.

Tender heart

2012-02-14T00:56:00.004-08:00

"We have said nothing about Chirico until we take into account his most personal views about the artichoke, the glove, the cookie, or the spool." Andre Breton.

Chirico is said to have dreamt of artichokes (great, giant artichokes!) in a piazza before painting them 1913. I heard tell of a famous artichoke pizza in New York, but I never tried it. I imagine his views about cookies are much the same as mine and yours.

The globe artichoke (which I like to eat with a fork) is also known as cynara scolymus. It is a beautiful fruit, made to be loved in folds. Here is its love letter.

Ode to the Artichoke by Pablo Neruda

The artichoke
With a tender heart
Dressed up like a warrior,
Standing at attention, it built
A small helmet
Under its scales
It remained
Unshakeable,
By its side
The crazy vegetables
Uncurled
Their tendrills and leaf-crowns,
Throbbing bulbs,
In the sub-soil
The carrot
With its red mustaches
Was sleeping,
The grapevine
Hung out to dry its branches
Through which the wine will rise,
The cabbage
Dedicated itself
To trying on skirts,
The oregano
To perfuming the world,
And the sweet
Artichoke
There in the garden,
Dressed like a warrior,
Burnished
Like a proud
Pomegrante.
And one day
Side by side
In big wicker baskets
Walking through the market
To realize their dream
The artichoke army
In formation.
Never was it so military
Like on parade.
The men
In their white shirts
Among the vegetables
Were
The Marshals
Of the artichokes
Lines in close order
Command voices,
And the bang
Of a falling box.

But
Then
Maria
Comes
With her basket
She chooses
An artichoke,
She's not afraid of it.
She examines it, she observes it
Up against the light like it was an egg,
She buys it,
She mixes it up
In her handbag
With a pair of shoes
With a cabbage head and a
Bottle
Of vinegar
Until
She enters the kitchen
And submerges it in a pot.

Thus ends
In peace
This career
Of the armed vegetable
Which is called an artichoke,
Then
Scale by scale,
We strip off
The delicacy
And eat
The peaceful mush
Of its green heart.

Shelf life

2012-02-05T03:58:00.000-08:00

It is sad but true, I have only just discovered Foyles books. Spent a lovely afternoon fingering the spines of these beautiful murder mysteries. Fingering spines is another textual/anatomical insertion; where will these meeting points end? Do books have veins? Do they have hands? Or is it their fate to be forever manhandled with no hope of protest or arrest.

Boom

2012-01-23T03:19:00.000-08:00

Jungle

2012-01-13T00:27:00.000-08:00

Eve Arnold, A girl who shares a bath and a flat with three other girls. 1961. Via Fans in a Flashbulb.

So long, farewell

2011-12-28T04:14:00.000-08:00

It's always good to try and leave a few bread crumbs on the trail, just in case you ever need to find your way home.

The suitcase

2011-12-12T06:39:00.000-08:00

Is magic

Tough but gentle

2011-12-05T02:48:00.000-08:00

Washing your children and their clothes at the same time.

A mum is tough but gentle. A mum also seems only to have male offspring . . .

This is England.

Obviously this is amazing.

To do

2011-11-28T02:58:00.000-08:00

Adolf Konrad's packing list, Oscar Bluemner's papers and Franz Kline's grocery list.

Archer

2011-11-23T10:52:00.000-08:00

"He bent and laid his lips on her hands, which were cold and lifeless. She drew them away, and he turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the gaslight of the hall, and plunged out into the winter night bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate."

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence.

Blue for you

2011-11-19T05:12:00.000-08:00

Stunning colourways in Forest Hill. Mint humbugs, the spines of Penguin books, packets of Camel cigarettes. Another shy male launderette owner who asked not to appear in any images.

Conflict zone

2011-11-12T03:05:00.001-08:00

This weekend's report comes to you from The Laundry Room on Hoxton Street where we caught the local washing-machine repair man at work (he declined to stop for a photograph). Points of interest include the sign on the wall offering £100 as a reward for any information that could help lead to the arrest of a gang who frequent the launderette and occasionally force its closure.

Impressive driers.

Sorted

2011-11-10T03:19:00.000-08:00

Inner

2011-11-06T05:11:00.000-08:00

“The first two weeks after her return represented to Mrs. Peniston the domestic equivalent of a religious retreat. She ‘went through’ the linen and blankets in the precise spirit of a penitent exploring the inner folds of conscience; she sought for moths as the stricken soul seeks for lurking infirmities. The topmost shelf of every closet was made to yield up its secret, cellar and coal-bin were probed to their darkest depths and, as a final stage in the lustral rites, the entire house was swathed in penitential white and deluged with expiatory soapsuds.”

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth.

Partir

2011-11-02T02:33:00.000-07:00

Chapter 14

Quelle heure est-il?

Words of approval and praise -Words dealing with railway travel -Present tense of partir to leave, and sortir to go out -Expressions of time of day.

"Against the backdrop of the metro our indiviual acrobatics seem to play a fortuitously calming effect in the destiny of everyone's daily lives, in the law of human actions summed up by a few commonplaces and symbolized by a strange public place -an interlacing of routes whose several explicit prohibitions ("no smoking" defense de fumer, "no entry" passage interdit) underscore its collective and ruled character." -Marc Auge

"In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd ;
Petals on a wet, black bough."

Ezra Pound

My beautiful launderette

2011-10-26T01:26:00.000-07:00

Images from Martin Yong; "in the launderette we have a piece of highstreet design history from the 1950s preserved for us to enjoy."

Service

2011-10-25T06:02:00.000-07:00

With a smile.
Which means
I will
Scoop out
the (invisible) dirt
From the milk
I have foamed
just for you.
Like some Dada renegade
I spoon air from air,
Asking forgiveness as I do.
You do not deign
To pour
So wait
Until I realise
That is what you want.

What did your last
Slave die of,
Weak elbows?

