Baa Baa Blogging

Borrowed, Blue

2009-08-21T03:08:00.000-07:00

Because of the increased length and non-blog-friendliness of the stuff I've been writing lately, I have found less and less utility in having a blog at all. Sadly, then, I think it's time to retire Baa Baa Blogging - at least for the moment - and I thought I'd let people know rather than allowing my older posts to sit here abandoned at the top of the page.

Y'all are still welcome to follow me on Twitter (of course) and I also have a rather more bloggish blog on wordpress, which you might enjoy if you like skinny teenagers, lowercase headers and paragraph-sized excerpts from longer stories. It's called The Other Scrapbook and it's got writing, photography, music and probably some fashion, etc. It's just a baby at the moment, it can't even walk yet.

Best of luck to all the lovely people who read this blog, and take care.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2009-06-28T04:29:00.000-07:00

I'm off on holidays today until next Saturday -- hopefully with no internet access as I could use, but will not willingly take, a break.

Since my last post, of course, the world lost the greatly talented and profoundly disturbed Michael Jackson. While his death - after years of drug addiction and mental illness - may not have been a tragedy, his fifty-year-long life certainly was. His abuse as a child himself can not and does not excuse his involvement with children as an adult (to whatever extent that involvement occurred), but it does go some way to explaining his shockingly evident self-hatred. The plastic surgeries, the eating disorders and the medical dependence seem more and more like desperate attempts to alter and ultimately eradicate himself. Like in that spooky, kooky "Thriller" video from long before I was born, the monster was inside him after all.

And meanwhile, innocent women and men are shot dead on the streets of Iran. Nothing is ever very simple for very long.

The following poem, however, is about as simple as they come. Enjoy, and take care.

We are leaving for a little while;

there is time for this, even

time for leaving and returning now.

We will wander like tourists

along the Left Bank and eat ice-cream

outside Notre Dam. I do not fear

this leaving, because I will take

you with me. I will keep you

like a secret in my mouth.

The Nameless (Part Two)

2009-06-17T09:34:00.000-07:00

Summer has finally arrived. It may be raining, it may be cold, there may be no ice-cream vans in sight, but my exams are finished and I finally get to indulge all those hobbies that seemed so interesting when I was trying to study (this week: teaching myself bass guitar!). For now, here's the next bit of this story. Enjoy.

They spent the rest of the day in their yard playing obscure card games, yelling at each other and letting stray cats eat scraps on the porch. Ethan especially liked the strays. I watched him watching them and when no one was there he’d reach out and pat them hard between the ears, even if they didn’t like it. Sometimes the boys fought out there too. It was Cameron who mainly ended up fighting; he was real thin, all delicate and narrow, with dark hair and a pretty kind of face. The other boys bullied him when they got bored of playing cards. If he got really beat up and his nose was bleeding, Ethan would tell them to stop. Sometimes he even bought Cameron sweet things in town, ice-cream or nectarines. One night I saw them lying out on the porch and Ethan was petting him like a stray, smoothing tangles through his hair.

They knew all the girls’ names, and whenever they walked down the street they’d say hey, how are you, and sometimes curl a strand of hair around their fingers. Everybody loved them, even the serious girls who didn’t usually have boyfriends. I saw Caroline Dalton in the pick-up truck with Matthew one night, and they had the radio on and she was laughing and laughing, with this little cardigan buttoned up around her throat, and everyone knew she wanted to be a doctor and she never ever went out with boys.

As it happened, the week I first met them was also the week carnival came into town. I watched the Big Dipper being put up from my bedroom window, a couple of blocks away from Three Roses, in the car lot behind the bowling alley. The Dipper was the scary ride that I guess everyone was excited about, but I liked the dumb kids’ stuff more: the Funhouse and the Bumper Cars and the games where you got to win toys. Usually I’d go to the carnival with my parents, but I was too old that year. I just sat inside my room watching the Big Dipper go around and around and sometimes hearing faint screams.

On Wednesday afternoon I lay out in the garden reading the encyclopedia. It was almost too hot to read, and I had to keep rearranging the book on my stomach because it was so heavy. Sometime around two o’clock, Ethan came outside and lay on his porch steps with sunglasses on. I looked up and he was looking over at me. I went back reading for a while, but whenever I looked up, he looked back at me. I started feeling the strangest sensation, as if I was a kid and I could tell that something was going to happen, or was already happening, and no one would believe me. After a while he took his sunglasses off and laughed.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“You been to the carnival already?”

“No.”

“Oh, really?”

I was going to tell him I had no one to go with and then suddenly I didn’t want to. “No.”

“We’re gonna go tonight, I think.” He stared into the sky. “You wanna come with?”

“Um – well – are you – would you mind?”

“I’m asking.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

He shrugged and put his sunglasses back on. “We’re leaving at eight.”

I put the book under my arm awkwardly and went inside. My mother was sitting right at the kitchen table, reading out of a recipe book. I crossed my feet and then uncrossed them and then did a little cough.

“You okay, sweetie?”

“Um, I’m going to the carnival with the boys across the street tonight.”

She looked up over her glasses. “Oh?”

“Well, yeah. See, they invited me and I thought it would be rude to say no.”

“Do you want to go?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay.” She looked back down at her book. “Well, if you want to go and they asked you, there’s no problem. Is Ethan going to drive you?”

It felt inexplicably strange to hear my mother saying “Ethan” very casually like that. It was like listening to her explain about where babies come from. I wondered for a second had she ever looked at Ethan and thought he was extremely good looking like all the other girls did.

“I don’t know,” I said. I waited for a second and then ran upstairs and into my room.

The Nameless

2009-06-14T05:01:00.000-07:00

After a prolonged absence from the world of blogging, interspersed with a few lonely little poems, I am delighted to be back (despite one final exam looming on the Wednesday morning horizon). This is the first part of a completed short story that I'm planning to post in sections, but God knows how many times I've said that and not done it, so let's see how it goes.

Enjoy, and happy summer.

---

I watched them: the scavengers, the nameless boys. They arrived in Three Roses one day in June, hanging out the back of their mother’s pick-up truck. No father around. They were all bare arms and dirty faces, dragging suitcases into the clapboard house right across the street that we thought was going to be bulldozed, kicking beer bottles away from the door. Their mother stood on the porch gently crunching the glass with her shoes, as if she was curious about what glass was made of. Then she cried. My mother stood at the kitchen sink, hands beaded with glistening suds, and, watching, mopped her brow with the dry part of her arm and said, “you be nice to those kids, now,” because we were a liberal neighbourhood.

There were four of them: the oldest, Jacob, was nineteen; the youngest, Cameron, just five years younger than him. Matthew and Ethan were sixteen and seventeen respectively. We found out from one of my father’s friends that their mother’s last name was Miller. For the first week they lived there, I never spoke to them, but one night at home I heard them shouting, rattling doors and crashing dishes and calling: Ma! Ma, come on! My father shook his head sympathetically and I held my fists in my lap until the noise stopped. I wondered if someone would come out of the house, but nobody did. When I went to bed, I pretended to be one of them. I laid in the dark stroking my arms and imagining them bare and sticky with sweat.

I was fourteen that summer – notionally the same age as Cameron – but I was an only child, used to those deserted months when I never saw any of my friends. I stayed inside a lot reading books of the encyclopedia, because I wanted to be a scientist. I was also intensely private from my parents, and would become hysterical if anyone touched the door handle while I was in the bathroom. Sometimes at night I locked my bedroom door and closed my curtains and examined myself in the mirror like a tumour. Once I even made a list, in order or preference, of all the different cosmetic procedures I would have when I was older, starting with the removal of this scar I had down the inside of my left leg from a time I fell off a bike when I was nine, and ending with my teeth, which were crooked.

On Sunday, the boys came to church in ironed shirts. Afterwards, when I was done talking to some of the girls from school about where the boys came from and how come they were here, my father gave me money to get myself some soda. I saw them in the car lot, sitting in the dust. I called over hello, partly because my mother told me to be nice, and partly because I was pretty confident around boys, since all my cousins were boys and I was the oldest. They squinted back at me from between cars.

“Where you going?”

“Get soda,” I said.

“You mind if we come with?”

“No.”

They got up slowly and came over, all skinny with their sleeves rolled up. I watched them and pretended not to watch them and felt the sun throbbing hot on my scalp. They were as different as new candles or strips of coloured ribbon: shiny and smelling of soap, like something I had loved and then forgotten.

“So, you live right across from us, huh?”

I told them yes.

I would have told them anything.

The Excavation

2009-05-15T07:07:00.001-07:00

I am not sad because I miss you.

But I have found a starling that the cats caught

and lifted his mangled body to feel

needling bones and slick feathers.

I have seen daylight spread over empty tulip fields.

I have made snow angels in a housing estate.

I have seen the fountains of Paris and on them

floated small wooden boats with red paper sails.

I have dreamed of bus windows.

I have watched interviews with no sound and felt

that sudden quiet loss, and turned from you

like a boulder from a tomb,

like the virgin lake reeds turn from something

they loved once and love no more.

These are my sadnesses.

I lift and cradle them like broken birds.

I have always been beyond your saving.

Sometimes It Rains, Sometimes Not

2009-04-26T15:00:00.000-07:00

The first piece of fiction I've posted here in what feels like, oh, a couple of months at least. I've written the second part but it's too long to post in one piece. It leans pretty heavily on a few sources (spot them if you can) but given the imminence of exams, my brain's probably not up to much. Here goes.

Cindy first insisted that he was the son of a Baptist minister and had spent his childhood travelling from state to state. Although we had no evidence to support this claim, there must have been something about it – maybe just the image of him pressed between fat bespectacled women in so many sweaty Southern churches – that rang true for us. No sooner were the words spoken than they became his unofficial history.

Caleb Fields was, as far as we could gather, sixteen years old when his family moved to Four Roses, making him two or three years older than us. His father was some kind of pastor, though whether a travelling Baptist one, we never could discern; his mother was vague and crinkled. Our first recorded viewing of the Fields family was late that March, when the pink cherry blossoms were breaking into early flower and their Chevrolet first parked itself in the driveway of the empty Mann house. He emerged from the car in tapered black jeans; dark-eyed and hollow-cheeked, almost girlishly slender.

We had never known love like it.

He appeared in school the following Monday. Because he was not in our classes, we had to glean what information we could from older siblings and babysitters: yes, he was quiet, they said, and he smiled to himself at moments that didn’t seem to be funny. Eventually, they started waving us off when we approached with questions. At the end of the week, we pooled our data among the floral wallpaper and oppressive heat of Rita Phelps’ living room.

“I just really want to know,” Cindy said, and we agreed that wanting to know was the most normal thing we could want, that it was an end unto itself, that the knowing was the thing we yearned for most, and that when we knew everything we would settle back into our respective lives with scarcely a thought for the Fields family. Yes, we said: it was the enigma we really loved.

The first week of April saw a heatwave sweep Four Roses. It slept in our classrooms, smudging our neat handwriting with sweat, trickling down our spines. It was the weather of dried grass, of tank tops and sticks of gum, of ice-cream cones that melted all the way to your fingers. Our mothers paused over their sinks to sigh, and wipe their foreheads with sudsy fingers and say it was inexplicable, but we knew how to explain it. It was the arrival of the Fields that was melting tar and wilting roses; it was Caleb littering the sidewalks with cherry blossom petals and waking us up at night with damp unknowing heat.

On Tuesday, Therese and Susan reported seeing him alone near the bleachers during lunch. We took to spending our lunchtimes from then on huddled on the dry grass, keeping a lookout. Within a week, we had watched him smoking on the baseball stands, saw the tips of his cigarettes flare briefly at his mouth; observed from a safe distance the small mirror he kept inside his locker, how he paused sometimes to smooth down his fringe; watched his hands flutter occasionally to the silver crucifix he wore around his neck. Every significant sighting was recorded. On Friday at lunchtime, our third vigil on the grass, we designated a small green notebook of Cindy’s for the purpose of recordkeeping.

It is due to this stenographic care that we can report when it was that we first heard Caleb’s voice. It was 13:34pm on Thursday the 28^th of March, nearly a week later, while he was on his way back from the bleachers – at that sacred point when he passed right by us where we sat – when suddenly and without fair warning Cindy Dalton called out.

“Hey! Caleb!”

He turned around, only three or four feet away. His face was inscrutable behind Aviator sunglasses, framed by the tilted sun.

“Yeah?”

His accent was by all accounts unplaceable, but to us spoke of wide deserted plains, tall summer heat and night-time car journeys. The coolness of ice clinking in water. The stations of the cross.

She shaded her eyes with a hand and smiled. “Nice glasses.”

“You like them?” He took them off and inspected them briefly, then folded them and threw them to her. She caught them delicately, as if she expected it, grinning like a bad actor who anticipates the play. He had already turned around and was walking away, chewing on a stick of gum like he always did. We recorded the incident in silence.

That Saturday, we convened in Mona’s room to discuss the unguessable facts of Caleb’s childhood. Cindy remained wordless, perched on the window-seat and stroking the frames of his sunglasses in her lap. Finally, when cool evening began to gather around the street and we had moved on to other topics of conversation, she spoke.

“I wonder if he’s a virgin.”

In all our discussion of Caleb’s life, we had not yet touched the subject of girls, not even expressing our own wish – however formless, however unsettling – to taste his mouth on ours. Cindy, however, seemed unaware of her trespassing on hallowed territory. The question came to her as naturally as the unfathomable Aviators: sudden but somehow unsurprising, exhilarating and unthinkable at once. In our hesitation, we began to see him as a kind of Christ, holy and laminated, innocent both of every sin and of none, immaculately conceived by a Chevrolet and born between car doors on a lawn in Four Roses, already sixteen. We could not imagine that he had ever touched a girl; we could not believe that he hadn’t.

While we kindled our indignation at Cindy’s sacrilege, Caleb himself came out of his house across the street and got in the driver’s seat of his father’s Chevy. We fell silent at the window as he backed out of the driveway and down the street, craning to watch him disappear until our breath misted the glass so that we could not tell his tail-lights from the street-lamps way out across town.

“Probably some party somewhere,” Cindy said.

“But he doesn’t know anyone here,” Mona pointed out.

Cindy shrugged, then pulled her sleeve over her hand to clean the lenses of his glasses.

Less and less now did Cindy come to our houses after school or help us to fill in the green notebook. One day she wore coral-coloured lipstick to school. She was becoming bony and angelic-looking, with tousled blonde hair and cupid’s-bow lips. Only her presence with us at lunchtime was assured: every day she’d stretch out in the sun-yellowed grass and watch Caleb’s narrow figure on the bleachers with the rest of us. One Tuesday, sitting with her knees tucked up under her chin and Caleb’s Aviators on, she told us she had started smoking. We squawked with questions. She stole the cigarettes from her mother, she said, and smoked them in her wardrobe, breathing the smoke out into a coat that had gotten too small. Despite our shock, she seemed somewhat disinterested in telling us about it, and abruptly trailed off into silence.

When Caleb came back from the bleachers that day, he nodded at her as he walked toward us. “Nice shades.”

“Oh, you like them?” she said.

He laughed, standing in front of us with the sun behind him again. He looked down and – in a strange and somehow uncharacteristic gesture – kicked the grass at his feet. When no word from Cindy seemed forthcoming, he continued walking back into the school. She kept on staring out at the bleachers, as smooth and cryptic as marble.

rich white boys

2009-04-18T06:31:00.000-07:00

you tell me that women are no longer oppressed.

I ask about honour killings, about mutilation

about rape victims who are jailed and beaten

about silence and slavery.

you say you are talking about the west, about our world

but really you are talking about yours.

I wonder if your body has ever been anyone else’s property

if you know what it means to be powerless

or to kneel in the dark and pick up the buttons from your blouse.

you say that I hate men.

but I cannot explain anymore

that there is only one world

or that I love more than I should.

instead I will go to the sea

to touch again the level waters

which are older than men and women

which will not try to tell me that my people are free.

St. Patrick's Day

2009-03-18T06:50:00.000-07:00

I haven't been writing much lately, due to various exam-based reasons. I did get a break yesterday to roam the town and take a few pictures of the St. Patrick's Day festivities, so I thought at could at least post the results. Here are a few, the rest are on my flickr photostream.

Drift

2009-03-06T17:20:00.000-08:00

Some more free verse. Woo.

Drift

my sister turns under the streetlamp

and she is dotted with snowflakes

as if someone was gently erasing her

it tastes good, she says

the world has shrunk to fit this little scene

the envelope of hush and sweep

it was this time last year I met you

and stayed up late to keep you company

when you worked the nightshift

and we were both untouched in love

and anger

On Sorrow

2009-02-06T07:11:00.000-08:00

These last few weeks have been difficult

abraded by the cold tapwater mornings

the watery sunless afternoons and all

the beads of bad news which hang heavy

together, all this buffeting by failure, by

failed promises and failed expectations

yes, these things happen, and they have

happened now. You are torn for a while

by disappointments, by the loss of long-

held imaginings. We all are, sometimes.

Still, there is a cat sleeping in a slant

of sunlight; there is a flock of girls on

the green, a windless fall of snow, and

a film you want to see in the cinema.

