Rant & Reflections on MA

This one’s rather self-explanatory…

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been juggling between the full-time course and the two part-time jobs. The juggling itself is fine – I seem to be managing with the heavy workload – but in the last couple of weeks I have found myself getting increasingly irritated at the organisation of the dissertation at the UEA. I’ll lay the dates down, just to give you an idea of how things are meant to pan out:

The dissertation period began on the 8th of May.
Our supervision ends around the 8th of June.
We have one meeting per week.
The dissertation itself is due on the 5th of Sept.

That means I have 4 weeks of supervision over a dissertation period of 4 months – not only that, but the supervision falls at the beginning of the dissertation period, which really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me; surely it would be better to have the supervision halfway or towards the end of the dissertation period so that there is more time for thoughts/ideas/words to develop. Instead, because the four weeks of supervision are the the beginning of our dissertation period I find myself forcing my words so that, come the next meeting, I’ll be able to get at least some critical/creative comments from my tutor.

Now for more numbers:

The finished dissertation should contain around 16 poems; if you write short poems then you should put a few more in, if you write longer poems then you should put less in.
Again, we have one meeting per week for four weeks.
That means an average of around four poems a week.

Four poems a week doesn’t sound too bad does it? No, it doesn’t sound too bad. I thought it would be alright; I’m quite a prolific writer of poetry anyway and I figured I could handle it. But I can’t. First I thought it was an issue of not having enough time (but now that I’ve dropped one day of work a week that should no longer be a problem), but I know it’s not that. I just can’t find any words. Picking up a pencil has become very similar to me picking up my guitar – I can play it pretty well/I can write something okay, but it all sounds the same. Same, is boring (to me). The poems I have managed to write for the past two meetings have been good. Some of them have been better than others (as is always the case), but overall I thought they were good semi-polished poems. Thing is, they don’t seem all that memorable. I’ve forgotten what most of them were about already. Maybe that’s just my dreadful memory, or maybe it’s because they don’t really say what I want them to say – they don’t feel enough, they don’t explore enough – which basically means that they’re not good enough.

These are somewhat polished poems as well. They’re not just me rambling on, I’ve actually thought my way back through them and added things, taken away things, but now it’s as if those poems don’t belong to me. I think, due to the stress of trying to get these poems out on a weekly basis in an acceptable state I’ve started to think about them too much. I’m not being true to myself. For example, the poems aren’t nearly as playful as those that have come before. I’ve stopped exploring the space of the page, I’ve neglected long words (although, yesterdays poem included ‘peregrination’), and generally I’m not having as much fun writing them. This is not how I should be writing.

Besides, shouldn’t this time at the beginning of the dissertation period be used for research? Shouldn’t I be reading now, to get some ideas, to begin to know what I want to do rather than rushing, somewhat blindly, into the actual writing? It all seems to have been arranged in a very backwards fashion. Truth be told – I’m almost tempted to throw in a ripped segment of towel (as opposed to the whole of it) and just write one a week, or none, and just read. I need good ideas before I write a poem – if I write poems without good ideas, or I force those ideas, then really it’s just shit-shining. Sure, that shit might just be someone else’s gold (working at a carboot/market has taught me that much), but I know it’s shit. I don’t want to write shit poems. Like Will Self comparing mainstream novels to table-making:

‘I get up in the morning, I’ll make another table – tables are great, we need tables, they are great to eat off, they are good to sit at, and I think I’ll make another one – and I never want to make another table, I want to make something new, I want to make something different, I want the form to feel elastic for me and dangerous, and that’s how I think art progresses, if art progresses at all.’

I don’t want to make tables, but at the moment I’m making them.

