January 2012
4 posts
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edwin
I had been seeing Edwin for two hours every Sunday for three weeks before he finally decided he could talk to me, and even then it was not until I had finished my last chapter of the day. We sat by the window in his room overlooking the gardens of the place, I with my glass of water and he always with his cold cup of tea and single uneaten digestive biscuit. I would read to him and he would nod...
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drank
Of all the myths which foreigners continue to harbour about England, the idea that our public houses are either very very friendly or very very unfriendly is the one in which I have most frequently found some semblance of truth. Allow me to share a few anecdotes from my own experience.
Several years ago, me and my lady friend of that time were out on a pleasant country walk when we decided to...
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the crest
One evening we were in the pub waiting for our dinner to arrive and not saying very much. I was looking past her shoulder to the bar and watching the regulars, of which we were not. They were mostly men but also one woman. I suppose you would call her an ‘older’ woman but she could not have been much older than my mother. She was with one man but she was laughing with another man several stools...
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like a ghost in its old home
“The key to the creative type is that he is separated out of the common pool of shared meanings. There is something in his life experience that makes him take the world as a problem; as a result he has to make personal sense out of it. This holds true for all creative people to a greater or lesser extent, but it is especially obvious with the artist. Existence becomes a problem that needs an...
December 2011
5 posts
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what to write at the wake →
‘So here we are, on this side of the mountain, nostalgic for the great storm-struck plateaus where our writer-ancestors once worked their magic, but knowing that we live on the lowlands. Here we are at the end of Literature and Culture, stripped, bereft, embarrassed. We are children tromping in old boots. Perhaps even Bernhard and Bolaño are too grand for us to imitate! We should study the...
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no banker left behind
We have some very specific ideas about corruption in Britain. Essentially, it is still seen as being about dodgy-looking men exchanging briefcases full of cash while muttering assurances in overheated hotel rooms. Such notions are confirmed when the British public is treated to the spectacle of something like the recent Pakistan spot-fixing scandal, which the tabloids enjoyed because they hold...
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the curse
I was listening to my music on the tube this morning and looking at nothing in particular when a woman sat alongside me and took out a small blue exercise book from her bag. My gaze, having nothing else on which to rest, naturally wandered over to see what she was reading. At first I could only see stacks of numbers written in red biro; my first thought was that she was a teacher catching up on...
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the parodist
‘Who has not heard at Paris of her that caused her face to be flayed only for the fresher complexion of a new skin?’
— Michel de Montaigne, ‘That the Relish of Good and Evil Depends on the Opinion we Have of Either’ (1580)
When we asked what brought her to the internet in the first instance, she could only reply that it had always been there. At six, her parents had been the ones who...
November 2011
5 posts
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bar soap
She was the first person to introduce him to bar soap. While he had always been aware that soap came in bars, he would never buy them for himself before he met her. He couldn’t stand the way a bar of soap left a slick of itself whenever it was left wet on a surface, and he hated the scummy tide marks that stained a sink filled for washing. His parents had never bought bar soap for those reasons,...
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friendship update
I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo for the first time this month. It’s tough. It’s why I haven’t been writing here very much. But I am on track. I had planned to supplement this blog with extracts from the ongoing project but oh god you really don’t want to read it.
I’ve been getting up at 5.30am to write without distraction (thanks to Freedom) for about an hour before I start getting ready for work....
October 2011
5 posts
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endpapers
The event which prompted the excavation of Subject C was the discovery of a very long strand of wire at the Crossrail site between Tottenham Court and Charing Cross Road. The worker who was operating the mechanical digger at the time later speculated that he might not have spotted the thing had it not appeared to him as a single unbroken strand in the freshly-cut clay soil, its vulcanised...
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the rug
Dinner was becoming unbearable. At around seven or eight o’clock every night we would be disturbed by the sound of thumping and banging and shouting from the region above the ceiling – which is to say, from the man who lived in the apartment upstairs. One evening, when we were settled with wine and flowers and music and food, the noise began again. Elizabeth told me, Edward, to please ask him if...
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— John Ireland, ‘Sarnia: Le...
September 2011
6 posts
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amontillado inc
Wednesday, 5.36pm – returned home to find the back door unlocked, all the curtains in the house drawn shut. My bike was off the wall rack and on its back on the kitchen floor. The knives had been rearranged in the block. H was in but she must have slept through it all
Friday, approx 8pm – the microwave doesn’t work. The plate turns and turns but nothing ever gets any warmer. I could have thawed...
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goings on
There was a fight on the tube this morning! At the time I was listening to This American Life at the far end of the platform (the most tumblr of excuses) so I didn’t realise anything was happening until I noticed that everybody around me was looking very concerned in the wrong direction, i.e. they weren’t looking in the direction of the approaching trains but at the ruckus which...