Shake out from the cloth of the month

those few hours that troubled you

and let them fall. Take comfort.

They are no longer in your future.

They can never hurt so much again.

February

2009-02-02T06:59:00.000-08:00

After my last post about the importance of formalism in poetry, I thought I'd shake things up with a little free verse. Enjoy.

February 2^nd, 14:45

This is a good day.

There is washing damp and starchy on the line

sunlight learning geometry on the grass

the new month unpacking itself in the sky.

I should use all of this

to say goodbye to you sweetly, without regret

without love or sadness, but with the same ease

of parting as a blackbird and a branch,

our usefulness together

now exhausted, and my memory bird-like

unclouded by your loveliness. Yes, I will

wash myself clean of you today.

A Sestina

2009-01-26T10:07:00.001-08:00

I often wonder about rhyme and other formal schemes when it comes to poetry. Why bother? (I ask, assuming the role of punchy internet kid). Why not let the words say what they want to say?

But I still can't deny that all the poems I feel are my best have been written with a rhyming scheme. They start out free verse, and I chop them into shape, and it helps. I think of myself as a rigorous editor with or without the guiding hand of formalism, but somehow it seems to work its magic for me (when I'm lucky).

My good friend Ken Armstrong has voiced the theory that by forcing your poetry into a strict metre, you become inventive out of necessity. It's a good theory - better than anything I can come up with - so I pushed it to its logical extreme and wrote a sestina.

(I explain what a sestina is for the benefit of people like me, who had no idea what it was until today - don't be offended if you've been rhyming them off since the age of eight). A sestina is poem of six verses, each with six lines, and a three-line tercet. Each of the six lines in the six verses must end with the same six words, and they must repeat themselves in a strict order. The tercet includes two of the words per line.

This was, I have to say, a lot of fun to write. Whether it is of any literary merit, well... no. Not really. But fun is good, right?

Sestina

Now there is all this distance.

The places where the buildings of your city

rise on the dark coast like teeth

and the sheltered terrain of my home;

the gaps where this rain-battered love

flutters uncertainly toward you.

And – 638 kilometres away – you

remain ambivalent to this unchanging distance

and my brief, excited promises of love

yet to happen. Instead you tell me about the city

and the mirrored coffee-table in your hall at home

with legs marked by the dog’s teeth.

I dreamt last night of sinking my teeth

in your wrist, and woke up missing you

or believing somehow that you were home,

as if something carried you across the distance

westward, out of your colourless city

while I slept and dreamt of love.

You hate these dreams, this expansive-sounding love

or worse, you shrug it off. I feel my teeth

water, and your letters swim in diagonals. You

don’t respond. This weekend I will go to the city

and forget about you until I come home.

I remember when you wished away this distance

and how grateful I was for our common enemies: distance

and time, finance and logic; later, probably love.

We wanted to share a kind of home –

I wanted bedclothes, the touch of your teeth,

keys rattling in the door, and you wanted a city

we both knew. I still love you

because I don’t know how you feel, because you

are scared of me, maybe. I love this distance

because I know its climate, and this city

because it is a secret you keep from me. I love

without subtlety, your collarbone and teeth

and the places we might have been home.

Carefully, I measure the distance between your city

and my home, with a piece of string torn by my teeth.

You would never ask me to love you.

Women Obscure in Their Labour

2009-01-20T12:54:00.001-08:00

Took a whole (Super) Tuesday off homework to watch the Inaugural Address, and wrote this kind-of response to it. This is still pretty rough, but I'm not thinking I'll have much time to work on it in the near future.

I guess this, like a lot of my work, is concerned with gender and what it is and why it is. And obviously, I'm coming at it from a feminist perspective - I consider this a feminist blog, really - but even the definition and principles of feminism are difficult and often contradictory. This isn't necessarily a criticism: I am a feminist, and I expect most good people are. Whether they identify as "feminist" or not is another issue, and because of some really pathetic stereotypes, lots of young women don't.

I don't know what point this poem is trying to make, exactly. It's all a little bit vague and celebratory or something. Also, if you Google the title, its relevance should become apparent.

Enjoy.

Women Obscure in Their Labour

The inauguration comes

one month before my eighteenth birthday

along with day-late prickling of cramps.

My mother is in the city

and the girls from school sign out

to apply for university before the deadline.

At home, I switch the television on and

watch thousands of tiny flags blur into pink

and my best friend texts me:

“things are changing today”.

This is not a love poem

unless it is for her, or for myself,

for the trumpet players, flag-wavers

swaddled in coats and badges

for Nancy, Hillary and Michelle

for those who watch this in London

dreaming of home and for those who

watch at home, dreaming of Washington

for this flush restless fertility

which is both mine and not mine

or somehow shared because in this

hope – and there is hope –

we all are bound together, each to each.

The Big Reveal

2009-01-08T11:00:00.001-08:00

Hey, guys. Haven't been doing much writing lately, and truth be told am feeling somewhat glum. I don't know if I will have time to keep up the blog given the approach of the mock exams/oral exams/real exams, and I know I keep saying that, but this time it may actually - gasp! - be true.

It remains for me to thank you all for reading thus far, and hope that I'll be able to make the odd appearance between now and June. You never know.

Oh, and I had a short story of mine published in a collection fairly recently; it's available on Amazon at the moment and for the forseeable future. It also makes a great post-Christmas present, I hear.

And would that be my name listed fourth from last on the cover? I'll never tell...

Hard to Explain: 3

2009-01-05T07:41:00.001-08:00

The third in a series of chapters I've been posting from my young adult novel, Hard to Explain. The first and second chapters are also up.

This probably gets past PG-13 at points, so consider yourselves warned...

The plane touched down at two thirty. Jared’s mother would have run her finger along every surface in the airport and shuddered.

His aunt Meg was waiting for him in arrivals. As soon as he got into her car, he wanted to shut his eyes and bite down very hard on his fists because this was all just like what happened last time and he didn’t want to be here then and he didn’t want to be here now. Meg was talking. The radio was on. Jared switched on his iPod and turned the volume up uncomfortably loud. He imagined that he was like a piece of knitting that had snagged on something in New York and there was a line of wool stretched tight over the Atlantic ocean, pointing back to everything he missed. He felt kind of car-sick. He listened to Fleet Foxes and watched a factory swallowed up by the yellow hills.

The journey took an hour and a half.

He remembered Meg’s house only slightly differently. It was a white two-storey house with a front lawn, next to lots of other two-storey houses with front lawns. A damp pink tricycle lay on its side, streamers trailing in the grass.

Meg opened the door, let him in and showed him to his room upstairs. It had a small cold bed and an old television and dusty purple curtains. She told him they had ordered the school uniform as soon as they heard but it wasn’t in yet and she fixed it up with the principal so he could go in his own clothes just for a few days. She told him that the girls had already started back at school and she’d be going to pick them up in half an hour and then they’d all have lunch. Eventually she left and he sat on his new bed and looked at the window.

His head throbbed with visions of Manhattan. That night in Treble when MGMT were playing. The tables ringed with beer stains – his right hand with that little red stamp on it – shitty stage lights pulsing the primary colours – the girls in a colourful flock at the bar, talking to someone from a band, all collarbones and bangles – Matthew peeling the label off his beer and talking about Sandra – then the crush of people around the stage, the perfume and sweat – some girl’s wrist in the air in front of him with a little wooden bracelet on – later he sees her in the corridor outside the bathroom and she’s Spanish-looking and she smiles when she walks past –

There were other nights. He remembered the Spanish girl probably because he didn’t look at her for long enough to notice her make-up was kind of smudged or to start wondering if he really did like her or whether he wanted to go over and try to talk to her and whether he would totally regret it and feel sick afterwards if she had a boyfriend or if she liked him back. The Spanish girl made him feel cool, like a person you could just walk past in corridors and smile at. There were nights in Treble that ended with kissing and phone numbers, but it was always awkward and he could never hear what the girls were saying and they never really got his jokes and afterwards he felt stupid and more frustrated than before.

Matthew once asked if he was gay. The actual fact of knowing Matthew made Jared want to smile. When he asked if Jared was gay, he asked it with absolutely zero offhandedness, like as if it was both the most important and serious question ever, but also the least important because Matthew just totally would not mind what the answer was. At the time, Jared was lying on Matthew’s bed wearing oversized sunglasses and Matthew was sitting on the computer chair kind of swivelling from side to side.

“Depends who’s asking,” Jared had replied.

“If I was asking.”

“You’re pretty cute, Matt, but I don’t know about –”

Matthew laughed. “Go fuck yourself.”

“What, with you watching? Please.”

There was a pause.

“Are you, like, bisexual, then?”

“Seriously, man, does it matter?”

“I guess not. I’d just like to know. I’m supposed to be your wingman.”

Jared sat up and removed the sunglasses. “Matthew. If I ever, ever, like ever use the word ‘wingman’ in your presence – just promise you will shoot me. Preferably in the face.”

Matthew swivelled back to face the computer. “Done and done.”

Jared didn’t know what he was. At the time, Matthew asking him made him feel better about the whole thing, like he could brush it off and nothing bad would happen. The more he thought about it, the more nervous it made him. He’d kind of gotten used to being an entity, like a whole thing, like an entire Jared all in one. All the usual parts of his identity were self-contained: eye colour (brown), favourite shoes (black All Stars), drink of choice (vodka and lemonade). He struggled to include his tenuous, undefined relationships with other people as a part of his actual self. It felt like standing in a room and stretching his arms out until they almost brushed the other people in the room but didn’t actually, and then trying to make that mean something.

Sometimes he liked girls and sometimes not. It wasn’t that he never thought about being gay: it was more that Jared didn’t really get desire. He didn’t have big epic feelings about anything. Okay, he did – when First Impressions of Earth came out; when he first saw Vampire Weekend live – but nothing sexy. Frustration, on the other hand, Jared got that. A lot. It was sort of everywhere, all immediate and dislocated, with that detached random fury that made him think about people in alarming ways. Even Matthew. Okay, alright, probably especially Matthew.

Jared didn’t know what to do with sexual frustration. Once, and once only, he had watched porn. It was a video of a couple having sex in the back of a Nissan Sentra. He didn’t identify the car make from the interior: it said it on the page title. Anyway, the gimmick was apparently the fact that the car was moving. At one point, the camera swung completely away from the action to film the passing cars out the window. It was on one of those freeways with a million lanes, bright and hot, somewhere in LA maybe. Anyway. He didn’t really want to think about that.

Suddenly the door opened and his cousins came in. Jared had only seen Christmas cards of them since they were babies: in real-life they looked much stickier and more intrusive. He could’ve been doing anything in there on his own. They were six and eight. The eight-year-old had curly brown hair and freckles. The six-year-old had blonde hair and a big plastic sword for some reason. He couldn’t remember their names, but he knew he didn’t like them.

“Who are you?” the six-year-old said.

“He’s your cousin!” the older sister giggled. “You know that! Mum told us!”

“I thought our cousin was a girl.”

They whispered something together, then turned to face him again with mournful eyes. This lasted only a few seconds.

“What’s your name?” the six-year-old said lispingly.

“Jared,” he said.

They both laughed and looked at each other and looked back at him and laughed again, stuffing their faces into their hands.

“What kind of trousers are you wearing, Jared?” the six-year-old said. The eight-year-old elbowed her.

“Aoife! Shut up!”

Aoife. That was it. And the other one must have been Sinead. The kids weren’t even Irish: Meg wasn’t Irish. She moved there to get in touch with her roots, even though the family’s last connection to Ireland was back in like the 1600s when they owned a part of it.

The trousers thing, Jared didn’t get.

“Look at his trousers!” Aoife squealed again.

“She thinks your trousers are funny,” Sinead said, red-faced with laughter.

“What’s funny about them?”

“Look!” Aoife cried, poking him in the shins. “They’re like what a girl would wear!”

Apparently, and unbeknownst to Jared, his cousins had grown up as the male college staff at his father’s office. Next thing they would be asking him how the boyfriend was and sniggering.

“Mum says to come down for lunch,” the older one said, grasping Aoife’s hand and tugging her out of the reach of his jeans. “We’re having fish fingers.”

They left, snorting and giggling. He got up and followed them down, thinking angry racist thoughts about Ireland and the Irish and most especially those who pretended to be Irish even when they still pronounced the word “coffee” like “cawffee” and called themselves a “mom”.

The kitchen was low-ceilinged, with lino on the floor and a shiny tablecloth with a pattern of pineapples on it. His mother used to sit at the table when it had a different tablecloth and pinch at her bony fingers as if there was something hidden in her skin. Every window had curtains, even the sink window. And none of the doors closed properly into their frames.

Fish fingers turned out to be rectangles of fish cooked in breadcrumbs. Jared didn’t like them.

That night, he lay in bed and listened to his cousins coughing and mumbling in the next room and the smell of rain and dust and then it was silent. He had not heard silence in so long. It reminded him of things.

He didn’t like it.

The Happiest of New Years

2009-01-01T16:09:00.000-08:00

My apologies again for neglecting this blog - two posts in two months! eep! - and more seriously, for neglecting your blogs. I am sure that in my absence I've missed loads of excellent material. Sadly, I am now entering the final phase of my last year in school, which means I probably won't be making as many appearances here as I would like.

My writing energy lately has been focused on polishing up my aforementioned novel, Hard to Explain, so I'll post the second excerpt of that here. It is also the second chapter; the first one is available here (and the third is now here). Criticism welcomed with open arms and possible cups of tea.

Oh - just before I post that, actually, I may mention a tiny side-project I am (unwisely) embarking on. It's called The Ingénue Diaries, and it is composed of writing which does not belong here because it's all part of one diary. A diary which is of unspecified truth.

Also, may I take this opportunity to wish everyone a happy new year. Here's to a better 2009.

* * *

The seatbelt light went off above his head. Beneath him, through the rounded window, Jared could still see the sprawling city, the island of Manhattan, the clawing fingers of the American coastline, and then nothing. He opened his seatbelt and leaned back.

They had thrown a going-away party for him at Sandra’s place. Pretty much everyone he knew from school was there saying they’d miss him and they gave him a card full of Irish money or European money or whatever and it was all way too nice. There was cake. Sandra and Matt made it themselves. He thanked people for coming like a hundred times and said he’d add everyone on MySpace and made sad funny jokes about Ireland not having electricity or running water or American Apparel. Damn it. He would really miss American Apparel.

There was another list to add to “clothes” and “items other than clothes”: Things Jared Would Miss About New York.

Treble. Final Vinyl. That one time Susan from Geology swore that Julian Casablancas came into the Starbucks where she worked. Matthew and Sandra and Louise and Noah and everyone. A whole year of school.

It had all started eight weeks ago.

Jared’s mother would disagree with this statement – they had been unhappy for years now, she would say; they had dealt with Claudia in different ways; there’d been talk since Christmas at least – but for Jared, none of that mattered. His parents splitting up? Big deal. Really. He was seventeen. His parents floated out at the edges of his life. He didn’t want to be callous about it. Sure, he wanted them to be happy: if divorce was making them happy, he wanted them to get divorced. Whatever.

But then there was the fighting. They fought over the flat, the car, the house in Rhode Island; they fought over Jared, even, who was going to Columbia anyway in two years. His father wanted to move back to Florida, and his mother was staying in the city, so they fought about that. They fought about who Jared would stay with for how long and for which parts of the year, and they fought about school and his airfare even – they fought about money, which no one in Jared’s family had ever fought about before. No one in Jared’s family had ever really fought about anything.

And then.

Since he was sixteen, Jared and Matthew plus a bunch of guys and girls from school would try more or less every weekend to get into this club called Treble about four blocks from Jared’s house. Treble was this really small exclusive garage rock club where the girls had short hair and the boys had long hair and everyone wore really tight tapered jeans. They all got in one night about three weeks ago and some security guy came up to them and asked for ID and they got kicked out and parents were called.

Jared’s parents took this as a sign that he was not coping well with the separation. He had grown up with an IRS guy for a father and a maritime lawyer for a mother: at home they watched MSNBC and drank fair trade coffee. He didn’t know how to argue. He didn’t know how to tell them that Treble was an okay kind of place, that nobody had ever tried to sell him drugs, that the music was good – that the music was incredible, it was everything – and he hadn’t fallen in with anyone, it was really just him and Matthew, and he didn’t even drink much alcohol and he was still pretty much a virgin.

Actually, ‘pretty much’ was a massive exaggeration. He was totally a virgin. Like as much as it was possible to be.

The truth was that Jared wasn’t particularly cool. Most kids in school probably didn’t even know his name. Sometimes, he could hear himself and Matthew self-consciously implying themselves into coolness: saying things like “the guys,” when they meant the only two other guys they occasionally hung out with. And they wouldn’t have even known those two if it wasn’t for the school chess club, not that they went to that anymore, but still.

He didn’t know how to say any of that. His apartment was too quiet for him to raise his voice. It was a civilised, talk radio place. It would have been like shouting in the library.