I’ve even gone so far as to wonder why I’m doing an MA in Poetry. That’s not to say that the course hasn’t  been eye-opening, or helpful, or interesting, I mean, one of the greatest things about the course itself is that it’s encouraged me to read more poetry, and has provided me with a long list of contemporary poets I can dig into, but this doesn’t disguise the fact that I have been rethinking my course. One of the bits I really loved about Creative Writing in Aberystwyth was the Critical Theory module, as well as Postmodern Fictions. Both of these modules contained aspects of philosophy; and they could be as philosophic as you pleased. In Postmodern Fictions, for example, you could have written an essay exploring how one of the texts we read is a postmodern text – you’d just have to take what you learnt in the seminar and apply it to the text you were reading, you’d be showing your understanding of what a postmodern text is, as well as exploring the difficulties in labelling a text postmodern. Alternatively, you could have taken a primary text: Lyotard’s ‘The Postmodern Condition’, or Baudrillard’s ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, and applied it to the text you were reading; this essay would naturally end up being more philosophic in nature.

I tended towards the more philosophic in my essays, and I can’t help but feel that that’s the MA I should have chosen. Philosophy and Literature, or just Philosophy. My main concern, however, was that when I looked over the BA module lists for Philosophy at various institutions, you had to study Plato, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley etc before you got anywhere near Sartre, Camus or Kierkegaard. I understand that it’s good to know the beginnings of philosophy, and to understand the different strands and where they lead off too because they are often referenced in later works, and the later works are very often a reply to those earlier works – but I already knew which area I wanted to concentrate on, and, as far as I’m concerned, you can still get a very good understanding of the philosophy within the text without having to understand it’s foundation, or even it’s context. I didn’t want to amble through truth tables and the issue of morality when the bit I was interested in pretty much denied the existence of truth and morals. I wasn’t interested in philosophy as something that can be right, more interested in philosophy as something that encourages thought, or open-mindedness.

I guess I should have looked up at my bookshelves a little more when deciding my MA. There’s more philosophy there than poetry. Numerous books on Sartre, books on Camus, Wittgenstein, introductions to Heidegger, anthologies of theorists and philosophers – Derrida, Kristeva, Hegel, Nietzsche, books on Nietzsche too, and only a handful of poetry books. Nevertheless, the two are very close to one another (again, in my opinion), my dissertation tutor just the other day was giving me some words of advice as to how to get into the poetic ‘mood’, and how to think about poetry. He said something like ‘poetry is like philosophy’ and went on to explain how it’s an understanding, an exploration, a way of feeling through something, and to try and achieve that which you are describing. To be as true to that which you are describing as you can be – for the poet to try and exist as that which he/she is trying to describe. I was reminded instantly of Keats:

‘The poetical Character has no self – it is everything and nothing – it has no character [...] what shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. [...] he is continually in for – and filling some other Body’.

And Woodhouse’s summarisation that, ‘the true poet can not only conceive this – but can assume any Character, Essence, idea or Substance at his pleasure. And he has this imaginative faculty not in a limited manner but in full universality’.

I’ll find my words eventually, I am sure of that, but I feel as if I am standing on the edge of a great cliff – that I have the option of jumping and maybe achieving something great, or staying put. I know, when I come to that, I’ll jump. Write dangerously. Destroy tables.

Quick shout to the legend that is poststructured. 

Assignment Complete! Iain Banks, Aberystwyth and Whatever Else You Think is a Major Theme.

YES!

I’m not afraid to admit that that was the hardest assignment I think I have ever done – and all I had to do was write a story of around 4,000 words with a 1,000/1,500 commentary! I think the task itself wasn’t too difficult, more that I had made it difficult for myself. Before the assignment itself, I hadn’t written anything prosaic for around a year, so I didn’t really know where to start. Also, throw in the fact that the rest of my classmates (bar the other two poets that took the module) had been writing prose, and probably just prose, for the entirety of their course. Wait, that might not make sense to some of you – the UEA has three creative writing courses; prose (the biggest, most well respected one), poetry and scriptwriting. The three are kept separate, but you can choose modules from the other discipline(s) as an optional module, when they are available. I chose a prose module (because I rather like writing prose, too – and I had applied to the UEA under prose as well as poetry).