Tea-cosy

2011-10-16T05:24:00.000-07:00

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and the tea-cosy. I can't say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left. And I have found that sitting in a place where you have never sat before can be inspiring -I wrote my very best poem while sitting on the hen-house. Though even that isn't a very good poem. I have decided my poetry is so bad that I mustn't write any more of it."

The openning lines of I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. One of the best first passages of all time.

Kitchen sinks and soap. My mother used to wash the twins in the kitchen sink.

In other news; fetch-light - a name for the 'corpse candle' supposed to be seen before a person's death travelling from his house to his grave.

Spoiling the view

2011-10-12T06:09:00.001-07:00

La Villa Madamma, Rome, 1778

Washington Street, Manhattan, 1936
From the very brilliant New York Public Library Archive.

Outgrowth

2011-10-11T12:46:00.000-07:00

"your homecoming will be my homecoming"
e.e.cummings

"And it is the tension between these two terms, an inside and an outside, which little by little becomes the continuation of an inside, that the appropriation of space takes place. As a result the neighbourhood can be called an outgrowth of the abode; for the dweller it amounts to the sum of all trajectories inaugurated from the dwelling place."
Pierre Mayol/

(Ingrowth?)

Pipilotti Rist

2011-10-08T01:58:00.000-07:00

Pipilotti Rist's show at the Hayward. Stare at a crystal ball nestled in the folds of a handbag, listen to a shell tell you about her answering machine, try not to tread on the angry fairy trapped in the floor. Dapple in the sunlight projected in the loo. Look for videos in the leaves of lettuce, stare up at three hundred pairs of pants reaching out accross the sky. GO AND PLAY.

Near Bleeker

2011-09-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

Ceasura

2011-09-20T04:33:00.001-07:00

Nausicaa; burner of ships

2011-09-10T02:17:00.000-07:00

She strings out the wracked cream undershirts of sailors along the stones,
Wraught with salt, the sea laps lapels, starches the soiled seams,
And the pebbles snuggle up against the buttons.
The sea marbles her feet, nails varnished, classically artful in coral.
Nausicaa pulls her hair from its tie and lays it in the water,
The fish swim in its darkness.
Molluscs hanker from their rock grips for the tendrils of tenderness opening and closing their puckered lips towards her, ruffled like feathers in the wind,
Poor shells. The crabs stagger to be near her.
And Nausicaa’s cheek is pressed against the sand,
She has closed her eyes and is imagining it’s a hand.

Between the bedsheets

2011-09-09T03:22:00.001-07:00

1985

2011-09-07T02:03:00.000-07:00

The trope of the bridge is extremely useful when thinking about the space of launderettes and the spaces occupied by washing-lines. Waiting rooms and bridges are spaces between. Neither here nor there, they occupy the same emotional realm as held breath, paused clocks, and the decks of ships pointing out to sea. This is part of the pleasure taken in the launderette, a pleasure which has been transferred in modern advertising to the pleasure of the random sexual encounter, clothes to one side, all bets are off, anything could happen.

Poetic Peckham

2011-09-04T07:13:00.000-07:00

This Friday we saw NEW HOPE FOR THE DEAD in a hay barn amphitheatre in a carpark in Peckham. I like seeing people climb into windows made of hay and then fall back out. I like Campari cocktails and cheap white wine spiked with elderflower cordial even more. The night was one of good smells, end of the world viewscapes, backward caps, pulled up socks, and poems about YouTube sensations and the arts cuts.

The night is a literary review hosted by Florence Welch and Stuart Hammond. They had seven living writers read words they had written before reading words by someone dead. The readers were Sam Buchan-Watts, Rachael Allen, Matthias 'Wolfboy' Connor, Sam Riviere, Heather Phillipson and Craig Brown.

Thinking about the internet often makes me want to cry so I'm not sure how I feel about writing about it. The poets Rachael Allen and Sam Riviere managed to do just that very beautifully and succinctly. You can read Sam Riviere here and Rachael Allen just below.

Random

Boxxy you are the home of the anonymous.
I liked to read on you all my false news
it went across your head like
The Financial District and how you glowed
with it. I got tipex and painted you
as an angel on my childhood rucksack
and wore you proudly to school

you’ve got the kind of fame of girls
Who killed other girls in childhood
I wonder if you’ve ever seen lamposts
In LA? Do they have crabs where you are?
Sometimes everyone thinks you’re dead.
I saw a rainbow today but it had nothing
on you. Your eyes held entire months
of teenage summers when my skin smelt
of a scented diary from the garden centre
or an Impulse set from Safeways
anyway I think where we lost you was
somewhere in the Californian sun squint and glare

Mass Observation

2011-09-02T00:56:00.000-07:00

"Many people seem unwilling to parade their more personal garments in front of a shop full of people, and, possibly as a result, launderettes have become classed as "gossip shops for lazy people".

Space

2011-08-26T05:24:00.001-07:00

Tina Modotti and Umbo, my picks from Moma this summer.

A Coney Island of the Mind

2011-08-05T15:40:00.000-07:00

Corn dogs, summer sun, and sea gulls the size of dogs. Being where the sea meets the city is sandy and gritty. I ate a mango on a stick and thought about eating a knish.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti said it better,

"The pennycandystore beyond the El
is where I first
fell in love
with unreality
Jellybeans glowed in the semi-gloom
of that september afternoon
A cat upon the counter moved among
the licorice sticks
and tootsie rolls
and Oh Boy Gum

Outside the leaves were falling as they died

A wind had blown away the sun

A girl ran in
Her hair was rainy
Her breasts were breathless in the little room

Outside the leaves were falling
and they cried
Too soon! too soon!"

Making do

2011-07-26T03:09:00.000-07:00

I am reading a book called Austerity Britain by David Kynaston and have come accross this marvellous moan from Vere Hodgson, a welfare worker in west London in March 1949 (capitalisation model's own). "Oh for a little extra butter! Then I should not mind the meat. I want half a pound of butter a week for myself alone . . . For ten years we have been on this miserable butter ration, and I am fed up. I NEVER enjoy my lunch."