So they decided it would be good for Jared to get out of the country for a while. His mother said it was a bad environment. Jared felt like he always felt, which was like a pinball, bouncing off things without any control whatsoever over what was bad and what was good. His mother had this sister Meg in Ireland who used to come to visit every Christmas when Jared was younger. They’d all gone to stay with her for a couple of months after Claudia and everything, because his mother had thought they just needed to get away. Jared disagreed. Jared had wanted to stay in New York and crawl under Claudia’s bed and bang his head repeatedly, but his mother made him leave. Anyway that was years ago and, yeah, whatever.

His mother was all like “you love Europe, Jared,” which, okay, Jared had been to Paris one time when he was like eight and to be fair, yes, it seemed pretty good. It’s just that it didn’t necessarily follow that he would want to miss an entire year of school to go live in Ireland, just because he got to have chocolate croissants for breakfast once. But lately his mother was always shouting down the phone and crying and it never seemed like the right time to say, actually mom, this whole thing is a terrible idea.

A perfumed stewardess wheeled past and he pretended to be asleep. It would be a long flight.

Poetry: Where We Belong

2008-12-22T10:12:00.000-08:00

Some more rhyme-y stuff. This is mildly racy (well not really, just slightly racier than other stuff I've posted - possibly) so avert your eyes if you're of a sensitive disposition. Okay, not that racy.

Also, I'm giving an advance "no comment" on the factuality of the story contained herein.

Where We Belong

The art room: pastels, brushes stiff with glue

papier-mâché, the Japanese silk screen

and prints – Matisse and Turner, Monet, Dou.

I don’t belong here with last year’s display

my hands too small, too fine for inks and chalk

these narrow wrists too delicate for clay;

and yet I find my features here, in paint

subjected to wide centuries of longing

in every pretty mute Renaissance saint

and every passive, sultry silhouette

oh all Lolitas with their teasing hunger

whose artists are tormented even yet.

Art and pornography, the oldest ruse

and we are not exempt from this ballet

the ancient arabesque of artist-muse.

Let’s not keep secrets: you are twenty-four

and I am seventeen, unschooled, unpractised

trembling Madonna, unromantic whore

depending on your mood. I am not wrong

to say I know what thrill you want from me

to say we’re both aware where we belong.

(her): a Prose Poem

2008-11-24T09:41:00.000-08:00

I broke this one up into paragraphs to make it more user-friendly (because I think that way it'll get more comments. Oh yes. I'm quite ruthless like that).

(her)

day breaks after your argument. she wakes at twelve, fitful, sore-eyed, and deletes your emails from her inbox. then a shower. she cuts her finger on a razorblade and the skin peels off but it does not bleed. she dresses, eats lunch, wraps her finger in a bandage.

her mother drives her to her grandmother’s house. the pontoon road is sheer and yellow in cloudless november daylight. they listen to kate and anna mcgarrigle singing kiss and say goodbye, singing heart like a wheel, singing the swimming song. he is flying in from the continent tonight. the expectation blooms in her shallow throat. the fear of expectation. she probably won’t see him until tomorrow. she thinks of all the emails she deleted from her inbox and she misses you.

at her grandmother’s house the trees have been cut back and the roses are rotted on their stems. sunlight stares through bare branches and dead leaves. inside it is warm, dark and curtained. they eat fruit pastilles. they look at photographs.

her grandmother in 1942. july in glenisland, her summer arms wrapped round her knees, her dark eyes and ringless fingers.

her mother in 1978. a photo booth in tottenham court road, and she had just had her hair highlighted, and she and her friend smiling breathlessly at the camera, all scarves and buttoned cotton.

herself in 1992. enniscrone. the sea glistening invisibly behind her. the tiny woollen hat. the fleshy baby face, the dimples in her knuckles. sucking her thumb.

the tall stride of her mother’s eldest brother. the french wedding. the first colour in 1966: pink and blue seersucker dresses, tanned legs. the tropics of lesotho, where her mother lost her engagement ring in the indian ocean.

they put away the photo albums and she goes to the bookshelves. her uncle’s college thesis. more photographs. a crumbling newspaper clipping of her grandfather’s gaelic team. a dictionary of flowers. she slides it out and thumbs through it, making bouquets in her head. for you: anemone, wormwood, geranium rose. hydrangea which means frigidity, heartlessness, vanity, thank you for understanding. sweet-pea which says goodbye. forget me not. for him: forsynthia, wisteria, primrose, peach rosebud and blue salvia. viscaria for will you dance with me?

darkness runs its fingernails down the sky. rain-stars on the windshield. in the car going home they listen to the strokes and they are singing the modern age singing someday singing hard to explain.

The Waiting Week

2008-11-20T13:35:00.001-08:00

I was recently tagged with a lovely meme by the lovely Dave at Pics and Poems. I have never done a meme on this blog before, and as it is of a vaguely personal (I mean as opposed to artistic) nature, I'm not sure I could come up with anything interesting. While I encourage you to go and see what a good job he's made of it, here's some more poetry.

Unusually for me, this follows a pretty strict metre, which the enjambment kind of wrecks at a lot of points. I'm sure you'll spot them and shake your head in disappointment. Other than that, enjoy.

(And although I am still considering that meme, I may as well mention that the following contains at least seven separate facts about me...)

The Waiting Week

The windscreen wipers in my father’s car;

my sister conjugates French verbs in time

with indicator’s rhythm. Foggy stars

of brake lights on the school run: your exams

will start tomorrow and I know you are

staying home to study for them now.

I think of you, asleep, your mouth still slack

unturned by morning’s curtain-light alarm –

outside the winter daylight bleeds grey-black.

Biology. We study respiration.

Rain licks the windows and I think about

Sucking your fingertips. Such education.

My best friend laughs and all is damp again

nail-varnished and sweet-smelling like shampoo.

Next we have Maths, and I imagine you’re

examined, asked to name the points and turns

the sultry coefficient correlation.

Outside: the sycamore, the gorse, the ferns.

On Thursday morning you are flying out

to Belgium with your Public Speaking team.

I talk to my Careers teacher about

the universities and plans and details.

I sit and watch the paint as it peels off

the outside drainpipe. Nothing inside stirs.

I would rather tell her about you

how you speak such lovely Irish, and about

the words you use, the pretty things you do.

In school this week, I’m restless and daydream

about your school tie and your shoulder-blades

and your Toyota Highlander. I mean

I don’t know what to think. I am uncertain:

a floating retina, a dislocation.

But still, I find the happiness in this

potential. This uncertainty of fate.

The question: firm, remaining to be seen

the week: irresolute, not yet too late.

Something of this remains when it is done –

and anyway I cynically suspect

it would not be so thrilling, if begun –

this sense of ambiguity and hope

that you might bring me gifts back home from Belgium

and I would call you up on Sunday night.

If I could always have this same ability

to know we are unfixed, unhooked, undestined

surrounded constantly by possibility.

Mathematical Poetry

2008-11-18T09:42:00.000-08:00

Here's a poem which reflects how much I listen in Maths class.

Solve For y The Equation Reading…

I will calculate our probability,

the biological likelihoods.

We could be charted on a graph:

you are a parabolic curve and

I am analysing our points of intersection,

using my same old variables.

Let x equal the distance between us

when we dressed up for Halloween

the axis between your drivers’ seat

and my fingers on your back window.

Let y be a metaphor for attraction

the eye contact, that Coronas song

the tennis courts at night

when we counted the money with the others

and remembered how we met.

Dissolve me into numbers and allow

this probability. Let us equal one another:

constant for variable, x for y.

Prose Poem

2008-11-10T09:36:00.001-08:00

I don't think I actually know what a prose poem is, but it sounds like it should be something like the following. I like this piece, but I'm not sure what it's for or actually what it's about. Enjoy anyway.

* * *

she will go home and abuse the keyboard with drunken confessions of love and apologies even though she is not drunk. what other excuse to remind him that she loves him even though he is miles away, what other way to say that she remembers the time he got drunk and called her at two in the morning and woke her up and didn’t have anything to say. her friend’s cigarette smoke makes her itchy and restless. she is flooded with a faint urge, a sudden and quiet desire. she thinks about being attacked outside the marquee here, beyond the patio heater and the pool of yellow shed light and she imagines how deeply her nails would sink into someone’s skin, how she would break his fingers and kick his shins and gouge his eyes out with her hands. waiting for something to happen. the light revolves on the ceiling in shades of primary. a lit cigarette tip. a stiletto heel. a small hole in the side of the white marquee that lets in the darkness. a flooding of the synapses, the distant sound of thousands of neurons firing within her own brain. outside, waves of hailstones pass the streetlamp like a black ocean cresting in the light. she shivers. the dj mumbles into his microphone. her best friend is kissing someone and nobody knows who he is. an empty bottle rolls toward her foot. someone standing on a table showers the room with dutch gold. it forms a tiny pool on her bare shoulder and glistens in the revolving light. blue yellow. blue yellow red. she could run out of the marquee with hailstones nicking her bare arms and taxis spitting at her feet and not stop until everything was different. a firework screeches outside, writhing on the ground like a wounded animal. they crowd toward the marquee entrance. she watches over their heads. it screams toward the sky. it is green. she will not pretend to be drunk tonight. instead she will say that all this is worth something, even if she does not know what it is worth, even if the one she loves is miles away. even if it seems that the only thing worth loving about him is that uncrossable distance.

5.11 (Poetry)

2008-11-05T06:43:00.001-08:00

Being as I am directly in the middle of my Christmas examinations, I thought it would be a splendid idea to write a poem. It is a simple poem in three parts. It's not quite finished, I'm happy with one of the verses and unhappy with the other two. See what you think anyway.

5.11

I waited up last night for the early call from Virginia

and this morning I heard the news.

I am different in this radio static

today, the beginning of Christmas exams

and somebody lighting firecrackers outside my school.

There is a parcel waiting at lunchtime

labelled Air Mail. I tear it open. Six copies

of the book inside and my name is on the cover.

The solipsistic joy of letters

how suddenly your name means more when it is

printed in some font that’s not your own.

And you send me a message on MySpace

to say that I should come see you sometime.

Let nothing ever stop this sense of reaching out

this endless connection, this effortless tide of

being, of being more than one.

Hard to Explain

2008-11-02T09:51:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in my last post, I have been working on a little something, which contains a lot of other somethings that have previously been posted here. It's called Hard to Explain, after The Strokes' song rather than the plot, and it's currently running at about 35,000 words long - should end up somewhere near 40,000, which I think is acceptable short-novel/novella length - and the first few chapters are really the only ones that make any sense at the moment. Feel free to assure me that they do not. Here's number one.

Edited to add: And here is number two.

He had condensed everything into a suitcase. As if when he had decided what to bring and packed it all away and zipped it up, that would be it. Even though he knew that this was not it – that this was hardly even the beginning – it was still something, it was a thing, and because it was the only thing he could think about, he thought about it a lot. He made a list of clothes, and another list of other things that were not clothes. He packed and unpacked and packed everything in a different geometrical pattern so he could fit an extra sweater.

The phone rang in the kitchen and he heard his mother pick it up.

His checked shirt from Gap. He never really wore it any more, but still. Could it go in one of the side pockets?

“Jared?” she called, while he folded the checked shirt up very small.

“Yeah?”

“Matthew’s on the phone, sweetheart.”

He left it on top of the suitcase and went through to the kitchen. Everything in the apartment was mirrored. He saw his mother’s angular frame reflected fifteen times at once while she ate noodles at the kitchen island. He held the receiver to his ear.

“Jared?”

“Yeah, man, what’s up?” he said.

“You want to go to that movie tonight?”

“I can’t, really. I’m basically going to bed right now.”

A short pause. “What time are you flying out?”

“Like seven. From JFK, so that’s like, whatever, an hour’s drive. So yeah.”

“Shit, man.”

Jared smiled. “Yeah, I know.”

“Well, listen. We’ll all miss you and everything.”

“Don’t be a fag just because I’m leaving the country, Matt.”

“Right,” his best friend said, laughing. “Well, you know I’m just disappointed that I didn’t get any from you while you were here.”

“I’ll be back next year, you know. Also, my mom is in the room.”

“Am I on speakerphone?”

Jared looked over at his mother. She was still eating noodles with her back turned, but in the mirror her face betrayed nothing. He swung the receiver back toward his mouth. “Sure.”

“Did I ever mention your mom gives great head?”

“No. Although everyone knows your dad does.” He heard Matthew laughing again, and it made his stomach hurt. “I better go, man.”

“Sure. You get your beauty sleep. Hey, have a good flight tomorrow.” Another pause. “Take care and all.”

When he’d hung up, his mother looked up from her noodles. “Are you going to bed, honey?”

“Yeah.”

“Goodnight, then.”

The Gap shirt wouldn’t go into his suitcase. He left it out. It was the kind of thing he would probably end up missing. He switched the light off and lay wide-eyed in the New York dark, listening to the sirens cry outside. The city would move on, swallowing lives and coffee cups and loose change, spitting up yellow cabs and record stores. The hacking, wheezing city, with its bloodshot traffic-light eyes, its nicotine-stained boulevards. It would not wait for him.

Jared was afraid that nobody would.

A Hesitant Comeback Post

2008-10-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

Hmm. It has been a while.

While school has been sucking my blood quite a bit, part of the reason I was away was because I started writing a novella which I didn't want to post. Mainly because it is composed of things I've stolen from stuff that I have posted here, and you guys would recognise it immediately for the copy-and-paste job that it is.

Anyway, I am here for now at least - and while I am, I would like to extend my gratitude to Francis at the very excellent Caught in the Stream who included me in his list of seven favourite blogs. You should now go immediately and check out his site - which is full of rather brilliant art, poetry and fiction - unless you are him, in which case, cheers again Francis.

I do have a tiny bit of poetry to post, so here goes.

Halloween

These clouds wash out

October’s orange dregs;

there are fireworks tonight

and I am in love.

Let the silt of these autumn hours

block sadness from my heart.

May I always remember

when everything was good.

Poetry

2008-09-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

London

I light a candle for her mother

in St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Trafalgar Square

five hundred miles from home

do I do wrong by widening this loss

what comfort is there after all

in my stopping without telling her

to light a candle without praying?

what comfort here for her in untold light?

the hotel room is a maze of shopping bags

and I am phoning home

they tell me you have run away

that the police are searching

and your name is on the radio

I wonder where you are: a car somewhere in Donegal

he has pulled over and it is raining

the trunk weighed down with your black bag full of clothes

and do you know her mother has died

and are you scared and when will you come home

I win twenty pounds on a scratchcard

in Marble Arch station. I spend it in Sainsbury’s

on hot croissants, on plums and nectarines

a box of cereal, a pint of ice-cold milk

a copy of the Times. No one is as lucky

or as guilty. I have never earned the right to be unhappy.

Senior Effort from the Followills

2008-09-19T13:36:00.000-07:00

Only By The Night by Kings of Leon is released on RCA/Columbia on September 22 in the UK.

From the outset – the effect-heavy “Closer,” with its expansive, creepy atmosphere – it is clear that Kings of Leon have moved on. Long gone are the days of Youth and Young Manhood, the raw Southern rock album released when the youngest of the band (bassist Jared) was just fifteen. Their evolution has been clear ever since: with both subsequent albums, they became more polished, growing further from their Pentecostal origins. If “Closer” is the result, then they have stretched their wings further than most thought possible.

The three brothers and a cousin, who grew up with the obligatory Southern back story – their father was a preacher, their childhoods spent moving from town to town – have been nothing in their career thus far if not honest. Whether it was the drug-fuelled whine of “Soft” or the grubby “Spiral Staircase,” they have never attempted to dress up their less glamorous attributes in anything other than skinny jeans. A promotion strategy for this album involves a new “Home Video” appearing on their website showing the band and crew at home and in the studio, every day in September prior to the release date. This under-publicised move exposes the not inconsiderable egos at work behind the album: lead singer and lyricist Caleb in particular appears fragile and belligerent, sensitive and self-aware. They have always been served best by this prickly honesty, their willingness to appear unchanged and unvarnished in front of their fans; this stadium-rock album, then, is most at risk of losing that vital authenticity and slipping too far into U2 territory.

“Crawl” does not restore faith at that level. The lyrics even become political at one point, though only in the vaguest possible sense: “The reds, the whites and abused/The crucified USA”. While the band – particularly Jared – have been laudably vocal in their support for the Democratic party and for young people voting in general, these lines are neither inspiring nor particularly coherent. It is up to the next track, the cringingly-titled number one single “Sex on Fire,” to bring Kings of Leon back onto more familiar territory, which they predictably and satisfyingly stomp all over.

Caleb’s best lyrics thus far have been the low-key expressions of solitude and uncertainty from KoL’s latest two albums, Aha Shake Heartbreak and Because of the Times. “Use Somebody” forms a highlight of the album for the same reason. While the heart of the track lies in its understated lyrics and exquisitely tortured performance from Caleb, the quality of the sound cannot possibly be ignored, from its sweeping backing vocals and symphonic guitar to its powerfully musical bass line and technically stunning drum fills.

It is difficult to dislike even the less striking tracks here: “Manhattan” becomes more charming at each listen, with its basic but endearing lyrics: “We’re gonna show this town how to kiss these stars”. Again the musicianship is obvious in the warm, melodic rhythm section. “Revelry” wallows in reverberating, melancholic self-pity, again revealing slices of the confused and unhappy anti-hero: “It was me that drove us right in the ground,” Caleb moans.

