no money to do it, no connections to anyone who might sponsor me. Here it is though:

 

I conceived of an epic journey across North America by Greyhound, going to every stop on the line and taking pictures of what I found. Thinking up a song for each picture, appropriate to mood, or perhaps suggested -or even sung – by folk I meet along the way. I’d gather pieces of wood, leaves, plastics, found images, letters. Mailing those findings home in a box marked with the name of the town. I’d get back on the bus to the next place and do it all over again. Maybe sometimes I’d stop in a motel for the night and for a shower. Any photos I took there at dusk, looking in or out, could be added to a ‘night supplement’. I know my talents as a photographer are limited, but it’s for the record, not for the beauty of the thing. Record of a moment, of place and fleeting things witnessed.

 

But for the main show – in the gallery they’d hang the blown-up pictures. Headphones underneath to play the song. A small shelf with the relics laid out. A note beside, with the name of the town, the date I visited, the people I met. This exhibit could travel too. Return to the places I’d been. I understand that this kind of art is an imposition on place, so there would be feedback slots where people from those places could slip in their own photos, the songs they’d want. We could make up a book of these images and mine, with credit to everyone and no one privileged over the other – just the town name, a series of pictures, a song list. A map at the back of my journey.

 

I thought I’d do this for America only, but perhaps America doesn’t need my help making art out of its own sense of place. And I know quite a few places. Somewhere new for me then? Canada would be immense. Every small town, every wrong-side-of-the-tracks and brilliant vista and tiny house on a grey field and lake shore crowded with pines, across that huge country.

 

I’d need a good coat and hat, I think.

 

Mutations

 

“Any form of art can only develop by means of single mutations by individual creators. If only traditional conventions are used an art will die, and the widening of an art form is bound to seem strange at first, and awkward. Any growing thing must go through awkward stages. The creator who is misunderstood because of his breach of convention may say to himself, ‘I seem strange to you, but anyway I am alive.”

 

-      Carson McCullers

Working and blurring

 

This statue is of the Ancient Greek Goddess Iris. Iris was the messenger of the gods, and linked the heavens and the earth – she was also the goddess of the rainbow. I love how the sculptor carved her dress as if rippling in the winds. And how this creation, even after hundreds of years and lacking a head, limbs or wings (she is often depicted as a winged figure), is still elegant and powerful, suggestive of great speeds -

 

And so I’m using the image as motivator. January has been a slow, creeping month in terms of writing. I have been tackling a long essay – which I will talk about more later if and when it is accepted where I hope it will be – and also on Dear Friends and Gentle Hearts. Editing is a painstaking business sometimes. A few hundred words here or there. A handful of pages. Keep going! Keep chipping at it until the text ripples with motion but still has weight. My reading has slowed as I attempt Beckett’s Molloy, which itself requires a patience, as if reading occurs with my head underwater, and I must resurface, catch my breath. Even thinking of its flash-fiction like intensity makes me take big gulps of air.

 

I put great spaces in everything. I take my time, picking over the surface. But I’m happy doing so. Focused, even if frustrated.

 

What are you tackling? What keeps you on a steady keel?

Back from the South

 

D and I have returned from a Christmas present trip to London. London snowbound and prettier for it, but harder to get around. In fact, one day we spent most of our time in a pub in Hoxton with friends, watching the snow blanket the streets. I’m still weary from our long train journey back up, and from walking on the icy streets, and seeing so much and so much. Lots of photos to share, so this will probably be a two parter. The first thing we did after dropping off our bag was to head to the familiar but wonderful British Museum to see all the lovely bought, looted, relics of Empires old and modern:

 

The Rosetta Stone

 

The Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon

 

Ancient Egyptian Ram God resting his head on a king

 

Beyond the Museum, D and I wandered the cold streets taking in the distinctive architecture:

 

The colourfully named The Hung, Drawn and Quartered Pub

 

 

A street south of the river, with the ghostly Shard Building above

 

 

The Shard at night

 

One of the running discussions of our trip was the Shard building itself, which we saw every morning and every evening as we walked back to our hotel. It’s probably been said elsewhere, but whoever designed that building was clearly going for ‘evil megacorp lair and/or inter-dimensional space portal’. It looms, it glows malevolently at the heavens.