I feel entirely blessed and will hurry home to have toast and butter for lunch. The book is made up mainly from the records of the Mass Observation movement who asked lots of interesting questions (eg. "What are your feelings about housework? What do you consider to be the six main inconviniences of present day living conditions?") and who rigorously observed the most compelling experiences of everyday life. They observed the cinema going public and noted that "whereas men tended to weep at moments of reserve, women wept at parting and loss". If I were parted from my butter ration I would indeed weep.

Dawn

2011-07-22T01:58:00.000-07:00

Dawn is overrated. But the first train is always a godsend.

“The breath of the moist earth is light around its unexpanded buds.” –Shelley

“The regularities of the metro are obvious and well established. Both the first and the last metro perhaps draw some poetic allure from being seen, thus assigned an immutable place in the order of everyday life, the two being symbols of the ineluctable character of limits, of the irreversibility of time, and of the succession of days.” (Augé ,28.)

Froth

2011-07-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

Couchette and launderette . . . The same last four letters. A coincidence? I THINK NOT.

It's worrying that this is what gets me excited these days.

I have been frothing milk for more hours than I have been doing anything else this weekend. But look where I get to do it . . .

I really really want to buy a van just like it.

My hipstamatic dont lie

2011-07-03T01:09:00.000-07:00

Dan the egg man

2011-06-23T03:07:00.001-07:00

I am inordinately happy to finally be reading Daniel Spoerri's An Anecdoted Topography of Chance.

I will share with you the second footnote on the first page.

"The author, off and on for about three years, has been so preoccupied with the preparation of an "eggcyclopaedia" that many of his friends call him "DAN THE EGG MAN". The book will explore the subject through such fields as advertising and alchemy, biology and business, cartoons and cookery, dancing and destiny, fables and feathers, garbage and games, happenings and hygiene, incubation and intriuge, journalism and juggling, the Kabbalah and the Koran, limericks and lapis lazuli, musicology and medicine, noodles and names, optics and orgasm, prophesy and poaching, quackery and quattrocento, radioactivity and ribaldry, sturgeon and sculpture, taboos and tattoos, vaginal stimulation and VIRGIL, warbling and WITTGENSTEIN, Yiddish yarns and yoga, zombiism and Zen, to pick a few categories at random. I myself caught the egg bug from the author, and after a month of intense and pleasurable research srrounded by my books at the Chateau de Ravenel was able to hand over to him more than 115 prime egg quotations in German, French, English, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Latin."

I would like nothing better than to spend the rest of my life researching "prime egg quotations". The only one I can think of now is that Dan managed to convince Tash that it was illegal to freeze eggs . . .

Couchette

2011-06-22T03:42:00.000-07:00

"a railroad car conveying basic non-private sleeping accommodation"

Sophie Calle and Annecy Attlee.

Nora

2011-06-15T10:35:00.001-07:00

Pin-up for June? Nora Barnacle. Tomorrow is Bloomsday, so here is the lovely and long-suffering woman who made it all happen (by agreeing to meet a certian James Joyce on June 16th 1904).

"O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactusses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I though well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

James Joyce, Ulysses

A dying art

2011-06-13T05:45:00.000-07:00

I cannot throw away envelopes.

Mushrooms on toast

2011-06-11T04:42:00.001-07:00

Dead letter office

2011-06-09T03:48:00.001-07:00

I am reading about the dead letter office (a warehouse in Belfast) and undercover mail. Did you know that during the second world war post to enemy countries was sent via Thomas Cook in Lisbon?

"Letters and envelopes must omit the sender's address. They must only refer to matters of personal interest… (a) no reference may be made to any town (other than Lisbon), village, locality, ship or journey… No indication may be given that the writer is not in Portugal… (b) mention of a letter … received from or written to enemy occupied territory is not permitted… " Dr. Josef Wallach.

The same process for undercover letters was used thirty years later by Israel and the Arab states following the 1967 war. I am pretty excited, will have to see if I can find out more in Lisbon at the end of the month.

Solis Laundrette (no.355 Bethnal Green road)

2011-06-07T08:12:00.001-07:00

To the sky

2011-06-06T03:46:00.001-07:00

Letters on sun spots.
The filling in of perfect blanks with iron pegs.
I have twenty-six pegs and none of them cast a shadow like the sun.
Its spots are fiery ink, bullet holes, visions.
And I am a mad man, long past the point of pulling threads from the sky.

Seven year itch

2011-06-02T01:51:00.000-07:00

Cast adrift

2011-06-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

The storm scene from Robinson Crusoe looks like it's been through a real storm.

Rue Mouffetarde

2011-05-30T11:44:00.001-07:00

"In my room, number 13 on the fourth floor of the Hotel Carcassonne at 24 Rue Mouffetard … is a table Vera painted blue one day to surprise me. I wanted to see what the objects on half of [it] … could suggest to me or spontaneously awaken in me while describing them; like Sherlock Holmes, who could solve a crime from a single object; or like historians who … reconstitute an entire epoch out of the most famous fixation in history, Pompeii." Daniel Spoerri, Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard

Clothesline canyon

2011-05-30T06:42:00.000-07:00

A New York tenement yard, 1900.

And for some Manhattan flavour of a different kind, I am reading The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. It's the orginal Gossip Girl and is scathingly brilliant.

"Ruling the turbulent element called home was the vigorous and determined figure of a mother still young enough to dance her balldresses to rags, while the hazy outline of a neutral-tinted father filled an intermediate space between the butler and the man who came to wind the clocks."

Frank O'Hara

2011-05-26T07:13:00.000-07:00

The Highway

as cool as rushes
rush is
along the paved
as my dripping
anoints tar
coursing macadam
and the concrete
slipping
under my blood
o empty heart

[October 13, 1946]

Love

2011-05-17T12:58:00.001-07:00

Patty

2011-05-13T09:50:00.000-07:00

Pin up for May? Patty Hearst.

