ROUGH STUFF

A private space in a public place.

A place where I write about notebooks, share and discuss what's in them and open up the process as wide as I can.

Rough and almost uncensored.
July 7
Bloggers Are Terrible Writers
July 1
“ Poetry is philosophy when God is allowed to exist.
June 23
My thoughts have been on practicals: like how to find the £4.99 required for continued existence in the Ideal Land. I’ve decided to be both proactive and reactive. However, this morning could have been more productive. My notebook has been reduced to a loose A4 sheet with a pencil scribble: Published work… experience of teaching referee: Onwards.

My thoughts have been on practicals: like how to find the £4.99 required for continued existence in the Ideal Land. I’ve decided to be both proactive and reactive. However, this morning could have been more productive. My notebook has been reduced to a loose A4 sheet with a pencil scribble:

Published work…

experience of teaching

referee:


Onwards.

June 20
My T-Shirt Says…I’ve spent the past couple of weeks preparing for panels and practising presentations. Panels make me feel like I’m being interrogated by the Gestapo, however friendly they try to be. A bit like the bit of lead in my knee when I accidentally stabbed myself with a pencil when I was 15: a relic from childhood I never knew would hang around so long that might be making me slowly and slightly mad. In any case, one of the presentations was for a commission for a festival for 15 minutes of new work. I proposed My T-Shirt Says… where I write new ‘found’ poems from people’s T-shirts that I photograph around town and festivals throughout the summer. I did a lot of work with Malika Buddy and a run-through with her and Suzanne which helped a lot. When it came to the presentation on the day, it was a breeze! I really think it went well - and while that often means you don’t always pass the exam - I’m happy because I gave it my all. And I think they liked it. I like it. And I like putting my work to music which was also a big part of the proposal. Soundscapes. What would  have for this? Purring and scratching and …cats are quiet creatures when they’re not yowling and howling…hmmm. So now I know that. More on this later…I’ll let you know if I get the commission.
My T-Shirt Says…I’ve spent the past couple of weeks preparing for panels and practising presentations. Panels make me feel like I’m being interrogated by the Gestapo, however friendly they try to be. A bit like the bit of lead in my knee when I accidentally stabbed myself with a pencil when I was 15: a relic from childhood I never knew would hang around so long that might be making me slowly and slightly mad. In any case, one of the presentations was for a commission for a festival for 15 minutes of new work. I proposed My T-Shirt Says… where I write new ‘found’ poems from people’s T-shirts that I photograph around town and festivals throughout the summer. I did a lot of work with Malika Buddy and a run-through with her and Suzanne which helped a lot. When it came to the presentation on the day, it was a breeze! I really think it went well - and while that often means you don’t always pass the exam - I’m happy because I gave it my all. And I think they liked it. I like it. And I like putting my work to music which was also a big part of the proposal. Soundscapes. What would  have for this? Purring and scratching and …cats are quiet creatures when they’re not yowling and howling…hmmm. So now I know that. More on this later…I’ll let you know if I get the commission.
June 2
Science Notebook. Excerpt from Page 1. Cellular:  a load of stuff tricky to understand yet simple (egg, tadpole tails, explosions on a minute yet catastrophic scale). Mitochondria needs looking up for clarity and exclusion. All of what we have: more and less. Melanin, slim ankles, duck feet, genetic propensity for diabetes, fibroids, receding gums, born with the taste of bloody…[illegible] on your tongue, knowing the seven scents of mango and exactly when it will go over. Ortanique: not quite an orange - a hybrid, Chinese, Arab - unspecified African parts.

Science Notebook. Excerpt from Page 1.

Cellular:  a load of stuff tricky to understand yet simple (egg, tadpole tails, explosions on a minute yet catastrophic scale). Mitochondria needs looking up for clarity and exclusion. All of what we have: more and less. Melanin, slim ankles, duck feet, genetic propensity for diabetes, fibroids, receding gums, born with the taste of bloody…[illegible] on your tongue, knowing the seven scents of mango and exactly when it will go over. Ortanique: not quite an orange - a hybrid, Chinese, Arab - unspecified African parts.