“17” sees us back onto another familiar subject. “Oh, she’s only seventeen,” it begins, and give it a guess where it goes from there. It suffers in comparison to the other Kings of Leon song which features a seventeen-year-old love interest, “Slow Night So Long”; it is less contemplative, more prosaic and less greasy. Where “Slow Night So Long” is jammed full of disgust, self-loathing and crippling loneliness, “17” comes across comparatively smug.

“Notion” is a vocal and musical strut, but lyrically devoid of anything new. It must be said that on the less interesting songs, drummer Nathan seems to work twice as hard: “Be Somebody” features a ferociously engaging rhythm section, as well as swampy guitar work from lead guitarist and cousin-rather-than-brother Matthew.

“I Want You” is the most obviously rhythmic track, a laidback and quirkily observant ode to nights out and small towns. I will here note that Kings of Leon have come a long way from their earlier “everything’s the same, this town is pitiful/and I’ll be getting out as soon as I can fly” attitude: we must assume that small towns are much easier to admire from a Japanese hotel room than they are from an actual small town. “The fickle freshman, probably thinks he’s cooler than you,” the lyrics go, trailing into descriptions of the “land of the creeps” and home-made fratboy pornography. What this has to do with the “I want you” chorus line is never made clear, but it is funkier and fresher than a lot of the material on the album.

“Cold Desert” is the album closer, a song written – Caleb claims – while under the influence of pain medication following a fight with Nathan. “Cold Desert” has none of the musical energy of the similar “Day Old Blues” or “The Runner” from previous albums, and at first seems bloated in comparison; in fact, this lyrically devastating, intensely personal, and achingly miserable hymn of desolation numbers among Kings of Leon’s most powerful tracks. “Jesus don’t love me,” Caleb howls into the emptiness, “No one ever carried my load. I’m too young to feel this old”.

For me, this does not equal 2005’s Aha Shake Heartbreak either track-for-track or cohesively, but this does not make it a bad record. It has substituted much of its raw teenaged energy for musical skill and lyrical exploration; it is a big, sprawling epic of an album, and I imagine it is just precisely the one that Kings of Leon intended to make.

Please do not illegally download this album.

Poetry: Love and War

2008-09-01T12:23:00.001-07:00

Here's a little poem which is also a piece of fiction, because none of it ever happened. Look at me, combining two genres at once. Seriously, sorry for the delay in posting, but I'm back in school for my final year and it's all exam-ish. Enjoy.

Love and War

I am not complete enough. I do not
live what I believe. Show me equality and I will
nod and smile despite knowing that

I might never love you more than I did the night
when you tore your lip fighting with your brother
and then sat in the car with your knuckles bleeding
and the radio on. I do not know what makes a man a man.
I guess I used to believe that it wasn’t important.

Now I struggle to reconcile the politics of our bodies:
you have your fists, and I have notebooks
pens and ink. The instruments of love and war.

Wolf and Bird: Part Three

2008-08-29T16:25:00.000-07:00

The Miller family were seated under the canopy of a restaurant, finishing their meal. The street was flooded with still-blue evening light; it glistened on the cobblestones and glared against the window of the jewellery boutique opposite. Around the corner, in front of the restaurant, was the harbour, where fleets of yachts clinked and whistled and the smell of the ocean mingled with pasta sauce and parmesan and hot doughnuts. When the bill was paid, they walked back across the promenade and through to the caravan park.

Jared didn’t really belong to the Miller family, but then nobody did. There was no such thing, no little cohesive unit: they were just separate, splintered people who shared a house where nobody belonged.

There was Stephanie, who was stylish and prone to getting drunk and calling Jared when he was at some house party and telling him that she’d gone off with a strange guy and could Jared’s best friend Matthew come and pick her up in the Polo please? – and right now was striding along in a black lace shift dress with shiny platform shoes and a large expensive handbag on her arm.

There was Emily, who had bad skin and rimless glasses and was wearing a green strappy dress from two summers ago, which pinched her shoulders, which Jared knew because she fought with Marguerite whenever Marguerite asked to wear it, because it was the only dress she owned.

Then Brian, the red-faced father figure in the loose polo shirt and slacks; Marguerite, the tan-powdered mother wearing her cream suit with the brown silk vest inside.

And Jared himself, in his pointy shoes and black knock-off RayBans and leather jacket. The pretty-boy.

It wasn’t that it had never crossed Jared’s mind that he might have been gay. Of course he might have been gay. Obviously. Firstly, the clothes thing, he liked clothes, he wore jeans that he bought off the Internet and might technically have been made for girls originally, that was quite gay. Secondly, all his friends were gay. They'd been his friends since he’d started at the school, since he was about thirteen, so it wasn’t like he consciously decided to make friends with a bunch of gay guys; and they weren’t exactly camp, Jared thought defensively, it wasn’t as if it had been obvious they’d all turn out to like men or whatever. But that was the thing. Jared didn’t like men. He didn’t like anyone. He felt like such a blankness, like a bit of a waste. He didn’t like fighting – although he broke someone’s nose once, kind of by accident when this guy was giving Matthew a hard time and Jared punched the guy in the face and all of a sudden his nose was broken, which, okay, yeah that was pretty cool – or explosions or fast cars or Die Hard and obviously not Playboy.

He found it so difficult to be a person. It made him so sad and tired to have to keep trying. He wished he could just vanish, just stop being: that or to suddenly wake up in Technicolor, feeling real and lively. The sky was starting to darken at the edges. He kicked at the tough dry grass along the side of the road. Thinking about it made it worse, definitely.

When they got in, there was an envelope on the mat. The envelope said JARED in neat block capitals. Stephanie picked it up, because of course she did, because it was Stephanie.

“There’s stuff in it!” she cried, shaking it.

For a minute he had absolutely no idea who it could have been from. Then there was no mystery at all because there was only one person he had met since they arrived in France who he told his name to, and it was the girl on the dunes with the camera. He took the envelope off his twin sister and felt something other than what he usually felt – because that was the way he thought of it, wasn’t it, there was the general Bad Feeling, and then everything else was just Something Else – and opened it. His family all waited to see what was inside. He spilled the contents onto the table.

It was a jigsaw. There weren’t many pieces – fifteen or twenty – and they were all small.

“Who is it from?” Emily asked.

“I don’t know,” he lied, because it was easier.

“How did they know your name, then?” Stephanie said.

“I don’t know.” Lying was never easier, which he should have known.

“Are you going to make it?”

He attempted to look at it indifferently. “I don’t know. Whatever.” Then he scooped the pieces back into the envelope and went into his room to make the jigsaw.

It took him seven minutes, during which time Stephanie interrupted twice and he had to move the CD clock radio in front of the pieces so she didn’t see what he was doing. She didn’t even want anything, she was just like that. When he put the jigsaw together it was about the size of a large postcard, and it showed a field of tulips and a windmill and a lot of blue sky. On the sky in black marker was written:

MEET ME AT THE B27 POOL AT 6:30 TOMORROW MORNING…
YOU SHOULD PROBABLY BRING A CHANGE OF CLOTHES
(THIS IS FLORIDA BY THE WAY, NOT A KIDNAPPER/RAPIST)

He turned the jigsaw over carefully on the palm of his hand, but it didn’t say anything on the back. The tap went on in the corridor outside. The sky crumbled into dark.

Poetry: Offering

2008-08-26T15:48:00.000-07:00

This poem is the product of staying up too late and reading poetry on the Wondering Minstrels website, a now-defunct poetry archive which used to post one poem by a published poet every day. Whether or not you think all the late-night reading was worth it in this case, it would be great if someone could link me to a similar service or at least a couple of good collections. I need more poetry for sure.

Offering

If it is said that not all loves are equal,
know then that my love for you
is a small thing
and I hold it in my hand like a stone.

It is not made from truth
I know we do not know one another
and so it is a false love:
it is the satellite and not the star
a small and unromantic thing, but still
I know the constellation of your face
the angles of your name
and these things are never far from me.

Look at your hard-edged beauty
and be lonely for a moment.
This is my gift
and I can only give you what I have.

If it is said that not all loves are equal
know then that I carry this small thing
this stone, this tiny satellite
and because words are soft and pliable
let us call it love.

Last of the Summer Whine

2008-08-20T15:56:00.000-07:00

Or: I Interrupt The Blog to Bring You This Unimportant Announcement

I have been seventeen this summer.

You don’t need old age or experience to know what seventeen means. You just need a collection of pop songs to understand that it’s basically it. I will never spend another summer being underage, drinking sneaky alcohol and sneaking into sneaky nightclubs. I will never be as young again as I am right now, writing this post. This is it. After this, there are exams, and after exams, there is university, and after that you’re too old to be a rock star or a supermodel. At seventeen, you are not past society’s sell-by-date for anything. At seventeen, you are the absolute centre of the universe.

And guess what? I failed.

I failed to drink any alcohol, take any drugs, or have any dangerous-type boyfriends (or even the type of boyfriends that your parents quite like). I failed to drop out of school and play in a band. I failed to get a part in a Hollywood movie or have a book published or just generally find a way to appear in the Sunday Times’ Culture supplement. I failed to be the pretty one, which is more hurtful than any self-respecting feminist should admit. I failed to have fun. I failed to be wild or rebellious or alarming. I failed to stay out all night – I even failed to come home late. Let’s face it: I failed the whole rite of passage thing as wholly as it’s possible to fail. I missed the HMS Coming of Age in a big big way.

I simply haven’t lived the beginnings of an interesting story. All of my heroes (each of whom, it should be noted, is a wealthy white English-speaking man) escaped reality somewhere around seventeen. None of them attended university. Most of them have a dodgy relationship with alcohol and/or drugs. And yet here I am, still in school (even – how did this happen? how could it? – a Prefect), still making reasonable grades and still on good terms with the local constabulary. I don’t know how to do anything else.

And confronted with the decision, I always choose what they tell me to choose. I sign the formative years of my life away to education, even though I don’t really believe that there’s anything else I want to learn. Not now. Not when I should be hanging out backstage at Glastonbury, wearing vintage clothes and being photographed. You only get a very short amount of time to do that, which in my case is approximately now. The time that I am spending not doing my homework and watching re-runs of Arrested Development.

Is there a way out?

Well, there has to be. But I’m never going to find it. I’m going to sit at home and write a blog post about how this perfectly good ordinary life just doesn’t seem to be enough for me. After all, I am seventeen. How could this be it?

Wolf and Bird: Part Two

2008-08-17T16:05:00.001-07:00

I'm more or less working exclusively on this at the moment, so here's the second part, which I hope is fun and interesting for you.

* * *

The breeze sifted its fingers through the whistle-grass, over the grit-smooth pebbles, onto the sand beneath. Patterns of white dust moved like ghosts toward the sea. Florida Cain sat cross-legged on a sand dune above the empty beach. She powered up her digital camera and held it to the landscape, framing the chipped mirror-grey sea with a ridge of dry grass.

Florida’s parents had been up late the night before, having a Talk. A Talk about Problems. A Talk about Florida. A Talk about Life. Florida was seventeen. Her hair was too long, her laugh was too loud, her hobbies were too many and all-consuming, and her clothes were wrong. That day she was wearing a vintage air hostess uniform which she’d found on eBay and paid for with her mother’s credit card, a denim jacket, legwarmers, four rings, white sunglasses, and tennis shoes. And a camera. A professional one with a big zoom lens.

Photography was one of Florida’s better hobbies: by encouraging it, her parents seemed to want to lead her away from the others – the protracted soundtracking of her best friend Nina’s unproduced screenplays; the way she assigned an animal to everyone she knew based on their personality or appearance; the sending of long typewritten letters to her favourite musicians at their home addresses (not to mention the musician who wrote a short, handwritten letter back to her that said “girl you really fucking make me laugh” and “I can’t believe you know my home address, that’s actually a little weird”); the MySpage page Florida and Nina ran, where people sent in their secrets through private message and had them published anonymously. The page had 70,000 hits.

Florida didn’t understand what was so worrying about these things. She didn’t even understand what was worrying about the biro graffiti beside the mirror in one of the bathrooms in school that said, “Florida Kane likes girls”. Firstly, as she pointed out to Nina, they didn’t even spell her name right (“which other Florida could it be?” Nina replied), and secondly, it was such a cheery example of graffiti: it didn’t have any swears in it or anything. And although the aesthetic choices were questionable – ballpoint pen on painted brick meant the letters had to be scrawled several times over – the overall sentiment was quite positive. The thought of Florida liking girls indiscriminately, liking every girl all the time, was a good thought.

“They mean you’re a lesbian,” Nina had said.

Florida was not unaware of this. It just still didn’t seem like a big deal. So how could an air hostess dress and a letter from Arizona be a big deal? Her parents’ fear that Florida’s weirdness would end up isolating her was beginning to isolate her. She started examining herself a little more. What other friends did she have, besides Nina? Why did she not know who Ross and Rachel were? Why had she insisted, at age seven, on changing her name to Florida (why not at least California or Manhattan? why the old people state?) and then stuck with that name ever since? What was wrong with her? She resented her strangeness, and then she resented her parents for making her feel strange, and then they took her on a holiday to the South of France.
So here she was. Click. Taking pictures. Click. Like a normal girl. Click click click. Sea, sky, little ridge of grass, all very normal, thank you come again.

Then she saw someone.

It was a boy. Or it seemed to be a boy. Standing behind her, looking out toward the sea. He was tall and slender, with a narrow frame, dressed in tapered jeans and a grey sweater and a wide-collared black coat with two rows of buttons. The white dawn was reflected in his pointy patent shoes. He looked strange. His hands were small and pretty; his skin was clear; his face was delicate, finely-boned. He made Florida shiver. She made him yelp by taking his picture.

“Hi,” he said, sounding strangled. “I didn’t know you were…”

She got up. “Hi. I’m Florida.”

“I’m – Jared.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Jared is an unusual name.”

He smiled at the side of his sleepy mouth, as if he was bemused. “So is Florida.”

“It’s not my real name,” she said matter-of-factly.

He frowned. “So… what’s your – is that like a fake name, or…?”

“I changed my real name.” She took his picture again. “I changed it to Florida ages ago.”

“Um – what are you – why are you taking pictures of me?”

She studied the small screen on her camera. His face looked fragile and feminine.

“Jared? Not that it’s any of my business, but are you a boy or a girl?”

“I’m – wow, okay, no, I’m a boy.”

She looked at him again. “No offence. Just so I know which folder to put these in, you know.”

A breeze lifted from the sea stirred his hair. He pulled his collar up with slim white fingers. “Is it, like, legal for you to take pictures of me without my consent?”

“Yeah, sure. But I’ll stop if you really want.”

He looked at her for a moment. “What time is it?” he said.

“Nearly seven.”

“I’m sort of lost, actually.” She took another picture and he just laughed to himself and continued: “You wouldn’t know where Lot B27 is?”

“It’s…” She stood on her tip-toes and pointed back across the glinting roofs, “… kind of, okay, do you see the watchtower there?”

“Yeah.”

“Down from that. That way.”

“Ah. Okay. No, yeah, I got it. Thank you.”

She smiled and lifted the camera again. “One more.” It clicked and he smiled and shook his head. “It was nice meeting you, Jared.”

“Right. You too.”

He walked off, down the dry slope, and she sat down and stared out at the white sky, picking at the laces of her shoes.

Wolf and Bird: Part One

2008-08-13T16:51:00.000-07:00

Hopefully I'll get around to posting Part Two of this, unlike most of the Part Ones I post. This particular one grew in a very strange way, and it's not quite finished yet. Let me know what you think. It's a slow start, I know. Actually nothing really happens. But whatever, here goes.

Wolf and Bird

The aeroplane touched down at 21:34, local time, just as Jared woke up. The family took their bags down from the overhead carriage and filed off. Heat bloomed on his skin when they left the plane. It was 25˚ Celsius, at twenty minutes to ten, but it was not just temperature: it was stale humidity that hung in the darkening air. The baggage carousel rotated in a flickering grey room where the ceiling tiles dangled half-off. Everything was dragged to the taxi, where their father gave directions in wild-eyed, touristy French.

By the time the taxi pulled up at the caravan site, a blanket of tiredness had overcome Jared’s body. He took his suitcase from the boot. There was a wooden lodge at the entrance to the caravan site. His father went in to get a key, and the taxi drove away. Pairs of middle-aged women walked briskly along the pavement. The air tasted of salt.

His father returned from the lodge with a key, and the family wheeled their luggage past a barrier, past a car with all the doors open and the stereo playing “Eye of the Tiger,” and then were confronted by the sea, beyond another row of caravans. It was spread out, a piece of tinfoil wrinkling and smoothening in the wind.

They turned away and walked down a little hill. Their father stopped outside a cream-and-toffee coloured oblong block with big windows, then went to the side and unlocked the door. It swung outward and he stepped in.

Jared lifted his suitcase into a low-ceilinged, plywood-floored room that smelt of dust. There was a heater beneath the TV rack. The sofa was built into the wall in faded velveteen. The whole place felt vaguely upholstered, spongy and stuffy and discoloured. Along a narrow corridor there were kitchen units and a series of doors. His twin sister Stephanie walked down, throwing them open. They banged against the fridge and sink unit.