"Honey, the way you play guitar makes me feel so, makes me feel so masochistic, the way you go down, deep into the neck, and I would do anything, I would do anything, and Patty Hearst, you standing there in front of the Symbionese Liberation Army's Flag, with your legs spread, I was wondering , were you getting it every night from a back revolutionary man and his women, or were you really dead? And now that you're on the run, what goes on in your mind, your sisters they sit by the window, and all your Mama does is sit and cry, and your Daddy, well you know what your Daddy said Patty, You know what your Daddy said Patty? He said, he said, he said, well sixty days ago she was such a lovely child, now here she is with a gun in her hand."

Margot

2011-04-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's because my denial of all things tobacco is beginning to waver, maybe it's because I am thinking about locks and doors so much these days, but Margot Tennenbaum is definitely my pin up for April.

She has a touch of Holly Golightly who ran away from her hick family and old man husband. Like Holly she has disasterous mood swings and a uniform. She is ten times as secretive and duplicitous as most femme fatales and is desired by not one but two Wilson brothers. She ran away to the museum and kissed her adoptive brother, she somehow managed to get married to and divorced from Bill Murray.

In her honour I will be smoking (in secret), chaining my television to the wall, and watching it in the bath.

I will also listen to this amazing Margot mix tape on repeat.

Little apple

2011-03-25T01:41:00.001-07:00

I am in the Spring issue of Transform! It's an expanding online magazine based in New York, it's very mysterious though.

In my dream James Franco was helping me with my essay. We both had daughters and it looked like this was the beginning of a beautiful friendship . . . There was also a python trapped in the cupboard trying to eat the cats.

Paris not flooded

2011-03-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

In 1955 Paris was flooded, almost. The streets were filled with water, lamposts grew like flowers and all that remained of the cars was the horizontal space of their rooves. They peppered the watery streets like so many floating kitchen tables. None of these tables retained salt or pepper.

A woman goes to the butcher in her canoe. I am not sure what I would ride to work, an inverted desk? A bedroom drawer?

Late night snacks

2011-03-04T00:40:00.000-08:00

A return ticket

2011-03-01T13:34:00.000-08:00

The Times, 5 June 1913, page 9

The desperate act of a woman who rushed from the rails on to the course as the horses swept round Tattenham Corner, apparently from some mad notion that she could spoil the race, will impress the general public even more, perhaps, than the disqualification of the winner. She did not interfere with the race, but she nearly killed a jockey as well as herself, and she brought down a valuable horse. She seems to have run right in front of Anmer, which JONES was riding for the KING. It was impossible to avoid her. She was ridden down, the horse turned a complete somersault and fell upon his rider. That the horse was the KING’S was doubtless an accident : it would need almost miraculous skill or fortune to single out any particular animal as they passed a particular point. Some of the spectators close to the woman supposed that she was under the impression that the horses had all gone by and that she was merely attempting to cross the course. The evidence, however, is strong that her action was deliberate, and that it was planned and executed in the supposed interests of the suffragist movement. Whether she intended to commit suicide, or was simply reckless, it is hard to surmise. She very nearly took JONES’S life and her own. Had Anmer brought down the other horses which were close behind him, a scene might have followed of which it is horrible even to think, and nobody could have maintained, had it occurred, that it was not a natural consequence of what she did. She is said to be a person well known in the suffragist movement, to have had a card of a suffragist association upon her, and to have had the so-called "Suffragist colours" tied around her waist. It is further alleged that just after she had run out in front of the horses, holding her hands above her head, a placard with the words "Votes for Women" was raised by some person in the crowd. The circumstances are not, of course, conclusive, but they are, to say the least, suggestive.

Jones escaped serious injury but Davison never regained consciousness and died four days later, though it was more a bungled attempt to spoil the race than a suicide mission (she was later found to have had a return ticket).

Hot salt beef

2011-02-27T03:48:00.001-08:00

"Josef walked quickly and Thomas had to hurry to keep up with him. Cold air burned his cheeks. They stopped several times, for reasons that were never clear to Thomas, to lurk in a doorway or shelter behind the swelling fender of a parked Skoda. They passed the open side door of a barkery, and Thomas was briefly overwhelmed by whiteness: a tiled white wall, a pale man dressed all in white, a cloud of flour roiling over a shining white mountain of dough."

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

Secular Eruv

2011-02-22T07:04:00.000-08:00

FINALLY.

This week I am all about washing lines, launderettes and greasy spoons. Bagel shops and bakeries can be glad to have made it to a close second.

When I say bakeries I am thinking of the ones you find in places like Leeds; tiny, crummy, a little bleached looking with wide open windows and sorry looking displays, bags of buns and eccles cakes. Nothing costs more than twenty pence and you can get instant coffee while you wait. The women wear pastel and oddly shaped tabards and sometimes, if you're lucky, there will be a bin of out of date Space Raiders or Monster Munch.

I am a bakewell girl myself but I was always tempted by the sturdy looking budnt cakes or even a cheesy scone. Bakewells come in silver foil caselets, cakes and scones in paper bags. Everything is labelled with a jagged flourescant price tag and at the end of the day (which if I remember rightly is lunch time) you can come away with a baked bargain. Oh Northern bakeries I miss you!

Bagels

2011-02-10T23:20:00.000-08:00

This story, by my new favourite author, has inspired me to write about bagels. Please read it and enjoy.

'The Portrait of the Bagel as a Young Man'

Don't call me baby

2011-02-10T09:35:00.000-08:00

Practicalities (a story in parts)

2011-02-10T09:33:00.000-08:00

I had not thought before
About what it might have meant.
And if I had,
In the vaguest of ways,
It took place indoors
In a Bexley kitchen,
Lace at the windows.

But you drove to the woods.

You drove to the woods,
Parked your car
And walked
Alone.
Tracing fungi secrets,
Bright pebbles in your pocket,
With wary fingers.
Amanita Muscaria,
Red cap.
Peeping tomahawks
Edging at your fingertips,
Scalping at your skin.