But it’s all done now, and now I don’t have to worry about it until it’s marked and I get a devastatingly bad mark for trying to break all the rules and being experimental and reacting against most of the reading we we’re given because I found it, although interesting, a little too ‘structured’ for my liking.

In other news, Iain Banks was at the university yesterday reading from his new novel Stonemouth. I became a pretty big fan when one of my teachers at UA handed me a copy of The Bridge, as an example of postmodern literature. I loved it. The Bridge  was somewhere between mainstream writing and sci/fi, and I fell in step with it incredibly quickly. After The Bridge, I tried my hand at Walking on Glass, then Complicity followed by his sci/fi Use of Weapons, then to The Wasp Factory, A Song of Stone (read whilst walking Hadrian’s Wall), and finally Whit.

I was actually talking to someone last night, and they asked me,
‘How much of his stuff have you read?’
‘I don’t know, three or so?’
It appears, on reflection, I was wrong. Even if it had been three, I know I’ve read Complicity three times, and Song of Stone twice…

Anyway…

One of the great great benefits of being a UEA Creative Writing student  is, not only that we get FREE TICKETS to the UEA Literary Festival(s), but that we get to have a chat with the author/poet/writer before the reading itself. It’s basically a little seminar in which we can ask them questions that might not come up in the question period of the reading itself. We can ask basic questions; ‘how do you find the time to write?’ ‘how much do you write in a sitting?’ ‘what about disruptions?’ ‘do you plan your novels, or just ‘start’?', to the more author-orientated ‘how do you negotiate between two genres?’ ‘to what extent do you feel ‘branded’?’ ‘do you have concerns over reader expectation?’ ‘any handy programs you use for note taking/organisation?’.

So we had a lovely little seminar with Iain Banks; and it was lovely, because Banks seemed like any ordinary man – he wasn’t (like some authors/poets) pretentious, or big headed, and he didn’t bullshit – he quite enjoyed telling us about his sudden realisations halfway through some novels that he could suddenly add something in – something that the reader would have thought key to the whole narrative; that it had to have been written there from the beginning. He didn’t over-romanticise what he was doing – mistakes were made, and will continue to be made, and accidents happen – both good and bad. It was very pleasant.

I only wish that I hadn’t stayed up till 5 the previous morning completing my assignment… I was sitting there with the most massive headache I have ever had, feeling a little unwell (probably due to bad eating habits – always happens during an assignment, I get all iffy about taking time out to cook), and having forgotten to bring a bottle of water with me. I would have loved to have asked some provocative questions, but as it was, I was struggling just to stay awake.

Then the reading, then got my copy of The Bridge signed (which was pretty awesome, he recognised me from the seminar and seemed to want to strike up a bit of a conversation, but by that time (8 in the evening) I had become the walking dead; a body capable of only the most basic physical interaction. Conversation was a no go at that point, which was a real shame), and took a train home.

Previous to this whole assignment/Iain Banks stuff I took a train back to Aber for the Flux Anthology launch (a poetry/prose anthology created by the MA Creative Writing students there – I know a number of them from the BA). First of all, the train journey up there was amazing, though f**king expensive. I got 3,000 odd words written on that train journey which helped me out immensely. There were no problems, everything ran smoothly, and the journey was a happy 8 hours or so. I spent the few days up there meeting some old faces, and I found it all rather strange. It was as if I hadn’t left. It wasn’t that not much had changed (though, not much had changed) but more that I felt an odd sense of home there, and I had to remind myself every so often – walking down the promenade, exploring the High Owen Building – that I wasn’t a student at AU anymore, that, in a couple of days I had to get on a train and go back home, and that I mustn’t miss that train!

The experience was an odd one, but a pleasant one. The intention of the trip was, as I said, to attend the launch, meet some old faces, but also to lock myself in the library to get some work done. The last bit didn’t really happen. Instead, I found out about a conference happening in the very impressive National Library:

The Welsh National Library (taken during my BA in winter – no, it wasn’t snowing in Wales last week).

