itineranced

flashback

2012-02-06T16:23:00.001-08:00

Recent events had summoned up the presence of N, even though it was twenty years since she had seen him. The lottery of their days together. When, upon waking, she would never know which N she would be sharing her life with. That feeling in the pit of the stomach, akin, she imagined, to a soldier awaiting battle. Anything might be round the corner. Death. Boredom. Laughter. Victory. Later, once the relationship had come to its inevitable messy end, she found herself laughing at the theories of why women remained with an abusive partner. Most veered towards the Freudian analysis that they were seeking out a forum to explore their own weaknesses. Few seemed to recognise the truth that to her was obvious. That if you love someone you have no choice but to experience your life through theirs. When, of a late afternoon, perhaps, on a day which had been destined for battle, she found herself transformed, turned into a warrior, defending herself or him or them or some principle which would always be disposable, minor. As though having walked through the mirror into an emergency version of herself, one reserved for meteorite attacks or fending off crocodiles or defending her babies. She later accepted that this journey she was going on with N was one that demanded she too participate in the abuse, she too learn to cross the line into the world of the uncivil. When he grabbed her hair at a party, perhaps, yanking it back, accusing her of having looked at another man, the petty grammar of jealousy, the greatest challenge was not the pain or the despair, it was the struggle to resist joining in the game, to scream back at him. It was her refusal to play the game he provoked that was the greatest betrayal, the only betrayal. N's accusations were never serious in themselves; they were a tactic, a way for him to cope with the tragic stress he was burdened with, night and day. When the stress became to much he would attack. It was not a defence of him to understand this; there was no defence. But love doesn't care about defence. All love wants to do is share.She thought.And through the act of sharing there grew the dream, the fruitless dream, of overcoming. The dream of the dawn when she would awake and it would be like they had been washed up on the shore after the shipwreck. They would get up and walk. They would look around them, realising that they had reached safety, everything was alright now. The sea had been tamed. N had left her in the end. In his account of what had occurred, she became the one who was unhinged. He became the wronged party. Their lives had veered apart. As though all that anxiety had counted for nothing.She had forgotten what it was like to wake in the small house with that feeling there, nestled in the bed, a quiet fear which lay concealed, under the blanket. Waiting to emerge in the hours that would follow if the spirit moved him. Only now had it returned. And although he was gone, so far gone that he might as well be dead, it was like he was back. Watching her. +++

on this day

2012-02-01T14:02:00.001-08:00

I did all those London things. Woke up late. Hungover. Quasi jump-out-the-window. Not quite. Not really. Get out. Feel better. Drink coffee in an important office. Feel connnected in a disconnected office. Sniff out openings. Feel dirty for wanting to sniff out openings when all you really want to do is catch up with someone who happens to work in an important office. Relatively important. It's all relative. Experience an awkward British hug. Go to another office. Name drop a bit. Demonstrate some intelligence. Fell the carpet moving under my feet. Go home. Sleep. Go out. Drink. Connect. Get the tube. The pub I went to is one I used to live right next to. In Brixton. For years it never changed and now it's been redone. Kind of tastefully. I went there with N and H on a particular night. The night of the day that the death of SK was revealed. A day of stunned sense. Sense not having been crossed by what in other cases might have been a senseless action. Stunned, because even if it was not such a surprise, after all, after all that people knew and didn't knew, after all that had been written, death still comes as a jolt. A winding. Breath taken out of sails.And we drunk in the pub in the same place if not the same table as I drunk tonight, and we were not yet sad, though at some point, later that night maybe, we would be possessed of a sadness we didn't know we could possess. But that came later. At that point we were, if anything, frustrated. Even irritated. As though one of us had given up the fight. Although it's never quite as simple as that, is it? As though we had been left behind, whilst the other moved down the fast lane, leaving nothing but tail lights, as red as ever, to be chased. And there I am, a decade and more later, still chasing. Catching up. Ever closer. Doing all those London things. Which are only beats. In a story which is being imagined in the mind of someone who's never been here; never tasted beer; never talked in a pub; never known refurbishment.

doodling

2011-08-01T07:53:00.000-07:00

The urge to write is ultimately connected to an instinct to order the world. In the course of which, all writing might ultimately be seen as an expression of a quest to ascertain why the writer has been both placed within his or her situation, and also given the means to pursue that investigation in a form which will allow future readers to share the writer's curiosity/ anxiety/ journey.

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the eclipse behind the cathedral

2011-06-22T03:03:00.000-07:00

It’s a Summer’s evening. The Eclipse is a Tudor fronted pub, black beams, white plaster. Inside it has a low ceiling and a tiny bar. Tables always at a premium. It has its regulars, who prop up the bar and have their own tankards. Although it looks like a village pub, this is a city, albeit one which froze in size around the time of the Crusades, and The Eclipse still has an edge to it, a place from where late at night drunkards will spill out onto the streets keeping the locals awake. Outside, there are twin benches either side of the door, set into to the fabric of the building.

That’s where we are. It’s around seven pm. We’re drinking lager, because aged 19, it’s what everyone drinks. There’s only the two of us, myself and a man called James, known at school as Muppet, who will go on in life to become a long-serving employee of the Bank of England, a reliable dad, a resident of Surrey. All these things are probably discernable in his frame and demeanour now, to the soothsayer, but at this point in our lives he still carries other possibilities around in his back pocket. We’re both negotiating our way out of childhood, on holiday from university, back from the growing-up wars. Our friendship runs deeper than any we have at university, but it’s also at its zenith. These are the last things we’ll truly share, after six years of school. For the next decade we’ll remain in each other’s lives, slowly drifting apart, the ties that bind, the common interests, eroded by time, geography and the atomization of the late twentieth century. Because really there’s no reason why James and I shouldn’t still be meeting and talking Economics until we’re old men, cozy in the complicity of the conversation game. But we won’t and we don’t and that’s just how it is.

This particular evening there’s an edginess around me and there’s a reason for it. My girlfriend, the one from University, is not with me. She’s gone back to her stomping ground, the wilds of Hertfordshire. Only, on this day, she’s meeting up with her ex-boyfriend. His name is Masa. He’s Japanese. He’s a multi-millionaire who was part of the Japanese Olympic skiing team. He lives in New York. A week after she met me, she took down the photo of him that lived on her wall. Destined to be together, until I appear. They are meeting in London. At his hotel. I don’t know where exactly. Somewhere on Park Lane.

I’m too self-absorbed to be really worried. She and I have been together a whole academic year, we’re about to move into a little house with a yard with roses in a place called Dunnington. We’re playing out some kind of fantasy of coupledom which we both need and which is already turning sour. Nothing will interrupt this sequence, I know, and even if something were to, I would recalibrate my horizon, suffer the crisis which will arrive sooner or later, the world would have shrunk, but then the world is expanding all the time anyway.

Although the truth is I’m not even contemplating any of this. I’m just edgy. On adrenaline and lager. James, because he knows me, picks up on my edginess. I explain the context. Perhaps he asks if I’m worried or not. I don’t remember. James says something along the lines of: “It’s good {or unusual} to see someone so passionate about things.” His thesis doesn’t quite ring true. Later others arrive and the evening changes or becomes more drunken. For the next three years whenever we’re back and we go out it feels like the end of an era.

I never learn what happened in Masa’s hotel room and I never force the issue. There are things you know in the heart which are more important than the things that are actually lived. As decreed we will spend the next two years of our lives together in a house with a blue door and a yard with roses. Sometimes he sends her envelopes stuffed with money.

For two years we fight a lot then we split up. She goes to New York and marries Masa. James has a child called George. James and I drift apart. The Eclipse is still there. To the best of my knowledge.

+++

on the way to queensway station, 7am

2011-06-12T04:19:00.000-07:00

I once knew roses that grew in back yards.
I’d wait for them and most years they’d show up.
When they did, I was grateful, if not inordinately.
I thought we’d grow old together, somehow, the roses
And I, in our back yards. Duplicate that course of
Nature, inherit a thoughtless rhythm. My roses –
Although they were never mine, they belonged to no-one –
Came back to haunt this morning, cascading over
City walls, crying for gravity, flexing dormant
Memory muscles of shared seasons, long-forgotten.

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unfinished 4am poem, written in a hotel near barajas airport, madrid

2011-06-03T14:49:00.000-07:00

Four in the morning is a transient moment in
A Spanish night. For some, the final minutes
Of a day which has ended in the soft
Enveloping grasp of alcohol and friendship.
For others in this functional hotel, it
Will be the last gasp of a day’s business
Which, far from soft, has gone on longer
Than was ever planned (twas ever thus),
And a night fuelled by lust for profit, or
A colleague, or mere security, which can
Only be attained at the price of nights like
This, a mortgage paid towards the family
Redoubt, the sound of your children’s
Exuberance of a morning still five years
In the future, a sound already heard as
The door is shut and you fall into bed, the
Fog of alcohol on your breath, an
Unfulfilled desire tempered by the knowledge
Of the investment you’ve made towards
The future you shall not dream about tonight,
But live one day, the day when the sight of
Your child in a sunhat playing beneath the
Pine trees beside the lake will trigger the
Memory of a bad joke, or the strange
Juxtaposition of pompous sixties
Architecture with the medieval wall
Hangings someone has chosen to adorn
The hotel’s walls. When your child trips,
And cries, you’ll smile at the investment
You’ve made to hear the sound of their
Bitter tears, and for a few perfect minutes
It will all make sense. Four in the morning
Is also the hour at which the earliest of
Risers make their way to the airport,
Wiping sleep from their eyes, leaving
Their partner and offspring behind to
Catch a bus, arriving as the lights come
On again, the bustle of international
Travel on the verge of spinning the world
Like a top; a world measured in the
Dead hours taken to trawl the very skies.

june 2010

+++

central line early morning

2011-05-18T14:54:00.000-07:00

An Australian woman, hair curly, reddish,
Sits next to an African man who looks older
Than she does. She coaches him in the art of
Closing the sale. Explains how, once the direct
Debit has been agreed, he needs to cut to the chase.
He takes out a notebook to ensure he's got it all
Down. She glances at some figures on a page.
Asks, shocked: 'Is that how much you owe?' He
Looks sheepish. 'You have to pay twelve thousand
In a year?' He explains the details of his father's
Debt. She says it's a lot. He looks like a lost
Sheep being reminded he's lost. His arm, it
Is noted, is placed behind her, across her seat.
Neither betraying an intimacy, nor denying
The possibility of an intimacy. They get off at
Loughton, carrying London Energy backpacks.

+++

south london stories #19901

2011-05-02T04:13:00.000-07:00

I go round to visit my friends who live in Herne Hill.

There's a freezer in the hallway.

The freezer is full of clothes. I think I spy a handbag there as well.

Later my friend has to locate his suit.

He needs it because he's going to be a vodka-distributing, confession-taking priest between the hours of 10pm and 2am.

He goes to the kitchen and starts throwing plastic bags out of the freezer section of his fridge-freezer.

Finally he finds the suit.

He takes it out and places it on a wooden chair to defrost.

It's chilled and has a texture like paper, not cloth.

We go to the pub. At half nine he will come back and put the suit on. It will have defrosted somewhat, but still be at a sub-normal suit-wearing temperature.

+++

why there's no point doing interviews

2011-04-05T17:23:00.000-07:00

Literary writing does not explain, does not teach: It simply offers the presence of its own mystery, its own experience, in its absence of explanation, thus inviting not some illusory ‘understanding' … but precisely a reading.

Hence the vanity of asking the writer what he ‘wanted to say' ... as if writing came from his wanting, from his free and sovereign will.

+++

Jonathan Littell, quoted here: http://bit.ly/esUPo6

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what to do in event of exposure to higher than normal levels of radiation

2011-03-15T06:14:00.000-07:00

General Decontamination Procedure (if water is unavailable)

• Remove your clothes and shoes and place them in a plastic bag.

• Wipe yourself down with cloth or a wet tissue (afterwards place the cloth or wipe in the plastic bag and throw the bag and its contents away).

General Decontamination Procedure (When water is available)

• Remove your shoes and clothes and place them in a plastic bag.

• Wipe yourself down with cloth or a wet tissue (afterwards place the cloth or wipe in the plastic bag and throw the bag and contents away).

Follow the procedure below if shower is available

• Wash your hair with shampoo.

• Wash your face. (with soap or body wash)

• Wash your body. Including the inside of your ears and under your fingernails (with soap or body wash)

• Wash the clothes in the laundry or if you are still concerned, dispose of the clothes.

