August 28, 2014
Yes please!
I’ll take a dose of this new
Magnetic brain stimulation treatment shown to boost memory
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Also this is very exciting to discover Ann Quin’s work existed (I’d never heard of her) and that it’s back in print.
“Ann Quin’s contemporary, the British writer Christine Brooke-Rose, declared in her wittily furious essay “Illiterations” that to be an experimental author was one thing, but to be British, and not only British, but a woman, and not only a woman, but working class, was quite another. Quin was all four, and so she went into self-imposed exile. For nearly a decade she was a “gonzo” novelist, creating her own biographical picaresque of writing, journeying, and free-loving across Europe and America, and living hand-to-mouth by the grace and favor of her publisher’s advances, Arts Council grants, and university fellowships—until, having wandered too far across the terra incognita of map and mind, she reluctantly returned. Quin suffered frequent and extirpative bouts of mental illness and died young, at thirty-seven and by her own hand. She drowned off the coast of Brighton, the south coast seaside resort which provides the setting of Berg and where she lived intermittently throughout her life, in the summer of 1973.” (Jennifer Hodgson) Read more including some of Quin’s work here
August 22, 2014
Teeth/teef
“I’ve told off six men, there, to go” he said, jerking his head at the loungers in the hall.
One of them spoke back at him, a fellow with only two walrus teeth above and below in his gums.
From The Patriot, Sean O’Faolain.
August 22, 2014
I and I
Fascinating documentary photography project featured on the NY Times blog here
“Their encounter led to an exploration of drag queen culture in China, which, despite its history of theatrical cross-dressing, is not particularly known for open views on sexuality. Nearly a decade later, Ms. Kikuchi says that her project, “I and I,” is more than the story of people confronting their sexuality. It’s about people confronting themselves.”
….
”
“It’s not really about gender issues,” Ms. Kikuchi said. “It’s just about how, as human beings, they try to find their space and how they live.”
August 20, 2014
Thunderstorm — Oregon edition: Portland on socks
I have been very buried reading and writing and more recently learning to play the concertina at a camp in Oregon with Noel Hill where I witnessed Thunderstorm the Oregon edition. I was in a wine growing region (is there anything other than wine growing regions?). There were many trucks carrying bales of hay. There were several number plates which included the word GOD and there was a thunderstorm. I’d also like to send a special word out to that moron at 11pm who was doing line dancing type moves with his car on a road with no streetlights and out onto which, I was trying to make a right turn. I think the driver has an unrealized calling to turn upside down in jets that puff out red smoke and make patterns and should release himself from the banality of driving and head straight to a jetpack.
It was rather a bowel groaning type of thunderstorm in the Oregon edition. Just belly busting cracking noises, no lightning. I took a video of it but in the many wonders of technology it has not endured. There was a man clipping a hedge during the storm. He adeptly continued to clip it but stood under a roof awning and clipped it in between the bellows over his head.
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Portland is so full of food that I was astonished to see an advert on the window of an innocuous looking cafe that touted a hot dog eating competition. A food eating competition seems redundant in Portland because basically all day and night it is already a food competition because there’s so much good food to choose from and there’s even caravans (food carts) to eat it outside of. And as you digest it you can read a book from the best bookshop in Portland, which is a shop in a house on Hawthorne street and either called Apology or Anthology. I found some very nifty books in it.
Another pointless thing to advertise in Portland would be a sock wearing competition because that’s also well under way. There are such an array of socks on people’s feet despite the astonishing heat. My favourite foot with a sock on it sat beside me in a cafe. The man had one of his trousers rolled up to the knee and extending from it was a luminous multicoloured stripy knee high sock. His other leg had the trouser down to the ankle. There’s nothing like a sock dichotomy. It also celebrates the possibility that he’d lost the other sock but wasn’t giving up on the orphan on account of it.
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July 16, 2014
Moments
Phone behind bars. Aldi in Ballina (I think)
“Ickle” pencils. My kitchen table.
Stairway to what? Heaven? Vancouver, 2014
River of rain in 5 mins. Vancouver, 2014
Signage in Cork. What was and what will be?
July 6, 2014
MERS: Calling for rapid development of a safe and effective MERS vaccine
“To date, however, the interest and enthusiasm of the global public health community in both MERS and a MERS vaccine could be described as ambivalent. “
The geographic spread and rapid increase in the cases of Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) caused by a novel coronavirus (MERS-CoV) during the past two months have raised concern about its pandemic potential. Here we call for the rapid development of an effective and safe MERS vaccine to control the spread of MERS-CoV.
