The fictional self

None of these thoughts are original but I've been thinking them for a few days and since I don't want this blog to be only a graveyard of remembrances to people who've died, here's what's been on my mind:

Interviews with artists, writers, musicians - the whole category of people about whom you want to know more because you experienced a work you liked or lots of other people liked. And because curiosity is a collective, besetting sin.

How exhausting it must be to reveal something of oneself each time. How much easier to curate a handful of things - not untrue - to share, and share so many times that it becomes an ingredient in a recipe, a thing detachable, a fiction edited with a critical eye and separated from oneself so that the rest can remain one's own, unknowable.

Each creative person's way of giving nothing away to the people they meet, because they give far too much away of themselves in their work. Look for them there.

this rash of posts

Woke up unable to wake up. Spoke to the kid who sounded like I felt so told him to go back to sleep (which is what I wish I could do).

Have 3,000 odd words to write but instead I am stalking people on Twitter and Tumblr. (So much for killing myself off on Facebook).

Am seriously considering starting Twitter & Tumblrs for myself, seeing as all I want to do online is reblog other awesome people and think up hashtags.

Plus which, I am, like a dragon I know, BORED.

3,000 words to go, Space Bar. And it's already half the day done. This time yesterday, you'd knocked off the day's word count, read three pages of Parade's End and listened to one episode of.

No. TMI. This is a serious blog. Full of poetry and obituaries.

In the meantime, if people are discussing the awesomeness of Mike in PGW (and he is, let's not dispute that) can I make a mention of Peter Wimsey's reluctant innings in Death Must Advertise?

Has anybody understood a word I've said here today? I feel like I am speaking from The Other Side, wherever that may be, and people can only hear a roaring sound.

Magnus Pym beckons. I am surrounded by temptations that urge me to give in.

sliding (in several minds)

Sliding Rock, November 2011

 Recite to me please all the letters you are not able to read.
Spell "fling yourself skyward."

Spell "fever."
                   from 'Speech', Kazim Ali, The Far Mosque, Alice James Books, 2005.

*

There are preoccupations, some of them pleasant, others not. I won't apologise for my continued half-presence here; instead I will hope that it signals good things elsewhere.

Placeholder

The first mind-change of the year. Take note, all of you!I love that I can spend a half hour on a post and then decide it would be better left unsaid.

Oh well.

As a placeholder and to mark the passage of a post, I give you a miniaturised disturbance. This was taken a couple of days after Thane passed through Pondicherry. You don't want to see the trees or the streets. I promise you.

Spaniard Tilts at Bureaucratic Windmills

Actually, don't Get. Me. Started.

It's worse than sitting in a hospital waiting to see a doctor. At least there you can arrive at 8.45 for a 10.30 appointment and expect to get a decent breakfast and a place to sit indoors.

At the passport office, a whole day in the Inquiries queue earns you an appointment to see the RPO (other variations include DPO and PRO; one of the letters stands for Passport and the other for Officer. The third is irrlelevant) on a given date, with the (misleading and false) assurance that you don't need to wait in line; you just need to turn up at the given time and see the man in charge.

Right.

Anyone with a bit of sense interprets this as 'Be there as soon as you wake up'.

I have turned up at the passport office five mornings since November, at approximately 7.15 am. I stand in the Apoointments Only line, and if I'm lucky I'm number 6 or 7. More often, I'm 11 or 15. We stand in the sun, sit on bits of paper or move in and out of this line until 9 am, when a bunch of cops come out and organise the line in the usual way - with a red lathi. Fights break out in the other, longer line, where people have been waiting since last night. Agents work the line, picked out the susceptible and sometimes get caught. Money changes hands, often not even discreetly.

Remember: all this is only to make inquiries and show up for appointments; this passport office no longer takes applications, so these queues are not even in order to submit forms. They are for people who want to know why their passports haven't turned up after three, six, twelve months or longer.

Ten am sees us inside, with little chits of paper that decides in what order we see the RPO/PRO/DPO. These are meaningless, because there's another line of people that the cops call VIPs: they have letters from IPS/IAS/MLA type people.

If your serial number is 11, say, you can reasonably expect to wait until 2 pm to see the man, and you can almost certainly expect to be told that your file cannot be found. This is what has been happening to me for the last three appointments. I wait in line from 7.15 am only to be told, some six or seven hours later that I need to come back another day when they will have my file.

