Some more snooping

Doctor Is In Session

Where Were You People?

Idea For A TV Ad

Pastel Green

Q&A #02

Q.
Failure as renewal. The regenative capacity of failure.
Q.
Indeed. We do need to fix a parameter on the term. In this case, let's say, an examination of some sort, typically educational - the culmination of a period of work through a formal procedure of grading.
Q.
Certainly - take, for example, a postgraduate course, an MA. 0ne-to-three yeras, dissertation and/or project at the end, grading based on this.
Q.
...
Q...
... I take your point. And readily I do not know. Can failure be other than failure?
Q...
Wait. Let me think; let me unspool a line of thought. Let me think. Failure - formal failure. It is artifical - like a game. To fail a game, then. Failure as not winning a game.
Q.
I am. To bed then.

Recall

Some stuff I've liked:

The Faceman

never a second chance for a first impression

Love is for suckas

Doodling...

European Son

Not exhaustive, by any means.

Yours etc.

29A The G----
S------
E15 4--
29.05.0-

Dear N----,

I'm listening to Arcade Fire, 'Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)' and it reminds me of D-- A------, that place you used to live with P----- & S---- and that night - some party - when everyone had finally slunk off to bed and it was just you & I and whatsherface? C----'s girlfriend? Who wouldn't end? Keeping me embroiled in some mindless afterhours talk? You didn't care for it (or her), I wanted you, you to the door - you stood there a moment, your eyes - and to bed and me left to endless ramble interspersed with dumb reflective laughter, me humouring her, tirelessly.

I felt that was my chance. I felt that was my chance and that ever after has been the letting go.

Even other instances of potential: I probably approached them with a doubtful mind - the seed had been planted. For that - not some - reason I failed you. And I'm so like a kid around you, wanting you to let your guard down and nurse me - and you know what that means: save me.

Yours etc.

The Last Dash of the Summer Wasp

They await their fate. Summer’s passing leaves only death now. That cocoon of industry, kamikazely protected, vacated as other, less airborne spindling creatures attach their labour in spiralling formations. Yet all have not yet subscribed to that number: Roaming not in lushous colours, this chill that nips whilst striking discord in that productive melody, it still beats on, unsure as to what progression this change was meant to merge.

Only death waits them now. While still brazenly coloured, attuned to what once was the season’s colours, now those bold stripes mean only passing irritation: Already that fight has being fought and, like forgotten soldiers stationed disjointedly in lonely outposts of an already-fallen empire, these drones know not the impossibility of that which they seek – they must die the death appointed them, annilation and nothing less.

And still that date eludes them. Those shrugs and disinterested swipes their buzz is met with, accumulates their sense that all is not right. Their dwindling population sparks unsettling indications: That sought nectar, the sustenance of their servitude, is not to be found; that once unisoned vibration beat with such vigour, is no longer met with rhyming responding calls. Alone now are these redundant vectors. Death only awaits them now.

The Literature of Salvation

WHERE I'M SITTING, in the reading area on the upper floor of Chipping Barnet Library, directly opposite me on the top book shelf sit two bulk reference books: To the left is a Fouclair Gaelige dictionary and against it, to its right, lies an Oxford Russian dictionary; they are askew - the Irish dictionary is at a diagonal with the Russian chunk falling on top of it. They are together and mutually off-centre. This is it, what I'm feeling for: Two nations askew, neither here-nor-there but apart and as such at odds with their neighbours - and it is in this that alternative histories reside.

Literature: If we take unanalyised the position that pre-eighteenth century it was in Spain and in France that literature was at, that in the eighteenth century the English upped their game and stole that flame - then in the nineteenth century (say after Jane Austin and circa 1820) the frontier of literature betook itself to Russia and by that century's end and the twentieth's dawning, this nymph had again traded places finding itself again on a fringe in a bit-country with a chip on its shoulder: Ireland.

What of it?

This literature I speak of (the 18th century English, the 19th century Russian, and the early-20th Irish) is a heady mix of xenophobias, national fervour and the creation of national consciousness. It is a literature of salvation. Joyce's words: 'to forge in the smithy... the uncreated consciousness of my race.'

There is a zeal that is attached to it - a religious intensity. Puritanical authors who find themselves misunderstood as liberals. Yeats spoke of the 'fanatic heart': 'I have a fanatic heart,' repeated like a death knell. FM Dostoevsky in Siberia with his busted Bible page-worn and discoloured and returning desperately out of pocket and with more than a little time to make up for. Richardson type-setting Clarissa hopelessly adding first in the margins then in the text insertions of passages that are countable in powers and not tens.

Plato has Socrates bully the storyteller to concede that he is no master but instead divine. The muse is in him. Through his person something beyond his comprehension is unleashed. He is without theory and in fact pure act. Socrates condescends to pay tribute to this gift. Ion, the rhapsode, is divine acting as herald - this applies to all poets in Plato's thought-terrain.

The muse of the divine is fickle and traverses between generations from one place to another. It is called down, incanted, willed into existence by whoever happens to be at the frontier at any given time: the English after Cromwell and an executed king, the Russians after Napoleon and a smouldering Moscow, the Irish after Parnell and in the throes of social stasis.

It is in the regions of being neither here nor there that the muse is invoked and the literature of identity, of nationality - the literature of salvation - is become life.