July 5, 2014
July
There have been a number of curious weather events this week. Hurricane Arthur made landfall and another storm was reported to me from France. I have been unable to devote my usual level of attention to the bursting winds because I am busy busting out sentences. Here we had a brief rain event which was an absolute affront. She sprang on us! I talked with another woman beside me on the pavement as the rain destroyed us and we agreed it was Top of the Pops affront. Where did it come from?
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The other theme this past week has been the body. I read a science paper on the eye blinking patterns of unmedicated schizophrenics which left me pondering the voluntary and involuntary notions of movement in the body and the role of the brain therein and what it can provoke. I can’t find the paper. But it came to mind again this morning at a storytelling workshop organized by the Indian Summer Festival where Sharada Eswar demonstrated and taught us how consonant sounds create Konnakol — a music based on vocal percussive sounds and rhythm. Russell Wallace demonstrated First Nations story telling through the physical body (dance) and music. The consonants particularly fascinated me how the tiniest adjustment in a sound and an increase and decrease in its rhythm could change so much meaning and intention. The same can be shown in relation to the brain and the body. I continue to find pondering the physicality of language rewarding.
July 5, 2014
Global collaborations
I appreciated this global seisun collaboration. What are the prospects for this same approach to be applied to literature? The remix? The one word submitted poem?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZARxiWJGAaU
I was at a trad session this week and sat between the button accordion and concertina. The fiddle was opposite. It was curious to be in immediate proximity to the sounds beside me and hear the response or interplay across the table. I heard long concertina notes that I never noticed in pieces when listening to them as a whole complete recording. Also, it was great hearing the players start a tune one knew and the others didn’t and hear them figure out their parts. As my pal said “sometimes you don’t know a tune & yet you know a tune.”
June 26, 2014
Thunder and concertina
We had thunderstorms. Perhaps it was a week ago. I have been very consumed finishing up a novel, hence a lack of diligent reports. They were very loud. The loudest thunderstorms I recall since living here. One of them happened in the middle of the night, so since it woke me up, I kept it company until morning came. At one point there was a very loud bang, twice. Since I have read Sherlock Holmes I knew precisely what to do and tuned into the scanner messages from the Fire Brigade and Ambulance Service.
A transformer had blown or been hit by lightning and blown and maybe caught fire very close by. There were mixed reports as to whether it was on fire. The Fire Service were not too excited about it. Power was out in some houses near the transformer.
Since the rumbly thundery business there was a deluge of rain and now there is sunshine without hesitation. Confident, plain old sunshine. Good consistent blue sky.
The other news which should be greeted by a thunder-clap and perhaps a set of earplugs is the concertina is here. She’s very happy. I am very happy. I was even happy despite the matter of playing her upside down for the first hour. We have come to terms with which way up she’s to be played and I can play four notes of O When the Saints … they aren’t going marching in yet because the latter notes are missing from the tutorial. My Saints are thinking about marching in, they are weighing up whether there’s anything to march in for. More importantly and triumphantly than the Saints entering whatever it is they enter I can play a polka. Maggie in the Woods which I am calling Baggy in the Woods because I haven’t yet absolutely confirmed I am playing the correct notes.
I am likely to be stupendously terrible at playing this instrument but that matters very little because I like the smell of it and because one of my favourite people in the world, Ita, is a concertina player.
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I am thinking of the people in Iraq, who having suffered so much distress, mayhem and invasion, certainly do not need this ridiculous and further distressing encore. We aren’t hearing anything more about the girls who were abducted in Nigeria, except that possibly another 60 may have been kidnapped. Nor the plane that left the sky. There’s always another agony-in-waiting. A queue of further agony. What does this mean for those who remain with the agony that, for them, has not actually passed? Agony in stasis. Agon-static. Agony that’s exists but is no longer trending on Twitter. That’s when we have to wonder of the value of our so-called collective power or collective outrage or the power of collective outrage. Is it ultimately any use? How do we make it mean something practical?
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On the theme of remembering and response: My friend Juliane Okot Bitek is creating a 100 day poetic response to Wangechi Mutu’s quiet visual homage to the 1994 Rwanda Genocide on social media (#Kwibuka20#100 Days 21-30): The visuals can be seen here