You drove from the chemist
With his small leather smile,
And from your husband
Who never smiled at all.

You drove from your daughters
Who you had cultivated like oyster mushrooms
Little, wide skirted things
In the dry and arid heat of Rhodesia.
They would lift their sticky hands
And sallow faces to you as though you were
The small cervices of light
Peeping through gaps in the shed walls.
Their skin was mushroom flesh,
And their voices crept.
You loved them
But they followed you like the moon,
Turning ever so slightly,
On stalks around the room.

They drove you to distraction.

Party Snacks

2011-02-03T08:34:00.000-08:00

Port and pistachios in Camberwell.

Pizza on Columbia Road

Coffee on Boundary Street

Cupcakes in the kitchen

MEEK

2011-01-20T02:34:00.000-08:00

Like the coy ankle of an intergalactic flamingo or the beached husk of an iridescent jellyfish, Jessica Meek’s work slinks into the RCA Work in Progress exhibition like a shimmering shoal of fish. Her mounted wall piece is at once graphic and illustrative, and she hopes it will soon form part or whole of a garment. At close quarters the shapes appear spun or stitched, and are redolent of the graphic shapes of a Spirograph but from a distance they are random and contain the strange beauty of fractal geometry and plant life.

She cites armour and Spirograph as influences and there are certainly hints of the armour of an armadillo in the work! Meek has also produced a series of films describing the movement of thread around a series of pins, there is something very Tim Burton-esque in the jagged motion of the string and as the thread crisses and crosses the layered forms become complex and beautiful.

All in all a very exciting show, and already creating a buzz elsewhere, designer Fred Butler has blogged about it here.

Avocado sandwiches

2011-01-13T12:21:00.000-08:00

Incrementally is a word Billie and I learnt from some Californian skaters in Paris. I was one hundred percent sure that it wasn’t a word and that this boy, in his deplorable state of American-ness had made it up. It was probably the way he said it –emphasis on the mentally. I don’t have my diaries from this trip but I remember a long meandering walk from the French hip hop club back to our hostel. There was already some light in the sky, and I dawdled at a bus stop with this boy, mainly laughing at the fact that he didn’t have the same vocabulary as me.

Incrementally means, by increments. Which are little bits; tiny pieces. If something happens by increments, you don’t notice it, it creeps up on you.

The next morning we took a train to Amsterdam and Georgia and Jerome made avocado sandwiches while I took my first valium and slept.

And you know what your Daddy said Patti

2011-01-04T01:07:00.000-08:00

Intelligence Squared are holding a night of conversation with Patti Smith and Geoff Dyer. Yes, yes, yes.

I got to write about it here

My downfall

2010-12-15T13:42:00.000-08:00

Comic strip

2010-12-15T13:39:00.001-08:00

cinema

2010-10-12T08:53:00.000-07:00

Falling asleep in the attic

2010-10-12T08:52:00.001-07:00

The leaves are simmering,
Foaming at the lip,
Boiling over.
They froth like the wreckage of tide on sand,
But are soft like flour through a sieve.
My hand’s ear touches the soft outline
Of bowl, made in flour on the table,
The missed eclipse, the circle of drift.

My roof is cast afloat
And my bed sent tumbling
Into the sea.
My dreams are of oars,
sails pillowing like puff pastry
Or the starched caps of sisters on the ward.
Punched straight full of air,
Stiff with nothing.

My duvet is a bright soufflé
Of billow and blust and
My breath is heavy and slow.

My hand’s ear hears the white eclipse
Of spilt salt,
An arc of superstition
From shoulder to floor.

Museum

2010-07-08T05:08:00.001-07:00

I put my legs in the water
They hang like hams in the larder,
Cool and gargantuan.

In this heat
I am held suspended
Like a specimen in a jar
Or a bunch of yellow peppers.

You have put me on the shelf
And all I can hear
Is the sound of blood in my ears
As heavy as dumb bells.

Green Face

2010-07-01T16:14:00.001-07:00

2010-07-01T16:12:00.000-07:00

Starlings

2010-03-03T09:33:00.001-08:00

Monsters

2010-02-28T13:43:00.001-08:00

Pamphleteering

2010-02-28T04:35:00.000-08:00

I get to be in these!

Pretty exciting stuff.

Kicking Against the Pricks can be ordered from editor@kickingagainstthepricks.com

Poetry and Audience can be ordered from engpanda@leeds.ac.uk

Do it!

Kissing

2010-02-22T06:39:00.001-08:00

Valentine

2010-02-22T06:37:00.001-08:00

Morning scores along the edges of the day
Like a tin opener on a can of sardines.

Your kiss on my lips is sweet with cider
And the sea-salt of sleep.

I am bevelled for you, parched.

With a line of question marks,
Shakily drawn with your morning hand of tremor
You rescue my whole world.

We walk together,

There is nothing but the artichoke stroke of your skin on mine.
The warmth of you is my
Eye, my smile, my sigh.
I am as happy as a tuna fish in brine,
drunk, cosy, packed flat, I am fine.

Inside the Whale

2010-02-17T09:30:00.000-08:00

The great dental scurf of your molars
trawls lichen and krill and moss.
I am used to the dough smell, the tired yeast,
the fragrant fart of seaweed fermenting,
the Diaspora of scales
flitting by my feet,
trying the edges in tired waves,
again and again and again.
They make sounds like breath,
And stir a memory of leaves.

I used to climb your teeth,
Go rock pooling in their
Rotten crevices,
Tread carefully about the yellowing edges,
Slip on green dredges of plaque.
I have no time for that now.

Ha-noi
Your name is for
Junk ships and the plunk
Of sinking pots
Into water
To out-pour
The overflow.

In the monsoon
cabbage leaves drift
like petticoat flotsam
against your knees.
Rotten fish flow
through the streets.
The power cut
Leaves roads
Black and wet
The drains
Full of paper
And pulp.
We eat soft glass noodles
Limp by the light of
A halogen lamp,
Haunted by the
Call of the siren
And the rasp
Of the water-logged
Engine
Gargling through the water.

