Saturday, January 31, 2004
Bugger Me!
Auspicious Fish is a year old! Admittedly it didn't really get going until March last year, but I first set it up at the end of January. Wow. Feel free to send me presents in celebration of this magnificent anniversary.
NJS
1/31/2004 04:40:00 pm
STOP!
Hammertime.
NJS
1/31/2004 04:32:00 pm
Links
I've added some new ones. They're still not in any kind of order, nor will they ever be.
NJS
1/31/2004 03:13:00 pm
When I was 15 I did a week's work experience in a local primary school. The teacher I shadowed had a copy of this on the wall by his desk.
About School
Anonymous
This poem was handed to a grade 12 English teacher in Regina, Saskatchewan.
Although it is not know if the student actually wrote it himself,
it is known that he committed suicide two weeks later.
He always wanted to say things. But no one understood.
He always wanted to explain things. But no one cared.
So he drew.
Sometimes he would just draw and it wasn’t anything. He wanted to carve it in stone or write it in the sky.
he would lie out on the grass and look up in the sky and it would be only him and the sky and the things that needed saying.
And it was after that. that he drew the picture. It was a beautiful picture. he kept it under the pillow and would let no one see it.
And he would look at it every night and think about it. And when it was dark, and his eyes were closed, he could still see it.
And it was all of him. And he loved it.
When he started school he brought it with him. Not to show anyone, but just to have it with him like a friend.
It was funny about school.
He sat in a square, brown desk like all the other square, brown desks and he thought it should be red.
And his room was a square, brown room. Like all the other rooms. And it was tight and close. And stiff.
He hated to hold the pencil and the chalk, with his arm stiff and his feet flat on the floor, stiff, with the teacher watching and watching.
And then he had to write numbers. And they weren’t anything. They were worse than the letters that could be something if you put them together.
And the numbers were tight and square and he hated the whole thing.
The teacher came and spoke to him. She told him to wear a tie like all the other boys. He said he didn’t like them and she said it didn’t matter.
After that they drew. And he drew all yellow and it was the way he felt about the morning. And it was beautiful.
The teacher came and smiled at him. “What’s this?” she said. “Why don’t you draw something like ken’s drawing?
Isn’t that beautiful?”
It was all questions.
After that his mother bought him a tie and he always drew planes and rocket ships like everyone else.
And he threw the old picture away.
And when he lay out alone looking at the sky, it was big and beautiful and all of everything, but he wasn’t anymore.
He was square inside and brown, and his hands were stiff, and he was like anyone else. And the thing inside that needed saying didn’t need saying anymore.
It had stopped pushing. It was crushed. Stiff.
Like everything else.
NJS
1/31/2004 02:09:00 pm
OMFG
I just checked the other disc, which I thought was hideously corrupted beyond salvage, and it's fine. 38,000 words in one file, and it appears to be OK. The disc has been gathering dust for four years.
Having a quick look, my worst fears are confirmed - it's almost entirely utter shite, semi-autobiographical and written when pissed and miserable and frantic. But... there might be enough to salvage a short story from the wreckage. I shall see what I can do...
NJS
1/31/2004 11:09:00 am
For Leon & Sam (and anyone else who ever tried to write a book on a whim but had no idea how or why...)
Some years ago, while still an undergraduate and essentially functioning as an alcoholic, I decided to write a novel about a boy who could fly. All that remains, four years later, are three badly corrupted floppy discs packed with something like 40,000 words. Inspired by Leon's short stories about falling in love at university, I've dug out a section from this never-finished novella, which goes some way towards demonstrating that drunk young romantic men are all of a kind, whether they be at Harvard or University College Northampton, born in Chicago or born in Exeter. The following 2,900 words is the last thing I wrote for 'Flying' before I gave it up as a bad job. As I said, the discs are corrupted, so the final 1,500 words or so of this way well be littered with strange juxtapositions and errors where I've tried to salvage the mess of page-breaks and symbols into something readable; this is what the 'almost rescued' part of the title refers to. And just in case you're wondering, no, this isn't based on real people, although some of the events and places have been stolen from the lives of people I have known.
Flying (part 2 - almost rescued)
The page curves away from me, bending and arcing through the space before me, like a sheet that someone has just billowed out into the wind of a summer’s day, shaking loose the dust and grime that has gathered over time. I can’t so much see its curvature as sense it, feel it, I know it is no longer laid flat and smooth in front of me, it is trying to escape, to pull itself free of me.
There is a breeze flitting across my face, coming from where? My left? My right? Above me? I cannot tell, I do not wish to tell. It is simply enough that I can feel it at all. I know that there are many others who cannot feel it, who have never felt it. But I, right now, here, in this space, this arc of the page, I can feel it.
