Everything

Everything I do I do to make sense of things.

Crispy skin salmon

Using Gordon Ramsey's well-known technique. Not a Ramsey fan, but I am a fan of this fish!

The edge

Beauty is the edge of truth.

Bigger problem

The problem is that death

Birthday cake

From Britain's Best Dish: Hayley Tamaddon's Chocolate Fudge Cake. It was good, but I don't think we got it quite right.

The problem

The problem is that complaint has more power—and more practitioners—than art.

Fear

Those who live with fear begin to communicate through fear.

New poems

+12

Rather not

Being motivated by money leads to doing a lot of things one would rather not.

Strategy

I remain idle so that I can be productive.

Grr!

Ah, the joy of having poems rejected by the New Yorker on your birthday...woot!

Hmm...

Which is worse, to be trivial or irrelevant?

The retreat

The retreat from death is not toward life
but into fear.

i write poems (Shange)

people keep tellin me to put my feet on the ground
i get mad & scream/ there is no ground
only shit pieces from dogs horses & men who dont live
anywhere/ they tell me think straight & make myself
somethin/ i shout & sigh/ i am a poet/ i write poems/
i make words/ cartwheel & somersault down pages
outta my mouth come visions distilled like bootleg
whiskey/ i am like a radio but i am a channel of my own
i keep sayin i do this/ & people keep askin what am i gonna do/
what in the hell is goin on?

Ntozake Shange, from "Advice"

Question

If we are not asking questions,
we are nothing.

The fury of oblivion (Corpi)

Nothing is fixed or perpetual
not rain
or seed
or you
or I
or our grief
in this world that is bleeding
because we're forever cutting paths
opening our way along unfamiliar roads
conquering the fury of oblivion verse by verse.

Lucha Corpi, from "Winter Song"

On fiction

Fiction is broken
because we are breaking.

I Can Ask (Pratt)

...I can ask
for you: that you'll know evil when you smell it;
that you'll know good and do it, and see how both
run loose through your lives; that then you'll remember
you come from dirt and history; that you'll choose
memory, not anesthesia; that you'll have work
you love, hindering no one, a path crossing
at boundary markers where you question power;
that your loves will match you thought for thought
in the long heat of blood and fact of bone.

Minnie Bruce Pratt, from "Poem For My Sons"

New poems

+10

On anti-tech writers (Harkaway)

...mainstream literary and “high” culture is showing a weird tendency to wall itself off from the reality of technology, and that this tendency risks marginalising what has been the central thread of cultural discourse for a long time. That may be natural wastage, but it’s still wastage, and what’s worse is that it leaves an otherwise informed, liberal decisionmaking class poorly informed about science and technology at a moment when they need very much not to be. That’s bad news for our politics, as if we needed more. If you’re not sure I’m right, consider the Auster/Coetzee letters. There’s a section which is bound to have many literati nodding sagely, where Coetzee details his reluctance to engage with modern technology. That’s like saying you’re reluctant to engage with music, the automobile, or death. It’s fine, you can write novels without those things, but they will be divorced from reality in a fundamental way, and the core of literary writing is on some way a search for truth, and specifically in most cases a search by reduction to what’s important, to identity and self. Those things are not disconnected from technology, and never have been. Identity now is partly shaped by technology, and by a society which is technological in the substrate. If new technology is an inconveniently awkward fit with your poetic perception, that’s a problem for you, and not one you can solve by pretending it does not exist.

Nick Harkaway

Joiners

Don't belong to;
participate in.

3 quotes (Winter)

Failure is a comfortable place, it locates you within a familiar frame. Success thrusts you into new territory.

Sensitive people...are the most insensitive of people. They are sensitive only to what hurts them.

You have to be motivated by love, guided by reason.

Michael Winter, from This All Happened

Objectivity

We don't create deity
for omniscience, for omnipotence,
but for objectivity.

Meaning

It means what it is.

Marvelous (Kowit)

'...in this world nothing is more or less marvelous than anything else.'

Steve Kowit, from "A Trick"

Seduction

A seduction is more than an offering.

What I do

It seems to me that most MFA programs would discourage, if not condemn, most of what I do. And I want to do what I do, not what they do (which isn't a criticism of what they do—but they have enough people doing it and don't need me to do it too). If I don't (and I don't) do what I do as well as I should or as well as I could, well, that gives me a goal. But the advice of a celery-reseller is going to be of limited use to someone trying to develop a market for salsa.

Current data

All else being equal, we are best advised by current data.

Indeed

Much of what we consider normal is very strange indeed.

New poems

+10

Eh?

The better I learn to listen,
the more I have to say.

"Sex"

Breakwater Review, associated with the creative writing MFA program at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, has accepted my poem "Sex" and will be publishing it in their next issue!

Erring

I'd rather err toward idiosyncrasy
than toward conformity.

Stupid cats

A face

A face may be a lie, but the back of the head isn't exactly a revelation either.

A disappointment

Buffalo chicken pasta.

The unknown

To know the unknown is to lose it.

The terrible lidless eye (Green)

The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory.

John Green, from The Fault In Our Stars

A retreat

A retreat from certainty
doesn't have to be an advance on chaos
if one knows where to bivouac.

New poems

+10

A recent dinner

Grilled chicken, purple coleslaw, and roasted vegetables.

A difference

Fiction needs friction
where poetry slides.

Measuring

We use culture to measure time longer.

From The Naked Ape (Morris)

It could be said that the advance of civilization has not so much moulded modern sexual behavior, as that sexual behavior has moulded the shape of civilization.

***

Writing...and verbalized vocal communication have, of course, been developed as our major means of transmitting and recording information, but they have also been utilized as vehicles for aesthetic exploration on an enormous scale. The intricate elaboration of our ancestral grunts and squeaks into complex symbolic speech has enabled us to sit and "play" with thoughts in our heads, and to manipulate our (primarily instructional) word sequences to new ends as aesthetic, experimental playthings.

***

Our climb to the top has been a get-rich-quick story, and, like all nouveaux riches, we are very sensitive about our background.

Desmond Morris, from The Naked Ape