+++

the jesus sutras

2011-03-14T14:41:00.000-07:00

This comes from a 7th Century Chinese text, as quoted by Martin Palmer, offering an insight into how 7th Century Chinese Christianity was evolving, incorporating elements of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism

+++

The Four Essential Laws of Christian Dharma

Now, what are the Four Essential Laws of the Dharma?
The first is no wanting. If your heart is obsessed with something,
It manifests in all kinds of distorted ways.
Distorted thoughts are the root of negative behavior . . .

The second is no doing. Don't put on a mask and pretend to be what you’re not . . .
The effort needed to hold a direction is abandoned,
And there is simply action and reaction.
So walk the Way of No Action.

The third is no piousness. And what that means
Is not wanting to have your good deeds broadcast to the nation.
Do what's right to bring people to the truth
But not for your own reputation’s sake.
So anyone who teaches the Triumphant Law,
Practicing the Way of Light to bring life to the truth,
Will know Peace and Happiness in company.
But don't talk it away. This is the Way of No Virtue.

The fourth is no absolute. Don't try to control everything,
Don't take sides in arguments about right and wrong.
Treat everyone equally, and live from day to day.
It’s like a clear mirror that reflects everything anyway:
Green or yellow or in any combination-
It shows everything, as well as the smallest of details.
What does the mirror do? It reflects without judgement.

+++

quoted from: http://www.sevenpillarshouse.org/article/the_jesus_sutras_an_ancient_message_for_a_post_modernist_future/

+++

el pibe de 17 anos

2011-02-14T17:13:00.001-08:00

Today, a footballer known to the world as Ronaldo retired. He's 33 years old. If you pay any attention to football he's been around for what seems like forever, in footballing terms.

There's a famous story which I found myself repeating about my first night on Latin American soil. I was taken to see a football match. I was hugged by a fat, sweaty man on the terraces. Thanks to him I learnt my first Spanish words the hard way. Saltar. Cantar. It was a fitting introduction to what was to become the other side of my life.

What I didn't realise, when telling this story, was that there was a kid of 17 playing for the Brazilian team, who scored two goals and ended up on the losing side. Because he was young, he wasn't famous in Europe at the time. There would have been no reason for me to have heard of him. His name was Ronaldo.

It's only this evening that I've worked out what team he played for in Brazil before he went to play for PSV in Holland. The same team that was playing against Nacional, in the Estadio Centenario, that night. The 28th October 1993.

The details of the match itself have always been hazy. I know Nacional won. Largely because of my capacity to learn in no time at all what the Spanish word for 'to jump' meant. I remember there were penalties involved. But not how many, or how decisively. Though now it comes back to me.

On that night, I was still a 'pibe', albeit of slightly more than 17 years. I had long hair and honey coloured skin. I didn't have the faintest idea that the internet existed and that it would become part of my life. Therefore I had no way of even conceiving the fact that one day I would be able to rediscover that night. That I would rediscover my first night in Latin America on the day that the kid who scored two almost immediately forgotten goals would eventually choose to retire.

Thanks to this thing called the internet, I would see the faces of the people who were all around me again. Hear the sounds of the stadium again. It's the sounds which, above all else, remain familiar. All of which I rediscovered here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvjtFM4vKrg&feature=related

+++

This match was the quarter final. In the semi final, I learn, Nacional were eliminated by Flamengo. The game was "Suspendido a los 77 minutos por incidentes." I suspect that translates. I wasn't there to saltar.

Ronaldo and the internet and myself. And everyone else. We've all been a long way round the houses since that mad, spectacular first night of victory and defeat in Montevideo.

+++

new writing in new places @ #royalcourt

2011-02-12T07:22:00.000-08:00

Hungover, I just make it in time for the start of the talk. Three writers and a director. Most of the things said seem reasonable, with everyone careful to stress that the purpose of the new writing initiative abroad is not to produce a 'royal court' play, but to explore and exchange. The writers relate how much they've got from the trips abroad, something that doesn't really seem surprising. There follow a few questions which are too complicated for my addled brain to follow, ably fielded by the panel.

It's only at the very end that the discussion threatens to explore the subject in more depth. The last questioner in particular raises an issue which anyone who's worked in theatre abroad will be aware of, the pros and cons of the subsidised system, and by implication the increased motivation required to work in a non-subsidised theatrical culture (ie most of Latin America, Asia, Africa etc). The question is rebuffed with the bland assertion that "there are no cons to a subsidised system" and there's no time to proceed further.

By this point, in part through Michael Wynne's engaging story of the Elephant and the Bus Engine play, which perhaps raises more questions about the scheme than it answers, the other side of the Court's agenda has emerged more strongly: the desire to find a play which will resonate with the Court's audience. Whilst this is of course a reasonable objective, what was never really touched on was the way in which the writers themselves (as I know from personal experience) are aware of this agenda and cannot help but be influenced by it in the engagement with the Court. (With the subsequent risk of what might be termed a beauty pageant.)

Throughout the talk there seemed very little disposition on the part of the speakers to place themselves in the shoes of the writers who participate in the Court's international schemes. Perhaps its because it's very hard to do this within the context of a passing visit which, as Wynne suggested, is also likely to be a formative event for the writer. The Court's International playwrighting scheme is a laudable endeavour which undoubtedly benefits writers across the globe. But like any scheme, it will have both its pros and its cons, and it seemed a pity that given the opportunity to engage in a public debate, there was so little impetus to explore both pros and cons within a wider, global, context. More time for questions would have helped as it seemed as though there were many theatre practitioners from around the world whose opinions we didn't get sufficient opportunity to hear.

+++

west london tales 12 - egypt

2011-02-10T10:09:00.000-08:00

Playing on my laptop, beside this screen, a woman with a blue scarf talks from Tahrir Square. The noise from the square slips down cables, slides through oceans, emerges through speakers, sings in my sitting room. Everything connects?

I took the lift this morning and saw my downstairs neighbours for the first time since I got back. More often than not the reason we talk to one another is because there's been a leak from my flat downstairs to theirs. (Generally arising from the Ethiopian couple who live upstairs.) In spite of this, I get on OK with my downstairs neighbours, an old man and his middle-aged daughter. But today, in the lift, they were distracted and made little attempt to communicate. The daughter was on the phone, talking in Arabic and her father, a hunched man with big specs who's always in slippers, looked concerned, trying to work out what the person on the other side of the phone line was saying.

Then I remembered. They are Egyptian Copts. They had bigger things on their mind.

+++

pace kipling, but in spanish

2011-02-09T02:30:00.000-08:00

La lucha siempre era, siempre es, y supongo siempre seria contra el fracaso.
Aveces pierdes, aveces ganas.
Aveces sentis que estas perdiendo cuando realmente estas ganando.
Y aveces sentis que ganas, cuando la realidad es que nunca puedes ganar todo el tiempo.
Hay epocas de victoria y epocas de fracaso y es asi la vida.
El truco es acordarte de lo que no esta pasando cuando esta pasando lo que esta pasando.

+++

Going running in Montevideo

2011-02-04T15:08:00.001-08:00

My friend Mr Kemp informs me the optimal method of fat-burning exercise is light jogging. Around the age of forty, when I lived near some fields for a while, I took up running. It killed me. I’d go round and around a field I’d known for 25 years until I was fit to drop. The first lap might have been a pleasure but subsequently it became a torture. The trouble was the challenge. It’s hard not to be competitive. If I did three laps one day I’d want to do four the next. And so on. The most I ever managed was eleven. But every peak was followed by a descent. Sometimes you were back to three. It lost its charm. I moved. I didn’t have to run anymore.

A while later I was living where I live now. I felt self-conscious about the idea of running in public. I didn’t want people to see me suffering. Across the road from me was a gym. It cost more than a £100/ month. I couldn’t afford it. A year or so later, I decided my health was more important. Whatever that means. I joined. Basically to run on the treadmills. They had a device to measure how far you’d run and how fast. I started on 3K and built up to 5K. Soon I was back in the trap of trying to go faster higher further than I’d ever been before. After a Summer of running whilst watching cricket on the monitor, the enthusiasm waned. The gym remained across the road. Costing me as much as it taunted me. It was relief that I finally got round to cancelling my membership, knowing I was going away.

I brought my running shoes with me. It’s always a risk. Maybe you’re going to end up leaving them in a corner, goading you. The second day I was there we had a row. These things happen. It was one of those getting-back-together-after-being-apart-for-a long-long-time rows. It was stupid. There was no logic to it. We sort of got over it. I said I was going to go for a run. Which I did. It killed me. All over again. The row was soon forgotten. The next day I went again. I got as far as the disused railway station. Curious, I swerved to go under an arch and check it out. As I did so I pulled a muscle in my side. I had to walk back.

It’s cold in Montevideo in September. The houses aren’t made for Winter. The cold seeps into the walls, there’s no central heating, and it stays there. You wear layer upon layer. Everyone gets ill. I got ill. I got horribly raking-cough ill. I had to work but the only thing I wanted to do was go to bed. I couldn’t. C was on tour. In the days I wrote. In the afternoons I worked. In the evenings I shivered. I didn’t go running.

The play happened. I hadn’t been running for ages. Been to Rio and Buenos Aires and wanted to go running there but there wasn’t the time. It was November. The weather was getting warmer. The shoes beckoned. I started running again.

From out of the front door of C’s flat, a flat which basically turns its back on the street, you can see the Palacio Legislativo. A big, Italianate building, which holds the Parliament. Sitting on top of a hill. In all the years I’d visited I hardly ever went near it.

The Palacio was a couple of kilometres away. It made for a target. First I jogged down the street in front of the flat, Piedra Alta. Most streets in Montevideo run for twenty or thirty blocks. This one runs for two. There’s a ruined old car on one side and a pension further down. A sign saying ‘Ingles’ at the top. At the bottom you’re near the Palacio Penarol, a giant yellow building which houses the Penarol basketball team. Then it’s uphill, towards the Palacio Legislativo. The streets are nondescript but empty. Full of low level one or two block houses. A mix of residential and business. Offering a scrappy, slightly out-of-centre feel. The Palacio itself is surrounded by a giant roundabout, with slow moving traffic trundling round. No sign of any Westminster crash barriers. I got to the steps and paused, taking in the view.

Over the next two months, the running became more regular. I started straying further and further. I ran on Christmas Day and New Years Day. People has set up their barbeques in the streets, whole families eating outside. A man wearing a hat guarded an empty garage, fighting off the sun. People meandered. There were no other runners on these streets. These streets weren’t made for runners. They’re littered with jagged paving stones, dogshit, rubbish. The sun beats down and you head for shade.

Montevideo is named after the fact that a sailor shouted from the sea his excitement at seeing a distant hill. So the story goes. The hill in question, Cerro, is on the other side of the bay, far from the centre. In theory, the city is supposed to be more or less flat. Only it’s not. It has peaks and dips and troughs. Nothing too dramatic, but a peak is always a peak and a trough is always a trough. There is a Spanish word, which got used a lot in the Himalayas. It’s a word I can never remember straight away. The Montevidean hills gave me time to focus. Climbing a gradual but consistent slope, the word would infiltrate its way into the brain. Repecho. You don’t know exactly what it means. And you also know exactly what it means.

Round every corner there’s something new to see. Dilapidated buildings, crumbling art deco houses with a stone lion stuck on the top. A bar adorned with vines. On my last evening we finally went there. And drank beer. The waitress came from Mozambique. We talked about how impossible it all looked. C did. And I felt trapped because she was talking about how powerless she is and she was right. She is. We are. It is.

But that’s later and earlier I’m running, exploring, beyond the Palacio, past the antique shops, East to the disused building with the plaque for the birthplace of Florencio Sanchez, the greatest of the Uruguayan playwrights, they say, a hundred years since his death. To the West where the new Plaza has been opened, with the skateboard ramps and the landscaped steps and the small trees that people use for shade. To the East, past the railway station, disused, a statue of George Stephenson in front slowly fading away, the place boarded up, more Victoriana. Behind it the containers stacked up in Montevideo’s ever expanding port, containers from Europe and Asia and the Americas, full of god knows what, waiting to go god knows where.

I run and I run and the city runs with me, bright in the sun, desperately seeking shade, laughing at the gringo running alongside it, where’s he going – why is he doing this?