Ha-noi,
Soft sound plugged,
Garbled,
Pitched high,
Like the staccato rickets
Of geese
Honking
At the moon
Just as sensible
And slow moving
As Oriental porn.

An alphabet of fence posts,
Tallies,
Scores.
An alphabet of
Pick up sticks,
Daft.

Ha-noi,
Your name is for
Whale guts,
Goat’s blood
And rice wine,
The chew of the
White intestinal
Noodle,
The hum of
The cockroach
Numbed by diazepam,
Under feeble bulbs
As dark as the
Moon glow.
Ha-noi.

I sit inside you
At the heart of your lake
At the arch of your neck
In the dome of your throat
Basilica cupped
And ribbed in the
High reach of your diaphragm
That touches with gargantuan love
The Delphic breach of your pelvis.

And I do not know what to do.

Ha-noi,
I am prey to the curious lunar
tug of your sleep patterns,
have forgotten day and night.
know only tides
spelt out by the starry phosphoresce
of shrimp
and sea horses.
And the tuba buzz of your snore.

In your sleep,
Your are one big wheezing harmonica
The great bulge of your B-flat stomach
Burps Yiddish protuberances,
Vov, Kof, Yud, Daled, Giml.
A phlegm ridden alphabet
Of whale parps.
And I dream of organ grinders,
Hot water bottles,
Tough rubber
And the London Underground.
Captain Mannering’s marching band
Red faced, ready for a nap.

Ha-noi I miss the earth,
I cannot remember a time before motion.

Pages of tobacco

2010-02-05T00:17:00.000-08:00

I am writing a poem called The Whale. It’s about a man but these are some of the things I have learnt.

2010-01-27T04:21:00.000-08:00

Whales used to be land mammals (they, like the Modernists and the Vorticists before them decided to exchange “the one ELEMENT for the OTHER. The MORE against the LESS abstract.”) They wanted to be in the sea.

Their closest living relative is the Hippopotamus. Some whales still have four limbs, complete with digits, that they keep hidden within their bodies. Perhaps one day, when the seas begin to bubble and dry up they will peel back their skin and clamber back to land using these helpful, concealed arms and legs.

Whales are made of blubber, a four chambered heart and flukes. They are very poetic animals and hear sound through their throat. It has been known for a whale to behave suggestively, this generally concerns the blow hole.
Just don’t tell the plankton.

A Poem by Hilaire Belloc

The Whale

The Whale that wanders round the Pole
Is not a table fish.
You cannot bake or boil him whole
Nor serve him in a dish;

But you may cut his blubber up
And melt it down for oil.
And so replace the colza bean
(A product of the soil).

These facts should all be noted down
And ruminated on,
By every boy in Oxford town

Who wants to be a Don.

Reading Bodies

2009-12-21T15:15:00.000-08:00

Barnacle

2009-12-21T15:14:00.000-08:00

The word speaks of limpets, steadfast brickwork, implacable against sea currents, against storms, against file and hammer, against knife, against boot. As I first heard it I felt my hands against grain, cheese grater jagged and rough. The word sounded in my palm, forced it open and grazed me.

She said it by the shop front, reflecting in the mirror of the glass, as the ribbons of meat hung down from their hooks. Her whole name. She’d told me it all in one, as frank as the brushing down of an apron, smoothing it down against the wind, flattening the white, pushing away the wrinkles.

And then she turned back to look at the sky, at the black birds flying across the blue and then again across the windows, refracted and scattered among the painted letters. All the colours of the world seemed very fine, bright reds and whites and blues and gold all sun bleached and certain.

The world set upon a slope, down to the sea front, tumbling. And I, king of the pavement, scanned the horizon and laughed and took her hand. The air was gelid and tanged at my nose hairs, bitter and potent. The salt and the red flesh, the rabbits newly hung.

As she tipped her head back to laugh I could see the blackness of her nostrils, and the stretch of her neck. As white and freckled as a pebble. I imagined my hands were creeping upon it as the scrape of tide along the shore, forward and back again, rapid wet black and creeping drying tan.

We walked with the concrete under our black clod feet and talked without looking at one another. I was glad to watch the steadying shops and street signs go past, holding onto them as firmly as I could as she laughed again and again and slipped occasionally in her uneven heels.

If I could just catch the billow of one her skirts, purple narcissi against the sky, inky sprout, parachute. If I could fall into the pail of that inside out umbrella, would I be closer to her than I am now? Would I furrow with my hands to the blind veins of the bulb? Would I find her there?

Or would I be swept under water as the boat capsizes, churned and choked, guttered. Would I gulp to the surface to find a pair of clean hands sawing at the surface in earnest, prizing away with bloody hands one and then another barnacle, and throwing them all to the sea.

Reading

2009-12-06T08:34:00.002-08:00

You made rude moorings with your words,
Tied them to listing posts in the dark,
Read by starlight.

The rushes fell and blew,
Creased by the wind and your intermittent ear.
A roaming radio, a wave-length
Snagged on the cock of an ear,
The pricking of needles.

Poem

2009-12-06T08:34:00.001-08:00

Sound spelt out into the air,
A sour bell rings into the cold.
Chancery Lane at one o’clock,
Sprint glimpse of sky,
Church faces,
Sun split.

Pilgrimage

2009-08-20T16:05:00.000-07:00

When you break the bread
- or it breaks itself,
splitting like stones in the sun,
overfilling, erupting,
core pouring, out spilling,
wrecking the calm surface,
upsetting the tray or shelf,
you make a good break,
a happy tragedy.
It is rendered new,
miraculous
and cannot be unmade,
un-baked, re-doughed.

My mind is the same,
a constant schism,
out out damn spot, damn speck,
damn seed,
out blood, out brains,
out guts, out greed.