I stumbled in, told the woman at the door I’d be happy to pay the £20 ticket (she said we’d sort that out later), and ended up spending my first day back in Aberystwyth listening to lectures on ergodic and electronic literature. On hypertext and literature that demands nontrivial effort on part of the reader to navigate the text. I was pleased to hear House of Leaves discussed (at great length! It became a staple text of the afternoon, generating a number of ‘I apologise, but I’m going to mention that book again’ moments), as well as a number of other books I was aware of or owned (The Humument, Raw Shark Texts, Pale Fire) as well as some new ones (My Life by Hejinian, and others). It was an afternoon that began to fall into the inevitable ‘but what constitutes a postmodern text?’ and ‘what is postmodernism?’, discussions that always make me feel warm and fuzzy inside. The woman I had seen on the way in wasn’t there when I left, but I fully intended to come back the following day for the next set of lectures, so I figured I’d pay her then (though, I didn’t end up coming back, so I got in for free – for a day).

The reading in the evening was really good. There was a large turnout, and a number of those I had met/seen in the conference were there. The bookshop filled remarkably quickly to the point where people had to stand for lack of seats. The readers were very confident (more confident, I’m sure, than I would have been), and a good number of copies were sold! There was wine, discussion, hand shaking and whatnot, all culminating in a reading from Matthew Francis from his new collection of short stories titled Singing a Man to Death.

It was lovely seeing everyone again, and pleasant being away from home. The train journey home was a tedious 11 hour behemoth, which I hope never happens again (thanks goes to Kundera and his Immortality, for keeping me entertained in the rain).

Assessments

Assessments…

Knee deep in M.A. work at the moment! Hold your horses…

I’ll be back to normal posting rates in a weeks time.

PS: You’ll find one of my poems in the Aberystwyth M.A. Flux Anthology which you can buy at the Art Centre in Aberystwyth.

Also, check out The Factory and Cartographie Curieux.

Love love.
x x

 

Human & Unnamed Draft (Poems)

It’s my birthday! So here are some poems!

Human

Lying, as an amorphous
shape, shifting by degrees
as the world spins
on the end of a pin.

Unnamed Draft

The world within us,
warm hearts, trousers
clinging in behind the
knees.

The fuzz-buzz of
flies and bee’s, the hum
of traffic from
the bypass.

Rounds of ice,
wheeling our hands
around maps and
tapping keys.

Dripping onto the orders,
flicking plane tickets
idly between thumb
and forefinger.

‘Default? Their fault,’
we mumble,
thinking about all that
paperwork.

But it’s all flowers
and trees, sitting at
a pleasant twenty five
degrees.

 

The Delayed Post

You know what’s funny?

When you begin a post with ‘what I wanted to put forward, quickly’ and then it turns into a 600 word mind-bender of a topic that you know you won’t finish writing about until it’s gone four in the morning.

Anyway, might as well post a taster:

‘And this is the thing for me, the crux of violence and war, the belief that certain individuals have that  they are right.

Religion is an extreme version of this belief in being right; a version that propagates the idea that there is something beyond death. When someone believes that there is life after death, and that in order to access that particular life they must destroy the lives of those that worship false prophets, then they will be more likely to put their life on the line than others.’

Expect the rest in a day/few days – might throw in a few poems between them, but at the moment its heads-down-thumbs up with uni work, again…

For the time being, here are some interesting links.

=D

Rough Maps – Update (Poem)

After re-reading what I’d posted, I just realised it wasn’t even the full poem! Here it is in it’s full draft-ness.

Rough Maps

And the past
is like an empty jug
that keeps on filling
with the echoes of water,
and the darkness rises,
perhaps, like love
lost on the shores
of some other island
- a world of shorn dreams,
maps torn at the surface
and worn with age.

But it’s gone.
gone, we say,
and maybe we hope
- that difficult word
that catches on the teeth
and cries in your throat
as murder, as a ghost,
as your shell crumples
like meringue in my
hands – but it’s all
over.