All our senses are descended from touch, the touch of moving air upon our eardrum, the touch of scent particles on our sinus membranes, the touch of flavour on our tongues, the touch of light upon our retinas. Colour is nothing, it is a lie, all we see is light, the same light reflected in infinite different ways, focused on our eyes, pulled in to them, telling our brain that the world has hues and shades and tints that are not really there.
The thoughts within your mind that you hold so dear, that you feel are so special, are merely electrical pulses within your brain, fluxes in the electrical aura that all things with mass posses. Electrical fields are sensitive, they are sensed, affected and changed by the presence of other electrical fields, they interact. Your thoughts are just electricity. They can be sensed. I can read your thoughts. I can shape your thoughts. I am doing so.
What is a dream, if not a means of escape? A moment when your mind is able to unleash its potential and create worlds for you that do not exist, worlds that you cannot consciously control, but that spring from the recesses of your soul. The every day, the things you hold as real, melt away and your dreams take you over, your mind seizes control from your consciousness. You are the author of your dreams, but you are not in control of the stories they weave, the paths they take. Anything can happen in a dream. Anything at all.
Do you care for me? Do you care about my life, my thoughts, my troubles? You have no control over me or my situation, you cannot understand the way I feel or why I think the way I do. So why are you still turning pages of my life? I am less than a dream to you, because I do not come from you, I do not pass through you, I am someone else’s mind, someone else’s dream.
I don’t know if I’m awake or sleeping, I’m not sure now if I’ve ever slept. I’ve heard horror stories of American soldiers during Vietnam being given drugs to help them stay awake, to make them more efficient, and they were given the wrong doses, some of them didn’t sleep for a moment in years. They weren’t able to. Do you understand me? There are holes in my life I can’t account for, gaps in my story that I haven’t told you, that I can’t tell you because they aren’t there for me to tell. Are you concerned that you care for me while I can’t tell you what has happened in my life, do you not mind that I’m keeping secrets from you?
If a dream is an escape, then what is a story? A story is an escape as well. If they’re both escapes, are they the same? I’m not in control of myself or my thoughts, you’re not in control of what is happening to me, you could put me down, wash your hands of me, the pages can go unread. Do you see the pattern? The picture has no frame, it has no ending, there is no start to this. I can’t finish it. If you stop now, do I stop with you? Don’t leave me alone.
Siobhan was an energy, a positivity I hadn’t come across before, and I was scared, I didn’t know what to do. She had friends, a circle around her everywhere, but they weren’t close, they weren’t confidantes, not like I have confidantes, not like you have them. Because she was open with anyone, she kept no secrets, she had none to keep. There was nothing in her past that she regretted, no loose ends that had knotted themselves around her neck and held her down. She could walk into any room and she’d know someone she could speak to. And if she didn’t, she would fix that. It was simple, logical, a mind that ran like that could do… just about anything, I thought.
But she wasn’t logical, she wasn’t working through problems or equations, she just moved and things moved with and for her, expanding or contracting as she needed them to. Doors could open, bridges could be built.
She could paint, she was sculpting an image from a dream when I first met her, in a studio, tall, the air was high and light but warm too. Off-cuts from a machine that moulded things from plastic, these shapes that seemed to be moving and liquid, but that were set as hard as stone, she hollowed areas out of them, applied pigments to the outer shells, placed light bulbs in the hollows that she’d made, let light come from within. She said it was “for touching, for seeing and for taking in,” and she smiled as if that was obvious. It was. I had to run my hands over it, and little gasps came from me as I realised it was warm to touch, as warm as it looked, a yellow and a blue and an orange. I took a step back, and I saw it felt like love. I’d only wandered into the studio because I was looking for a pen to write on a board with.
We had seen each other around, at the same clubs in town, at the students union, we got talking. We both loved music, our tastes crossed again and again. She knew about art and I knew about society, we talked simple philosophy, got to know each other over drinks and in canteens. Bumping into each other while we were doing other things, nervous ‘hellos’, forlorn ‘goodbyes’, until she said to me “let’s go somewhere tonight” outside a science lab. So we went somewhere, and we danced and drank and
The page curves away from me, bending and arcing through the space before me, like a sheet that someone has just billowed out into the wind of a summer’s day, shaking loose the dust and grime that has gathered over time. I can’t so much see its curvature as sense it, feel it, I know it is no longer laid flat and smooth in front of me, it is trying to escape. I think I understand now.
