Early June

I was getting steadily frustrated with Jeanette Winterson a few nights ago because she has not updated her site for about three months. Then I realised the depth of my hypocrisy, although it is not as deep as it might be given that I do not have an international fan base, I have not sold millions of books worldwide and I do not give speeches full of verdant promise about the powers and possibilities of the internet. Though shortly I will be. I updated in march, but it feels as though I have not updated all year. So much has happened, including a drastic re-think of how the internet works for me.

When I was first connected my impulse was to find other people. I realise that this was almost ten years ago, but I had a sharper understanding of the net and it’s possibilities than I do now. The other day I mentioned ‘FaceParty’ to someone and they laughed because it sounds like an ancient (lame) version of Facebook. But the principles are different. Facebook is about connecting with people you know; the site actually prevents you from adding someone randomly. The fact that you might browse a stranger’s profile makes you feel (and seem) like a perverted stalker. However, Faceparty was all about going through thousands of profiles and finding someone who sounded cool. There was little scope for creativity, but effort in any direction generally indicated an independent mind. (If, of course, independent thought was what you were looking for – in retrospect I realise ‘looking for friends’ was only ostensibly what FaceParty was about. Such innocence.)
The point is this: I got bored with the internet because it became very small. Suddenly, I was visiting the same few websites, I was only using MSN to communicate with people I already knew and all the friends I’d accumulated (admittedly under a pseudonym) were lost because the sites we hung out in were closed down. It was a strange form of gentrification; sites were getting slicker as coding was becoming easier and us ordinary folk who were happy with blocky pages thrown together on FrontPage provided the humanity was there, were shunted aside. It is portentous, and vaguely false to say that Facebook is a symptom of our times, but there, I said it. And it’s hypocritical too, which is the theme for today, since I spend a good half hour checking the thing each evening.
I’ve been playing with my site. I decided not to bother with anything fancy – including that decadent and bourgeois system they call CSS – and I’m going to make it look and feel like a scrapbook. Then I will not feel obliged to make it look pretty, get bored with and depressed by it, then leave it to fester for another six months. It’s also a step away from the peculiar solipsism I developed, whereby I believed that the standards I had for myself were mine alone and no-one else would possibly want to read a site made by an introverted little queer who had no talent for or interest in proper web-design. But that is partly what I am looking for… So instead of complaining, I’ve decided to make like Ms. Morrison and write something I want to read.
This is a belated articulation. I am so pleased that it has manifested itself as my first blog post in donkey’s, since it means I am genuinely typing in to oblivion. For someone who has spent the past few nights reading poetry to judgemental audiences, this is re-assuring – so, let’s buck tradition and begin with a haphazard list of things I’ve been doing.

SEVEN DAYS
A small personal project in which I read seven books in as many days.

Sunday: ‘Quartet’ by Jean Rhys
The first novel by Rhys, indicative of the incredible form and potent language present in later works like ‘Good Morning, Midnight’ and ‘Voyage in the Dark.’ All Rhys’ novels are the same – Early 20th century paris; a young woman on the verge of destitution moving from one cheap hotel to another; an obsession with money, youth and men.

Monday: ‘Imagist Poetry’ – various
A nice clarification: Imagism takes a dim view of baggage and attempts to deliver to the reader an exact ‘image’, which is more powerful and realistic because it does not over-describe. Almost all the poems are in the first person and seven out of ten refer to the moon / stars / sky, but with few of the cultural signifiers that earlier poets used, such as the names of Gods. Much of it was dull – inadvertently sentimental, brief to the point of obscurity, exaggerated and inward looking. The imagists were not rebelling against anything – it was not a single doctrine, but the basic idea was to take the best from traditional poetry, not subvert it.

Tuesday: ‘Not to Speak of the Dog’ – Ed. Christopher Reid
101 Narrative poems. I did not finish them all, since it was suggested in the introduction that reading cover to cover was probably not a good idea. I am moving towards narratives. It occurred to me that a thought is a moment of comprehension rather than a sentence; it is prior to language and a poem is at best an approximate version of that thought repackaged for further distribution.

Wednesday: ‘Nothing bad ever happens at Tiffany’s’ by Marian Keyes
A very, very short read from Penguin – a combination of self-conscious superficiality and travel writing. She refers to her editor as ‘Himself’ which induced a rapidly-suppressed-loony-grin-in-public. Lots of exaggeration and melodrama of the kind favoured by hacks who work in the fashion industry – the tendency to magnify triviality one hundred-fold so that the queue at Starbucks becomes a merciless gamut, riddled with insurgents.

Thursday: ‘The driver’s seat’ by Muriel Spark
I did not get very far with this one, although I intend to finish it. Lise is a compelling character and there are enough scenes of isolated peculiarity to intrigue one with such a taste for juxtaposition! Contrast! And coincidence! As I.

Friday: ‘Loot’ by Joe Orton
A dead woman and the total disregard for the situation by the people around her. Hal is particularly good – dumping his mother’s body in the wardrobe so he can stash stolen money in her casket and avoid the uncanny interrogative powers of the man from the waterboard… Fay is a brilliant catholic caricature, who has ‘somehow’ got through seven husbands in as many years. Farce. Beautiful, gorgeous farce.

And tomorrow: ‘Loser Takes All’ by Graham Greene.

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Two readings: yesterday the Bishopsgate institute, courtesy of Tom Chivers, which was really nice. Heard Simon Barraclough for the first time and was very impressed. Wednesday a reading at the Calder Bookshop alongside Sonya Smith, Todd Swift and Matthew Sweeney; really liked Sonya’s ‘Nappy Breast Meat’, her description of something smelling like swimming pools and sweat and ‘pterodactyl’ garden clippers. Todd performed a magnificent poem with 100 lines – about 45 lines in, the tone suddenly changed, it became self-doubting, questioning, and reflective and was brilliant to hear because he is an awesome reader.

I was surfing the Granta website and came across an offer: first 101 people to write in get a free copy of the 101st issue. I got one! And what do you know – the first two pieces summarise two of the issues I’ve been thinking about most: Douglas Coupland on fonts and Ruth Franklin on the primary nature of nightmares. Buy it, please – or write to them for a free one – so we can have conversations.

I was invited by Y to see ‘Retour a Goree’ at the NFT. It chronicles the preparation for a show by Youssou N’Dour, a Senegalese singer who wishes to explore the African roots of Jazz, via New York, Luxembourg and other locations. Amiri Baraka was featured and asked the beautiful question: ‘Who is looking through your eyes?’

In the farther past: LadyFest, which was much queer radiance; ‘The Weather Underground’, a documentary about the eponymous group who blew up buildings in response to government atrocities in Vietnam and elsewhere; The Art of the Book at the V&A, which wasn’t great, but gave me a few ideas for new projects; the whole PBS pamphlet choice thing – I read the mini review they gave Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl and it’s quite nice.

TWOFIVE album! It’s finally out. I am pleased to say that it is possible to hear me reading poetry on vinyl.