This, dear readers, is how Spaniard gets homicidal. Spaniard is A Knight with Very Little Patience. Oh, wait. I'm mixing books up, aren't I?

This is also why I have no energy and want to curl up in bed with a trashy book and oranges and chocolate. Escapism has a function if this is what short-term reality looks like.

(Anyone wanting to send me trashy books, oranges, chocolate, sympathy and valid passports, please get in touch).

So how's your end-of-the-year treating you?

'not speech but more silence'

Yes, things have been quiet here recently and are likely to remain this way in the foreseeable future. I'm saving the whys for later, for the ritual blog anniversary post which seems like the appropriate occasion for such a thesis.

For now, though, this: that the apparent compression of events and the speed of their occurence, both in the world and at home, requires not speech but more silence*.

Therefore no links either. Just the quiet reassurance of my arrival only to announce my continued departures.

Or something.
__

*In an inversion of an earlier use of these words.

Redacted poetry is a message in a bottle

Imagine you have one book with you, a reasonably large one, with lots of words in it. It is your lifeline, because you are now in a place where all other means of getting in touch with people has been taken away from you. There is only this one book, and it speaks to you and your one chance of speaking to the world is through the words that make up the book.

So you compose your message in your head, and you mark words in the book, and you carefully cut them out one by one, knowing all the while that for every word you use up that will speak, there's another that will be lost on the reverse. This is the opportunity cost of 'writing' your message out.

But you do it anyway, because you must. At first your dispatches are voluble and profligate. Soon, you ration your words. As the pages become cut-outs the books speaks to you differently. It must be a classic because every time you read it, it has something new. And you get different things out of it.

The end of the book does not come, as one assumes, when the last page is turned. It comes when what remains are the unusable words. Everyone has a different list of these, but because this is the book you have and this is your list, the words that remain include 'anneal' and 'recombinant' and 'brise'. This is not to say that you do not love these words, or are not happy that somebody - the author of the book, for instance - found a use for them; just that you can't imagine what you could have to say that would include these and other such words.

But you learn these words because - after you have said all you have to say, after you have used up all the other words - these are all that are left you. Until other words come from the outside, until they can be recycled, the words you don't want or need are your companions through what you hope is only a temporary silence.

**

Speaking of redactions, Ron Palmer and Stephanie Young in Shampoo 38.

in the nature of the beast

Writers/filmmakers/people who publicise their work* through their blogs/twitter accounts/facebook pages appear to use the medium less as an aggregator and more as a selective filter that lets in only the praise and keeps out the criticism.

This is only natural I suppose.

But I'm more fascinated by the phenomenon of linking to reviews at all. It assumes on the part of the consumer 1) laziness; 2) an inability to make up one's mind without help; 3) a willingness to be directed.

Also fascinated by what this says about the author**.

__

* Specifically, reviews. Information about availability/ readings/performances/exhibitions are different beasts.

**Here I'm distinguishing between the person who created said material -film, book, music album, painting - and the person in charge of disseminating information about it. It's when they're the same person and that things become really interesting.

From The Man Without Qualities

For Swar

From Chapter 21 of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities:

Brought up in a religious and feudal spirit, never exposed to contradiction through having to deal with middle-class people, not unread, but as an aftereffect of the clerical instruction of his sheltered youth prevented for the rest of his life from recognising in a book anything other than agreement with or mistaken divergence from his own principles, he knew the outlook of more up-to-date people only from the controversies in Parliament or in the newspapers. And since he knew enough to recognise the many superficialities there, he was daily confirmed in his prejudice that the true bourgeois world, more deeply understood, was basically nothing other than what he himself conceived it to be.

**

Something very like this is what Swar and I were discussing in Bangalore in early May when we were discussing our dissatisfaction with recent IWE. 

What else do people mean when they use phrases such as You really got into my head there or You put my exact thought into words, and say them when they mean to praise?

**

Of course, my recognition of the truth of the quoted passage only shows that I am equally susceptible to the glow that the confirmation of prejudice gives. When such truth is spoken by someone with talent and precision, it elevates one's own regard for one's intelligence.

pucker

Sexy Motherpucker™ . Also known as gift. I can't help feeling, though, that if I do use it, I might end up looking like Goldie Hawn in Death Becomes Her.

I have lovely friends.


'Made in the UK for the Soap and Glory Cosmetics Co.'

Yes. Soaps and Glory.

You're welcome.