It was Summer now. The sun shone as I ran. I returned draped in sweat. Running was no longer a chore. To go running in Montevideo is to step out of self-consciousness. To step out of self-consciousness is to feel free. Really free. No-one’s looking or judging. No policemen in the head. No criteria. Just a simple goal of heading off somewhere and then returning.

Just like one of those runs, I didn’t really know where I was going when I set out to write this piece. But I knew I’d discover something, something which would help to lead me home.

+++

entre las cosas que extrano

2011-02-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

america latina
las partes de america latina que no conozco
rio de janeiro
buenos aires
los andes
incluyo los partes que no conozco
montevideo
montevideo
corriendo por montevideo
santa catalina
cabrera, que solo vi una vez...
el cielo
taxis
teatro
que no hay fronteras
mirando peliculas
la feria
la otra feria
todos las ferias
y los ferias de mas. que no conozco
carne
gente
la futura
la pasada
los techos
tres de la manana
cuatro de la manana
y lo de mas
mas gente
puesta del sol
mar
cocinando
adivinando
viviendo
dia por dia.

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words of vila matas

2011-01-30T20:48:00.000-08:00

Me voy. Terminó todo. Recuerden que uno nunca ha de escribir una frase si no siente que la esencia de esa frase no la ha sentido nunca nadie. Cada frase es una innovación. O así debería de ser, muchachos (y muchachas)

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on a train heading east

2011-01-30T20:21:00.001-08:00

If you were to ask how I felt, I would reply:
Permanently drunk. Drunk on dislocation.
Drunk as a split person who knows his
Sober self resides within but cannot be
Accessed because the opiates have shut
Him out of his own sober mind. Who stands
In two hemispheres, doesn’t even try to
Walk the line, befuddled by twin climates,
Languages, states of self. Lost in a blizzard
Of scripts, stories, fears and hopes. His head
Covered to protect him from the sun’s glare,
An Arctic sun which rains all the time and
Also burns. I am drunk on 24 hour English;
Unlimited Skype; tragic tales; the mundanity
Of city life. When do I sober up? And where?
In a ditch? At ‘home’? Speaking in tongues?

28.01.11

+++

Mosquito Wars 5.30 am, Montevideo

2011-01-19T02:34:00.000-08:00

Seven, eight, nine perfect welts. White
Havens of blood-sucking frenzy. I scratch
The contemplation of a skin stripped bare
Of: nut-brown ale (natch); must (natch).
The whisper of cowslip in an unsung
Heat-haze. The threat of dandelion.
Round tables with forked iron breath.
Last orders. Breath like fire-flies in
The night made of ice-cream. Coal
Black ice-cream. Swans gliding down
A black river like a living movie from
The days before film existed. Swans
Like a mobile in a child’s bedroom.
Nut brown ale (natch): must (natch).
The snap that brings a day of bright
Terrier cold when you walk past spider
Webs frozen in an image of optimism.

+++

3 rio poems

2010-11-10T05:05:00.000-08:00

+++

Copacabana, Sunday Afternoon

Fluid lines of black and white mosaic unfold
Beneath your feet. The Impressionist carpet.
Youngsters in their toy cars, Peruvian
Trinket-sellers, handball players, volley-
Ballers, families, tourists, zero-eyed
Beach bums, surfers, millionaires and paupers
Jockey for space, of which there is no sense of
Shortage. In the midst of this throng, a bunch of
Scruffy orphans fight over popcorn, squabbling
Like miscreant kittens, a whiff of favela,
As though by design. At a bar table drinking
Jugos of some yet-to-be-named fruit, three players
Assess a gun magazine, calibrating
Kill efficiency against aesthetics
Like true collectors, killer nerds. A youth
Shins up a coconut tree, throwing unripe fruit
At his friends, who pose for the camera. This is
The anarchic, democratic colony of
Copacabana, where every face fits, all souls
Are deemed equal.

+++

Hills

It seems against nature for a city to evolve
In a landscape such as this. Cities seek order,
Evenness, coherence. Instead, Rio surges
Out of the land like a drunken sailor,
All knees and elbows. Tunnels and bridges
Breach the geographical divide; join
The dots. Look up by night and a million
Spots of light speckle hillsides like a childhood
Dream of what the city might be: beach and cliff and
Bay, a home for elves, superstars and errant fairies.

+++

+++

Bomba

For breakfast a concoction made from
Acai, guarana, peanut, protein, more.
As dense as a Cairngorn fog. Fuel for
Morning, afternoon, night and the month to come.

+++

24 hours in buenos aires

2010-11-08T09:27:00.000-08:00

+++

I was told by the taxi driver, a taxi driver who I later realised had succeeded in charging me double the going rate for the trip, that Boedo, the barrio where I was staying was the ‘barrio de tango’. I didn’t realise it, but his remark at the start of a flying visit to Buenos Aires presaged a quest to discover whether tango, a slightly anachronistic seeming rhythm in a world of beats and salsa, was more than just a museum piece. Driving down 25 de Mayo, the city’s main artery, with all its billboards and its grandeur, it seemed hard to imagine that this was still a city of immigrants, nostalgic for the motherland, singing sad, lilting songs of loss. A meal in an authentic Italian restaurant, with homemade pasta and pictures of the 2006 Italian world cup winning team on the wall offered a hint that it was out there somewhere, and the next day, the girlfriend and I set off on a haphazard exploration of the city, with the unwitting ambition of discovering if tango was alive and well.

We had started in appropriate fashion. By arguing for most of the night. Finally sleeping near dawn and waking after 11. Sun dappling the windows of our hotel room, suggesting that no matter what the grief might be, it would still be worth our while heading out. If tango is a dance of lazy passion, an understated hysteria denoted by the flick of a leg or a sudden shift of rhythm, then it makes sense that we began the quest in a woozy, desiccated state of mind. Fortified by café au lait and finger sized croissants, we headed out into the back streets with hope in our hearts.

+++

To begin with we drifted through the leafy streets of Boedo which, save for the odd mural, offered precious little in the way of tango. Admittedly it was far too early for any kind of serious tango activity. (It’s only down in San Telmo they dance for the tourists all day long). After a while, the leafy ‘barrio of tango’ began to give way to a seedier vibe, as we moved from Boedo into Once, which is all warehouses and shops. Our route took us across the train lines into the commercial zone. Suddenly, tranquillity gave way to a feverish shopping street.

In common with every American city, Buenos Aires is a city of immigrants. The majority of Portenos, as the citizens are known, have either Spanish or Italian descendency. But there are also large communities of Germans, Eastern Europeans, Russians etc. The only Porteno I know in London has red hair and the surname Rattagan, his ancestors having come from Ireland. Tango emerged in the early twentieth century on both sides of the Rio Plata, in part as an expression of nostalgia for the motherland. However, the mass influx of Europeans ended over fifty years ago. Their descendents are all Argentines now. Nostalgia for a lost paradise is more of a symbolic than an actual phenomenon. Which is where the bustling activity of Once took on an extra dimension. Because the shoppers and the shopkeepers are all, by and large immigrants. The new immigrants – Bolivians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, as well as Chinese and even Nigerians, are economic migrants, hoping that the biggest city in the South of the continent will offer a higher standard of living. They have taken over Once, with streets full of Andean restaurants, money changers, any commercial opportunity. Perhaps here is where the modern day tango is most likely to be found. Except for the irony that the Argentines resent these modern day immigrants. They don’t want to integrate them into their culture. Instead, like immigrant communities the world over, they are blamed for rising crime and other social ills. The spirit of tango might exist in Once, but its not a song that’s getting heard.

So we left Once, crossing Avenida Corrientes, heading into Abasto. In a matter of minutes the streets were cobbled and the houses, theatres, garages and pizzerias painted with vivid, floral designs. This seemed more like the traditional image of Buenos Aires, and it came as no surprise to stumble across the home of the greatest tango singer of them all, Carlos Gardel. In his day, before his untimely death in a plane crash in Colombia in 1935, Gardel’s fame took him far from his Rio Plata roots. He was an international superstar, big in Europe and Hollywood. His modest house displays a quote which says that a homemade stew cooked with care tastes better than the finest meal in the finest restaurant in the world. A clip from one of his films shows him waking up in his New York penthouse, with four platinum blondes lying around to whom he promptly croons an appreciative ditty. His house has become an unpretentious shrine, and the spirit of tango flickers throughout Abasto’s pleasant, low-key streets, where some of the houses are painted with lyrics and notes from Gardel’s greatest hits, as well as a stream of Gardel murals on seemingly every corner. (Warhol Gardel; Lichtenstein Gardel, Impressionist Gardel etc.)

However, for all the murals and street art, there’s something of the heritage industry about this veneration of Gardel, who died over sixty years ago. If anything, it seems to imply that the phenomenon has atrophied. A short stroll towards the historic centre of Buenos Aires takes you to the Plaza del Congreso where the offices of the Madres de La Plaza de Mayo are located. The offices of the Madres, which continues to function as an NGO, are open to visitors. On the walls are photos of those who remain disappeared, a quarter century after the fall of the dictatorships and the return to democracy. Rows of faces, captured in the aspic of their seventies haircuts, are testament to a time when, along with its human rights abuses, the nation suffered a period of cultural devastation, its musicians and artists banned or forced into exile. Argentina, along with the other Latin American nations which suffered political repression in the latter half of the twentieth century, has moved on, but the walls are a constant reminder of the lasting scars.

In the Plaza de Mayo itself, there are more reminders, with a demonstration by veterans of the Malvinas. One banner says ‘No more fake veterans’. However, the demonstrators share the square with a christian rock band, and the mood is relaxed. We decide to cut short the expedition and head back to the pension. The search by day was always likely to be fruitless. A hunt for the real spirit of tango has to take place by night.

+++

A few hours later we made our way to La Boca to see El Fulgor Argentino. The show recounts a hundred years of Argentina’s history, in its own theatre, the Galpon de Catalinas. El Fulgor Argentino has been running for 13 years, with the ending constantly being rewritten. There’s a cast of approximately a hundred – it varies from night to night – made up entirely of local residents from La Boca. This is their theatre. Outside, vast grills serve up chorizo sandwiches, beer and cake. All of which can be taken into the theatre. The audience is a mix of the well-heeled, venturing into the badlands of La Boca, and locals. The theatre’s full and the audience’s enthusiasm grows as the tale unfolds, a mix of satire and music, including comedy tanks and generals, the rich and the poor, culminating in a hundred people on stage singing a rousing finale.

Obviously a show dealing with a hundred years of Argentina’s popular music has to include tango, and there’s one wonderful scene where a series of actors dance with giant puppets, whispering sweet nothings as they do so. But the show also demonstrates how tango would appear to have been displaced, by salsa, rock, pop, you name it. As each new dance craze hits the stage, a lone couple continue to steadfastly dance tango, resisting the tide. If anything El Fulgor Argentino would seem to confirm the fact that tango is nothing more than a museum piece, in a society which now looks both to Europe and the rest of Latin America for its cultural infuences.

It’s midnight by the time the show finishes. There’s one last stop to be made. We flag down a taxi and head back towards the centre. Our destination is La Catedral.

La Catedral is a vast hanger. You climb some stairs and enter a cavernous space, with a bar at the far end. The lighting is subdued. As, at first, seems the atmosphere. It’s gone one in the morning and people are dancing but there are no beats, no flashing lights. Gradually the mesmeric rhythm of the tango starts to get under your skin. On the dance floor, a dozen couples are weaving their way around, lazily changing pace as the music picks up and recedes.

Tables surround the dance floor. They are occupied by a mix of age groups and demographics. Sixty year olds dance with twenty somethings. Domination of the dance moves provides the democratic key to participation. On the sidelines, there’s no pressure to join in. A milonga is an opportunity to observe the dancers’ talent, with no need to make a fool of yourself trying to emulate them. Unless you feel like it.

If one were to say that an atmosphere can be dream-like, then La Catedral would embody this atmosphere. No-one is in a hurry. No-one makes too much noise. The environment is both resolutely contemporary and absolutely timeless. The dancers could have been there for decades, centuries, picking out steps, lurching against one another in a parody of desire, staggering or skipping, graceful swans then, by turns, clumsy swans, all at a time. Here is the pulse of tango, alive and well in Buenos Aires.

Later a singer comes on, a small, fiery woman with a low-key band of four. She sings tangos which the audience knows and tangos which they don’t. The most confident couples join her on the dancefloor, cutting through the space like lasers.

