indifferent references

on sanity

2007-06-29T15:11:00.001Z

‘Madness was someone with attention deficit disorder surfing the internet. Sanity was the ability to stick to your search.’ Glen Duncan

But I think that if madness is a blanket, then sanity is the holes. And some blankets are too well made, and worn in midsummer, sun beating down, airless and dark beneath. Fingers scrabbling for a loop to pull, a ripcord to tug on to draw some air inside. So I say get struggling, keep believing that you will dance your way through to next winter, wearing nothing but ragged lace.

sweet the sting

2007-06-14T09:59:00.000Z

Inspiration is like a mouthful of Spacedust. Sometimes sweet, sometimes gritty, but always followed by the pop pop pop of ideas, as words jump from your tongue and hit the roof of your mouth. Sometimes it’s a bit unexpected, a bit too much, almost frightening. But sometimes it feels so good its like the top of your head could come off.

As I sit spinning my own fragile strands of this great web we stand upon, I spot other treasures as I go. I pick them up and put them on my back and hope to weave them into my own designs somewhere down the road. Two recent mouthful of Spacedust came from Found - which reminds me to keep my eyes open at all times, in all places, because you never know what might be waiting for you. And from Mothballer - which elicits a sigh as I glance over silent images begging for their stories to be told.

And lastly, just to make sure I don’t get lost in virtual pages at the expense of the paper variety - a few choice pickings from recent reading -

‘Maybe the definition of home is the place where you are never forgiven, so you may always belong there, bound by guilt. And maybe the cost of belonging is worth it.’ Gregory Maguire

‘The truth cannot be told, that is why it is the truth.’ Andre Brink

‘You always pay too much. Particularly for promises.’ Cormac McCarthy

on a maddening loop

2007-04-23T10:46:00.000Z

Usually books and music inspire me more than films. Perhaps two hours of moving images fill my head to such a degree that there is no space left for independent thought. No soil untended for seeds of questions to take root.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was an exception to that rule. I entered into an engaging conversation with the characters, scenes and stories. I came away with far more questions than answers - but as always, I like it that way.

Some of the seedlings currently struggling to reach for the light include -

Is memory a loop? do new memories eventually overwrite and erase older, less cherished or less used ones? Perhaps memory is like a hard drive? so that when something goes wrong and you lose everything saved on it - only then do you remember that you haven’t backed it up? Only when lost do you cherish the memories that you stored away and never even glanced at. But how do you back up your mind? How do you preserve memories against mechanical failure? By taking their photos, by writing them down? Perhaps by telling their stories so they are shared between many rather than an unreliable few?

walking in my shoes

2007-04-14T11:06:00.000Z

Books can be a lot like life. In some there can be so much to take in that one threatens to suffocate. In a case like that I hold my breath, squint and try to focus on the little things. The innocence amid experience.

In The End of Alice it was this moment that stayed with me - that made me want to reach my hand through the page and lift her out.

She crosses one leg over the other and I can’t help but notice, not the skinned knee, not the bruised shin, but the writing on the bottom of her shoe, neat print.

‘Tell me about your sneakers,’ I say, children’s feet of course being my area of expertise.

‘On the right is Emily Dickinson, 712, and on the left, the one you’re looking at, is Sylvia Plath, “Lady Lazarus.” “Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air”’

She smiles. ‘It drives Mother crazy, especially when I put Ferlinghetti on my patent leathers. She hates modern poetry.’

A.M. Homes

And while on the subject of innocence and endings and beginnings - my word of the week. A word I never knew existed. A word so aware of itself - so very aptly named it makes me smile.

abecedarian \ay-bee-see-DAIR-ee-uhn\ - one who is learning the alphabet; hence, a beginner

the voice on my shoulder

2007-03-06T12:50:00.000Z

If I ever become a successful serial killer, and there’s always the slim hope that I might, I will use this quote in my defence -

‘If a killer kills, it is not because he “has no conscience” but because, in his horrendous existence, things are all the same, so that by destroying some of these replicas one has the momentary illusion of making space in the world, space to breathe and to re-create differences.’

Denis Duclos - The Werewolf Complex

lost within blue

2007-03-06T12:32:00.000Z

Lots of things let me down. And many things catch me unawares. Not least books. Often the ones I am most looking forward to disappoint, and those I have avoided as I graze along the shelf delight me when I finally embrace them.