We hold ourselves in.
hold ourselves in even though
We want to be forgotten.
even though we want
to be forgiven. We can’t.
and the touches, delicate fingers
whispering along cheeks
in that jug of echoes
that we try to break but can’t,
that endless torture ripping
at our seams.

What life have I lead?
What lives did I lead and how
much hurt. How much?
How many soft trails
must bleed from my eyes
for me to be forgiven?
Not enough. There is no amount
because words are not enough.
They rest like spoilt milk
under the tongue.

Maybe, like me, you can see
the meadows in the distance.
The cows that munch amongst
the trees. The hay that rolls
uncomfortable beneath
the suns late day retreat.
And here I wander.
Empty in myself;
not myself; not anyone
and no-one, but just there.
I am just there, with all
my sorrows, my dreams
and my regrets sitting
with those cows that look
on me with blank eyes.
Flies buzzing around their flanks.
Tails whipping their dirty behinds.

On a quiet day
I can hear you breathing.
your footsteps in the hall.
The sound of the pages
you flick through
in the study.

There is no cavity
big enough for me
to crawl into.
I am fat with a disease
that I empty onto
others when I please.
But when do I please?
How do I know?
What do I know?
Except that jug that never
breaks. The meadow that always
rolls away into the trees.
That empty space
that sits within me.

What tortured youth we lead
when we had dreams.
The questions we opened
up to the horizon when hand
In hand are now exhausted.
the sun has set. We sit
in the dark waiting for a moon
that never rises. Watching
the sea rise and fall
like your chest when you slept.

What eagerness to blades?
And so exhausted when I wake…
all those days I thought
I knew but didn’t know;
those days you pretended
- one walking masquerade
I lived with; close to; as.
Sharing all our times either
meant nothing or something,
Never neither. Never.
and now we say things
and hide behind our words
because we can’t shoulder
our share of the blame.
Push our minds to bend
the rules of the world.
Throw our intellectual weight
behind those certain systems
we find attractive and ignore
what we really lost.

Reality. Realism. Be realistic.
All terms that died
with people that did fuck all
with their lives. People that killed
themselves by choosing to live
a system they had given
in too. People who ended
up not living, not loving,
but making-do like the housewife
and the office worker
that wanted to be a stage musician
or astronaut, but threw
in the towel before trying.

All we are is hope.
Hope exists. Hope persists.
But what is hope without action?

I am the man that sits in the cupboard.
The man that sits in the cupboard
and hugs himself to sleep
with cigarettes and cartons of orange juice.
Waiting for you to come
and open the door
because I don’t think I can do it myself
with these hands
that crumble like biscuits.

 

Rough Maps – Poem

A very rough poem today – perhaps this will be a poem I’ll ‘show-my-working’ with. Just this minute finished writing it. Took me about half a hour (it’s that raw).

Rough Maps

On a quiet day
I can hear you breathing.
your footsteps in the hall.
The sound of the pages
you flick through
in the study.

There is no cavity
big enough for me
to crawl into.
I am fat with a disease
that I empty onto
others when I please.
But when do I please?
How do I know?
What do I know?
Except that jug that never
breaks. The meadow that always
rolls away into the trees.
That empty space
that sits within me.

What tortured youth we lead
when we had dreams.
The questions we opened
up to the horizon when hand
In hand are now exhausted.
the sun has set. We sit
in the dark waiting for a moon
that never rises. Watching
the sea rise and fall
like your chest when you slept.

What eagerness to blades?
And so exhausted when I wake…
all those days I thought
I knew but didn’t know;
those days you pretended
- one walking masquerade
I lived with; close to; as.
Sharing all our times either
meant nothing or something,
Never neither. Never.
and now we say things
and hide behind our words
because we can’t shoulder
our share of the blame.
Push our minds to bend
the rules of the world.
Throw our intellectual weight
behind those certain systems
we find attractive and ignore
what we really lost.

Reality. Realism. Be realistic.
All terms that died
with people that did fuck all
with their lives. People that killed
themselves by choosing to live
a system they had given
in too. People who ended
up not living, not loving,
but making-do like the housewife
and the office worker
that wanted to be a stage musician
or astronaut, but threw
in the towel before trying.