“Not bad,” she declared.

“Two of you will have to share,” Marguerite said.

Their father, Brian, cleared his throat, at which point Jared knew that he and Emily would have to share, because Brian liked Stephanie best. But he was surprised. “I think Jared should have a room to himself. He’s a young man, he’s –”

“I’m a young woman.”

“It’s not the same, Stephanie,” Marguerite said, making it obvious they had discussed it beforehand.

“It’s no big deal,” Jared said. “I can share with Emily.”

“Forget it.” Stephanie dragged her suitcase from the carpeted sitting room to a door down the hall. “After all, Jared is the eldest boy, so he’s automatically more important…”

Jared took his case and pushed into the first room off the corridor, a cramped space with a wardrobe, double bed, and very little else. He closed the door and sat on the edge of his bed, being the eldest boy in the family. He felt weightless. He didn’t feel like a boy. He never had. When he was a child he used to inspect Stephanie’s Barbies and Kens, their smooth plastic bodies, hungering for a similar flawlessness. And he never got over it. He still felt trapped and wrong, as if somehow he was never meant for flesh or blood. Not a boy. Not a girl. Jared was nothing. He was a negative value on the scale of humanity.

Outside his room, his family sat around the table and discussed whether to play Scrabble or Cluedo or Go Fish. Somebody was leaning against the other side of the wall; he could hear the soft thump of their head. He switched off his light and lay on top of his bed. Heat gathered in the small, closed room. It bloomed on his closed eyelids, soaked his skin, prickled though heat-swollen fingers.

He woke a few hours later. The house was quiet, the curtained window dark. He felt desperately sexy. He got up, took off his shirt and jeans, and leaned against the wall. Inside the door was a full-length mirror. His dim reflection was faceless, an dark shape between wall and floor. It felt more accurate than his usual mirror image: it seemed appropriate, representative, this indistinct blur of a person.

He opened the door and felt his way along the corridor to the shower room – separate from the toilet – but ended up opening the wrong door, onto two tiny single beds wedged into a room the size of an envelope. He could make out Emily’s sleeping shape in the one on the left. On the right, Stephanie returned his gaze with startling bright eyes.

“What are you doing awake?” she said.

“Trying to find the shower room.”

“On the left.” She shook her head. “You freak.”

He closed the door and found the handle of the shower room, switched the tap on and drenched his hands in cold water. Then, sleep-drunk, he sat on the floor of the shower room and put his head on his knees. Slowly his life was unpicking itself, collapsing on top of him like a circus tent, smothering him where he sat on the floor of a shower room in the South of France. He couldn’t stand to do anything to himself. He wished not to even have to look at himself anymore.

Two hours later, he woke up, his head wedged against the shower screen, one of his legs numb with pins and needles. The threat of morning leaked through the tiny window, a wash of pale dawn whiteness. He decided to go for a walk.

Some Poetry: Charmer

2008-08-04T11:25:00.000-07:00

This is a very, very rough draft, so I am looking for some criticism if anyone could offer some. You won't get paid, but...

Well, you won't get paid.

Also, points for guessing who it's partly-partly based on. I've spent the last few hours tinkering with it, so I no longer have any idea how obvious (or indeed legal) the inspiration is.

Charmer

1
Son of a Tennessee preacher
naming the psalms in the colors of the fall
the call of the mockingbird and honeybee
God-fearing honor-roll descendant of the sun
running barefoot in the summer through the streams

2
White-eyed and sweating on the floor
the powder and the mirror
fifteen, too young to hear your God desert you
oh childish grace, oh drunken prayer
the Devil holds His hand against your brow

3
And so you stand before us, pretty saint
partly broken in androgyny
our love is born in sound and blooms in sinew
you pay your price: we trespass on your body
we dare to speak aloud your holy name

4
Do not say we don’t know you:
your beer bottles, your tapered jeans
your crucifix and cigarettes
we who count your lashes, pay your wages
we who light our candles in your name.

What do we know, if not you?
If not by us, how do you know yourself?

Some Fiction

2008-07-07T06:39:00.000-07:00

Here's a little bit of something I wrote yesterday. Any suggestions on how to better it are totally welcome.

* * *

It is seven in the evening, the eleventh of July. The air breathes a kind of sweaty heat over the garden. Helen’s family sit greasy-fingered in deckchairs, eating barbecued chicken wings. Her youngest cousins are on the swing. Helen herself is in the greenhouse, where the afternoon heat is trapped between the windows and heavy with the noise of bees.

The weather has not broken since early June. Helen has spent all summer either lifting damp clothes away from her skin or sitting inside reading. But the text crunches up and looks greenish in the coolness; the house seems too small for her, as if the walls are converging. She is embarrassed by family events, feeling that she has outgrown birthday candles and cousins.

The flowers hang limp with heat from their baskets. The scent weighs down the air with drunken sweetness. Insects scramble on the ground. Helen stands beneath a basket of petunia and closes damp eyes to hear the hot buzz. Outside, her cousins shriek on the swing. Time unravels slowly, each second echoing dully in Helen’s head. After a minute her forehead is aching.

She does go out with her friends sometimes, but it is too hot to dance this summer, so they stand wilted in someone else’s garden with melted lipgloss in their pockets. Long nights where everything is always just about to happen and nothing ever does. It does not reach dark until eleven. Helen does not really belong to these nights. They slip on and off like jewellery. The memory stays warm for a while; then as it cools, it becomes confused with every other party she has been to. Nothing ever really changes.

A bumblebee hovers near her ear. She feels her heart slow to the pace of his movement. The glasshouse is its own clock; her head keeps thumping out the seconds. The sky overhead is thin-blue, cloudless. A tractor rattles past on the main road and Helen’s teeth water. She is dizzy with heat and the damp smell of flowers.

There is nowhere she could go to escape this feeling: these are her converging walls, her terrifying disconnection from everything. She used to believe that she could be one of the beautiful people; now she has seen them, and they are pink-eyed, bloody-nosed, chewing on their dirty fingernails. She does not know them. Their words sound hollow, dropping into the sweaty air and losing their meaning. Her old heroes are just people sitting behind a different fence. They have nothing to say to her and she has nothing to say to them. Helen is a loose end, a random configuration of proteins. She lacks the energy for understanding.

Her skin blooms with humidity. A tiny fly crawls across her knuckles. Nothing stirs in her brain. Her feet are pink and swollen in their sandals; when she moves her toes she feels them prickle with sweat. The world is packed up in a box somewhere. Her head aches desperately; her eyes are still shut. She cannot remember sound.

Then everything begins again, suddenly. She opens her eyes and it is raining. Her cousins are running from the swing to the house through the darkened grass. The greenhouse walls are streaming. Her sister is collecting the glasses and plates from the lawn. Helen lifts her feet up one after another off the hot concrete and opens the glass door: everything is darker and fresher. The air smells of something new.

Some Poetry

2008-06-29T09:37:00.000-07:00

Hello again everyone. To account for my absence for the last two weeks or thereabouts, I can only explain that I got an idea in my head for a new book, so I wrote that. Then I got bored of it and here I am again.

Poetry time!

A Sonnet for Someone Who Will Never Read Any of My Sonnets, No Matter How Much I Hint That I Would Like Him To

Maybe someday I’ll see the place where you live
and then everything will make sense
and everything I don’t understand about you
will be reflected in the dirty fractured river
in tall halogen streetlights, in broken bottles
in the bloodshot sunset, brickwork buildings
the glistening arcs of St James’ Park;
the logic of your indifference will be revealed,
spun out thin and wide like a spider’s web
on the roofs of your beautiful city.
Maybe there for the first time I will see you
(of course by then you won’t live there anymore
it’s not as if I’m hoping for romance here:
just for a little understanding).

Love Gets Everywhere

2008-06-16T16:41:00.000-07:00

It's funny, because often I read bloggers who mention the fact that they don't include any personal details in their blog posts, and I always feel a little bit inferior. Why can't I be similarly aloof, allowing my work to stand on its own feet without clumsy explanations of my personal life?, I think to myself (having not yet fully mastered the art of thinking to anybody else). Only yesterday did I realise that actually, I have never written any personal stuff on this blog.

I'm not about to start or anything - it is a rare blogger who can turn the mundane into the fascinating, and even s/he would be challenged by the details of my life, which are either a) stolen and used in my short stories or b) sort of exceptionally boring. So, if you ever thought I was mysterious or anything like that... well, no. I just don't really do stuff that's worth blogging about. But if I start, then trust me: you guys will probably be the first to know.

Here's some fiction.

- - -

And everyone around the world fell in love, as if for the first time.

The fifteen-year-old Juliet Clarke began to stay awake at night yearning for someone who worked in the chocolate shop on Cavendish Avenue and smiled on the left side of his mouth. She went to the chocolate shop during the day and stood there, at the counter, watching him stack trays or wrap boxes with gold paper, and she wished that she could see him from every angle at the same time. Whatever it was that caused this love to happen – beauty or perfection or perhaps love itself, created with its own regeneration – there was so much of it in his every movement, in the way he cut the sticky tape when he was finished wrapping the box, in the way he raised his eyebrow when he was asking her if she wanted anything.

He himself was in love too, of course. He had fallen in love with a photograph that he saw in an art gallery. And each day he returned to look into the eyes of the person in the photograph, and each day that person looked back at him. His heart beat harder and faster and his neck ached and the blood rose into his face, and each day it seemed there was a little more detail: a pearl button; now a little lace on the collar; now the umbrella, a different, lovelier shade of red. Once he reached forward as if to touch the cold glass with his fingers and a gallery attendant had to come down and ask him not to. It was embarrassing, but still he kept coming every day until the exhibition finished, and then he wondered what he had done wrong, and why everything was falling apart.

The person in the photograph loved, too. She loved – deeply, completely – her two children, aged four and six. She loved their tantrums. She loved the clever little whorls of their ears. And the children loved as children do: like helium balloons, like fizzing rockets, offering their love to the sky. Their little bodies cannot contain the brilliance of life. It bursts out of them. The children are unguided missiles of love.

The librarian Susannah Birkin loved so much that she longed to detach her beloved’s head from its neck and cradle his sleeping brain in her arms, wondering aloud at each precious neurological connection. The electrician Adam Wilson loved so much that it showed through on every fuse and sparkplug; he squeezed his love through this tiny channel of workmanship, until everything he did shone with his appreciation of his loved one. Love got everywhere. It dripped from the ceilings, colouring everyone’s furniture. It nestled in floorboards. It made sounds between the walls at night.

Some people even fell in love with each other. A bride and groom, reciting vows at the altar and suddenly noticing each other – the curl of her hair, the particular set of his nose. Two schoolboys in a damp field taking a shortcut home from school. People who bump into each other when the subway jerks to a halt at the Lincoln Centre, beneath Manhattan. The lead singer of a certain famous rock group and a girl in the front row. Love colliding with love, inexplicably, like angles of light that mirrored each other.

Of course this did not last for long. Fifteen-year-old Juliet started going to the cinema instead of the chocolate shop. The chocolate shop man began to take his own photographs. The woman in the photograph let her children move away; her children stopped exploding with love. The librarian became less impressed with her lover’s neurology; the electrician found less time for his beloved’s sparkplugs. The bride and groom stayed married, and love translated into something dependable. The schoolboys never got married; the couple on the subway found each other dull; the rock star and the front-row girl never saw one another again.

But for then, for that moment, that hour or that week, for that eternity in the universe, the world was lit up with different and spectacular love. Some of it survived in its original form, and that which didn’t was merely converted like energy, forming new love somewhere else for someone else. It cannot be created or destroyed, just changed, transferred, translated; swapped from person to person; dimmed, switched up, ignited. We are made of it. And now, at this moment, people wait for love to find them, not realising that they only have to hold their hands in front of them and look at the pattern of their own fingertips. Love is already there.

Fiction: "In Sickness"

2008-06-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

She wakes to the noise of his coughing. It is a tearing sound; she can hear liquid bubble in his throat. She kicks the rest of the blankets off and swings her legs onto the carpet. His body looks oddly crumpled on the other side of the bed. Sweat glistens on the ridges of his spine. She pads to the bottom of the room and switches the kettle on. The alarm clock reads 4:56. She sits at the desk and takes a pad of watermarked stationery out of the drawer. The kettle growls quietly, and he begins to cough again, turning onto his back. She does not look at his face, but she knows he would be frowning: even in sleep his mouth tightens with pain. The sound of the kettle swells. She poises the pen above the writing paper; words writhe uselessly in her head. The kettle clicks. He wakes.

“What time is it?” he says.

“Five. You were coughing.”

He groans and sits up against the headboard. “It’s so hot.”

She switches on the desk lamp and makes coffee, emptying sachets of UHT into two mugs. The ghost of milk floats on the surface like scum.

“Here.” She leaves it on his bedside locker. They do not look at one another. She sits at the desk again; the fake leather seat of the chair sticks to her thighs.

He coughs again. “Are you writing something?”

“Just a note to Kate.” This somehow gives her licence to begin.

Kate, she writes, we’re staying in a hostel in Nevada. Temperature is in the high thirties, so it’s hard for us to sleep. I –

He starts to cough again. The hacking noise distracts her. Her pen pauses on the paper. I what? Internally she composes the possible sentences: I don’t want to be here. I want to leave him. I sometimes wish he would – A few hours ago, in the tangle of their limbs and his heavy mottled breathing, he whispered, “I am going to die.” It was the first time he had ever said it to her. He fell asleep afterward and she lay there in the dark knowing that vows meant nothing anymore. Death was already parting them.

“I was thinking,” he says, and again she hears liquid rasping in his voice, “sometime we could drive out to the sea from here.”

The pen presses hard into the paper, making a single deep dent. “Yeah?”

“The Pacific, you know… it’s only about two hours away.”

She turns in the chair to look at him. He is lighting a cigarette. In the lamplight he looks pale, glossy with sweat, ethereal. The tip of the cigarette flares briefly and he inhales. It would make him angry if he could see himself like this, his cheeks gaunt, his hip bones framing the hollow of his stomach. He hates being sick: he will not even go outside now because of shop windows that reflect him back at himself glaringly, surrounding him with ghosts.

The last time they were at a beach together was more than a year ago, hundreds of miles away, when they were different. He found a dark red anemone in a rock pool and showed it to her, prodding it with his finger as it opened and closed its gaping mouth.

“Look at this,” he had said. “Look at this. It’s alive.”

She laughed. Now she longs to take him in her arms, to wash him with cool clean saltwater; to open up his chest and claw out his disease with her bare hands.

“We should do that,” she says.

He smiles at the side of his mouth, drags on the cigarette again. “Soon.”

She lifts the pen out of the paper.

I think we’ll go to the beach sometime this week, she writes. He just needs fresh air, and it’ll be good for us to get out of the city.

She will not let him read this. It would make him cry to see how much she lies about him, about herself, about they way they are. He closes his eyes, damp with the effort of sitting up. She sits beside him on the bed and kisses him. His mouth is wet with sleep; it is a miracle of being; a sea anemone. She almost puts her fingers to his lips and tells him that they do not need to go the Pacific; that they are already surrounded by the fragile beauty of existence. She almost says, Look at this. Look at this. We’re alive.

Memories in the Key of G

2008-06-10T06:39:00.000-07:00

It is a common feeling, that of hearing a song and being magically transported back to the time when you first heard it. Sometimes the song becomes inexorably tied up with the memory of the song, so that even if it is The Spice Girls singing “Spice Up Your Life,” it nestles its way into a warm fuzzy space in your heart and on your iPod’s Most Played playlist. I can vouch for this, though thankfully not with that particular track.

What I haven’t heard so much about is the area of recommended songs. For example, if your friend Mavis recommends you an album, and later you fall out with Mavis, do you also fall out with the album? If you are trying to impress Susan, and she tells you that she likes David Bowie, isn’t it possible – even probable – that your subsequent fondness for the works of David Bowie might have something to do with your fondness for Susan? And sure, eventually you will cease your battle to impress her and you will continue to listen to Mr Bowie, but couldn’t it be that – at least to begin with – you only liked him because Susan did? And does that make your appreciation for his music any less real?

Maybe it’s just me, but there are a few songs that I love dearly, which I may not love quite so dearly if it weren’t for the person who recommended them to me. Music is not like other arts; it doesn’t just sit there on its own in your life. It becomes tied up with people, places, memories. It’s a sticky art. It picks up values and associations that don’t really belong to it. Okay, my Top Five Favourite Songs of All Time list probably doesn’t feature any strictly sentimental entries. But there is some value in music that you only love for your own personal reasons, because in its own way, that can be powerful too.

While we’re on the theme of music, here are some tracks I’ve been listening to lately (only some of which come with added sentimental value):

White Collar Boy by Belle and Sebastian - quirky, funny, and lyrically deft, plus it's got a great call-and-answer thing going on in the verse.

My Manic and I by Laura Marling - following on from Catherine at Sharp Words' excellent recommendation last time, I have discovered the delights of the eighteen-year-old songstress.

Boys and Girls in Love by The Rumble Strips - a sweet and cheerful indie pop tune. Nothing to argue with there.