The very word ‘tango’ in English is a strange, almost comical one, an alien sound for an alien dance. This is the music of old Europe, displaced, distorted, disturbed, remade anew for a new continent. In La Catedral, of a night, that time when the dawn is still distant but the night is already old, it’s possible to glean what tango feels like, what tango was and is and always shall be.

+++

international get together, montevideo

2010-10-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

Anibal says he's going to see a friend of his who's Australian. She used to live here and she's back for a while. It's a small party. We walk across town, twenty minutes, from Cordon to Barrio Sur. The Australian lets us in. There's another Australian upstairs, who's her boyfriend, of Greek descendence, an American, a Uruguayan tango dancer, another Uruguayan woman and a Frenchwoman, who's there with the tango dancer. Everyone seems very friendly and they ply me with wine. Because I say I can speak a bit of French, I'm sat next to the Frenchwoman.

When she tells me she's a dancer it doesn't surprise me. She has a dancer's physiognomy, petite features, alert, slightly vulnerable. She speaks some Spanish but not a lot. No English. I speak some French, not a lot. We communicate, as you do. She's only just arrived from Buenos Aires. She met the tango dancer, who's also called Anibal, either last night or the night before. She doesn't know anyone here. Anibal, the tango dancer occasionally holds her hand or strokes her hair. She tells me that she's a tango dancer. In France. She dances tango. So now she's come here, to the Rio Plata, to dance in the milongas of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. She's never been to South America before. It's a kind of pilgrimage. She's goes to the milongas alone and dances.

She didn't like the Portenos much. She found them awkward, stand-offish. I tell her the Uruguayans will be kinder. I ask what prompted her visit, now. She tells me that she's just split up with her partner. A relationship of many years. Her partner, who was also her dance partner. The partner with whom she danced tango. In France. I tell her her story, the story of a tango dancer who goes to the Rio Plata to discover the roots of her dance and at the same time sever the ties of her dance, sounds like a film script. She says someone else has already told her that.

My French dries up. Soon afterwards, she leaves, with Anibal. Anibal the tango dancer. They're heading off to a milonga. I talk to the Australian. Whose parents were Uruguayan. Before they emigrated to Australia. Before they returned to Uruguay. The Australian woman studies child poverty. She'd like to stay in Uruguay, but there aren't any jobs.

+++

in the pension, buenos aires

2010-10-23T17:39:00.000-07:00

It's early evening. The pension, in Boedo, consists of a series of rooms which open out onto a first floor patio. There's a parillada and a settee and pot plants. It's pleasant and all the Gatos hang out there. In the middle of our three rooms is another. A couple have moved in. The man is Spanish. I speak to him for a bit. I tell him I'm English. He calls out to the woman who's inside the room. She comes out. She's wearing a sarong. She's middle aged. She comes from New Zealand. We start speaking. In English. I haven't spoken to anyone in English for weeks. She tells me that she just arrived in Buenos Aires that morning. From New Zealand. She's spent a long time travelling. A very long time. She's on her way to Brazil. Tomorrow she goes to Florianopolis. She's going to hang out on the beach for six weeks. Get drunk and hang out on the beach. She has friends there. I ask if she's been there before. She hasn't. I haven't been there either. She says the friend she's going to see is her ex. He's moved back there. From New Zealand. Moved back to his family. I haven't quite got round to thinking that it's unusual to go and spend six weeks with your ex, but I'm getting there. She tells me she hasn't seen him for over a year. Then she says she's going for their child's birthday. Their child who died. He would have been two. She's brought the ashes. She's going to scatter them in Florianopolis. She's going to stay with her ex and his family for six weeks and hang out on the beach and not do anything.

+++

random montevideo notes - on knowing a country

2010-09-18T16:39:00.000-07:00

You can never really know a country.
You can get to know more of it and more it, but you’ll never really know it.
Just those bits of it it allows you to see.
(This has political connotations).

+++

random montevideo notes - pinter/ betrayal

2010-09-18T16:32:00.000-07:00

Ok, so the play works backwards. It’s radical but it’s not as though it’s never been heard of.

However… who else actually ends their play not at the beginning (nor at the end)… but at the end of the second scene?

+++

random montevideo notes - the things that are keeping me sane

2010-09-18T16:24:00.000-07:00

Harold Pinter.

And

Zombies.

+++

random montevideo notes - santa rosa

2010-09-09T10:34:00.001-07:00

The week before the end of Winter, it returns with a vengeance.
Santa Rosa is the last hurrah of the wet, the cold, the dank, the grey, the dull, the turgid, the hopeless, the desperate Montevideo.
The one people long to leave behind, knowing that Summer will bring something else.
Those who've got through Winter without flu will fall at the Santa Rosa hurdle.

+++

When the sun flirts with the clouds at the week's end, winking like a naughty teenager, it's met with not so much joy as swathes of relief.
There is life after Santa Rosa.
You'd forgotten but it's coming back.

+++

the arrow maker who gives birth to a new century

2010-07-04T05:19:00.000-07:00

The most extraordinary festival of all those celebrated by the Indians of America was surely the Toxiuh molpilia (the binding of the years) which took place at the end of every century, at the end of a cycle of fifty-two solar years. This was the festival of the new fire... It was the most beautiful, the most tragic, and the most meaningful of festivals, since it took place at the time when, according to the Indians' counting of time, all the stars having completed their cycle, the entire cosmos would begin again the revolution which lead it from the year One Rabbit to another year One Rabbit.

...

There was something tragic and dreamlike in that terrifying wait for the end of the world which the Christian Sahagun could not accept, because for him it has the inevitable sense of a damnation: it was, he says, "an invention of the devil so they would renew the pact they had made with him... by plunging them into terror of the end of the world and by making them believe he was prolonging their time and was having mercy on them, by allowing the world to continue."

...

The priests then arrived, each one wearing the insignias of his god, and they began to walk slowly, silently, "and they were then called teonenemi, which means, they walk like gods".

Then, at a given moment, a man was sacrificed, enabling the entire universe to continue on its course. They chose a warrior, captured during combat, chosen from among the most courageos, who had to bear, by the date of his birth, the name of his destiny. Born on the first day of the year, he was called xiuhtlanin, he who arrowed the new year. The high priest placed a stick of wood upon his chest and quickly rubbed the tapered stick between his hands, thus producing a spark. When the fire caught "the captive's chest was immediately opened, his heart ripped out and thrown into the fire, which they kept fanning, and then the whole body was consumed in the flames". And all around the people who were waiting in anguish, seeing the fire rise up, "immediately cut their ears with knives, collected their blood and threw it in the direction where the light had appeared"; fire was taken to all parts of the province by runners carrying torches and, says Sahagun, "it was an admirable sight, that multitude of fire in all the villages, so such a degree it seemed to be daylight." The last ceremony of the new fire took place in 1507, according to Sahagun, "they did it in complete solemnity, for the Spanish had not yet come to that land".

+++

From The Mexican Dream, J.M.G. Le Clezio, p54.

+++

with regard to the various ages of wo/man

2010-06-15T00:37:00.001-07:00

As people age they are inclined to sublimate their disappointments, channeling them into their attitude towards the world. The price they have paid for that which has not been realised is compensated for by moments of capriciousness or pettiness. As though seeking to rediscover the privileges of childhood, before the disappointments of adulthood tarnished childhood's dreams of a promised heaven on earth.

+++

We are all subject to these whims. The degree to which we allow ourselves to indulge them demarcates the line between our desire to continue becoming an adult, or our inclination to remain a child.

+++

the whole of the moon

2010-06-15T00:34:00.000-07:00

You have to love someone for their flaws (in your perception) as much as their values (in your perception).

Otherwise your love is partial, discriminatory and vulnerable.

+++

define your terms

2010-06-15T00:33:00.001-07:00

You can't write about corruption in a corrupt society, because it doesn't want to know.

+++

london - montevideo, april 2008

2010-04-02T03:17:00.001-07:00

Because all we do as we travel is note or having thing things noted unto us.

The woman flying from LA with her husband and daughter. The husband holding a large object which looks like a ring of fire. On their way to Bucharest. Delayed firstly because an engine hadn't worked and secondly because of the NATO summit. Heading to Bucharest because the fourteen year old daughter is one of the top ten under 15 rhythmic gymnasts in the US. Their hotel in Bucharest is going to cost 30 Euros a night. They are bringing their own sheets. Stay three nights before returning directly to LA.

The assistant as I checked in at the TAM desk at Frankfurt. Who arranged my window seat and then disappeared for ten minutes having seen my baggage was only routed as far as Sao Paulo. Before returning with a sticker which informed that the case would now go as far as Montevideo. Who said with only the barest hint of multilingual irony: I think this is better now.

+++

funny how these things have a way of coming together

2010-03-22T11:14:00.000-07:00

What we watched was a work by Harold Pinter called Betrayal...
'What did you think?' he asked.
'Of the play?'
He nodded as he chewed. I shrugged.
'Good.' I said. 'Pretty good.'
Rodney's expression demanded an explanation.
'Well'. I admitted, 'the truth is I'm not sure I understood it all.'
'I, on the other hand, am sure I didn't understand any of it,' Rodney said after emitting a grunt...'But I fear that's not Wong's fault but Pinter's. I can't remember where I read how he discovered his writing method. The guy was with his wife and he said to her: "Darling, I've got quite a few good scenes written, but they've nothing to do with each other. What should I do?" And his wife answered: "Don't worry: you just put them all together, the critics will take care of explaining what they mean." And it worked: the proof is there's not a single line of Pinter the critics don't understand perfectly.

+++

Javier Cercas, The Speed of Light

+++

inside out (2)

2010-03-21T04:43:00.000-07:00

Every relationship is also a story.

+++

What a story reveals is no more the shell of its existence.

+++

Beneath the shell lurk networks and connections and fears and dreams.

+++

However, even in the best told of stories, nothing more than the shell can ever be revealed.

+++

it could quite reasonably be argued that we inhabit -

2010-03-21T04:41:00.001-07:00

- A world cursed by the fascism of perfection.

+++

the tudors

2010-03-12T16:46:00.001-08:00

Four eight year olds sit around a table. One has Somali parents. Two have Turkish parents. One has British parents. All are British schoolchildren. They are studying the Tudors. Religion under the Tudors. They've made a poster, with a picture of the Pope hidden beneath the flap. The exercise they are asked to do involves imagining themselves to be a Catholic and then a Protestant firstly in the reign of Mary and then in the reign of Elizabeth 1. Their Catholics express their happiness at being ruled by Mary and their Protestants their relief at being ruled by Elizabeth. Their Catholics express their fear of persecution during the reign of Elizabeth, and the Protestants the fear of persecution under the reign of Mary. When questioned they say that the exercise makes sense, and they like it.

+++

west london tales 11 - silence

2010-03-12T16:38:00.000-08:00

I finish the play that I've been reading. It's gone midnight. The play's about a soldier who comes back from Basra and brings the war with him. I switch the light off. I notice something. I look out of the window, which is placed alongside the bed. The Westway is closed. Not a car passes. A camera flashes in the distance. I realise what it is that I am noticing. It's the first silence I have known in my home in the two and a half years I have lived here. I listen to the sound of my room. It hums. I hear a train go past, and see its lights reflected in the next tower block down. Or perhaps I see the lights and then I hear the train. The room hums. Silence.

Then, even as I am wondering what it might be like to live with silence, or that approximation of silence which the traffic, the traffic which never sleeps, snuffs out; the Westway opens again. Red tail lights drone Westwards. In an instant I forget what the sound of that silence, if that is what it was, felt like. Although the hum remains.

+++

pelevin on writing; on buddhism; on writing and buddhism

2010-03-10T11:09:00.000-08:00

Life is a bitch, and then you die. Death is a bitch, and then you are born. Writing is very much like this, as it is living multiple short lives within your longer one.

+++

Buddhism seemed to me to be the only religion that didn’t resemble the projection of the Soviet power onto the domain of spirit. It was only much later that I understood that it was exactly the other way around—the Soviet power was an attempt to project the alleged heavenly order onto Earth. Well, Buddhism was totally out of this vicious circle and there was something so strangely compelling and soothing about it.

+++

http://bombsite.com/issues/79/articles/2481

+++

cash flow

2010-03-05T11:41:00.001-08:00

Money is just an opportunity cost.

+++

For what you gain from the having of it, you lose from those things you might have gained from the not having of it.