All we are is hope.
Hope exists. Hope persists.
But what is hope without action?

I am the man that sits in the cupboard.
The man that sits in the cupboard
and hugs himself to sleep
with cigarettes and cartons of orange juice.
Waiting for you to come
and open the door
because I don’t think I can do it myself
with these hands
that crumble like biscuits.

Sex, Love, Relationships

*Edit: this song seemed apt: 

In the last couple of weeks I’ve found myself wanting to blog about so so many things.

So many themes have cropped up in my various conversations|reading|studies that I want to reflect on. It’s just a shame that I don’t really have the time! In the last week, I’ve found myself thinking a great deal about identity, racism, globalisation, mental health, hierarchical structures, religion & ideology – all in very big ways (and often in relation to other concepts, or to one another). I’ve been thinking a great deal. I’ve been thinking too much.

Today, anyway, I want to talk about sex. ‘Sex?’ Yeah, sex. ‘Why?’ Because it’s really funny, and the context of sex makes it all the more hilarious. What is sex? The furious movement of two people in, usually, opposite directions – two bodies, wildly flailing, gripping or trying to grip, slipping, lost (perhaps) in that intense feeling we seem unable to obtain from anything other than sex. Sex is fun for most, and yet, people try to avoid talking about it. Sex happens behind closed doors and it often stays that way (which, for physical sex, is perhaps a good thing!), people don’t want to talk about it. Why? I’m not sure.

What I find interesting is that when you try to talk to others about it it very quickly becomes an issue of emotion. If you are sleeping with someone regularly, then what does that mean in terms of liking or loving the person you are sleeping with? The emotional is certainly tied up with the physical – the two can, and often do, go hand in hand – but that is not to say that they always go hand in hand. There is this implication that sex can lead to love, and love can lead to sex and this is true, but also false at the same time – it strikes me as a far more complicated issue and yet we refer to it as some kind of universal. ‘So, is such and such interested in you? [...] Are you interested in such and such?’ And that interest is more than just attraction, or lust, or sexual interest – there is the implication that there could be an awful lot more behind it. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t, and sometimes there will be.

If, for most people, sex is fun – then why must we be so tied up with that traditional idea of being in a relationship to enjoy it? But then, counter to this, doesn’t having sex with someone else mean you are in a relationship of sorts? Perhaps not in the traditional idea of a ‘relationship’, but, nonetheless, you would probably still find yourselves sharing each others time. In turn, is it something that can be measured by frequency (such a horrifyingly scientific term)? So, if you spend a great deal of time with someone and have sex, then are you not, essentially, in a ‘normal’ ‘traditional’ relationship? Perhaps you never (and just formulating this sentence made me giggle) formally agreed that you were in a relationship, but then to the outside world would you not appear as one? What prevents this image of a relationship from being realised as a ‘relationship’ (I’ve read too much Baudrillard, I think)?

Perhaps there is a problem with the word ‘relationship’. It can mean so many things. The relationship between me and my desk, between me and my boss, between atomic particles, between two people that are in love. These are all relationships — and there are many many more – and yet they are all so varied. These relationships share similarities in that they have a relationship,  but the nature of this relationship is very different in each example. In addition, ‘relationship’ strikes me as a word that has connotations of respect, of involvement (obviously), and perhaps of interest – and yet, I find it interesting that a relationship can be described as ‘broken’, or severed. Surely it hasn’t been broken? Surely it has just become something else – a difficult relationship – or a negative relationship – or even just an ignored relationship, forgotten, or purposefully avoided. The relationship is never ‘broken’ – it has simply changed. We say that we are no longer in a relationship when a ‘formal’ relationship ‘ends’, but really we are still in a relationship. We still feel things. There is residue. Perhaps we go out and find someone new – but then the irony is that that could have been caused by the fallout of the last relationship. To what extent did the last relationship dictate the new relationship?