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an appraisal
Hi!
Thanks for taking the time. Okay.
How are things? Good?
Now I’m afraid I haven’t had the time to review your form so let’s go through it point by point. Why don’t you begin with the list of objectives we set earlier this year. Yes at the top. The top of the page.
Some water? No? Coffee? No?
Okay good. That’s all? Let me look at my copy. Here you missed one out: ‘Improving Personal...
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from the vault
I wrote the following essay ten years ago, when I was 14 years old. The subject was the most memorable event of September that year. In October 2001, it was published in a short-lived creative writing magazine at school.
I’ve reproduced this as it appeared then (errors and all) as a document of how I felt at the time. It is a curiosity and nothing more. The only thing I can remember about writing...
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mumblelard asked: Can a small hexagonal glass jar of kumquat honey be accurately referred to as a small pot of kumquat honey?
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Anonymous asked: hi, don't know if you remember me, i go by jaranodle, you wrote a piece on your blog about harry potter in response to my anonymous ask back in 2010. I've been trying to expand my literary horizons ever since and because of what you wrote. There has been also a bit of reassurance regarding the whole HP thing. So, to the question at hand, what is there to say about Hemingway? So far...
August 2011
9 posts
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On arriving at the office, she clicked In on the first popup to clock in, and the light changed from red to green. At lunch, she clicked the Lunch button and the light changed from green to amber. After lunch she clicked Lunch again, and the light changed back to green. And then at the end of the day she clicked Out to clock out, and went home, and the icon had no colour.
When she first...
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‘A scientist, in this sort of situation, behaves like a trained elephant made to face an obstacle. He uses the strength of his intellect the way the elephant uses its muscle – on command – which is most convenient, because the scientist can agree to anything if he is responsible for nothing. Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed...
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mouse claw
In between tasks or even during tasks you stop what you are doing and for perhaps two minutes at a time you do not work. While not working you look at photos of people on the internet actively not working, enjoying themselves, maybe on holiday, or people just being somewhere with other people they like, or where there are no people at all, places where there is certainly no work. When they are not...
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‘And last of all, a true story. I repeat: this isn’t fiction, it’s real, it happened in Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship and more or less everybody (the small and remote “everybody” that is Chile) knows it. A right-wing young woman sets up house with a right-wing American, or marries him. The two of them aren’t just young, they’re good-looking and proud. He’s a DINA (National Intelligence...
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on the riots
I lived for most of my life in Ealing, West London, which was one of the many areas affected by the rioting last night. I now live not far down the road from that borough, and will tonight feel more fortunate than usual to live in a poorer, quieter area where there’s little that anybody could possibly want to take from a shop window. But I had today off work (on holiday, not because I was sent...
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July 2011
9 posts
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On Friday I had to leave the house very early to take a 7.23am train up to Birmingham for work. It isn’t important what I do for the purposes of this blog, but that day my job involved sitting in on an examination. I’d not done this since I last took an exam myself, several years ago, for the theory part of my driving test. The only real incident of note during Friday’s exam was when a...
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the targeted individual
Tilting the camera out of the window he rested his thumb on the button until the focus came to rest on the man on the bicycle at the end of the street. He took in the woman pushing a pram by the man on the bicycle, the man in sunglasses passing beneath his window, the car driving past his house and away down the street which turned left out of sight to cruise around the block and return to drift...
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‘The church is as cold as the night outside. There’s the smell of damp wool, of bitter on the breaths of these professionals, of candle smoke and melting wax, of smothered farting, of hair tonic, of the burning oil itself, folding the other odors in a maternal way, more closely belonging to Earth, to deep strata, other times, and listen…listen: this is the...
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June 2011
5 posts
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ouroboros
Not long into the second half of the twenty-first century, a pioneering cross-disciplinary study upturned the assumptions associated with what many had long considered a basic point of common sense: that people wrote their blogs as an expression of their own personalities.
Samples were taken from the writing of thousands of individuals from across the world, selected according to the...
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the beaten generation
I’ve started reading ‘Just Kids’, Patti Smith’s recent memoir of her youth in the New York of the 60’s/70’s. It is an intimate portrait of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. But it is also a story which has become universal — or rather, it has become universalised as a myth of artistic development.
She’s not shy of citing the artists and...
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sorry i haven't
At the risk of sounding like part of Cory Arcangel’s abandoned gallery of failing bloggers at Sorry I Haven’t Posted: sorry, I haven’t posted. The most troubling part of having not posted is that you start to become increasingly self-conscious about whatever ideas you might have about posting. So it becomes very easy to post odd little abstract things but it’s much harder to come up with an...
May 2011
5 posts
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Watch
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