You come from me like mould
or maggots, the tubor
reek of Keats' fruit,
swolen, heavy,
pregnant.
You come from me like mushrooms,
Little steadfast atomic clouds
Nightly exploding themselves
making pleasure havoc
casting pearly spells.

Throwing Up

2009-08-09T14:52:00.001-07:00

I fell asleep in your lap, in your hands, on your knee.
You folded me like paper, like napkins, like cutlery.
You wiped me down on bread, lifted me to your lips,
Then placed me back carefully
As if to say,
Thank-you.
As if to say,
I’m done.

1930's hip hop

2009-07-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

It’s just past midnight on a Sunday evening in the middle of the countryside. 2009’s Secret Garden Party is coming to a bleary, rainbow fairy-lit, slightly damp and decidedly quiet end. Party-goers (or ‘gardeners’ as they prefer to be known) are wandering from tent to tent, past idyllic lake and snake-head stage, hoping for more musical mayhem. Those who were lucky enough to find their way to the dilapidated Officer’s Mess will not have been disappointed. Through a tiny tilted wooden door you escaped the rain and the cold and found yourself in a scene straight from MASH, skull and cross bones flag, peeling posters of pin up girls and one or two sawn-off muskets. As four men in lion masks prowled about the DJ booth it looked as though Kate Bush through sodden speakers was all we were going to get. Then an unassuming man in horn rimmed spectacles, a tail coat and wet look leggings took to the stage as ‘King of the Swingers’ from The Jungle Book began blasting out behind him. What happened next was without a doubt everyone presents’ highpoint of the festival. The man could skat, and how!
Mr. Bruce of the Correspondents kept the Officer’s Mess jumping for the next hour, literally splitting the sides of the tent at one point as more and more gardeners tried to squeeze their way in. Grimey beats, squelchy bass lines, all from a man with a cravat who calls you ‘Old Bean’ and wouldn’t look out of place in a P.G.Wodehouse novel. The Correspondents make Jay Z look like the guy who sang ‘zipadeedooda’, get a life Grandpa! We’re dancing to beaten-up swing skat!. If you’ve ever dreamt of getting down and dirty with Fred Astaire or shaking your money maker with King Louis then these are the men for you. Like tap dancing on a tea cup spiked by Ugly Duckling, we are pulling up our spats and dusting off our top hats in anticipation for the next gig.

You Can Paper My Machine Any Time

2009-07-13T07:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, it's true, I love Jacques Derrida. Second (or third) in my affections only to Ryan Atwood and Dara O' Briain. He makes sense out of non-sense and does things to grammar that make my toes curl and pupils dilate simultaneously. He is gloriously obtuse and disarmingly simple. He is the reason I can write things like this in my dissertation.

"Seth’s conception of the experience of mechanically reproduced music can therefore be seen to subscribe to Derrida’s theory of ‘hauntology’."

Pretty sexy.

this way please

2009-07-07T02:30:00.000-07:00

The Coasters

2009-06-28T15:30:00.000-07:00

He sees her face in punctuation.
Seeks it never for it follows him in the pigeons wing,
muffled against sky and pavement.
In the comma’s hesitant black, in the irredeemable blot of the stop,
I crush your ears in my hand and throw them away,
Touch your knee cap fleetingly,
I like to hook my toes in the hollow under your knee
And kick
As hard as I can.
I tick your freckles off on betting slips, darking out white squares,
Pressing down the point.
I pierce the paper.

I am reading COLETTE for the first time.

2009-06-28T07:08:00.001-07:00

"In my room, hanging on the icy wall, there's a set of rules where all the brackets have the same shape as your upper lip: it's the only objet d'art which adorns the bareness of the place. My child, as I said, leave your old husband within the four walls of this refrigerator. It's the only way to treat fish that have lost their freshness."

2009-06-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

Permission

2009-06-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

Line my eyes with kohl. Zip me into a sailor suit. I shall walk with my feet on the pavement and rub my back along the walls of each sky scraper. My tipped toe finger stretch cannot even begin to scrape! There is the smell of popcorn in the air. And heat which meats me like mince.

Vendors slide their sausages my way, but so politely! You are black and dark and oh so very Italian Jewish Turkish Brooklyn skinned. I could lick your sweaty chin.
I can see Jack leaning out of a window, throwing down pillow case of clothes and books. And Neil or Dean catching it in his grubby hands. Such spans.

I smoke a cigarette on steps on Bleeker. I eavesdrop twangs. And when a leaf falls into my hair I keep it carefully in my bag.

I fall in love with the women in the Guggenheim and chant to myself, “Guggenheim, Guggenheim, why are your circle filled floors so fine?” And think myself immeasurably clever. The sounding line tries but no ruler can even begin to fathom the strange perfect width depth and pitch of that shell interior.

I hover across the road from so many songs. Smell the air and hum along. At night the freeway mumbles as if it does not know the words, and I stretch under a single sheet, to let the air reach my feet.

The heat grasps its stomach and laughs (unkindly) and with gusto in the morning. I must hold my own body and walk onwards to the promise of something frozen, chilled or cool. Perhaps a visit to the zoo? I shake my head with peanut breath and we walk through the greeny dream of Central Park.

The park is folded up, tucked away, nipped and frocked by loving paths. It rolls so, I suspect we are already in our boat, rowing through the trees.
I lie on my back and try trapeze shapes with my legs in the air. We are children, we don’t care. We have discovered terrapins by the dozen and peered through our faces in the water green with awe. And now I am lying on the ground.

Don’t get me wrong, I got lost. I couldn’t get the hang of blocks. But my mind grinned when resting on those words, blocks, the L, side walk and sub way. My mouth is smug to say them. And retracing your steps is not so bad when you’re stepping on Lexington.

Over brunch which is so obviously eggs, a man with blood on his shirt asks me for a match. We sit outside, table, railing, road. The sun is here, on the table, making colours of our ham and spinach.