+++

interchange

2010-03-05T11:36:00.000-08:00

It might be said that in order to truly experience the pathos and/ or beauty of living in a big city, you need to be single, and lonely. In which state, every touch of humanity counts at least double.

+++

Having just crossed the path of the man who works in the BBC courier department at Kings Cross Station, on the down escalator as he passed on the up, a man who I met briefly earlier today for the first and probably last time.

+++

enfield locked

2010-03-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

The exercise was about writing without thinking. Letting the pencil reveal what the mind contains and conceals. Six years olds sighed at the chore, before the classroom was given over to the sound of pencils tacking at paper.

A few days later one of them, a boy called B, told me his dad had been quizzing him. Normally when this happens, his mind goes blank, the more he seeks the answer he's searching for the more it eludes him. This time, he tried not thinking. And to his surprise, he found the answer he was looking for.

+++

reading and drinking

2010-03-05T10:22:00.000-08:00

Reading a novel is not dissimilar to having a conversation with a drunk in the middle of their night.

Saying which:

Reading a novel you don't get on with is like being trapped in the drunk's headlights.

Reading a novel you do get on with is like getting drunk with the world's most entertaining boozer.

The only thing that's certain is that when the dawn comes, the night will end.

+++

feel the quality

2010-03-05T10:19:00.000-08:00

We inhabit a conviction society. The more you convince yourself and others of your worth/ the worth of your idea/ the worth of your conviction, the more successful your integration within this society.

+++

the devil's in the detail

2010-02-03T02:13:00.000-08:00

To be a true artist you need to be conscious of the complete insignificance of your work.

+++

And learn when you need to fight that insignificance.

+++

And when you need to accept it.

+++

on a flying visit home from the peruvian rainforest

2009-08-28T08:25:00.000-07:00

In New York I went to the entryway, only two blocks from my apartment. where John Lennon was shot. In Central Park a crowd had gathered spontaneously for a silent vigil that kept growing and growing. The degree to which people were feeling genuine shock and dismay made an impression on me, even if the demonstration was plagued by all the inanities that also form part of his era: joints were passed around, posters of gurus were held up in the crowd, and vague demands for peace were voiced - for what peace, where? A young woman wearing a paleo-hippie outfit held up a banner reading, "All he said is give peace a chance."

Werner Herzog, December 1980, from Conquest of the Useless

+++

quotation from a plastic bag from libreria del teatro el galpon, av 18 de julio 1618-20

2009-07-15T04:32:00.000-07:00

Uno no se llega a ser quien es por lo que escribo sino por lo que lee.

Jorge Luis Borges

+++

what he said in caracas

2009-07-05T16:22:00.000-07:00

What then is writing of quality? Well, what it has always been: knowing to stick one’s head into the dark, knowing to jump into the void, knowing that literature is basically a dangerous occupation. To run along the edge of the precipice: on one side the bottomless abyss and on the other the faces one loves, the smiling faces one loves, and books, and friends, and food. And to accept that fact, though sometimes it may weigh on us more than the flagstone that covers the remains of every dead writer. Literature, as an Andalusian folk song might say, is dangerous.

bolano

+++

2 quotations courtesy of enrique vila-matas

2009-07-04T03:38:00.000-07:00

To those who ask me the reason for my travels, I tend to respond: I am well aware of what I am fleeing from, but not what I am searching for. In any case it's better to exchange a bad state for an uncertain one.

Montaigne

+++

The soul while travelling is constantly being exercised as it observes new and unknown things; and I know of no better school for the formation of life than consistently bringing before it the diversity of so many other lives.

Montaigne

+++

on finishing the guermantes way, the 3rd volume of A La Recherche

2009-05-23T15:50:00.000-07:00

Confieso, The Guermantes Way didn’t affect me in the same way as the first two volumes, the Greek and the Australian. This volume, the Uruguayan, never quite connected with the Proust who captured passion so clinically in the earlier books. The hundred page long descriptions of a snobbish dinner party or a Paris salon felt sobre-extended, testing the mettle of the ordinary reader whose taste for this world is fragile at best. All those surgical powers of description put to the purpose of describing a world whose vacuity the narrator is constantly noting. It seems a waste of the great man’s talents, a frivolity in the wake of his established genius. And yet, the reader hangs in there, battling his way through, moments and details ever ready to leap out and rupture the banality of the Guermantes’ world. M de Charlus lurks, promising to reappear, and Swann grants a cameo, as does Albertine, all bestowing the gravitas which we know is there somewhere, waiting to re-emerge. I don’t know where I’ll read the next volume, Sodom and Gomorrah. I suppose there’s no guarantee that it shall even happen. However, after three years and three volumes, in three countries, I shall live with the knowledge that should one be lucky enough to avoid the porcine flu or the depths of despair or the black box or the sharks in the pool, there’s another three volumes of Marcel’s epic, waiting to beguile or frustrate.

+++

inside out

2009-04-01T09:05:00.000-07:00

What people see on the outside has so little to do with what takes place on the inside that sometimes it feels incredible there should have been any connection between the two at all.

+++

on friendship

2009-04-01T09:04:00.002-07:00

It might be said of a writer that it is not his or her job to like his or her friends.

+++

But then there are as many ways of ‘not liking’ your friends as there are of skinning a cat; which is also to say that there are as many ways of ‘not liking’ your friends as there are ways of liking them.

+++

dream diary xmas 08, ipswich

2009-04-01T09:04:00.001-07:00

The events of the dream(s), the details, are of less importance than the fact of the dream. However, for the benefit of context I shall attempt to describe them.

I met up with H in South Africa. We spent a lot of time in a car. The clutch was slipping. Sometimes H drove but most of the time I did. We were in some kind of valley. At one point I had to clamber up a slippery muddy slope; at another we were trapped in a lift in an old building into which a black cat had crawled. At another we became separated, and I walked through a village where a girl approached me, begging me to sleep with her and pay her, her whole family in tow. I gave the girl 20 pounds, which was all the money I had in my wallet, and an old 70 real note which no-one recognised as currency.

[My nephew is playing a Boo game with me]

Later H and I rediscovered each other and kept driving. There is much that I’ve left out. But the real thing that has struck me about the dream is the way it both reminded and revealed to me a sense of intimacy with H. Intimacy which has nothing to do with sex (although the consummation may be found there), but the knowledge of one for the other, and the other for one, of spending time in each other’s pockets. An intimacy which engenders a way of speaking, knowing, sharing. Its been so long now since H and I knew one another, both as lovers and as friends, that I have all but forgotten it. I would almost have been ready to accept her commandment that we no longer know one another, and that to claim otherwise would be to claim a false knowledge. The dream restored the intimacy, which can, I suspect, never be quite annihilated. The intelligence, humour and love which accompanies it. I can’t remember the last time I dreamt about H. Maybe I’m only just ready for it.

+++

2009-04-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

salisbury

2009-03-01T15:25:00.000-08:00

Modern theatres have the architectural feel of airports: points of departure (in theory).

+++

Looking at photos of past productions reveals a flock of actors and writers whose day came, went, and is now little more than a scarcely glanced-at photo.

+++

Exceptions for my generation are: Rossiter, David Hemmings, Ronald Harwood, as an actor. All now dead.

+++

Theatres in other countries with photos of actors whose moment of glory has gone.

+++

My own friend himself captivating of a night, emphasising the value of the ephemeral in the face of eternity.

+++

angels walk backwards

2009-02-05T14:58:00.000-08:00

Do you not believe that you can know everything there is to know about someone from what is depicted on their face the very first time you meet them? And everything that comes thereafter is merely an unfolding of that moment?

+++

images which will will never grow older (only fade away)

2009-01-30T04:05:00.000-08:00

What tends to be forgotten in the act of creating cinema is that above and beyond all its other functions it is primarily an act of immortalization.

(For a while at least; firstly as long as our generational minds can conceive immortality; secondly for as long as human minds shall conceive immortality. Lastly for as long as the true immortals shall conceive immortality. Thereafter immortality itself enters something of a conceptual void.)

through a glass darkly

2009-01-27T15:29:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it's possible to recapture everything you need to know about a dream, in terms of how it made you feel, without being able to remember even so much as a single detail of what occurred within it.

+++

head over heels

2009-01-27T15:26:00.000-08:00

When you fall in love with someone, try to make sure you also fall in love with some part of the person they think they are, in addition to the person you think they are (which you cannot help but do).

+++

winchester

2009-01-26T02:55:00.000-08:00

It's a beautiful day and the sun brings warmth to the eleventh floor. The door is open and the Westway traffic resonates with an urban twang. Although it's still January, the day has a first hint of Spring to it.

Whenever Spring peeks through the clouds, I find myself thinking of Winchester. Although I was never enamored of it, for reasons which are lengthy and fundamentally English, I find myself missing it. Winchester, the Winchester which I knew, was not the countryside, it was some corner of an old English provincial town, a kind of hinterland. My parents' house, at times my own, was on the edge of town. During the Winter, whole months would go by with low cloud, drizzle and damp. But, as the season turned, signalled by the appearance of daffodils on the banks of the Itchen, the mind would fast forward. To days when the walk up the hill would be balmy, to be undertaken towards dusk, the grass longer and docile under the final rays of the day. Or an evening in the garden of the Queen, pulling a jacket or sweater against the onset of chill as the Summer night faded. Or just the smell of the meadows as you ambled the seemingly over-familiar path down to St Cross, verdant, reassuring, nature's nurture pulling its underhand tricks.

+++

the invisible hand

2008-12-14T06:52:00.000-08:00

If no-one sees any artistry, how do you know it's there?

+++

pitfalls of the consumer society (#274)

2008-12-14T06:44:00.001-08:00

Thinking oneself - one's problems, peccadilloes and perfections - unique, is the first step on the road to ordinariness.

+++

west london tales 10

2008-12-14T05:48:00.000-08:00

On a good day it takes 15 minutes on the 18 bus from my nearest stop to Warren Street. The buses are regular and this day was no exception. However, at the Paddington Green police station stop, which is the junction with Edgware Road, the bus hit heavy traffic. The driver opened the doors early, to let people out. The rear door wouldn't shut. The bus sat in traffic for five minutes. I offered to go out and give the doors a push for him, but he said they had to shut on their own or not at all.

I got out, as there was another bus behind, but almost as soon as I did, the driver got the doors to work, and the same bus pulled up, and I got back on. I wasn't in a hurry, merely heading to Tottenham Court Road for what turned out to be a doomed mission to buy Christmas presents.

The bus filled up. Just past Marylebone, I heard a thud. I looked up. There was someone on the floor. She was writhing around, her head under the seat, her legs stretched out. A stocky man, who looked Turkish, with a short, neat ponytail, looked at me, and we both called an ambulance. He got through first. The woman was still writhing on the floor. Several people had gathered round her. Finally someone told the bus driver to stop, and he did so, at the Harley Street stop.

No-one was quite sure what was going on with the woman. She had her clothes - primarily her hijab - bundled over her face. Someone tried to pull them back. They spent what felt like an age trying to get the black cloth away from her face. For a moment I wondered if there was actually a head there at all. Perhaps this was a symptom of a new horror, the headless fit. Finally the clothes came away. The woman was a young African woman, bundled up against the cold.

Most of the passengers stood around for a bit, looking at the spectacle, and then got off. The woman still lay on the floor. Suddenly she began to fit and then appeared to pass out. This was the only occasion I found myself able to do anything useful, as I reached to undo the buttons of her coat which were constrictively tight, the top button throttling her. A European man appeared and pressed on her chest. Suddenly the woman sat up.

Besides myself there was the Turkish looking man, the European, a white English woman who seemed to have some idea of what she was doing, a frenetic Italian woman and a smiley black man with two protruding front teeth. The man with the teeth spoke the woman's language, Somali. The woman was concerned about her hijab. The Italian tutted at her for being so silly, telling her that god wouldn't mind how she was dressed. We waited for the ambulance to come. The African man explained he'd been born in the UK, and his Somali was rusty, but she was thanking us. The ambulance still didn't come. The driver was full of calm and good sense.

Nothing much happened for five or maybe ten minutes. There was no value in most of us being there. But the longer we all stayed the clearer it became that the value was just in the choosing to be there. To ensure that whatever could be done - those things that society can provide - would be. This woman wouldn't be left to fend for herself. She would be looked after. Even though, by now, she seemed to be alright again, the crisis passed, sitting up and wrapping her hijab around her. She'd only arrived recently, the man explained. He'd go with her to the hospital. The ambulance arrived, and I left. The man with the protruding teeth waved goodbye.