This was the case for The Poisonwood Bible. I recall I bought it because it was cheap and it sounded like something I should read. But it has lurked unloved on my shelf for years, looking too wordy and too blue to tempt me. But February is a long month despite its days and I gave the blue book a go.

And these are just some of the wonders I found within -

‘Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them.’

‘my heart felt like a soft, damaged place in my chest, like a bruise on a peach.’

‘The substance of grief is not imaginary. It’s as real as rope or the absence of air, and like both those things it can kill.’

‘My mind is crowded with a forest of facts. Between the trees lie wide-open plains of despair. I skirt around them. I stick to the woods.’

Barbara Kingsolver

shine forth upon our clouded hills

2007-02-10T12:18:00.000Z

Mr Paxman recently gave me a thorough introduction to my kind through his book The English - A Portrait of a People. I found it fascinating but far from familiar. According to my birth certificate and my expired passport I am English - but I don’t fit the mould that snugly. Rather than cataloguing a list of all my discrepancies I will share those few points where I do connect with his findings.

Without needing to look at my over-stacked shelves or numerous to-be-read lists he observes that ‘books are a national currency’. He goes on to discuss ‘the absurdly overproductive British publishing business, which turns out 100,000 new books a year - more than the entire American publishing industry’ - one very good reason to call this island my home.

The most telling character trait I share with the typical English is my comfort in resigned pessimism - he confirms that we are ‘a people marching backwards into the future, for whom change always means change for the worse’.

And a further list also prompts ticks in a number of boxes - ‘individualism, pragmatism, love of words… fundamental cussedness’.

word of the day

2007-01-30T11:21:00.000Z

I like to wander. I like to wonder. Aloud, around and often in circles. I like the word meander. So this seems another useful word to add to my vocabulary.

maunder - [MON-duhr]- 1. To talk incoherently; to speak in a rambling manner. 2. To wander aimlessly or confusedly.

word of the day

2007-01-17T11:06:00.000Z

metanoia - [met-uh-noi-uh] - noun - a profound, usually spiritual, transformation; conversion. a fundamental change of character.

the spice of life

2007-01-13T12:20:00.000Z

I ordered Shantaram because it sounded like a book I might enjoy. When it arrived I hadn’t reckoned on the sheer size of it. Over 900 wordpacked pages. It weighed heavy on my shelf for a couple of years, waiting for a surge of strength in my forearms. That time came a few weeks ago - and it was well worth the wait / weight.

I like philosophy. And I like creative writing. I like the former more when it fuses with the latter. Too many philosophy books are stuffy and stale. Too many novels are empty and drifting. If a novel is a story of life - filled with living, breathing, loving, crying, sinking and dying people, then it seems the perfect place to drop the seed of philosophy. To watch it take root and grow. Some writers have achieved this - Camus and Satre to name two, and at times Gregory David Roberts comes close too.

And from those pages, these are some of the more fascinating flowers I watched grow, from which I picked a bloom to press between these screens, to peruse at my leisure.

‘At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we wont stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone.’

‘if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we’re half way to wisdom’

‘The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling, and sewn with rebus threads. Most of the time, the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on. But everything has its cause and its meaning. Every life, every love, every action and feeling and thought has its reason and significance: its beginning, and the part it plays in the end. Sometimes, we do see. Sometimes, we see the past so clearly, and read the legend of its parts with such acuity, that every stitch of time reveals its purpose, and a kind of message is enfolded in it. Nothing in any life, no matter how well or poorly lived, is wiser than failure or clearer than sorrow. And in the tiny, precious wisdom that they give to us, even those dread and hated enemies, suffering and failure, have their reason and their right to be.’

Gregory David Roberts

gone but not forgotten

2006-11-17T13:53:00.000Z

Its been a while since I have collated my collected quotes. So here are the flashes that refuse to fade from some of my recent reading.

‘When we spoke the wind whipped our words inland, and I imagined them being trapped miles away, caught in the branches of trees like plastic bags’

James Robertson

‘A vapour trail gashed the sky. But the sky healed itself. Without fuss.’

David Mitchell

Striking descriptions of the natural world always jump out at me.

‘and even when peoples names began to slip out of reach his was the last name she forgot.’

Jon McGregor

Memory - one of my favourite pastimes. Perhaps all we can hope for is to be the last name our loved ones forget?