And then for love, the most complex of human emotions (so they say). Isn’t love the same as a relationship, in that, love cannot necessarily be broken, severed or lost? Certainly not easily – again there is residue – and yet we can learn to love someone else, or maybe to not love at all.  It becomes interesting, that question of ‘do you love such and such?’ Which so often comes out of the conversation about relationships, or a relationship. Does love enter into an informal relationship? In addition, if we don’t  think about love, or have a bad view of love, then why should we have to think about our relationship in terms of ‘so I love such and such’? If it is an informal relationship – an image of a relationship – an illusion, almost, of the formal (although, the formal is as much an illusion as the illusion itself) – is it just about comfort, about not thinking or not being involved with ‘do I love’. Then the question is invalid, surely? It is not a relationship of love – it is something else – and yet when people say ‘No, I do not love such and such’ there’s this massive shock-horror look. I’ve put on the shock-horror look plenty of times, so have many people, I’m sure, though I reckon that’s mainly because when we talk about ‘relationships’ we don’t really go that in depth about what we are really asking – what really is the nature of the relationship? What is important in that relationship? So, perhaps we shouldn’t slip into shock-horror as easily as we do – and we should avoid rolling into the cul-de-sacs about the connections between sex, relationships, and love – because they are all so complex: one thing can become another that can become another, or they can just become two, or just stay as one – or become something else entirely.

Can a long term ‘formal’ relationship last without love? Yes. Yes it can (I think). Love can be an amazing thing, but it can also be torture. I was very naive not too long ago and thought that, so long as two people loved one another in a relationship, then the relationship would be able to navigate it’s way through any problems it might encounter. It doesn’t work like that, not in my experience anyway, which was quite a shock for me. Could you go as far as to say that love is, in fact, dangerous in a  ’formal’ relationship? Or, perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself – we need to first ask how much do we love? Can we love too much? Is there a healthy dose of love – and – then, is it an individual dosage?

I think that love is like spice. Spice or herbs. It can make things taste amazing; it can dictate the success of a meal; but it could also overburden it. Too much spice and it all just tastes of spice – perhaps its undercooked, and you get the grit from it stuck in your teeth and then you want to spit it all out again. Put it in the bin. Start again. But a meal is the sum of it’s parts and more; the person who eats the meal has their own set of tastes – what they like and don’t like – and then it becomes almost infinitely complex.

Love is like spice. If we’ve never had spice we don’t miss it. If we’ve had spice and used it well when we had it, and now find ourselves without it, we miss it. If we’ve had spice but messed up the whole operation, and now find ourselves without it, then we might be happy about not having spice. Spice is a hard thing to get right, but even if it all went wrong you’ve probably still tasted it’s potential – what it could have been.

A Tofu Tip: Making it Crunch

Right!

I like to think I’ve been cooking with tofu for ages, but I havent. I am no tofu guru, no tofu genius, no tofu god, so naturally I’ve been asking myself that question we all find ourselves asking on a daily basis.

How do I make tofu crunchy?

So, lets make this quick (because I have to edit a poem for a seminar tomorrow, and, as important as tofu is, poetry is also pretty important).

1. Get a saucepan, and put a good slug of oil in it.
2. Turn the hob up to FULL POWER! Seriously, I had it on gas mark six (full power on my cooker).
3. Whilst the pan is heating, cut the tofu into rectangular hunks about as think as your little finger (unless you have really fat little fingers, in which case borrow someone else’s fingers – or – go for half-finger hunks).
4. Wait until the oil is sizzling – OR – keep testing the oil with a hunk of tofu: just dip it in the oil. If the oil doesn’t try to leap out of the pan and kill you, then you’re not ready yet. If it reacts like potassium in water, then you are there.
5. Put the tofu in the pan and arrange it on the outer edge of the pan (where most of the oil tends to pool).
6. Now the important bit: KEEP THE TOFU MOVING! If you don’t, it’ll stick and you’ll end up with tofu omelette. Tofu omelette is not hard (unless you charcoal it).
7. Lower the gas by one, maybe two – but makes sure it’s still fizzing away – you want it to cook all the way through – and keep checking the underside.
8. When it seems firm, flip it over, and keep it moving again.
9. The fun bit: get some soy sauce and tip it slowly over the pan. Keep your distance because it gets all potassium-y again and I don’t want to be sued because you were silly and burnt yourself. You want a couple of glug’s or so (look at me, with my uneducated cooking measures).
10. As silly as it may seem, you still want to keep the gas quite high (silly, because its probably trying to escape like an angered hissing demon) then you want to take the handle of the pan, keep it at arms length and then shake it so that the soy sauce ends up under the tofu (making the demon even angrier).
11. Leave for a little while but keep it moving, then when you think it’s had time to infuse flip the tofu, glug the sauce (maybe just one now) and repeat the step above.
12. Add some lemon sauce, maybe – and pepper is a good bet too.