+++

its easier to take an engine to pieces than it is to put it back together again!

2008-11-28T19:05:00.000-08:00

Once you have negated someone, it's a tricky technical operation to un-negate them.

+++

west london tales 9

2008-11-02T13:32:00.000-08:00

In the Bayswater Coffee Republic a business meeting is taking place. A group of five men sit around a table, all of them wearing suits. An older Asian man tells a younger Asian man that he has already asked him two questions, which have only helped him to ascertain that whereas he, the older man, has ten million pounds to invest, he cannot see anything that the younger men has to bring to the table. The older man talks at length about sugar cane and Malaysia. The younger man is trying to get the older man, who says he's from Pakistan, to invest in palm oil, in Ghana. He enumerates the advantages of palm oil as an investment. This is the kind of conversation which helps to explain why, unlike some, I find it hard to write in cafes.

+++

west london tales 8

2008-10-08T14:21:00.000-07:00

The woman whose flat downstairs I sometimes flood is a Coptic Egyptian. She doesn't hold the flood against me, and we make small talk in the lift. Today I came back with vegetables from the market, and she said to me: 'The market is getting so expensive now'. She's right, it is. The price of vegetables has gone through the roof in the past few weeks, for all kinds of reasons. For a moment it seemed like we could indeed be living in a world where the ebbs and flows of fortune are revealed by the price of broccoli or spuds. A world we ususally associate with markets in distant countries; markets where shopping has a meaning which is both exactly the same and completely different to our own.

+++

on economics, love, war, etc

2008-10-08T14:13:00.000-07:00

Crises are subject to the rules of drama, rather than the rules of logic.

+++

Which is another way of saying: Drama contains its own logic. Whose connection to the logic of physics or mathematics is tenuous, at best. And, in the world of humans, infinitely more powerful.

+++

stating the obvious

2008-10-08T14:12:00.001-07:00

If you don't fight you're not a fighter.

+

If you don't write you're not a writer.

+++

destiny

2008-10-08T14:11:00.000-07:00

The older you get the easier it becomes to believe in it.

+++

solitude

2008-10-08T14:10:00.000-07:00

The degree to which we enjoying being on our own depends to an extent on the degree to which we have come to accept ourselves for who we think we are.

+++

say it ain't so

2008-10-08T14:09:00.000-07:00

The average truth tells as many lies as the average lie.

+++

Dollar Thrifty

2008-08-23T15:44:00.000-07:00

Every journey, as any student of narrative can vouchsafe, contains its own beginning, middle and end. However, within this straightforward structure, there exist sub-journeys, with their own beginnings, middles and ends. This is an account of the very first day of a road trip undertaken by Mr Collins and myself, through a venerable part of Russia, known as The Golden Ring, a trip which began and ended in Moscow. The trip lasted from Wednesday 13th August to Sunday 17th, but the events described below all took place on the first day.

+++

We awoke around 11am, hung over, after a night of beer, Ukrainian pancakes and honey vodka. Our first mission was to check out of Godzillas, our hostel, and get to the airport by 2pm to collect the hire car, with the subsequent task of driving East out of Moscow to the ancient Russian capital of Vladimir, where we had a hotel room booked for that evening.

Godzillas, like much of Russia, is in the process of being redeveloped. It appeared to be owned by a posh looking Englishman and run by a coterie of fierce, attractive Russian females. The one bathroom on our floor provided for 300 euro-travellers, and looked like something that had been recently shelled in South Ossetia. After waiting in line for 255 euro-travellers, we clambered through the rubble, had a shower, and dragged ourselves and our cases out into the searing heat.

There is a recently opened rail link to Sheremetyevo airport at Savelonsky, just two stops away on the tube. We plunged into middle-earth, where the Moscow tube is located, and arrived at the rail-link for midday. Only to be informed by a stroppy woman in the ticket office that the next train wasn’t until 2pm.

Undaunted, Mr Collins lead us back into the Stygian depths of the Metro. He’d taken the long way round to come and meet me off the plane the day before, and was sure we could get to the airport within two hours. After changing twice, travelling for forty minutes, we arrived at Planernaya, the end of the purple line. Outside, it looked, as Mr Collins observed, a bit like Cairo. There were no signs for the airport bus, but he knew what he was doing and after 15 minutes it arrived and we were on our way.

Moscow traffic is unfriendly at the best of times, but despite the stop-start progress, in part caused by having to briefly join the notorious MKAD, (the Moscow equivalent of the M25), it looked like we’d make it for 2pm. Mr Collins pointed out the 2nd World War Tank Trap memorial, and we stuttered past many a challenging housing development. Mr C observed that it might be the long way round, but the trip cost less than a pound, whereas a taxi ride to the airport could be as much as £40.

We got off the bus as 13.45. Mr Collins had hired the car via Easy Drive, whose supplier had the evocative Russian name of Dollar Thrifty. We went to find the Dollar Thrifty booth. Avis, Hertz, and all the other usual suspects had booths on the ground floor, but there was no sign of Dollar Thrifty. We went upstairs to departures, and there was still no sign of Dollar Thrifty. We came downstairs again and explored the furthest recesses of Sheremetyevo Terminal 2, but no matter how hard we searched, Dollar Thrifty remained elusive. Finally we went over to someone at Hertz, who told us that Dollar Thrifty used to have a presence at the airport, but not any more. Not for a month or so at least.

We sat down to weigh up the situation. Various taxi drivers approached us, hoping for a fare, asking where we were going. When we said Vladimir, they laughed, asking if we realised it was over 250 km away. To which Mr Collins replied that that was why we’d hired a car…

Finally, a woman at one of the other car hire booths studied our scrappy computer print-out. She decreed that Dollar Thrifty did, in fact, exist. Only its offices, as written in the small print, were not at the airport, but at 22 Leningrad Street, one of the main avenues headed back into Moscow.

It was now mid-afternoon. Detailed negotiations revealed that 22 Leningrad St was nowhere near any convenient metro. If we were to have any chance of getting to Vladimir that evening, we would have to get to our car by taxi. The woman at the car-hire booth called a taxi driver over. The man was happy to take us to our destination. At a cost of around £40.

+++

Moscow traffic is unfriendly at the best of times. Mr Collins and I sat in the back seat of the cab, as it inched its way along the six lane highway also known as Leningrad Street. The cab driver occasionally peered to his right to see if he could spot the number of the latest industrial estate, as we headed into town. The traffic slowed to a crawl. We passed 81 Leningrad Street. Then passed no more buildings for another fifteen minutes. The crawl, which I had speculated was down to weight of traffic, turned out to be caused by a Lada that had broken down in the middle lane. If you’re ever stuck in Moscow traffic, the chances are that somewhere up ahead, another decrepit Lada has bitten the dust. Once we got past this obstacle, the traffic loosened up. After nearly an hour, the cab driver turned off the six lane highway and came to a stop in front of 22 Leningradsky Prospekt.

The address was a Jeep showroom. It contained dozens of pristine Jeeps. But not a single hire car. And no-one who worked there had ever heard of Dollar Thrifty.

We handed over 2000 roubles to the driver, ready to concede defeat. There was no way we were going to get to Vladimir that evening. It seemed probable that Dollar Thrifty did not exist, and Mr Collins had lost a considerable amount of money hiring a car from a fictional company. Then the taxi driver had an idea. He consulted the computer print-out again. Scratched his head. And informed us that we could well be at the wrong 22 Leningrad Street.

It turns out that major roads leading out of Moscow are split into sections. The inner section is called the ‘Prospekt’, and the outer section is called the ‘Schosse’. The taxi driver had brought us to 22 Leningradsky Prospekt, when we needed to be at 22 Leningradsky Schosse. As it was on his way back to the airport, he said he’d take us there. We plunged back onto the maelstrom of the six lane super-highway, heading back in the direction we’d just come from.

It was at this point that Mr Collins realised there was a contact number for Dollar Thrifty, concealed in the small print. He called it and miraculously got through, explaining that we were running late, but were now on our way. There was only one problem. As far as he could make out, the man on the phone at Dollar Thrifty had no record of any booking in the name of Collins, and no available car. Mr Collins’ Russian is good, but conducting high level negotiations about his non-existence after four hours of seemingly pointless motion was a bit much. He handed the phone to the taxi driver, who was pleased to confirm the existence of Dollar Thrifty at 22 Leningradsky Prospekt. The cab driver handed the phone back to Mr Collins who was told he would be called back in 5 minutes regarding the possibility of hiring a car.

By now completely confused, we pulled over to the side of the highway, and waited. Traffic thundered past. Mr Collins and I began to take in the fact it was now getting on for 4pm and we were attempting to recover from our hangovers without the assistance of fluids or food. The phone didn’t ring. The traffic continued to thunder past. The day grew hotter.

Mr Collins called back. He was connected to someone who spoke English. The man who spoke English confirmed the non-existence of any booking in the name of Collins, but said he had a car available, at an additional cost of £60. For a while we vacillated, unsure what to do. Finally we decided to bite the bullet. We set off again, in pursuit of Dollar Thrifty.

+++

The taxi dropped us on the side of the road beside a small industrial estate containing a selection of car showrooms. The man on the other side of the phone had mentioned Audi. We dragged our cases into the estate, going past a Hyundai showroom, before turning a corner. The Leningradsky superhighway continued its thundering to our right. Once again there was no shortage of vehicles. Hyundais, Fords, Daewoos, and more, but not an Audi in sight. When we asked someone for the Audi showroom, they suggested we go to the reception desk in the Ford showroom.

Dwindling oil reserves do not appear to be of great concern to the newly affluent Russians. At half past four of a Wednesday afternoon, the Ford showroom was full of young couples gazing lovingly at sleek new models. Mr Collins went to the woman on reception. She had never heard of Dollar Thrifty. The car-hunters took no notice of the oddballs carting their luggage around with them. Mr C continued to enquire. Eventually a bespectacled young man who spoke English appeared and said he’d see what he could do, before disappearing, telling us to stay put.

Thrusting young car salesmen and women eyed us with curiosity. The helpful man showed no sign of coming back. Dollar Thrifty, Vladimir, even a bed for the night – all of these things seemed further away than ever. We contemplated changing tack and asking if we could take a Ford for a test drive, one way of getting a car, but the chances of the salespeople letting us get behind the wheel of one of their Fords did not seem high.

Suddenly the bespectacled man re-appeared, telling us to follow him to the lower level of the showroom. There, tucked away in an inauspicious corner, was a small, freestanding booth, the kind of thing which is set up at train stations to market credit cards. Behind the booth stood a young man in a white shirt, with a pony tail. Printed on the front of the booth, in bright green letters, were the English words: Dollar Thrifty.

The sense of exhilaration which engulfed Mr Collins and myself at the sight of these two words was only marginally punctured by the fact that the man with the pony tail had no idea who we were, and possessed neither any spare cars for hire, nor any knowledge of a reservation in the name of Collins. By now, obstacles like these seemed like nothing more than glitches, small Russian tests of our endurance. Sure enough, the man with the pony tail got on the phone to the head office of Dollar Thrifty, and spoke to the man who spoke English, discovering that there was a car for us, if we could only find our way to this other office.

The man with a pony tail put the phone down. He gathered up some papers and carefully placed them in a leather briefcase, which he zipped up. Then he lead the way out of the car showroom. He walked towards the six lane highway, across a muddied verge. We trailed behind him, dragging our bags behind us. The man with the pony tail stood by the side of the super-highway, and thrust out his thumb.

If the man with the ponytail had decided to hitchhike with us to the Siberian Dollar Thrifty offices, we would have accepted this as a necessary detour. In fact, he was hoping to flag down a taxi. The sun beat down. Lorries, buses, four by fours and Ladas streamed past. The man with the pony tail did not seem like a natural communicator. However, he had untapped reserves of patience, something we were coming to learn came in handy when dealing with Russian hire-car operations, and after a while a cab pulled over. The man with the pony-tail did a bit of negotiation, Mr Collins and I got in, and twenty-five minutes and £3 later, we arrived at the Audi showroom, beside which was located the promised land of the main Dollar Thrifty offices.