‘All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.’

Mitch Albom

I often feel that I spend my time stating the same point over and over again, just in slightly different ways. Here Albom makes a point that is often repeated, but gives it a new powerful slant.

‘a woman named Mrs Benson, who spoke as through a pencil sharpener that turned all her speech into impaling pointy phrases.’

Eli Gottlieb

We have probably all known someone like this!

And finally, after years of reading about ‘nonpareils’ in various novels, I looked them up to see what they were. And they are those milk or white chocolate buttons with the technicoloured balls on. Although there seems some debate as to whether the word applies to the whole sweet or just the balls. I always thought they were more aptly referred to as ‘hundreds and thousands’?

eloquent overspill

2006-09-21T10:55:00.000Z

I am harvesting more quotes from my current reading than I can sow into my Booker blog. The extras will not be cast aside. They will appear here -

‘They flutter like dreaming eyes, delicate parts removed from the machine of sleep. They fall from the sparrow tree, soft fruit of their bones. Sparrows mating, fine clocks mating, begetting time, which scatters at angles, always at angles.’

‘Love occupied the spaces between, worries the edges of their consciousness like a song neither could quite remember.’

‘But this is the unreal place, the place at the heart of things, where there is no fake eccentricity instead of real madness, where, it seems to me, everything is trapped somehow, and has to struggle just not to become grotesque.’

Naeem Murr

‘Once you locked into language, all you could do was shuffle the greasy pack of a few thousand words that millions of people had used before.’

‘Neglected meanings piled up like unopened letters. She knew they contained ever more threatening reminders that her life was unexamined.’

Edward St Aubyn

‘I don’t know why somebody spending their time thinking would surprise anybody. There are thousands of thing to think about. When it comes to thinking, like is like a giant amusement park. When you walk into the park, you should want to go on all the rides.’

‘I stare at his black hair and the way it slides smoothly over the shoulders of his jacket. He must be made at least partly of silk.’

M. J. Hyland

a couple of quotes

2006-09-04T11:47:00.000Z

‘Innocence is like blindness - all your other senses are heightened in compensation.’

‘I longed for the sleep I had known in childhood : the deep bath of nothingness, the black sea of innocence.’

Sam Taylor

in your darkest hour I'll be there for you

2006-09-04T11:21:00.000Z

I haven’t spent much time with Ted Bundy since the late 80’s. I haven’t looked at pictures of him since I saw him shaved and fried and laid out on the slab. Until a recent documentary reintroduced me to my old friend.

Through this I heard how, the night before his execution, he met with an eminent christian and accused pornography of leading him astray.

How convenient - for both Bundy and america. That both should have a reason, an explanation, an excuse. A path which could lead this educated, handsome and charming man to the pastime of bludgeoning, strangulation and mutilation of over 30 people.

How much safer we can sleep at night if we know that as long as we steer clear of those sweaty images we wont be tempted to pick up the unidentified blunt instrument.

How much nicer than wondering if there could be a little dark spark flickering inside any of us, just waiting for someone or something to fan it into life.

every line of a long moment

2006-08-04T16:35:00.000Z

[Theres something in the air, when the images on the covers of your books and your albums collide. It means you know who you are. It’s a sign that you have arrived.]

Roddy Woomble - My Secret is my Silence

This is an album for people who live at the edges of the land - who hear messages on the sea breezes. People who are at home among the driftwood - sitting wondering where all the pebbles came from, and where they will eventually go to.

And happy as you may be, to just sit and be still, he wants to take you for a walk. He wants to talk in riddles that circle as they serve their purpose. He wants you to think about the magic of names and words, and the letters that dance together to make them. All the little things that combine into parts and wholes.

I once wrote -

These trees look down –
beacons of wisdom
in our drunken darkness.
Carving questions in their bark
a leaf for every answer.

And this album is such a tree. And these are songs of filemot days - endings that have to end, if only to allow for what comes next. And when all our autumns have fallen to the floor, we will be left to gaze at the shadows of where these trees once stood.

quotes of the weeks

2006-07-28T10:52:00.000Z

‘My mind is racing. But now my face feels like concrete, with my expression just draped over.’

‘A gang of pigeons shatter their shadows over the railway bridge’

Gwendoline Riley

‘After all, the animals simply looked like their names, tigers, lions, penguins, elephants, no more, no less.’