As usual, I'd love to see your recommendations too. If nothing else, they'll always have sentimental value...

More Fiction

2008-06-08T17:05:00.000-07:00

He breaks the surface of the water with his sleek dark head. Smooth pieces of wood and stone litter the sand. There has been a storm, and the morning sky is papered with dark clouds. He surfaces again, his body pale in the slate-grey water; then he comes toward the shore. He is trembling from the cold, his eyelashes dripping with saltwater. The air is still and bitter. His throat stings. The clouds swell together on the horizon, forming a black mass in the corner of his vision.

“Hi. Morning.”

Alice’s voice startles him; she is sitting on the rocks in her dressing-gown. He swallows, then blushes and looks down at the pebbles and bottle caps. “Hi. You’re up early.”

“Yeah,” she says. “So are you.”

He shakes his head like a puppy and little droplets of water fly off him. “I couldn’t sleep.” It is true. Before walking down to the beach, David had been lying awake in the hot, half-lit room, watching lines of shadow move slowly across the ceiling.

“Me neither.”

“Was it the storm?” he says.

“I don’t know. I have trouble sleeping a lot. It might have been the storm, yeah.”

His dark wet hair is plastered to his forehead, and he is still shivering.

“You must be freezing,” she says.

He puts his hands in the pockets of his swimming shorts. “I don’t mind. Did you know I was down here?”

“No. I didn’t like – follow you, or anything.”

“Oh, no,” he says quickly, “I didn’t mean…”

She slides off the rock and ties her dressing-gown tighter around her fifteen-year-old waist. “They’d kill you, if they found out you were down here on your own.”

He shrugs, digs his toes into the sand. “I’m fine.” But he is not fine. He did not come to the shore because he wanted to stop swimming, but because he felt the same sharp ache in his chest, the sudden dizziness, the warning signs. It has not left him. Not yet.

“But why are you doing this?” says Alice.

“I said. I couldn’t sleep.”

“So you came down for a quick swim at half-five in the morning.”

He continues to look at the sand. “I was… I just wanted to take my mind off things. What else was I supposed to do?”

She comes closer to him. “You could come up to our house.” Her family lives in a house overlooking the pier; he passed by it on the way to the beach.

“What, and wake your whole family?”

“There’s a door into my room at the side.”

He struggles not to look at her, and when he does look at her, he struggles not to think about what they would do in her room: not to think about the damp, sandy sheets, the light seeping through the closed curtains, the awkward urgency of movement until finally he would feel something that was not this.

“David,” she says. He swallows. “Nobody blames you for what happened.”

“Except me.”

She sighs patiently. “The accident was not your fault.”

“Okay.”

He says this because he agrees that the accident was not his fault. In fact, he knows that the accident was not his fault; that things go wrong at sea every day; that even if there was something someone could have done to stop it, there is no reason to believe that David, at fifteen, was the right person to have done that something. No, the accident was not David’s fault.

What happened after the accident is what he blames himself for. He blames himself for his ruthless instinct, for the unexpected strength and energy in his limbs, for the tenacity of his lungs even as they filled with water. The wet scramble up the pier ladder; the pale wreckage still within sight while his legs pounded away from the shore; the breathless, throat-burning sprint inland, past the fire station, where his footsteps woke a flock of dark birds from the field beside; the stopping, finally, with bleeding feet and several cracked ribs, in the middle of nowhere, miles beyond the noise: this was David’s fault. Surviving was David’s fault.

He cannot explain to Alice why he comes here every morning at five o’clock, the same time the accident happened. He cannot really explain it to himself. It is as if he wants to prove that the sea never really wanted to kill him. He keeps going back in to give it a fair chance, but nothing ever happens, which shows that he was not meant to die that day. Sometimes this strategy works, and after coming back he feels – not happy, but almost clean. Most of the time he knows that if something were to happen, he would fight it off just as hard as he did the first time.

He cannot explain this to Alice for two reasons. One: he is terrified of her. Two: nobody knows that David ran away from the wreck that morning, and nobody knows what he did to get to the pier in the first place.

“Just forget about it,” she says.

“Look,” he replies, his voice sounding strained, “you weren’t there that time. You don’t know.”

“Don’t I?”

“No. You really don’t.”

Then she tilts her face upwards and kisses his mouth. She smells like the sea. It makes him feel sick and exhilarated. He has never kissed a girl before. And then before he realises she has stopped, she is whispering: “You’d be surprised what you can see from my window. I can see everyone on the pier, you know. Even if they’re running really fast.”

Every muscle in his body seems to contract. He stares at her. The sky buckles and cracks above them. The dark clouds break into vast rolling sheets of rain.

Not to Get Ahead of Myself...

2008-06-04T12:19:00.000-07:00

... but I feel safe in saying that for the time being at least, I'm back.

Here is a little piece I wrote today. It's very first draft-y (first draughty?) so feel free to bandy about criticism with the careless enthusiasm of a crowd of bloggers.

---

It could be true, after all, that somewhere in the black distances of his mind there is something, one thing, that he never told her.

Even as she lies here in his room, in his small white bed, with the computer on his desk ticking quietly and his t-shirt on the back of the chair, she longs for one thing that she does not know about him. A photograph with mysterious faces; a drawer full of letters she didn’t write; any fragment of a secret that might be in the room somewhere. Because she cannot love what is here. She cannot love this completeness, this totality of him. If this is all he is, and she were to love it, then that love would be absolute. She cannot love an absolute love. She’s only seventeen.

And since there may not be any more to him – since he might be found completely in the folds of curtains he keeps closed during the day, in the box of old Nintendo games on top of his wardrobe – she keeps herself from loving these things. In fact she gets up, pulls her dress on over her head and opens the curtains, even though she knows he can’t see the computer screen when they’re open. This satisfies her a little bit.

They have no history in common, this boy and she. She waded through a childhood of damp fields, treehouses, games of football in the evening and midget bites. His early life was that tiny high-pitched crackling when the TV powers up, SCART leads, the smell of hot Gameboy cartridges.

It is not only history that they don’t share. She knows she is beautiful, with her long slender athletic limbs and dark lips. Men have been in love with her, in love with her smooth cheekbones, with the corner of her mouth. He is not like her in this respect. He has never even brushed the side of love, and she has lived inside it her whole life. She is his first girlfriend. And he’s still shy with her sometimes.

She sits on the edge of his bed, waiting for him to come in. For now, the last thing she wants about him is the whole truth. What she wants is something about him that she cannot love, because she does not know it. For now, she does not want what she can see, but the things that she will never see; not the words, but the spaces between the words, the two pages that are stuck together and cannot be pulled apart. She has to feel that there is more to know about him than she already knows, because otherwise this love is the greatest love she will ever feel. And she’s only seventeen.

He comes in and they look at one another.

“Is it okay if I close the curtains?” he says.

She shrugs. “Go for it.”

“It’s just… yeah.”

Unerringly, she knows him. She tucks her feet underneath her and looks up at him. “Do you have secrets? Like, stuff that I don’t know?”

“Well.” He pulls the curtains closed. “Everyone has secrets.”

A pinprick of light. Somewhere in the black distances of his mind is the whole truth of him. More beautiful by far are the things she might not know.

Some Fiction

2008-05-21T08:48:00.000-07:00

I'm just going to pretend that the reason I've not posted in so long is because I was...

... studying.

Anyway. Here's a piece of strangeness.

- - -

Crows screeching. This is how it began.

Then wide daylight, and a bare room panelled with wood and flaking white paint. The room is bold and incurious. One window gapes open. Breeze streams through the closely-packed trees outside.

The Writer is here. If you are still, you will see her shadow moving against the wall. This is her place; everything happens the way she imagines it. She thinks of rain: clouds gather and spread damp through the open window. Paint peels beneath the frame.

And now a house is taking shape around it. A house is reaching ground and spreading out. It squeaks and simpers over wet grass, a seething form, reaching nebulous fingertips to the ground. Somewhere inside a boiler rattles; pipes clatter into existence.

So this becomes her place. She is carried here by sounds. The air is hers, heavy with moisture, and sometimes as she opens her eyes she sees it swimming with incandescent flecks of light. This is her home and she is always alone here. The grass can sing to her. The rooms can silently rearrange themselves in the dark.

Then there is a boy. Some of his features are clear - his dark hair, his large black eyes - and others merely smudges of vagueness. Slowly, he is coloured in, inked and re-inked; he is shaped, carefully, his shoulder blades and fingernails. The Writer's eyelids flicker with effort. The house drifts on the grass. Daisies poke obscure, lifeless faces through the green.

In the evening she finds him on a windowsill, carving his mark into the white-painted wood.

She will never be able to erase this.

Now she forces him out, filters him through words and letters until he is a collection of small black symbols. These, she keeps in the attic. This is her work.

Soon she is lonely again, though it is not the same; and there is beauty in the solitude that lets her run her unmarked fingers over the grooves in the painted wood.

The place becomes populated with these strangers. They leave with pieces of her: a strand of her hair, one of her scars, a tooth.

Some come back. The dark-eyed boy is there, lying on his back on the bare floorboards, playing disjointed chords on the piano.

Others are difficult to filter out in the first place. There are lovers upstairs who close the shutters and lock their door. She can't get rid of them. On the porch, in the screaming August heat, there is a flickering man with sunglasses. He does not speak English. Love visits there, a pale and fragile woman whose silver-blonde hair is peppered with wilting flowers. She speaks too quickly and bumps into things. Bruises bloom on her frail ribcage. Her brother sits upstairs, flicking matches at the wall opposite the lovers' room, tense and frustrated.

Most of the strangers do not stay overnight; they appear with sudden clarity and they are translated into language.

Sometimes the house gets cold; the lovers keep their shutters closed at night; the others disappear somewhere. The Writer worries that this place has been forgotten, reduced to bird noise and peeling paint. But it is merely shifting shape: rearranging its windows, pinning new photographs on the walls. Listen. The pipes rattle. All things will start anew.

Music Swap Shop

2008-05-09T14:21:00.000-07:00

How's about this for an idea? I post three tracks that I think everyone of sane mind and sound body should listen to, and if you so wish you may respond in the comments with some recommendations of your own.

Here goes. If you already know them, then... well done you.

Time to Pretend by MGMT, the current darlings of the indie world. Get past the Klaxons-ish intro, because I promise, it gets better.

DVNO by Justice. Yes, the French electro group of the mega dancefloor hit "D.A.N.C.E.". I like them. A lot.

Flipside by Royal Males. I link to their MySpace because they are - as yet - unsigned, but "Flipside" is a quality tune and it's always nice to know a band before they get famous.

I'd love if you guys had some recommendations to, erm, recommend to me in return. If so, make yourselves comfortable in the comments section. I'll get drinks.

The Kooks @ Dublin Castle

2008-05-06T11:42:00.000-07:00

I have written here many times about the joys of being a pop music junkie, and indeed, of all the shiny, sweet, spangly things to be addicted to, pop is top of my list. I am regularly delighted by the crackle and hum of my stereo when I put in a new CD, the crunchy guitar intro, the quiet bit where the singer repeats the first line again and again and your stomach just aches for the resolution chord. But these are all insulated, armchair experiences, and – of course – there’s a whole other facet to pop music.

Last night I went to see The Kooks at Dublin Castle. I realise that The Kooks are quite an uncool indie pop act, known mainly for that appalling song “She Moves in Her Own Way,” and being slightly posh (they went to the BRIT School). I do not care about this. I like them. I liked their first album, and I like their new album Konk, and if this makes me wrong then I do not want to be right, etc. They aren’t pushing boundaries or anything, but they are writing some lovely tunes, and in my humble opinion there is nothing wrong with that.

Anyway, it was last night, while pushing my thoroughly bruised chest against the security barrier and screaming the lyrics to “Naïve” at an atrocious volume, that I did wonder for just a moment what was going on. Most of the people around me in the pit were about seventeen. We would go home on buses or in taxis after the gig and then wake up and go to school. What the hell were we doing shoving each other out of the way, jumping up and down and throwing things at Luke Pritchard? Where did it come from?

The relationship between band and fans is a unique one. The fans are stuck below, surging forward in their thousands and battering each other in the process. The band are on the stage above, doing the same job they did last week. Somehow, despite all this, connections are forged. The guitarist looks at you and smiles. The guy playing bass waves back at you between tracks. The lead singer jumps forward and touches the crowd and you might not be totally sure but you could almost swear you felt his hand among all the others before the silent security men hoisted him back onstage.

And so it goes on. We work ourselves up into a raw-throated frenzy, clawing our way to the front so they have a better view of us. Some girl throws her bra onstage. Someone else screams the lead singer’s name between songs. You could be forgiven for thinking that it’s about sex, but I don't think it is. It's not really about him, or them, or us. It’s about music, and what it means to share that. We’re straining at the barrier because we want so much to be a part of it.

So I do not care even slightly how uncool I am: The Kooks were really very good. They did look at us and smile, they did jump into the crowd, and they did sprain my friend’s wrist by holding her hand too tightly. We were there and they were there with us. When it comes to live music, what else is there?

Fiction Saturday

2008-05-02T15:59:00.000-07:00

So, just after having that rant about only ever writing very short short stories, here is part one of an, um, slightly longer short story. Sorry about that.

* * *

It is June. For days they have been airing out the guest rooms, scrubbing floors and washing windows. This evening, Julia takes the tin VACANCIES sign from the press and hangs it outside. The coastal air is sharp with cold and salt; she watches surfers pick their way in towards the shore. Tomorrow, the first visitors of the year will come. Even now, the arcade is open, its harsh lights and tacky music audible over the wash of the sea. Tomorrow, life will start again, waking itself from the sleepy monotony of spring.

The middle-aged guests and their teenage son arrive the next morning to a house with windows thrown open and a smell of frying bacon. Julia helps bring their bags upstairs. The boy is about her age, maybe a year older, tall with narrow shoulders and dark hair. He smiles at her on the stairs, a lazy lopsided grin. He is beautiful. It startles her to think this.

"Hello," he says quietly. He has an English accent.

She smiles. "Hi."

There’s a pause.

"Where are you from?" she says.

"Newcastle."

"Oh." She nods. "So how long are you staying?"

"A few days."

They reach the landing: she leaves the bags outside the doors to their rooms. "Thanks," he says.

"Not at all," she replies, then nods awkwardly and walks back downstairs. He’s gone into his room when she reaches the hall, and she can hear the plates being laid on the table for breakfast.

After swimming, it takes Julia a long time to reach the shore. Coming out of the sea is uncomfortable to her, like waking up tired. She stands facing the horizon and feeling the sun beat on her shoulders. It’s a strange sensation. She feels as if the sun is melting something inside her, a thick shell of ice beneath her skin that is thawing now for the first time. She imagines the sound of it chipping and cracking inside her, filling her with newness.

On the way back from the beach she meets him again: he’s walking the same way as her. The sunset is blocked by houses, but occasionally it slants through, lighting up their faces with bold dying colour. Her bare arms are pricked with goosebumps.

"Hi," she says.

"Hey."

She smiles. "What’s your name, actually? Sorry, I never asked," she says.

"Jonathan."

"I'm Julia," she says. A pause. "Weather’s beautiful, isn’t it?"

He looks up, as if to check. "Yeah."

"I love the summer."

"Must be quiet here in the winter," he remarks.

She is relieved at his engagement in the conversation. "Oh, it goes totally dead."

"And you don’t have any brothers or sisters or anything?"

"I have," she says, "one brother. We don’t get on very well or anything."

"Oh, sorry, I didn’t see him."

She shrugs. "He wasn’t in earlier, I don’t know where he was. He’s a few years older than me."

"You’re what, seventeen?"

"Yep. He’s nineteen. Nearly twenty. But yeah, like I said, we don’t get on really."

He whistles. "You must get so bored."

She thinks about this. "I hibernate."

He laughs. "I just can’t imagine it. Living here, I mean. We live right in the city."

Something about this makes her uncomfortable. She wants to explain that she is portable, that Sligo is not embedded in her. To him, she could only be engraved with the patterns of this town – eleven o’clock Mass on a Sunday, karaoke with Big Dan, red lemonade in the Pilot – but her soul is mobile. It is not printed with geography.

"Do you like it?" she says instead.

"Yeah, I love where I live."

"Lucky you," she says.

He grins. It looks good on him. "Where do you go to school, then?"

"The Convent in Ballina."

"The Convent?" he says. "Are you… do you want to be a nun?"

She snorts with laughter. "Oh my God, no. No, it’s the only school I can go to really. There aren’t any non-religious ones around for ages. What do they call them, non-denominational."

"That’s a bit shitty," he says.

"Totally. I hate being in a Catholic school."

He laughs again. "Yeah, I’d hate it as well. I’m an atheist, like."

"Same." The freedom of atheism appeals to her: to be without judgment, dogma, terrifying afterlife.

"I bet they love you at the Convent."

"Believe me, I’m the star pupil," she says wryly.

They reach the front door and she fishes for her keys.

"See you then."

He goes upstairs to his room and she goes into the living room. Her mother is at the window and her father and brother are watching football.

"Did you meet their young fella?" her mother says, turning from the window with a smile.