+++

Mr Dollar Thrifty turned out to be an avuncular, white-haired man, who spoke good English. He had been the one who Mr Collins had spoken to on the phone. He offered us fresh water and tea, and explained that although there was no reservation, there was a car, and he would be happy to redeem the internet voucher, which Mr Collins downloaded. After the best part of an hour of bureaucratic activity, our Mitsubishi Chevrolet was ready. It was now gone 6pm, with the Moscow rush hour in full swing. Mr Dollar Thrifty strongly advised against trying to get to Vladimir that evening, and recommended a hotel near to the motorway we’d have to take in the morning. He was even kind enough to print out a map, which he carefully marked, showing the hotel’s location.

Moscow traffic is, as is well known, unfriendly at the best of times. Rush hour is not the best of times. During rush hour, Moscow traffic verges on the psychopathic. We had to get to the MKAD, and drive about twenty miles round it in a clockwise direction. Russians have an engagingly anarchic approach to the art of driving. The MKAD is never less than ten lanes wide. There is, presumably, a theoretical speed limit, but in practise everyone just goes as fast as they can. Overtaking can take place on the outside, the inside, or, if you possess the technology, over the top. Lorries see it as their duty to pull out without warning, and indicators are for wimps. Ladas break down randomly, and every now and again, just to make it more fun, all lane markings are removed, encouraging a kind of free-jazz driving experience.

Mr Dollar Thrifty had explained procedure if we had an accident. He said that of course this was unlikely, but his eyes told a different story, implying it was just a question of time, and if we were lucky it wouldn’t be fatal, as though he’d already accepted the car was a write-off. Nevertheless, we somehow made if off the MKAD, and headed for the spot which he’d marked on his map. We arrived there sometime after seven. There was no sign of a hotel at the marked spot. A medium sized shopping centre, but not a hint of a hotel.

The last forty minutes of the first day of our road trip remains something of a blur. Mr Collins nobly leaped from the car at least a dozen times to ask directions, as Muscovites dispatched us from suburban back streets to super-highways; down dead ends, wrong turnings, black holes.

Finally the high rise towers of the Beta Gamma hotel loomed out of the dusk. The hotel is part of the largest hotel complex in Europe, which has been converted from the athletes village of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Its rooms are neat and serviceable, with a reassuringly dated feel. The beer we drank at one of the various hotel bars was vastly over-priced, but so hard-earned we couldn’t have cared less. When Wednesday 13th April finally came to a close, and I settled down to sleep in a room that might have once have been Thompson, Coe or Ovett’s, it felt as though I had acquired, over the course of that long day, an understanding of the satisfying sense of complete exhaustion which comes from securing a great victory against improbable odds.

+++

Travelling is a strange business. It’s easy to visit places, feel as though you have in some way got to know them, and yet come away with no idea what it’s like to live there. The curious events of that opening day of the road trip seemed, perhaps, to give more of an insight into Moscow, its chaotic scale and complexity, than I should ever have got if things had gone according to plan.

The following morning Mr Collins and I headed East on our voyage to the heart of old mother Russia (or at least one variation of it). Something we perhaps encountered in Suzdal’s marketplace, where we bought redcurrants and cucumbers from one of the little old ladies who lay out their wares on a cloth on the low market wall.

+++

Vladimir

2008-08-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

Russia’s previous capital, the town’s three hours drive from Moscow,
Down a straight road which leads to Siberia, renamed ‘The Road of
Enthusiasm’ by the Soviets. It’s cathedral contains
The grave of Alexander Nevsky. At Lake Pepius he lead
The Russians to victory against the heavily armoured Teu-
Tonic Knights, who crashed through the ice. The cathedral’s being restored.
Yellow plastic sacks adorn golden chandeliers. Masons lay floors
Between baroque angels and frescoes so old they can barely whisper.

14.08.08

+++

Dawn over Suzdal

2008-08-23T15:41:00.000-07:00

Clustered crows reel overhead, cawing for the night being lost
To day, when their dominion’s supplanted by god and man,
Those tolerated foes. One day they’ll attack, tearing the
Lead from brute spires which invaded the sky so long ago;
Pecking flesh like the bloodthirsty mosquitoes, (already
Taking breakfast). The sky inverts. Flamingo pinks pale to
Pallid blue. The streets of Suzdal are empty, its churches,
Monasteries and convents dedicate to the glory of
Christ. The stand-off between meadow, reed, flower and white-washed walls
As fierce, yet tranquil, as it has ever been, or shall be.

16.08.08

+++

In The Monastery (Suzdal)

2008-08-23T15:40:00.002-07:00

The monastery is the size of a village. Its
Fortified walls enclose a hotchpotch of towers,
Churches and tourists. It hums with the sound of a
Thousand twangling instruments. The campanologist
Peeling his eleven o’clock solo, competes
With a team of rubber booted lawn strimmers, who
Compete with the drills of building workers, enjoined
In more restoration of the Russian soul. In
The monastery’s museum of decorative
Art, all notes are written in Cyrillic, far from
My comprehension. I stare in ignorance at
A thousand years worth of rings, pendants, winding sheets,
Bishop’s robes, goblets, crucifi, icons and the
Rest, fragments from another, parallel, culture.

16.08.08

+++

The End of The Road

2008-08-23T15:40:00.001-07:00

We drove cross-country, North East from Suzdal,
Towards a pretty town whose name I can’t
Recall, crossing meadows saturated
In wildflower, dusted by morning rain.
Reaching a small town with seven exits,
We took one leading to a road marked
Brown, not yellow, on the map. A Russian
Driving ahead turned round. The brown road was
Indeed brown, a gloopy quagmire. After
A hundred squelchy yards we reversed,
Discretion being the better part of valour.
Returning to the seven tongued town we
Opted for a safer, yellow route. This
Too proved to be a blighted track, the top
Layer of tarmac a memory of
Long-spent tyres. But it took us in the right
Direction, leading to a hamlet six
Kilometres from our destination.
Before deteriorating. After
The rain, it was no more than a sequence
Of gravel lakes. We cajoled the unwilling
Hire car through the treacherous pits, inching
Forward, awaiting the rending of an
Axle or the demise of the suspension.
Finally, we reached a raised, concrete track,
Of sorts. The car bumbled through a
Terrifying landscape of reed and giant
Yellow weeds. Midges bombed the windscreen.
After a meagre kilometre the
Concrete came to a sudden stop. Ahead
Lay more gravel pits, muddied, rain-soaked,
Stretching into the visible distance.
A four by four or a dirt bike might have
Done the job. But in a tin-can hire-car
In the fly-blown heart of Russia, we had
Reached our point of no return. Like so
Many other invaders before us, we
Conceded defeat, turned on our tails, and fled.

16.08.08

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Notes on the Ceremony

2008-08-23T15:38:00.000-07:00

In one of several cathedrals contained within
The Kremlin of Segiev Posad, one of various
Never-ending services is taking place. The
Cathedral is a baroque, high-ceilinged hall,
Brightly frescoed, with hundreds of people
Gathered, negotiating their personal
Prayer space. The choir sings a constant refrain.
Light gate-crashes the prayers’ line of sight.
Head-scarved women cross themselves as they
Enter, and when the service dictates. Some
Have brought foot-stools for later in the day,
Others bag the benches on the sides, the
Only seating space. Devotees kiss relics.
A mobile phone goes off and is absorbed by
The energy of worship. I think of church
Services I attended as a child, dull in
Comparison to this palpable passion,
Bottled up for seventy years by the

Communists. Awaiting its release,
In spite of Soviet attempts to refract
It unto the fading glory of their cause.

17.08.08

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The Mayakovsky Museum, Moscow

2008-08-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

A deconstructed shell of a building
Ripped to pieces and re-assembled
With all the clutter of his life and
Myth scattered like grapeshot, at the heart
Of which lies a small, untouched study,
Containing a desk, a divan, a
Fireplace and a picture of Lenin.
With a blunt gesture, the guide explains this
Is where the poet shot himself in the head.

18.08.08

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The All Russia Exhibition, Moscow

2008-08-23T15:36:00.000-07:00

Set in a large park, the exhibition was created by
Stalin and called, initially, The Exhibition of
Economic Achievements. It features extravagant
Pavilions dedicated to every corner of the USSR:
The Georgia Pavilion, the Karelian, and so on.
At the centre, in front of a vast Lenin statue, is
The House of the Peoples of Russia, behind which
Is The Fountain of the Friendship of Peoples.
The site is capped by two Aeroflot jets and a
Duplicate of the rocket that took Gagarin into space.
(Disconcertingly cramped, man in space in a
Baked bean can.) Where once denizens of the
Soviet Republic marvelled at its glories, now the
Site is overrun by teenagers on roller blades;
Pumping Eurotrash which booms from strategic
Speakers; fast food joints; whilst the pavilions
Are devoted to tacky trade fairs selling computer
Parts or furry toys. Lenin looks on as a bright blue
Tellytubby prances below.

It’s as if the place
Has been remodelled to mock the regime which
Aimed so high only to fall so low. But this notion of
Design is misleading. All that’s happened is the old
Has been displaced by the new. The old may frown
At the brashness of its successor, but its forefathers
Felt the same way. No doubt the sparrows look at
Each stage of human development in bafflement,
Remembering the glory of a world before creatures
Walked on two legs and began chirruping
Their incessant, meaningless twitter.

19.08.08

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Kasimir: What Happened?

2008-08-23T15:35:00.000-07:00

The New Tretyakov gallery, near Gorky Park
Shows 20th Century Russian art. At the turn
Of the last century, Cezanne’s influence is
Evident. Later, The Jack of Diamonds movement,
Founded in Moscow, emerges, blessed with its
Vivid, rough-hewn brushwork and a Fauvist palette.
Malevich belonged to it, but only briefly.
By 1915 he’d created his Black Square,
Which does exactly what it says on the tin: a
Work of savage purity which blew up art and
Made it start again. Two years later politics
Caught up. The ambition of Constructivism
Dovetailed with the ambition of Revolution.
For five years, Malevich, Tatlin and co explored
The edges of form, pushing it past inconceived
Boundaries. Then, the energy waned. Russian art
Began the long drift towards Social Realism.
Malevich’s work ceases to feature. Save for one
Piece from around 1930, called Sisters. A
Figurative picture showing two sisters, daubed in
Dull pastels . The avatar of modernity
Turned into a chocolate box craftsman. At which point
The Revolution could be called that no more.
Kasimir Malevich died in nineteen thirty
Five. He was accorded a state funeral and
Revered as a hero of the USSR.

19.08.08

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2 barcelona poems

2008-07-29T14:37:00.000-07:00

3 People I Have Spoken to in Barcelona

The first evening, I spoke to the un-
Speakably beautiful waitress, just
Briefly, because she was too beautiful
And I didn’t want it to seem like I
Was chatting her up, even though she smiled
At me and spoke English better than
Spanish, a result, perhaps, of her
Being Polish. She said she was coming
To London soon and I wanted to say,
Well if you come you should look me up,
But I didn’t, because she was un-
Speakably beautiful, and I am
Human and then I would have been
Chatting her up. On the second day
I spoke to the cleaner of the flat
I’m staying in. I couldn’t place her
Accent and asked where she was from and
She told me Paysandu, in Uruguay,
Where once we drove across the border
So slowly it seemed we’d never get there.
(Or was that Salto?) The woman said
She had no desire to go back. She’s
Lived here with her eighteen year old son
And sister since splitting up with her dull
Machista husband eight years ago.
Since coming to Europe she’s learnt,
She said, that you have to enjoy life.
She gave me a cigarette and we
Sat and smoked and drank water out of
Wine glasses, muy fino, she joked. Although
She said she didn’t miss Uruguay, the
More she talked the more she softened in her
Attitude towards the mother country,
And by the time our cigarettes were
Smoked and the water drunk I felt as though
We’d known each other half our adult lives.
Though we hadn’t. We’d only just met. The
Third person I spoke to was a doorman
At a bar called Marmelada, who came
From Brasilia where I’ve never been and
I can’t remember much about that
Conversation, though I remember
Enjoying it, despite being,
At the time, extremely drunk.

27.07.08

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In Club Divine

The thing that was scary about
The transvestite diva was not
The powder blue outfit or the
Hyper-tensile hair. It was not the
Way she lurked in the corridor
Outside the loos whilst preparing
To perform her next number. It
Wasn’t the way she tried to tweak
My nipple as I walked past, and
Then, seeing I was unfazed, clapped
Her hands, violently, an inch
From my nose. The thing that was scary
About the Catalan transvestite
Diva was the fact that, beneath the
Powder blue outfit, beneath the nail
Varnish and the eyeliner, she remained
Irretrievably, resolutely and
Forever, masculine to the bone.