Ian McEwan

pocketful of wisdoms

2006-06-29T17:13:00.000Z

‘The roof of the sky was a stuck clock, moving across, frozen on its hinges of air.’

‘She smelt of dancing cinnamon moving about on the burned edge of dark rooms.’

‘The trees stood without effort and even the air lacked ambition.’

‘He stood, pacing in his mind, watching the slush of the corner for a sign, as if sanity were a pair of idle hands with nothing to fidget with.’

‘Work is the most overused excuse for not being able to live any other way.’

Dow Mossman - The Stones of Summer

flotsam and jetsam

2006-06-28T19:04:00.000Z

‘That day it didn’t really rain: the sky just sort of dripped, as if the gray ceiling of clouds had a thousand little leaks.’

Arthur Nersesian

littoral - Of, relating to, or on a coastal or shore region, especially a seashore. A coastal region, especially the zone between the limits of high and low tides.

one more for the road

2006-06-14T16:32:00.000Z

Further to the circumnavigator discussion of this book -

‘I have realized that an exile has no place anywhere, because there is no place, because the place where we started to dream, where we discovered the natural world around us, read our first book, loved for the first time, is always the world of our dreams. In exile one is nothing but a ghost, the shadow of someone who never achieves full reality. I ceased to exist when I went into exile; I
started to run away from myself.’

Before Night Falls - Reinaldo Arenas

a good haul

2006-06-07T16:23:00.000Z

bombinate \BOM-buh-nayt\, intransitive verb:To buzz; to hum; to drone.

cerebration \ser-uh-BRAY-shuhn\, noun:The act or product of thinking; the use of the power of reason; mental activity; thought.

glabrous \GLAY-bruhs\, adjective:Smooth; having a surface without hairs, projections, or any unevenness.

otiose \OH-shee-ohs; OH-tee-\, adjective:Ineffective; futile. Being at leisure; lazy; indolent; idle. Of no use.

pablum \PAB-luhm\, noun:Something (as writing or speech) that is trite, insipid, or simplistic.

pleonasm \PLEE-uh-naz-uhm\, noun:The use of more words than are necessary to express an idea.

Recently appreciated quotes

2006-06-04T14:38:00.000Z

‘The mind is infinitely larger than the world it inhabits. There is more to the human brain than machinery or meat.’

Liz Jensen

‘The past and the future are dangerous countries’

‘The anguish that rolled down then was like the first feeling ever to touch me: its rawness, its power, was almost like love.’

Damon Galgut

Choking on quotes

2006-05-18T17:36:00.000Z

‘we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not’

‘we forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget’

‘innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself’

‘the apparently bottomless gulf, between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love’

‘keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss’

Joan Didion - Slouching Towards Bethlehem

paper blossoms

2006-04-06T12:33:00.000Z

‘that point in August when nothing tangible suggests the demise of summer, except our apprehension’

David Gutterson - East of the Mountains

‘There were clouds of pigeons, flocks of Japanese tourists, and masonry so ornate and delicate that it seemed to be dreaming.’

Douglas Coupland - Eleanor Rigby

Word of the day

defenestrate - to throw out of a window

Quote of the day

2006-03-09T18:27:00.000Z

‘Each of us is stranded on our own desert island, unable to know anything of the world that lies beyond the horizon of our own sensory experiences. We are closed off from the world beyond. And we are closed off from each other. We are prisoners within our own minds.’

Stephen Law

Word of the day

2006-02-21T13:03:00.000Z

canard \kuh-NAHRD\, noun: 1. An unfounded, false, or fabricated report or story. 2. A horizontal control and stabilizing surface mounted forward of the main wing of an aircraft. 3. An aircraft whose horizontal stabilizer is mounted forward of the main wing.

In French canard means "duck" or "false news; hoax." The latter sense of the word probably comes from the phrase vendre un canard à moitié, "to half-sell a duck" -- which is to say, not to sell it at all, hence "to take in, to make a fool of."

Quote of the day

2006-02-01T18:04:00.000Z

'There is a difference between being a memory and being only a memory.'

Michael Wood

Word of the day

2006-01-29T12:53:00.000Z

epigone \EP-uh-gohn\, noun: An inferior imitator, especially of some distinguished writer, artist, musician, or philosopher.