"Yeah. Jonathan." She doesn’t know why she adds this; it just gives her a tiny thrill to say his name.

"Real Liverpool family," her father says in a fake Liverpool accent, not looking away from the television.

"They’re from Newcastle, Dad."

"Is that right?" He still doesn’t look away from the screen. "Newcastle."

She thinks about living in the city. "I’d like to go to Newcastle."

"Why?" her brother says, shaking his head. "Why would you want to go there?"

"I don’t know. I’ve never been."

He snorts. "You’ve never been to Kildare, like. Have you?"

"No."

"Do you want to go there, so?"

"Just – shut up."

"Mam? Mam? Did you hear that?" he says. Their mother has turned back to the window. He continues: "You tan."

Julia sighs. "You’re right. I’m a huge traitor. I want to be an English girl."

"Dad? Are you listening to this?" he says. His father keeps his eyes trained on the television. "That is fucking disgraceful, that is."

She goes to her room, feeling like she is her own country. She declares her body an independent nation, devoid of history or custom, free of allegiance. A state within a state. A government with one voice, making decisions about melting ice caps, about trade agreements and foreign affairs.

Some Fiction for Monday

2008-04-28T15:10:00.001-07:00

I realise that, if one were to rely on my previous "Fiction Saturday" posts, this would seem somewhat out of place. But... uh... well, I have no excuse, I just didn't write anything.

So here, two days late, is a small piece of fiction. These pieces are pretty much as far as I ever get, so when people ask me for "more" I do feel I've let everybody down slightly. If ever I post a snippet that is indeed a snippet of something more, I'll surely let you know in this pre-amble bit here. For now, these mega-short stories are all I've got. Enjoy.

* * *

He met her on the London Underground in 2002. They both took the Northern Line to work, Max in his suits and ties, and her in dresses and plastic raincoats. She always had a book with her; sometimes they’d nod across at each other and smile. Then that day she came in on crutches and he helped her with her bag. It was the first time he ever spoke to her: Johanna.

They went to see a film together in Leicester Square. When it was over they came back onto the street as if they’d just been born, and it poured rain, thundering down over the awning that advertised the cinema times. Bikes pedalled furiously by, splashing through the puddles; people ran from restaurants with newspapers over their heads. He opened his umbrella and they stepped out under it, walked back through the soaking streets to find a taxi. The dark spokes of the umbrella dripped around them, the corners of their own small sky.

That was October. In July, she moved out of her shared flat and into his place in Spitalfields. They didn’t need removal men: her friend Gary brought round some boxes in the back of his van. Johanna’s friends all worked in some indie design firm together and wore clothes they made themselves and smoked dope.

The night she moved in, they ate a Chinese takeaway together at the kitchen table. She’d just been away for a week in Greece to see her parents, and her skin was tan against her short white dress. They stayed up late, talking. He couldn’t go with her to Greece because of work, so before she left there had been a coolness between them, and now there was the embarrassed relief of reunion. She said she had missed him. He said he’d missed her too.

That Christmas, the hailstones and the wind broke a small window in the bathroom. She cleaned it up and he put duct tape over it and called someone to fix it, but they could hear it whistling from the bedroom, as if the noise was in their bones. He asked her if she had ever thought of getting married. “I don’t want to,” she said. She said she had never wanted to. And they kissed as they usually did, as if nothing was wrong except that the bathroom window was broken and they could both feel the cold against their skin.

Her firm closed down two months later. She didn't seem to take it too badly; they'd lost touch with most of those friends, anyway, and they had never needed the money. She moved the TV into the bedroom and stayed up late most nights watching westerns and black and white films. Max learned to sleep with the sound of it, but sometimes the dialogue strayed into his dreams.

He woke up to find her crying at the table one morning in April, and he just went to get a glass of orange juice from the fridge. She was always crying. He felt that the less he said about it, the less blame he would eventually incur, as if all the crying was leading to one final explanation, complete with scorecard. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He was too tired to deal with all the crying. He didn’t know why she was doing it.

“Were you being sick this morning?” he asked eventually.

She didn’t answer.

“You should see a doctor.”

She nodded slowly, pressed her hands against her eyes, then looked up at him.

“Are you going to work, then?” she said.

“Yeah. Do you want me to get you anything?”

She shook her head, pretended to smile. He left.

That was the last time he ever saw her.

Sometimes he imagines her on Carnaby Street in the faces of young beautiful women pushing buggies or carrying the shopping from Tesco, but this is not the reality. The only reality he knows is that there was love once, and now that love is gone.

Friday Poetry

2008-04-25T10:34:00.001-07:00

I decided to stray from my usual free-verse to write this poem, and I borrowed the rather lovely metre from Philip Larkin's poem "The Whitsun Weddings," so more credit to him for that.

I generally don't do pre-amble so let me know what you think...

The Way We Are

I have always lived here, in this town:
The butcher shops
And chemists, glaring windows, blinds pulled down
The brilliance of the sun on slate rooftops
The old facades of Main Street, and the noise
Of children shrieking, laughing. I could name
Each movement of the clock and what should follow:
At four, the school bell and the herd of boys
Trundling from hot classrooms; the car-park soccer game;
By five, the evening tea, cool sky, a swallow.

Here is the rhythm of my town and I,
A clockwork song
As all around, this living passes by
Moved, as if by unknown force, along
An ingrained schedule. It is not for me
Salesgirls dress mannequins; shops replace
Sun-faded stock with new: there is a sense
That all these things will somehow always be
Part of this constant unaffected pace,
Which is not yours or mine, but something else.

Feeling Somewhat Prolific

2008-04-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

And since I'm not running to any particular schedule, I decided to post another piece of fiction just to see what you all think. It's on its second draft or thereabouts, so I welcome criticism (especially the nitpicky kind).

Hope you enjoy.

* * *

It was evening on Castle Lake. The fairground stalls were lit, full of chatter and the clinking of coins, the rustle of hay underfoot. Horses whinnied softly. A shout went up; the bell rang; someone won a prize. A boy dropped a cloud of candy floss on the ground, his wails drowned out by the brisk, mechanical noises of the carousel.

Beyond the fair, in the soggy marsh at the bank, were two figures heaving a long basin out of the lake. The taller of the two was a man; the other, a woman in a short, spangly dress, her bare shoulders pale and shivering.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the man said. “Go back to the trailers.”

The woman sighed thinly. “You can’t carry it on your own.”

“I’ll manage. Just go.”

“For God’s sake. Are you always like this?”

He pulled the bathtub-sized basin a little further onto the damp shore; it slipped silently back toward the water. She sighed again.

“Let me help.”

“Just get back inside,” he grunted, dragging it up the slope again. “You’ll tear your dress.”

“I –”

“I don’t need any help.” He heaved at the basin. Water sloshed down the sides. She lifted her feet out of the mud one after another, crossing her arms against the breeze.

“We all know why you come out here.”

He paused. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

The bells went off again at the fair, sounding distant. The loudspeaker announced another prize, advertised the raffle and then crackled off the air. The breeze picked up, wrinkling the surface of the lake.

“You used to meet her here, didn’t you?”

He let go of the basin. It slid immediately back into the shallows, but he wasn’t watching it. “How do you know about that?”

“People still talk about it,” she said.

He stood up straight, wiped his hands on his shirt. “And what do they say?”

“Nothing really.”

“No, I mean what do they say?” he said, walking toward her until they stood face-to-face. “What have they told you?”

She shuddered with the cold. The wind was stronger now. “That you used to see one of the dancers down here.” He stared until she continued: “They said she was one of ours, but she left for school or something, and you used to meet her at the lake when we stopped here. And then…”

“And then what?”

The wind lashed out at the lake; on top of one of the stalls a weather vane was whipped into a creaking frenzy; the trees crashed and groaned down the bank.

“And she drowned,” she replied, trembling. “That’s all I’ve heard.”

He nodded, then walked back to get the basin out of the lake. She breathed again. “Come on and help me, if that’s what you want,” he called. She padded through the mud into the shallows.

“It happened two years ago,” he said, as she tried to find a grip on the side of the basin.

“How did it…” She swallowed, started again: “How did it happen? Couldn’t she swim?”

He looked at her, but in the darkness she could not tell whether his eyes were sad or angry, or if there was any expression on his face at all. The wind howled over the lake and she stepped forward into the water to catch a hold on the basin. From what seemed very far off, the noises of the fair continued.

“Oh, she could swim,” he said quietly. “She could swim alright.”

The Age of the Understatement

2008-04-20T09:32:00.000-07:00

If you have been following Alex Turner’s short career thus far, you may be familiar with the opening line of Arctic Monkeys’ debut album:

“Anticipation has a habit to set you up for disappointment”

Despite the dodgy grammar, the sentiment rings true. The more you look forward to something, the more you buy into the surrounding hype, the less exciting the end product is likely to be. I am as susceptible to this as anyone – perhaps even more so, given that when I last checked I was Ireland’s leading consumer of Surrounding Hype.

And if you have been keeping any kind of track of this very blog, you will know that I have been – enthusiastically and with signs of mild obsession – chronicling the movements of Turner’s side project The Last Shadow Puppets and their album The Age of the Understatement, an advance copy of which is currently living in my CD player. Are you following my train of thought here?

I knew it was impossible for an entire album to maintain the outrageously grandiose sound of the swooping single (“The Age of the Understatement”) and its wonderfully kitsch Russian video. I knew that it would turn out to be a cheap Peter-and-Jane guide to the 1960s for those of us who missed them the first time around. Trust me, dear readers: I was ready for the let-down.

I needn’t have bothered.

This album spreads its wings far beyond pastiche. Despite the grandeur of the sound, every aspect of the album is infected with modernity. Neither Turner nor bandmate Miles Kane have forgotten the lessons of their day job: there is an honest, youthful urgency behind the veil of sophistication. The interplay between the two vocals is snappy and fierce; the strings are joyously full and dramatic; the stop-start rhythms build up tension with a knowing dexterity; and the melodies themselves are raw and satisfying.

As for the lyrics, they are as clever and brilliantly convoluted as we have come to expect. The sweeping majesty of this album reveals some of Turner’s best work. Social realism be damned: rarely has a debut sounded so fluid, so fragile, so sharp in its characterisation. “I’m sorry I met you, darling/I’m sorry I left you,” goes the refrain of a stand-out track, “The Meeting Place”; in “Black Plant,” the lonely protagonist “got paper cuts from the love letters you never gave him”.

It is not going too far, I think, to label it a concept album: a collection of wistful, bitter, tender songs that yearn for the excitement of beautiful cities and heartbreaking women. Certainly, there are flaws – usually in the tracks that stray uncomfortably close to their previous work, but with none of the tunefulness – but on the whole it is a very, very fine album.

Highly recommended.

The Age of the Understatement is released on Monday the 21st of April on Domino Records.

(Technically) Fiction Saturday

2008-04-18T17:01:00.000-07:00

It is time I wrote back to you. I have been preparing for it. I arranged all your old letters on the table and I put the dog out in the yard so she wouldn’t bother me. I want to answer your questions. I know it is time.

You ask me how I live now. I live quietly: there is myself and the dog and the forest. I believe I have neighbours now, a family with small children, but I have not met them. Once a week I drive in the old van to a petrol station where I buy my groceries. The rest of the time I am working.

I keep a picture of you above the stove. It is not recent. I think of you when I look at it: you are in profile, wearing that coat of yours with the wide collar. You remember when I took it. It’s a Polaroid: the heat of the stove has distempered the colour; some of it has pooled in the bottom of the photograph. I have others in a drawer somewhere.

I am not often sad about you. There are things to be sad about, I know: and sometimes I feel a tightening in my chest when I think about all the secrets that will die with us, suddenly extinguished like two candles, hundreds of miles away from each other, as if they had never existed. I do not know if you have people now, a family maybe, but if you do perhaps they will read this and know what we were. That is my hope.

We worked together for a time in Moscow. We shared a small apartment: two single beds and a kitchenette, everything littered with paper and crumbs. You slept at strange hours, sitting up at the table until four or five in the morning, not waking until lunchtime. I carried a sense of normality with me from my family, but it didn’t last. I never attempted to impose any order on you; your chaos seemed somehow superior to me, as if I was quaint and homely. Gradually, I adjusted to your schedule.

The work was difficult. I tired easily, which annoyed you. I remember you wanting us to work later than we had to, pulling out new cases at midnight and insisting we go through them. Sometimes you did it just out of spite, I know. It went on like this – we never fought as I was too quiet for you – for the first month or two.

Then one night I told you I was too tired to work late. I had been up the night before writing to my sister, and my eyes were sliding out of focus. The backs of my legs had gone very cold and my feet were tingling. You looked at me, then shrugged your coat on and banged out of the office. I stumbled after you, hanging my camera around my neck and stuffing my gloves in my pockets.

Outside, I followed you down the steps to the Metro. We echoed across the vast marble halls, my clicking footsteps and your brief irritated rhythm. Your shoulders were hunched. We reached the platform to a surge of hot metallic air and you leaned against the wall.

“Tired,” you said.

“Yes,” I said breathlessly. “Just… tired, yes.”

You nodded slowly. “We’ve been working hard. You were up late last night.”

“Writing to my sister,” I said.

“How is she?”

I swallowed. “She’s alright. Now.”

You kept nodding. I watched your profile as the train rattled and whistled around the corner. I felt the camera strap heavy on my neck, and I lifted it, looked through the glass and pressed the button. The Polaroid slotted out the other end, a grey square in a frame of white. You looked at me and started to laugh. The train pulled up; the doors slid open and we went in, giggling like children. I held the photo up to the light and shook it, waiting for your image to appear.

“Why did you take that?” you said.

I smiled. “I don’t know, it just looked good.”

Your face started to appear in the photograph, delineated vaguely in the greyness and slowly becoming sharper. You stood close, watching it over my shoulder.

“Look,” I said teasingly. “You’re beautiful.”

You laughed softly again. We sat together on the blue velour and the train moved steadily under us. When it stopped and we left the station, it was snowing. I put the picture of you on the inside pocket of my coat and we walked home. It was the first snow I had seen in Moscow. That night it was so cold in the apartment that you pushed our beds together and we shared a damp blanket that we found in the wardrobe. We were so young. It did not seem like it then.

I will let the dog in now: she’s crying. I am sorry for never writing before this. Maybe now you can see that it has not always been easy for me. I do not pretend to know anything about you. I have enclosed some of the Polaroids you asked for. It is time, after all. It is time.

It's Friday Poetry Time

2008-04-16T10:03:00.001-07:00

Translations

I long for my thoughts to carry themselves
across this distance,
finding a way to you safely
and somehow unaltered.

I know this cannot happen.
We live in different languages:
our sameness is blinkered
by our separateness of meaning.

We can only speak with old words,
rendered clumsily across our geography,
chipped or broken,
made dishonest in re-use.

I love you
so show me a new way to say this.
Teach me the differences of our tongues:
for you I will forsake each word I know.

Remember Punctuation?

2008-04-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

No?

You're not alone. Newspapers don't remember it either. In fact, they have totally forgotten it. Take this quite odd example from one of the recent Sunday papers:

[...] from Cole Porter's Let's Do It to Paul Simon's Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover, memorable lyrics are often [...]

I read. I re-read. I re-re-read, if that's even possible.

Because, dear readers, I knew deep down that Cole Porter had never written a song entitled "Let's Do It to Paul Simon's Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover".

Maybe I am the only person who was so confused about the above example. Maybe I am the only one left with a sense of real curiosity about Mr Porter's listening habits. Maybe so. But is there anyone who doesn't prefer the version below?

[...] from Cole Porter's "Let's Do It," to Paul Simon's "Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover," memorable lyrics are often [...]

Does anyone find that confusing? Does that leave anyone with the impression that Cole Porter - when wooing his lady friends - dimmed lights, lit candles and turned up the Paul Simon records?

I thought not.

So can we go back to the quotation marks? I mean, really. What was wrong with them in the first place?

Fiction Saturday: "Act of Grace"

2008-04-12T04:58:00.000-07:00

He opens his eyes. Something huge is beating at the corners of his consciousness. His head hurts. Morning light glares through the glass: he turns over to see the shutters open, and her figure, turned toward the window, silhouetted against the clouds. White clouds. And beyond, the noise of the sea.

She turns – the cold light illuminates the simplicity of her profile – and blinks, seeing him awake. He feels sense of embarrassing, ham-fisted gratitude for her presence, and a part of him cringes at this surrender of power.

“Have you been up long?” he says.

“Not long, no.”

He forces politeness into his voice. “You alright, then?”

She smiles weakly. “Are you?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

She shrugs, leans against the windowsill and stares out beyond, over the city, to the sea. “They called again.”

He sits up onto his elbows. “When? This morning?”

“About half-an-hour ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You were asleep.”

“You could’ve woken me.”

“I told them you weren’t here. They went away.”

He frowns. His skin prickles with sweat and discomfort.

“I handled it,” she says. He doesn’t reply, and she takes an envelope from the windowsill and hands to him. He snatches it from her fingers and throws it on her pillow beside him. He doesn’t have to read it. He doesn’t even want to touch it.

“We have to go,” she says.