It was late September, the start of my second year, when we first spoke properly, and we continued speaking with each other, more than speaking, being with each other, being nearly part of each other… we were like that until the worst of the winter. We came together in sunlight and warm days, an Indian summer like my parents used to talk about. We stayed with each other through changing clocks and persistent rain. I’ve never given a present at Christmas to a lover before, but that Christmas I did, and I felt good doing it. It seemed right. I always bought presents for my family, just because they were my family and you do that, always, sometimes for friends too, but only if times were very good or very hard, never if things were just normal. To give someone a gift, just for because you could and you wanted to, that was… good. It gave a purpose to the whole event.
Sometimes, when the sun was out in those first five weeks when it was hot, we’d lye on the grass, with our heads close together, and just talk. She would tell me all the things she planned to do, her ideas for the future, what she wanted to do, to be, and I would avoid answering when she asked me what I wanted. Because I didn’t want anything. Except, sometimes, just to lye with her on the grass and for that split second of ‘now’ to last a little longer. I never had a vision of the future. I didn’t need one. I still don’t understand why so many people do.
Even when it rained for days on end, when we had work piling up for us to do, we didn’t care. We stood in the rain, once, twice, three, four times, getting soaked, giggling because we were doing silly things and not minding, talking, kissing, dripping rain-water off our noses. It didn’t matter. Was I comfortable? Yes, almost. Was I happy? I think so, for a while. Yeah. Yeah, I was, I was happy, just being part of something, being with someone.
But we couldn’t last the winter through. We couldn’t deal with the cold in January, the bitter winds in February. The air chilled, and I think I did too. I’ve never been good when the weather turns to winter, when the plants and flowers and trees look dead and the animals all stay in bed. Normally I start to crack as soon as the nights get dark so soon I have to close the curtains before eat in the evening, but this time I lasted until the cold drew in for real. I had company, didn’t I? I had someone to hold me when it got dark. It made it not seem so bad.
Wrapped in two jumpers and a thick coat bought for £20 from a charity shop, with a scarf and gloves, standing in the wind, I didn’t feel like holding anyone. It was all I could do to hold on to myself, never mind Siobhan too. I stood alone, because it was romantic, to be alone and cold and holding onto yourself in the wind. Never mind real feelings, I had notions to uphold. So I betrayed myself. I let myself get caught up fictions, waiting for things to be right before they could happen. I didn’t realise I could have made it better, made it bearable, just by… making the effort.
To pull itself free of me.
There is a breeze flitting across my face, coming from where? My left? My right? Above me? I cannot tell. I do notice the colour of the sky. Everything I do I choose, it all expresses who I am. All of it. How I tie my shoes! I would look at the ground, scuffing my shoes, my hands in my pockets, expressing myself, too, without knowing
“Don’t you worry? Don’t you ever think too much?”
She looked at me and sighed, an exhalation of not just air but hope and pain as well. I’d been saying things like this for too long now. I’d been saying things like this since the sun lasted less time each day than the moon. Normally she’d shrug, sigh, look at me like I was a petulant child, and she’d tell me not to think bad of things that couldn’t be fixed, things that didn’t concern. She could only take so much, though. No one can deal with that cloud every day.
This time, she didn’t shrug. The sigh lasted longer, she seemed to exhale all the breaths she’d ever taken, like she was trying to push something else out of her along with the air. She was pushing me out, at last.
Her eyes glazed, she shook her head, frustrated, fatigued suddenly, enough is enough.
“What the fuck is there to know?! You’re not a fucking thing, you’re not a piece of information, you’re a fucking person, people change, they grow, there isn’t a finished article, there isn’t a thing to know! Why are you doing this? Why do you say these things? You have choices. We could be so happy, I know we could. We don’t have to be two people.” Pause. The bedroom is enormous, it’s expanding in every direction, we’re so far apart. I still feel claustrophobic. She stumbles as she pulls on her jeans and top, her shoes and coat. Stands in front of me. I’m there again, it keeps happening to me, keeps reappearing. “If you want it you could just take it. It isn’t difficult. It needn’t hurt.”
Tears not just in her eyes but all over her face, and I just sit there in bed, a balloon inflating in my stomach, pushing my guts apart, making me feel nauseous when I should feel upset. I can’t say anything, I can’t move. I’m afraid she takes my stasis for disinterest; when really it’s paralysis, fear. I know I’m making a mistake, I know I’m pushing us towards the cliff, but I can’t stop it. I’m not in control.
“I’ve seen other people without half as much as we have, I’ve seen them make it, make it last, why the fuck can’t we? Why won’t you let us even try?” Her eyes are puffy and red through crying, she’s gulping, every word an effort because it hurts to cry this much, physically hurts, and she has to speak nevertheless. “Why are you doing this? Killing this? It isn’t fucking fair on me, that you’re not telling me why, and it isn’t fair on either of us for you to end it.” Angry water fills her eyes along with drops of sadness. “You’re not even fucking finishing things properly, you don’t even have a fucking reason, do you? Bastard. You’re different to that. You’re better than that.”