May 29
+

Life Imitating Art

  • Freud: So you say you left your laptop where?
  • Me: On a chair in a clothes shop while I tried on a dress.
  • Jung: In the changing room?
  • Me: No there was no changing room so it was out on the shop floor.
  • Freud: So this was a shop that only sold women's clothes?
  • Me: I don't know it didn't have a name it was one of those wholesale places that opens to the public every now and then.
  • Simon: So you just left it out in the open in the middle of the West End?
  • Me: Yes, while I was trying on a dress. I know, it was an unassailably stupid, careless even reckless thing to do!
  • Police officer: So do you think someone swiped it.
  • Me: Yes. There was this moment when a few people came in the shop and something wasn't quite right but I wasn't sure what. Then I looked over at the chair and my handbag was there, with my phone out on the side. All I could see was the phone. From that moment on the laptop became invisible. In the shop and to my mind. A woman I thought for a minute might be dodgy smiled at me and then I forgot. If a thief looks you in the eye at the moment they're robbing you they can cast a spell and become invisible. It's happened to me before and I've still not learnt.
  • Hercule Poirot: So you realised at which hour, exactly, that you no longer were in possession of the laptop Madame?
  • Me: Not until I arrived home and then it hit me as soon as I stepped through the front door. I started to panic. Couldn't think. Felt sick. Then the spell started to wear off.
  • Dr Watson: Have you informed Scotland Yard?
  • Me: Yes, I have a crime reference number now. The thing is, this thought struck me while I prayed and prayed for my laptop not to have fallen into competent criminal hands. I felt so vulnerable, everything was on there: all my photos, my proposals, invoices, tax returns, poems, stories, plays, THE LOT.
  • Sensible Citizen 1: But of course it's all password protected, right?
  • Me: No, the whole thing was open, even though the machine was fitted with fingerprint recognition I never bothered to activate it.
  • Nurse Ratchett: It's time for your medication now.
  • Me: Of course I felt sick inside at the thought of what might happen but there was also this other voice at the back of my head, a tiny little whisper, and that's when I realised, my IDENTITY was on the laptop, but my HEART was in the notebooks.
  • Responsible Individual 14: Have you filled out an insurance claim?
  • Me: I've been playing with this idea Notebook vs Laptop vs Blog vs Private vs Public space in an almost academic way, well that's how it turns out when you write a proposal, but here it was, the cold, hard 'he who feels it knows it' fact of it: the really secret stuff - my thoughts, fears, confessions, admissions - not my national insurance number - stayed on paper, in notebook after notebook, in a little wooden cabinet next to my desk. They're full of I don't know what, but that's the space where I write as illegibly as I can, so that only I can read it. The words I write for me. They're worthless and priceless.
  • Freud: Tell me, does the laptop resemble your mother? Or your father perhaps?
  • Me: The fact that these things - these words, scribbles, ejecta - were safe was a comfort. I realised what was important to me. It made me never want to have a laptop again. It made me want to audit my notebooks, write up ALL the poems and destroy them in a big bonfire in the back garden. It also made me think that perhaps I should just post them up - AS IS - the real rough stuff - so then I'd have nothing left to fear but identity theft and death.
  • God: I'm not sure what you're on about but if it's any consolation you looked good in the dress.
May 9
I’m working out of several notebooks currently. I bought this at the British Library bookshop, which was once a good place for stationery. I bought my favourite notebook ever there years ago, which was a bespoke commission from Redstone. The Leonardo. It had everything I could ever want from a notebook. Pockets, varieties of paper (rough purple, smooth cream), Leonardo sketches sprinkled throughout. This was the best they had and overpriced at £3.99. It wasn’t until I was a third of the way through that I realised I’d been using it to struggle on with a poem I’ve been trying to write for years, now titled My Mother’s Wedding. I like the subliminal coincidence of Oedipus and a narrative which concerns an anguished separation from my mother: did I want to marry my own mother? Freud’s Oedipus Complex has become a shorthand for lusting after one’s mother, but in fact Sophocles’ story is more about the relationship to prophecy and fate. Oedipus doesn’t know he’s marrying his mother and it is his (and his father’s) attempt to circumvent the prophecy that ultimately makes it come true. In common parlance we call this Sod’s Law. Oedipus ends up blind and in exile. Just as the Oracle said. You cannot escape your FATE. Or your parents’ fates? How does this relate to My Mother’s Wedding? My mother was half blind literally and figuratively: actually, subconsciously that’s the sense I’ve been trying to get across. The sense of being DAZZLED. Light so bright you can’t see. Captured underwater above ground in a heatwave, where the air is so warm it bends and slows things like water. Sound is muffled. Senses simultaneously heightened and dimmed. Malika said the poem was searching for an epiphany that doesn’t arrive…but there is no epiphany that day. Just the sunblindness. The dazzle.

I’m working out of several notebooks currently. I bought this at the British Library bookshop, which was once a good place for stationery. I bought my favourite notebook ever there years ago, which was a bespoke commission from Redstone. The Leonardo. It had everything I could ever want from a notebook. Pockets, varieties of paper (rough purple, smooth cream), Leonardo sketches sprinkled throughout. This was the best they had and overpriced at £3.99.

It wasn’t until I was a third of the way through that I realised I’d been using it to struggle on with a poem I’ve been trying to write for years, now titled My Mother’s Wedding. I like the subliminal coincidence of Oedipus and a narrative which concerns an anguished separation from my mother: did I want to marry my own mother? Freud’s Oedipus Complex has become a shorthand for lusting after one’s mother, but in fact Sophocles’ story is more about the relationship to prophecy and fate. Oedipus doesn’t know he’s marrying his mother and it is his (and his father’s) attempt to circumvent the prophecy that ultimately makes it come true. In common parlance we call this Sod’s Law. Oedipus ends up blind and in exile. Just as the Oracle said. You cannot escape your FATE. Or your parents’ fates?

How does this relate to My Mother’s Wedding? My mother was half blind literally and figuratively: actually, subconsciously that’s the sense I’ve been trying to get across. The sense of being DAZZLED. Light so bright you can’t see. Captured underwater above ground in a heatwave, where the air is so warm it bends and slows things like water. Sound is muffled. Senses simultaneously heightened and dimmed. Malika said the poem was searching for an epiphany that doesn’t arrive…but there is no epiphany that day. Just the sunblindness. The dazzle.

April 17
The Magic Number Angel Darhouk at the Poetry Society in London just sent me this: pick 3 stories form Google News, using only words that occur in the first 3 paragraphs of each story, make a poem with 3 stanzas, 3 lines each.
April 11
Malika’s new notebook. I bought this notebook for myself.  But it wasn’t right. I knew  I’d have to give it to Malika. But I wasn’t ready back in November when I bought it. Or at Christmas. It sat in the corner of my study. Eventually I gave in and handed it over to its rightful owner on Tuesday night. 

Malika’s new notebook.

I bought this notebook for myself.  But it wasn’t right. I knew  I’d have to give it to Malika. But I wasn’t ready back in November when I bought it. Or at Christmas. It sat in the corner of my study. Eventually I gave in and handed it over to its rightful owner on Tuesday night.