He scrambles out of bed, starts to dress.

“Right,” he says. “Alright.”

It is good, now, to have this invasion of his life: her lavender soap on the washbasin, the hairpins scattered on the dresser, stockings limp and silky on the back of a chair. She is a symbol of his power, of his ability to attract something beautiful and loyal. The boys like her around. These are the familiar thoughts, they come to his mind smooth with wear, cheap and threadbare in the cold glassy light. There is something else now. Again the sensation of something large, pounding softly at the edges of his mind, some huge beating thing.

He stands beside her at the window, looking out to the infinite sea, and for a moment the last three years are nothing and they are children, bewildered by each other, tugging at dominance and power.

Last night, he was in the kitchen with Regan. It was late. He was drinking milk from the carton. Regan smelt like cheap wine – he always did, even his clothes smelt that way – but he wasn’t drunk: he was incisive in his clumsy way, stumbling around the issue, not wanting trouble. He kept staggering past the snappy replies. Things were slipping; everyone had noticed. They’d moved how many times in the last month? It couldn’t keep up like this. Maybe time to move on. For them all to move on.

And then slippered footsteps came down the stairs and she appeared, in her long lilac dressing-gown, her mouth wet with sleep. She looked unreal in the dingy white doorway, beneath the harsh electric light.

“Hello, Regan,” she said.

Regan gave her a shy, toothy smile. “Evening.”

Then: “Are you coming up soon?”

The rush of pride nearly embarrassed him. He felt, suddenly, as if there were nothing to choose between them: as if she and he were one and it would do well for everyone to know it. He wanted everyone to be here now, to see this.

He put down the carton of milk, almost flushed with gratitude, and turned to her. “Yeah. Soon.”
She smiled at him tiredly and he smiled back, looking at Regan with new authority as she padded back up the stairs. Regan nodded gravely.

“You’ve not done badly, son.”

“And I’m not about to start,” he said shortly. “All I’m asking is for a little trust.”

“As much as you deserve,” Regan agreed, and got up, shuffling out of the kitchen. The front door swung shut behind him with the smell of damp.

He went upstairs, undressed, and got into bed beside her. He reached for her, her body small and warm under the quilt. A handful of rain rattled the glass. He was filled with a feeling like tenderness, a selfish hunger for the things they had done before. For once he was not frightened of this desire: he wasn’t nauseated by the softness of her skin underneath him. It was as if something terrible had been cut away from around him and he was at last able to breathe.

And afterwards the silence, permeated by the other beautiful near-silent things. Her breathing. The rain. The noise of the city; and, just beyond, the pulsing sound of the sea.

“Where will we go?” she says.

He has thought of sacrificing everything, of giving in to her. The thought has sickened him: he is constantly disgusted by his own weaknesses – the first time he let her stay the night; the way she tidies his rooms; when he buys her clothes or kisses her on the mouth – his stomach has turned. Each motion a tiny surrender.

She said once that all people are made up of cells, millions of tiny living things. A person is not a being, anymore than nine dogs on one leash are a being. People are constructs of other microscopic lives, fooled into individuality. He is not separate to her, any more than she is separate to the cells that have built her. They are as good as one. Now, this vast rhythmic thing that has beaten its wings outside his consciousness is somehow inside, as if a window has shattered to let in the air.

“We might go away,” he says. She looks at him.

“How do you mean, away?”

“Just get away for a while. Stay with those cousins of yours or something.”

She keeps looking at him for a few more moments, then turns her gaze out over the city. “You’ve never been away from here. You told me that.”

“It’s not too late,” he says, with false buoyancy.

Her breath makes a noise in her throat. “No,” she whispers. “No. You’re right.”

“I don’t suppose I’ll ever really get away, though,” he says lightly. “From this, I mean.”

“It’s not too late,” she repeats with conviction. “It’s not.”

He breathes. The air is fresh and cold. Beyond the sparkling city he watches the sea breaking onto the shore. He has been sick with the permanence of it, the steady eternity of motion, but now it seems irrelevant. He cannot change the ocean, but he can walk away from it, he can leave it behind him. Things will be different now. He has never known silence without that sound.

Some Friday Poetry

2008-04-04T07:58:00.000-07:00

I don’t know you.
I’m finding you still
in silences and other places,
building you from darkness.
This is not easy.

Maybe I will never know someone except myself
but I’m trying.

I was not born with a promise to love you.
Isn’t it enough that I have done more than my word?

The Rise or Fall of the Political Pop Star

2008-04-02T09:12:00.000-07:00

An issue that has been hovering near the limelight for a while is the role of politics in pop music (or rock or indie or whichever term you prefer).

Did I say hovering near the limelight? Excuse me - what I meant was, it has been causing a silent but quite serious feud. In one corner, we have Reverend and the Makers - whose frontman, Jon McClure, appeared in the NME under the caption "Fuck Bush! Fuck Blair!" - and The Enemy, whose political stance is conveyed in their music. The opposition is represented by Arctic Monkeys, who pretty much go all quiet when asked to discuss matters of politics. So what exactly is the story here?

Well, Tom Clarke of The Enemy has long made it clear what he thinks of Alex and co. - that is, not much - and has been specifically scathing about their lack of political radicalism. And since Turner has neglected to offer his opinon on the issue, I feel really it falls to me to shed some light.

Firstly, what is "political music" in this case anyway? Well, I'm talking about popular music which is written with a political agenda, usually but not always criticising the powers that be. For example, Bob Dylan had plenty of early anti-war protest songs; John Lennon seemed intent on civil rights and, for some reason, getting the English out of Ireland; and perhaps Sam Cooke's greatest song is "A Change Is Gonna Come," about racial relations in the early 1960s. Pretty much everyone in the '60s had a go at politics, come to think of it...

And given that we still live in a far-from-perfect world (perhaps even more so now), there are still lots of artists eager to stir up some political feeling among their listeners. Not only is this a laudable attempt to bring across some important messages, it can also have real results. When you combine a revolutionary spirit and the power of pop music to bring people together, you often end up with... a combination of those two things. In a good way. So why on earth would any socially conscious musician with something to say turn his or her back on politics?

Actually, there are a few reasons.

Firstly, it's worth pointing out that not every problem in the world at the moment is caused by George Bush. Handy as that would be, we're also living in a world with very high levels of drug abuse, diminishing communities, disaffected youth, dangerous lifestyle habits and failing moral standards. Addressing those things is no less serious than attacking a bunch of politicians, nor is it less useful. In fact - since the people listening to your records will be the people taking these drugs, living these lifestyles, being disaffected, etc. - it may even be more so.

In the case of Arctic Monkeys, there are other reasons why they are reluctant to express any political leanings: if they did, those preferences would be used as a crutch by politicians. If they say they vote Conservative, they've given David Cameron new bait with which to fish for that elusive Youth Vote. By refusing to discuss politics, they're refusing to be party spokespeople, which since they're actually Arctic Monkeys is fair enough.

But here is the one real reason I can't stand people like Tom Clarke bitching about rock bands with "nothing to say". When you get a record contract, you never promise that you have a regime in mind to criticise. Artists don't have a duty to impose their opinions on the public: their only duty is to produce art.

The Mona Lisa didn't come with any ugly political message. I don't remember the "Fuck Bush" bit of Beethoven's Fifth. We cannot lose the central idea of art: it doesn't have any particular purpose. It's there for its own sake.

In other words, write all the protest songs you want, but leave our musicians alone, thanks.

Fictional MSN Conversation #1

2008-03-25T16:34:00.000-07:00

*noodles* says:
hey… you don’t mind that I added you I presume…

Max says:
No, it’s all good.

*noodles* says:
wait a sec lol is that you in your pic?

Max says:
Yup. That’s me with Lily Allen at Glasto last year.

*noodles* says:
WHOA

Max says:
Is that a whoa of awesomeness or a whoa of Seriously? Lily Allen? Meh.

*noodles* says:
rofl

*noodles* says:
actually it was a whoa of you are quite nice

*noodles* says:
now that I come to think of it, it’s pretty cool that you met lily allen. but my primary concern was with the fact that you’re fit.

Max says:
… Thanks.

*noodles* says:
haha sorry I’m not trying to be weird lol

Max says:
No you’re alright, like, I’m flattered. That’s not a particularly good picture of me to be honest, I only put it up because of the whole Lily Allen thing.

*noodles* says:
you’re insanely proud of that aren’t you

Max says:
Nah. I am insanely proud of this >>

*noodles* says:
fucking hell that is Brandon flowers… fucking hell man!

Max says:
Yep.

*noodles* says:
you look quite nice there as well lol… send us over the pic! when did you meet him?!

Max says:
After a Killers gig in Dublin.

Max says:
Is it sending?

*noodles* says:
yup… whoa I am so jealous right now

*noodles* says:
oh who’s the girl?

Max says:
My ex.

*noodles* says:
ouch. sorry.

Max says:
Nah it’s okay. We had a good run like.

*noodles* says:
she’s really hot as well. damn you fine Dublin people! why am I stuck here in nowheresville?!

Max says:
Weren’t you here a couple of weeks ago for The Enemy?

*noodles* says:
yup it was quite good. I mean I don’t *live* there.

Max says:
I’d rather London to be honest.

*noodles* says:
nah man. noo york.

Max says:
Yeah, New York is great. Been there twice.

*noodles* says:
*vibes of envy* I’ve never been to america. realllllly wanna go tbh.

Max says:
I’m sure you’ll get there someday.

Max says:
Oh, I’ve got to go. My band needs me. And all that.

*noodles* says:
are the other guys in your band cute also?

Max says:
Probably cuter to be honest.

*noodles* says:
my brain just exploded

*noodles* says:
go on, go thee.

Max says:
This has been pleasant.

*noodles* says:
yeah actually it has :] see ya

Max says:
Bye.

No More Nu Rave

2008-03-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

Hey, remember how you slavishly follow trends? Want a hot tip? Throw away all your eighties print neon disco stuff right now.

Why, you ask? Because I know these things, that's why.

Oh, that's not good enough for you? Well, okay then: it's because the sixties are back.

I know, I know, you're asking how I could possibly know this. Well, there have been signs.

Julie Christie is everyone's new style icon. (Yowzers, right?)

Everyone's got a fringe. Including me, obviously, but I did it first.

The retro shift dress has made a return.

The god of indie, Alex Turner, is releasing a 1960s wall-of-sound type new album that I won't stop talking about while there is breath in my body. Dig the gratuitous, non-60s-themed picture.

Other music that's gone quite Swinging recently: Duffy, Amy Winehouse and Adele.

Speaking of La Winehouse, the beehive and liquid eyeliner looks are both back, but with a tad more class than Amy tends to exhibit.

So in the face of such evidence, what can you fashion minions do to update your look, like, right now?

Well, for one thing, you can keep your skinny jeans - they're quite mod. Update your make-up with heavy eyeshadow and nude lips (if you want a really iconic 60s look, pat foundation over your lips and wear tons of mascara a la Twiggy). Go for bright blocks of colour. Layer shift dresses over coloured tights with clunky heels for a look that can transfer easily from day to evening.

Or alternately, ignore trends and dress the way you like. But where's the fun in that?

Animal Charities

2008-03-09T04:58:00.001-07:00

Can I preface this post by saying I love puppies and kittens? Seriously.

Okay, say you were in one of those strange moral dilemmas where there's a train running down a track towards a sleeping person, and you can flip the switch so that it misses them. But if you flip the switch, the train will run over a dog. You have to choose either dog or person to survive.

I don't know about you, but I would save the person. Obviously animals don't deserve to be killed - that's not where this is going. But I suspect most of you would agree that human life is more important.

Then is it really right to donate money to Dogs' Trusts and Animal Protection Societies instead of AIDS charities or Concern? Bear with me here.

People are dying of hunger. We know this. They might not be dying in our street, in our town, not even many of them in our country - but humans are dying because they do not have food or clean water. Because we are wealthy, we can afford to donate a portion of our incomes to providing them with these basic necessities. We can afford to save human lives.

But we'd rather save puppies?

I propose that in this day and age, with humans dying from malnutrition and easily curable diseases, it is morally reprehensible to donate money to save an animal. Both individually and as communities, we have a duty to care for our fellow humans before we care for other species. This should be obvious.

It doesn't mean that animal cruelty is any less wrong or disgusting. Just that we should prioritize about who really needs our money.

So, please: if you're giving a charitable donation, give wisely. Save a human life.

Emergency Blog Post

2008-03-06T12:50:00.001-08:00

http://theageoftheunderstatement.com

The song and video available at high or low resolution above.

Epic.

I don't need to say any more.

Wednesday Update

2008-03-05T12:46:00.000-08:00

Since I haven't updated for like a year... How are you guys? And all that.

Let's see what's going on lately. The Last Shadow Puppets (aka Miles Kane and Alex Turner), played their first concert together recentlyish and the single, "The Age of the Understatement" turned up on YouTube. Check it out here, if only to laugh at how much whoever was making the video ignored Miles Kane. You fight for your YouTube screen time, Miles. You might be less aesthetically pleasing and famous than Alex, but someday - someday you'll show them.

What else? Oh, politics! Whoever you're supporting in the upcoming US elections, you can't deny that it is pretty frantic at this stage. Hillary's Ohio and Texas wins have prolonged a race which otherwise might've been over.

Not that it particularly matters, in that I'm both underage and not American, but my own opinions have been swinging back and forth like the proverbial pendulum. To begin with, I favoured Obama - him being a natural and likeable leader, as well as a less divisive candidate than Clinton and possibly more likely to bring the Democrats to the Oval Office - but now his vagueness (which I originally defended) is irritating. Hillary is beginning to prove herself more and more capable as the race goes on. In my humble opinion.

In other news, I've been tuning into The Hype Machine lately and am giving it my official stamp of approval. A good selection of remixes, mash-ups, live versions and unlikely covers with a distinctly indie bent, harvested from blogs all over the Internet. No downloads, but you can click and listen whenever you want. They also provide a free radio station streamed from popular blogs. If you are a tunehead like me, you might just like it.

If you didn't catch Juno already, I can only offer my highest recommendations that you do. One of the most charming, wryly funny, finely-gauged films I've ever had the pleasure of watching. You'll laugh, cry, choke on your popcorn. All that jazz.

I think that's it from me for now. You never know: I might just check back later.

What Music Says About You, Us, Etc.

2007-11-22T14:29:00.000-08:00

If you have never felt a deepseated, unshakeable, life-affirming, breath-taking kind of commitment to a three-minute pop song, the rest of this blog entry is not for you.

There's a line in a Paul Simon song that goes, "Every generation throws a hero up the pop charts," and it is inescapably true. Sure, we have movie stars, athletes, models and comedians, and we have fans who are insensibly dedicated to their every move - but they're more or less irrelevant. In a more basic, further-reaching way, we have pop stars.

Example. The 60s had The Beatles, and that wasn't a coincidence. The Beatles said something about the 60s, represented something about an aspiration that generation had, about a life outside the daily grind, about a freer - and somehow attainable - lifestyle. And every generation has done it ever since.

This truth I hold to be self-evident: the music you choose to listen to says something more about you than just that you like how it sounds. And if you, like me, feel a deep and illogical attachment to a bunch of guys (girls, whatever) you've never met, then maybe it's not just because you're deeply illogical.

I don't just listen to Arctic Monkeys because I think they're good and I fancy the lead singer. I listen to them because they say something about this time I'm living in, something I desperately hope is true. And every time I hear them, I feel not so shitty about being part of it.

Music is sometimes about the people who make it. And if the biggest bands of our generation are raw and funny and, most of all, honest - then what does that say about us? I don't know, of course. But I hope it's something good.

In Which I Dream of You Walking Through Doors

2007-10-12T16:44:00.000-07:00

You are untarnished.
I have never seen you sleep.
Your voice, my level pilot,
Is all I know of you.

I have never laid a hand on your white restless shoulderblades
but she has.

Is it so wrong, then, to wonder
why I was born lucky
instead of beautiful?

Thursday Blues

2007-10-11T12:21:00.000-07:00

Are we feeling a bit of a cultural lull lately? Let me soothe my public's senses with a bit of news roundup and commentary.

NME.com brings forth the fanfare to announce that George Harrison's solo work is now available on iTunes. So that's including his first album, All Things Must Pass, then, which is actually great (unsurprisingly, from the guy who brought us "Something" and "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"). So woo! Let's face it, he was by far the best Beatle anyway, if not musically then by default of grace and good looks. Picture on NME page notwithstanding. Linky: http://www.nme.com/news/george-harrison/31744

Doris Lessing, renowned author of works such as The Golden Notebook, won the Nobel Prize for Literature today. She's apparently very deserving, but also a bit of a kook. Renouncing communism! I tell ya! Link: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/culture/2007/10/11/2007-10-11_doris_lessing_wins_nobel_prize_for_liter.html

Aaaaaaand Arctic Monkeys win Q's best band in the world award, Madonna considers switching record label, Alex Turner says those bedbugs weren't that bad after all, Gwen Stefani's tour with CSS support still going strong, and "Teddy Picker" release date set for early September - B-sides remain to be seen, but my bets are that "The Nettles" will turn up somewhere soon.

Now. Doesn't that feel better?