TA DAH! You should have some awesome-tasty-cauldron-esque  marinaded tofu (but it’s not marinaded – just tastes nice).

Simple. Now, for the poetry…

Ps: I will not be responsible for any tofu-related deaths that occur whilst performing this dangerous task – please try to keep the pan at arms length – and I will not be held responsible for this.

Ephemera | Fragments

I said I’d do it…

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What you see here is about one and a half days worth of things I’ve found in books. You’ve got your standard scraps of paper – half ripped and folded A4 pieces of scrap printer paper | unused postcards | post-it-notes | receipts - but then you have the more interesting pieces: visitor information pamphlets for Alcatraz | filled in postcards detailing a person (or persons) holiday | notes from publishers asking for reviews, additional materials, or expressing concerns over content | love messages | goodbyes | travel arrangements.

I found this tucked away in one book (I wish I’d remembered what book it was in, perhaps it would have helped me decode the curiously arranged ‘tables’):

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What I find particularly interesting about this is how the person has tried to map out the entirety of their future. We don’t just have Career Travel and Work, we have things like Spiritual, Self, Relationships, Creativity under such we find things like 5 reasons – delusion, up & down, 23 ladies(?) – agreement, 7 (somethings – Sepeus(?)) - evaluation, which, to me, makes very little sense (lets hope it made more sense to the author).

Then underneath, from what I can make out, we find potential points of conflict. How private clients will affect some or all of the larger circle above, or ICASA’s impact on the spirit | purpose, or/and a mapping out of history, as seen in the 2007/8 boxes.

Then we have that mysterious ‘Phoenix Therapy’ – which seems to be some sort of holistic therapy to assist with various things, I’m guessing something along the lines of: stress, joint function, and sleep or somesuch. The whole piece seems like an interesting way of working things out, of mapping yourself, but looking at it made me both tired and concerned. How can we map out our future? Or even our past? Surely, there is the danger of infinite regress – of going back so far, or of missing out what is really important | complications over repression and suppression | we don’t work like computers, things don’t connect in the same way, so then how can we map ourselves? Trace our development? What is development?

Next:

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‘As you will understand as you read, there are quite a few potential libel issues to sort out!’ Ouch! Well I guess that throws some light on the world of literary agents and publishing… I took the names out as point of courtesy, and I’m not going to mention the book I found it in, or whatnot (to be fair I can’t remember what book it was in, though I remember the cover). These little things are of particular interest to me, as I’d like to think that, someday, someone will be getting similar messages about something I’ve written – though, let us hope it has nothing to do with ‘libel issues’, and more like the Faber & Faber ‘plate sections’. On the right is a little Penguin review slip, which is pretty cute (awww).

There’s not much here to read into, I simply found them interesting because it’s the sort of thing you don’t see – it’s not private correspondence as such, but it’s something unusual, and insight into the insides of publishing, review, and literary agencies.

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And where would we be without the obligatory note from an eleven year old (eleven years, nine months and three days, to be precise) stuffed away in a lovely pink young adults book. She obviously enjoyed the books…

And I’ll leave you with this:

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Have a Luvly HolliDay my Lovly Darlings.