 

But aside from awe-inspiring solitary buildings, the city as a whole impresses upon the viewer with its hard, dull edge. It’s a city worn into shape over hundreds and hundreds of years. Londinium. In the right light, it itself glows in its own gloom.

 

Northwards across the Thames, with the Tower of London to the right

 

More to follow, when I’ve recovered a little more.

 

First look: Everywhere is the New New York and Hallelujah Giant Space Wolf

 

A delightful package arrived today from Colorado and Yrfriendliz – a copy of the chapbook Everywhere is the New New York (which features a piece I wrote on Edinburgh) and a surprise – Hallelujah Giant Space Wolf by Daniel Bailey.

 

I want to do a write up on both, though I’ll be away for a few days in London, doing touristy London things this time, rather than business (because D is coming with me, for his first stay of any real length there) and I have some deadlines looming. Books to review, a long essay to wrestle with on the theme of my first ms, my first girl – Kilea. Before then, though, I’d like to let you know that Hallelujah Giant Space Wolf is a book of poems, and, as you can tell, has an amazing title. The first poem is ‘Geronimo Boredom Prayer’ and features the ‘I’ becoming God:

 

‘gifting love unto the world like a premature baby

shining its way out of the womb all naked and hairless

then I became God in human flesh and walked through the woods

damaging trees with my love-making and sex appeal

eventually, I grew bored of my godliness,

so I became Nicolas Cage, which was awesome

except for the whole being a dad thing

 

You can own Hallelujah Giant Space Wolf and have it on your bookshelf to warm your poetry-and-excellent-book-title loving soul by going over here and buying it.

 

If you’d like to support the tiny publisher/editing team who put together Everywhere is the New New York, and to read 12 wonderful essays on American Cities that are not NY but their own dirty, magical thing, and one essay that’s ditto on a certain Scottish city, the chapbook is bargain at $5, and available here.

And the winner is…

Well, I didn’t really want to keep you in suspense! My post was eaten by the hungry internet!

 

To those asking what a clootie dumpling is: a cloot is the Scots word for ‘cloth’ – clootie dumplings are sweet puddings, a little like a Christmas pud but lighter, traditionally served on New Year’s Day in Scotland. Here’s the recipe I used (I added mixed peel, subbed the oats for millet flour, and used golden syrup instead of treacle/molasses). It was warmly spicy and very filling.

 

Now on to the winner of the ‘place’ photography contest.

 

After dinner, my parents looked through the photographs and cast their votes – D had to be brought in for the final decision. He chose the same photograph my mother had picked, and we had a winner: Chris J. Rice. Here is her entry:

 

 

She included this lovely descriptive piece with her photograph, though the judges evaluated the photos all on their own merit:

 

Your favorite color was yellow. Yellow, so heavenly even when mixed with black, often expressing otherworldly grief, like the field in Van Gogh’s last painting; wheat overshadowed by darkness, yet, there it was, a hint of the sun, a thick shimmer of light. In fourth grade when the teacher told the class to paint the flower on her desk, a purple iris—dark veined and fragile—you did what she asked. Except you made it yellow. Dipped your brush in water, mushed it in the palest color cake, and copied down what you saw in your head. Transferred the flat world of your vision to the flat world of the page. So easy to do, you were surprised by her praise. Still you soaked it up, feeling momentarily okay, good for something. Like it was acceptable to see what you saw, to like what you liked.

 

Chris, please look through the archives of pictures here and choose one you’d like me to frame for you. Let me know by email – alongside your postage address. I’ll also be sending a mystery book from my shelves, and shopping for small goodies to include in your parcel. I’ll send it to you as soon as the city has recovered from its hangover.

 

To all the rest who contributed a photograph to the competition: Thank you. The standard of entries was very high, and it was tough for the judges to reach a consensus on the winner. Happy New Year, and hope to run another giveaway/contest at a later date.