And every morning I walk past Sparacino’s bakery where they sell French and Italian and Sicilian breads and comic booklets. How is that so? I am a booklet made of dough. Rising and falling in eddies of flour which stay white on my nose tip and little lips. My pages get folded down, leafed through, my edges are browsed. Warmed too.

I would happily be tipped back in the road, held between you and the ground, kissed by gravity, subway vent and time simultaneously. I don’t mind you turning me over.
So let me stay.

2009-05-17T12:46:00.000-07:00

TAT

2009-05-17T12:04:00.000-07:00

With swallow lips and darkening pips at the meet of hair to face, skin makes dark little nips of loving and loved and spilt.
The switch of brush through ink, the lub of spill and freckle fill
Follows each reasoned inch, dogs each scissor snip.

Blinking marks a dark tattoo, beating like my heart.
In each and every dotted point, in each and every part.
There are loves which stutter like tooth bites into red and plumping arms
And ones which bubble like blisters under silent grasping palms.
Mine is beating wings,
Cages made to fit,
Dipping, lowing branches
And happy, milky trips.
I care all of me, I crowd my kneecaps blue,
I drop to elbows, chins and cheeks, I cradle all I know.

Pour me as you will
Out of mermaid tail and swallow swoop
Cry me briney teardrops
Catch me in those static hoops
For I am centuries, years ago, cooking with a ladle,
Caught lonely in the light line
Caught still in pouring moment.

The parasol opens out into sky
Dipped like nib or pen
Blue purges white and fans out papered shade.
On my shoulder, over pebbles, from a crows nest far away
Its bobbing marker
Dribs and drags its ragged line,
blots and jogs along the way.

Underneath, the Katakana curdles like ink in rancid milk.
Like the origami newspapers wrapped round fatty fish
Seeping new with oil,
Spelling all the while.
Eyelid, coverlet, lets sun spill through
Lying on the beach, writing letters, letters to you.

Can you spell kingyo? Seven layers of golden fish?
Buttered like marmalade on ear and over tongue,
Knifed one dancing shard after darting orange shred,
Hazarded with silent signs, made through frosted glass
Silent rapid white clean hands making rapid white clean shapes
Swimming oiling rolling curling
in a world of weightless weights?

Can you spell at all my love, holding moon in rigid place?
Whiting out the night time with strong and sturdy grace.

upstaged

2009-04-21T09:12:00.000-07:00

I just scrolled onto the blog next to mine and it is about a canibalistic restaurant in South Korea. There is a group of giggling students sitting around a partially peeled corpse. Its insides are the colour of jam.

2009-02-03T08:41:00.000-08:00

Desert

2009-02-03T08:32:00.001-08:00

The sky is rabid with stars,
A sick, blue stew
Curdling with salt rocks,
A squirm of counterpane
Tickled with rips,
A puncture full
Crunching spill
Pucker of pips.
The stars annihilate
the dark sweep.
No Artemis, no arrow poised,
No subtle scythe
or fattened pie.
Just a rabble,
A ricochet,
rocketed and raucous
A shining, whining
Many eyed
chorus.

2009-02-03T08:30:00.000-08:00

Trying Not To Grow

2008-12-19T10:59:00.000-08:00

I have not always been this small. I went up before I came down. Which I suppose means I was this small once before, just not for very long. I grew at the same pace as my class mates for a while. Which is not to say that I wasn’t terrified by the speed at which I grew, I was. It was far too fast! Who needs pubic hair at twelve? Who wants breasts? I decided to take matters into my own hands when I was fourteen. I thought that as you could curtail your nails and keep your hair as short as you liked, why not the rest of you? I am a meticulous cutter of nails and trimmer of hair. I never go to the hair dressers because every other night I will be sitting by the mirror, scissors in hand and ruler in mouth. I save a lot of money this way. My nails suffer the same attention on every third day (which means of course that on some days I cut both nails and hair, and on some days neither). I have been told that this behaviour must take up all of my time, but really it’s just an extension of the way my brain works, I’d like to take the scissors to more than my gruesome outspillings (hair and nails come from inside your body straight to the outside! Then you just let them lie on your hands and head. FOR EVERYONE TO SEE!) I don’t see any difference between them and all other bodily effluvia. I’m sure you will come around to my way of thinking. I think time ought to be scissored back too, who asked it to grow and grow the way it does? Unbounded, wild, full of split ends, and growing interminably! Revolting. Anyway, me. I grew to the startling height of five foot six, but this was not for want of trying not to.

It has been said that the Amazon women sliced off their right breasts so that they could wield a bow and arrow with the same ease and accuracy as men. I tried to cut off the tip of my left nipple, just to see if I could get my breasts to stop growing. Suffice to say, the logic of the human body does not bow down to the logic of a fourteen year old girl. I was rushed to A and E pretty swiftly with an alarming post box red spreading all down the left side of my body. It was painful (which is always the first thing people ask), but the over riding sensation was that of fascination. There was a point (a split second) where my body was connected to my body (hand, scissor, nipple) and then the next moment, it wasn’t (hand scissor, scissor nipple). There’s not much to choose from between my breasts, but where the tip might have been on the left one, is a flat, woodlouse shaped scar.

I have not always been this small. As I write, you can measure my height by noting that my eyes are level with the handles of a shopping trolley. It goes without saying that shopping is a painful and particularly depressing experience. I can only reach the full fat milk. I can have iceberg lettuce but even standing on tip toes I can’t reach the coriander. I can eat alpen and all bran but none of the cereals I like. And all I look at throughout the day are groins and midriffs. I get a crick in my neck if I try to look up too much, so lately I don’t really bother. Predictable perhaps, I do have a loving relationship with shoes. My feet are the only part of me that have not reduced in size. Some people might think this would be upsetting, a miniature girl with large, oversized feet. What it actually means is, for once in my life, I get to wear things appropriate for my age. I have at least fifty pairs of killer shoes. Platforms, wedges, stillettos (etc etc). You can tell a lot about a person from their shoes. You can also tell a lot from someone’s groin too, but I don’t really want to dwell on that.