28.07.08

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barcelona pensamiento 2

2008-07-28T02:13:00.000-07:00

Two years is long time but three years is longer.

+++

The first year you're still grappling with the consequences of what happened/ has happened/ is happening. The past and the present and the future seem inseperable.

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The second you're quantifying, making space, organising a perspective.

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It's not until the third that you can truly begin to believe it was, or is, now, in the past.

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Praca de Santa Marta, following a converstation with Mr Blue.

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barcelona pensamiento 1

2008-07-28T02:06:00.000-07:00

The state of poeticism, (so to speak), is a state determined by the expectation of death, which is also to say, a heightened awareness of the transitory nature of life. There are many different ways of allowing this state to influence behaviour, all of them poetic, (so to speak), and none of them particularly useful in the business of perpetrating the human race, or business, or plain day-to-day living (something conditioned by the ability to wipe this state from the daily slate). However, poeticism, like death, is unavoidable: we all have a poet within us; our consequent choice is how much attention we choose to pay her, or him.

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sartre's waiter (variation)

2008-06-29T09:27:00.000-07:00

Some people are so in love with the concept of what they are trying to achieve that they forget what it is they are actually trying to achieve.

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dealing with the inevitable

2008-06-29T09:24:00.001-07:00

If you try too hard to achieve something, you are liable to fail at it.

+++

(And success is nothing more than another trick of the mind.)

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cautionary notice

2008-06-29T09:19:00.000-07:00

Sentences, phrases and words: all of these things combine to over-simplify the world.

+++

Behind every sentence lurks a galaxy of meaning which can only be revealed through the use of further sentences.

+++

Never believe a word anyone says. Not because they lie, but because the truth is unspeakable.

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hemingway

2008-06-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

If you've lived life to the full, the older you get the harder it becomes to find reasons to keep going.

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south west london tales 2

2008-06-29T04:02:00.000-07:00

It's gone midnight and we're sitting outside the theatre in the car park after the last show drinking rum and beer. The pretty girl who I've barely spoken to in three months is sitting next to me. She apologises for not really being present during the run. She says it's because her personal life has been getting in the way. She can't help it. It's in her blood. I ask about her parents. She tells me her mother lives in Eritrea and her father's in Paris. He's an actor and a writer and a spoilt child who stamps his feet down the phone. The mother works for the Red Cross. She's a different kettle of fish, but she's in Eritrea. I ask her how old they are. Just making conversation. She doesn't know. She thinks about it. She says her father was born in. She thinks about it. The same year as her mother. Sixty six. On the bus home this information will sink in as some kind of a crossroads, an unforseen detour into the desert just off Marble Arch.

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west london tales 7

2008-06-29T03:53:00.000-07:00

It's half past two in the morning. I'm walking across the iron bridge to the Harrow Road. I'm drunk. Someone's walking behind me. There are people on the streets. Then the someone is walking beside me. I'm listening to music. The someone crosses my path under the flyover. I try to move away from her, increasing my speed. I look round. She's still there. She's talking to me. I take one headphone out. She asks me if she can come and stay at my place. I'm befuddled and bemused. I keep walking. She sticks to me. I tell her I have a wife and three children. She doesn't budge. We've reached the library and she's still there. She says she knows she can't stay at mine because of my wife but she still wants to stay at mine. I ask her where she's from. She says she's from Birmingham. She says they sent her away. I take her to the hostel. Ring the buzzer and a man lets us in. He comes down the stairwell. He says there aren't any beds. He says she should go to the police station. We have to leave. I give the woman the money left in my pocket and tell her to go to Euston. It's just down the road. Wait and get on a train to Birmingham. She says she doesn't have enough money for the train. She says she's going to go back into town. See what's happening there. She says goodbye and walks away.

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self consciousness

2008-06-17T02:16:00.000-07:00

The most interesting aspect of an Achilles heel is not that it exists and that it has the capability to bring its owner down.

It is that the owner of the Achilles heel is unaware of its existence, and its ability to bring him or her down.

The Achilles redemption lies in our capacity to discover our unavoidable flaw, and prepare for the day when an unleashed arrow will strike.

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dos anos

2008-06-10T17:01:00.001-07:00

No son tanto,
Pero son bastante.

(Assuming my understanding of the last word is better than the italian director who irked his Uruguayan actors according to la Panella)

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near-identical formulas

2008-05-31T01:26:00.000-07:00

Time recedes in volume with age.

or

Time's volume recedes with age.

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still

2008-05-31T01:21:00.001-07:00

I wake up early, Saturday, peaceful in the absence of scaffolders. In a dream you visited, treating me with your now habitual brand of self-centred disinterest. Which nevertheless I welcomed; for it had been good to see you; after so long. By day I walked the canal, reflecting, in dirty water, that my real mistake was not the one you would like me to think it should be.

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the foundations of shifting sands

2008-05-31T01:15:00.000-07:00

Unless one is secure in one's own attractiveness, whatsoever that might be based on, it becomes hard to accept the attractiveness of your partner; preferable to see them as loveable but resistable to the opposite sex.

At which point the other is liable to assume the role delegated to them, in order to play the part the partner desires, in order to please them.

They might play that part so well they come to forget what anyone ever saw in them, (including their partner).

Until someone else comes along and reminds them.

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nature, nurture, and chinese meat-eating habits

2008-05-31T01:11:00.000-07:00

A localised sense of decline can affect every corner of it's people's psyche. Likewise a sense of optimism.

This has been one of the reasons the USA has been, and has been seen to be, so successful in my lifetime. And might turn out to be the most significant ramification of the events of September 2001.

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around the city's edges

2008-05-20T09:59:00.000-07:00

Relationships demarcate a hinterland of our psyches, souls, or sensibilities that we forget exists when we are not in them.

Those long conversations about marginalia that don’t need to occur for any other reason than they help us to understand who we might be; have been; or might become.

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blurred vision

2008-05-16T15:28:00.001-07:00

Last night I got home after two glasses of wine, one game of football, one late-night trip to Euston station, a shakespeare workshop and about twelve thousand scripts, and switched on the laptop.

Everything was fuzzy. The words has furry edges. My head spun trying to read them.

I tried to find a way to correct the problem. I turned the computer on and off. I searched the control panel for screen adjusters. I searched the yellow pages. I thought of which friends I could call for advice after midnight. I gave up. I went to bed.

In the morning I woke and read a script and contemplated the calamity of the fuzzy screen.

I switched the machine on.

Its world was no longer fuzzy.

But then again, neither was my brain.

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montevideo notes 1 - ciudad pequeña

2008-04-23T17:31:00.000-07:00

The smaller the city the greater the possibility of co-incidence.

Montevideo may not be the smallest of cities, but it’s small enough. Ana’s neighbour, on the landing across the way from her flat, is a man called Leo Masliah. A couple of years ago, in London, John Rattagan put on a playful CD of his favourite Uruguayan musician. Whose name was Leo Masliah. From behind whose front door I occasionally now hear a piano playing, and who hurries past me on the stairs.

The part of the city I’m staying in is not somewhere I used to know all that well. It’s a street called Jackson, on the edge of Pocitos, the barrio where Helena lived. Her first home was in Luis Franzini, where I spent a year sending hundreds of blue aerogrammes. That’s a fifteen minute walk away, and I inadvertently ended up there on my first morning, whilst looking for the feria at Villa Biaritz. (I bought a Uruguayan hat.) Her parents then moved to Cardona, (next to the Jewish school where I will later go to give a class on The Boat People), about twenty minutes away. That’s where I used to stay when I visited. Now I’m informed they’ve moved again, and are nearby. It was only last night, when Anibal pointed out their house, that I realised how near. They’re two blocks up from here, on the same street, a minute’s walk away. I recognised their cars and now the street is rendered by this co-incidence into a different street altogether.

Today I called my friend Jorge and he asked me where I’m staying. It turns out that he’s working on the same street. About a minute and a half away.

Living in London, reading books from another time or place, you feel as though more than one co-incidence in a day or a text is excessive. When the truth is that in most places, people are haunted by the insistence of co-incidence. Our big-city lives are the exception, not the rule.

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montevideo notes 2 - the bookseller

2008-04-23T17:27:00.000-07:00

Jorge’s friend, W, returned from living in Europe around the time I first lived here, 15 years ago. I met him a couple of times, but never really got to know him. W opened a bookshop on Tristan Narvaja. It’s a rambling kind of place, but has survived for over a decade, so is presumably successful enough. Uruguayans love books. This morning I visited the local market, dozens of which are peppered around the city on a daily basis. Beyond the fruit and veg stalls, people laid out odds and sods for sale on blankets on the street. About half of these contained second hand books of one form or another.

Jorge told me that lately, things haven’t been going well for W. He’s a cocaine addict, perhaps a crack addict as well, and he’s got AIDS. He’s in constant need of petty cash to finance his habits and he’s losing contact with many of his friends.

I expressed surprise that the bookshop has survived in spite of all this. Jorge pointed out that if W sold the enterprise, as he could, he’d get an influx of cash, but thereafter he’d be left with no ongoing means of support. He then described the remarkable ecology of the bookshop, explaining its ongoing solvency.

The bookshop has two employees. In theory they work for W, but in practice they make the bookshop work for all three. The two employees run the place. They keep the accounts, do all the ordering, sell books, keep the place clean. Everything. W appears on the shop floor now and again, mostly just to get in the way. His primary connection with the place is the small living it affords him to sustain his habit. However, it is never enough, and when in need of urgent intoxication, and short on cash, W will think nothing of taking from the till. It is, after all, ‘his’ money. Fortunately the two employees have learnt over the time how to manage W’s stealing from himself. Every night they remove most of the cash from the till, but leave just enough for W to be able to afford a small purchase. Jorge believes that this has saved W. It has allowed him to maintain his habit, but in moderation. More spare cash would lead to a greater intake of drugs, which would kill him, sooner rather than later. As it is he never feels entirely deprived, but is never in a position to partake in excess. The ecology has saved him, and it also keeps the business running, ensuring the employees continue to have jobs which they obviously enjoy.

Nevertheless, there are some times when W isn’t satisfied with what’s been left in the till. For some reason or another he decides that on this occasion he has to have more – cash and drugs. When this happens, there’s a solution to hand. The bookseller steals his own books. He takes them to a neighbouring bookseller and sells them on at a reduced rate, second-hand.

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montevideo notes 3 - foreigners

2008-04-23T17:22:00.000-07:00

Montevideo isn’t on the way to anywhere. To get here you have to make a detour from Buenos Aires or Punta or Southern Brazil. The financial incentive to get here is minimal. And few would come here out of ambition. Anyone who did would soon enough realise that, no matter how cultured the society, it seems destined to always remain a backwater, a footnote in the works of Borges, Pauls or Cortazar.

As a result of this the foreigners who end up here tend to be a strange bunch. When I lived here I knew a couple of people in the language year of their university courses, a Norwegian whose Uruguayan wife was in Norway, a British school contingent who inhabited an affluent, xenophobic ghetto, some US evangelists and a pair of English roses who’d come to the city to create horse sculptures out of bamboo.

The other night Anibal invited me for supper. The other guest was Marcelo, who Anibal said was a Uruguayan who’d lived in New York but turned out to be a New Yorker who’d somehow found himself in Montevideo, via Miami. His mother owns a house some way out of the centre. He lives there alone, practising his martial arts. He’s enrolled in Montevideo university, studying philosophy, the ancient greeks being his sphere of specialisation. The conversation flitted from Plato to Derrida to the inhumane conditions under which students study at the university, four hour sessions in high ceilinged rooms lit by distant florescent tubing.

Marcelo doesn’t appear to have any profound reason to be here. Despite that, and the fact that he claims not to like the place or the people and their conservative ways, he’s stayed here three years already. Every Thursday he goes to tango classes, because it’s the best way, he claims, to get to know people. His ex-girlfriend, a Uruguayan, told him that should they ever have a child together, she would permit Marcelo to live next door. He is cultured, intelligent, touched by a hint of sadness and the sense of being lost within a world which promised something it stubbornly refuses to deliver. He also drinks copiously, socialises as much as possible, and knows when the very last buses run to Carrasco. He clearly loves the climate, the food, and the vida.

With all his contradictions, Marcelo struck me as, in many ways, a quintessential Montevidean.

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