Quotes of the day

2006-01-26T18:15:00.001Z

'I return to problems I can't solve, not because I'm an idiot, but because the real problems can't be solved. The universe is expanding. The more we see, the more we discover there is to see.

Always a new beginning, a different end.'

'There are two facts that all children need to disprove sooner or later; mother and father. If you go on believing in the fiction of your own parents, it is difficult to construct any narrative of your own.'

Jeanette Winterson

off the shelf

2006-01-21T16:08:00.000Z

Mercy Among the Children - David Adams Richards

The story of a boy whose father chooses to stubbornly walk a merciful path, despite many obstacles in his way.

'...the sky was like building blocks of eternity...'

The Penelopiad - Margaret Atwood

An age old story told in a new way - and from the point of view of the girl.

'...the gods often mumble...'

We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

Does a mother always love a child? what happens when she doesnt? can a child be unlovable?

'...everything in their house was buffed to a high, flat shine, so much reflection to protect the fact that there was nothing underneath...'

Short and sweet

2006-01-09T12:02:00.000Z

fireflies -
remembering things
I've only imagined

Kenneth Payne

standing up
for a closer look
at the stars

Maurice Tasnier

Some Words

2006-01-04T12:05:00.000Z

lambent - 1. Playing lightly on or over a surface, flickering 2. Softly bright or radiant; luminous 3. Light and brilliant.

logorrhea - Excessive talkativeness or wordiness.

querulous - 1. Apt to find fault; habitually complaining 2. Expressing complaint; fretful; whining.

Poem for today

2006-01-04T12:02:00.000Z

The One

After all these years
he turns up
in his new blazer
with the grey piping,
smiling just a little
anxiously, my baby
brother they expected me
to look after. Peter,
wait he calls out.
And shaking, shaken,
I round on him:
I haven't gone.
You're the one
who got drowned
and turned me
into their only child.

Michael Laskey

New words learned

2005-11-12T15:02:00.000Z

subfusc - Of a dark, dull, or somber color.

oneiric - Of, pertaining to, or suggestive of dreams; dreamy.

as the nights draw in

2005-10-26T18:22:00.000Z

I Sincerely Apologise For All The Trouble I've Caused - David Ford

He sounds familiar - brittle, but never broken. A light at the periphery of vision, insistent, almost maddening - there to remind you of something you dare not forget.

The tracklist alone reads like the note that you stick beside your mirror - a mantra of all the things you said, all the places you avoid, all the people you could be.

An album comfortable to face up to contradictions - it resonates with a poem I read this week claiming - 'My tears despise my knowledge, and vice versa.' Patrick Mackie

Current highlights - Katie, If You Only Knew, Laughing Aloud.

Current favourite lyric -
'the truth
Well its for students of philosophy,
and faith is for losers like us.'

Poem for today

2005-10-19T15:16:00.000Z

Metaphor

A tear flames - falls,
carrying light downwards -
another thing that won't come back.
The table you sit at is solid with factuality
that a tear won't burn a hole in.

Patrick Mackie

Word of the day

2005-10-17T22:05:00.000Z

susurration

A soft, whispering or rustling sound; a murmur.

on autumns doorstep

2005-10-07T15:49:00.000Z

All Maps Welcome - Tom Mcrae

Current highlights - For the Restless, Packing for the Crash, It Aint You, My Vampire Heart, Still Lost.

"I’m excited and if not happy – it’s me after all – then at least as close to peaceful as I’ve been recently. It’s a strange life at times, and I’m no closer to understanding anything, but somehow singing and writing songs is as good a map for this journey as I’ve found yet." Tom Mcrae

Patron Saint of Liars - Ann Patchett

... set in a Catholic home for unwed mothers in Habit, Kentucky.

Think before you lay the foundations for a lie - once built they are near impossible to demolish.

deliquesce \del-ih-KWES\, intransitive verb: 1. To melt away or to disappear as if by melting. 2. (Chemistry) To dissolve gradually and become liquid by attracting and absorbing moisture from the air, as certain salts, acids, and alkalies. 3. To become fluid or soft with age, as certain fungi. 4. To form many small divisions or branches -- used especially of the veins of a leaf.

Deliquesce comes from Latin deliquescere, from de-, "down, from, away" + liquescere, "to melt," from liquere, "to be fluid." It is related to liquid and liquor.