I feel as if I would die if I was to utter a word. So I keep quiet.
She’s going, walking out of the door, I don’t know if she’ll come back. I let her go. It’s not my place to stop her, is it? I can’t control her. But that shouldn’t be an issue. I shouldn’t be concerned with control or blame or anything apart from seeing that this is good, that it could last, that I ought to care more. Try more. I know I’ve made a mistake.
If I’d held on, would it have been through love or through fear? Was letting go brought about by fear? Maybe. Probably.
Since then, nothing. A few encounters with anonymous people, not meaning anything, more through drunkenness than affection or feeling. Nothing to make me feel good, nothing taken anywhere. Nothing. It’s been more than two years since her. I can’t focus on anyone else, I can’t see them in three dimensions, everyone seems hollow to me, everyone who comes too close.
I still have a photograph, one she took, but it was of both of us, not just me. She’d used a timer, put the camera on a table in the garden, focused in on me as I stood with a wall behind me, in the sun, the first days, and then, without warning, she ran round and stood with me, squeezed me so I flinched and laughed, and looked into her eyes. Looked into her eyes with a smile, she smiled back, just in time for the ‘click’ of the shutter.
We looked amazing, we looked like love, smiling, her hands on my waist, my arms frozen in a spasm of happiness as she squeezed me, our eyes together, our smiles a mirror of each other. You couldn’t have got that expression, that beauty, with a posed shot. She knew what she was doing.
Deliberately, she under-exposed the print when she was developing it, to make us seem hazy, insubstantial, too thin to be real. She wanted us to look happy, blissful, but slightly vague, because no one person was ever really defined, no one has a sharp outline. When I look at the picture now, we look like ghosts, we look like we’re fading away.
I didn’t even see her in passing for two months at least, we must have each avoided areas were a glimpse of the other might be caught, I don’t know if it was deliberate, or… unconscious? A self-defence response? To stop the hurt deepening. Tha would make sense…
We haven’t spoken properly at all. An awkward ‘hello’ maybe, once or twice. One time, in a shopping centre, we passed each other on the escalator, her downwards, me up, maybe it was ironic. The eye-contact lasted days, she burrowed a look into me that filled me with a sense of waste and illness, lost opportunities, stupidity, my own ignorance making me unhappy, reflected pain. I haven’t cried for her, even though I wished I could.
NJS
1/31/2004 10:53:00 am
Friday, January 30, 2004
A Record Review
Cos, you know, that's what I'm meant to do. And this is good. Check out the opening paragraph...
Pluramon
Dreams Top Rock
Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak in Vertigo. John Keats - “heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter”. Twin Peaks never really being about who killed Laura Palmer. The space between the spokes of a wheel. The diastolic gap between heartbeats when the atria flush with blood. How in a lucid dream you can’t adjust light levels or read a digital clock but you can fly…
The link between electronica and shoegazing is made more explicit every day. The real descendents of Loveless aren’t Black Rebel Motorcycle Club or Joy Zipper, or even the Kevin Shields all-stars version of Primal Scream, but rather the likes of Manitoba, Boards Of Canada and M83. The technological developments of the last thirteen (13!) years mean that one man (or two) with a laptop can now produce in a matter of months something akin to what it took Kevin Shields 3 years, 20-odd engineers, countless guitar overdubs and £250,000 to pioneer. A large part of the allure of Loveless is the mythology that has built up around it, that Shields could never follow it up, that it nearly sent Creation bankrupt, that, to this day, no one has recording anything with a guitar that sounds remotely like it, despite more than a few explicit attempts. Nothing else born of a six-string sounds quite so alien, so intangible, so warped by a different sun. It’s not surprising then that the things that sail closest to its orbit are manufactured via utterly different means, or, at the least, by people practised in what began as utterly different arts.
At it’s best, shoegazing gives substance to unheard melodies, makes you feel like you’ve eaten too much fruit and inhaled to much vapour, like your blood is thin of cells, your plasma stretched by spacious molecules of oxygen. It blurs the lines between sense and senses, gives rise to synaesthetic sensations the likes of which inspired Blake and Coleridge and Chapterhouse alike.
For Marcus Schmickler’s fourth outing as Pluramon, a shoegazing analogue to his parallel careers (who has only one these days?) in IDM and electronica (as Wabi Sabi, Corvette and Sator Rotas [hooray for palindromes]), he enlists the voice and words of Julee Cruise, the Roadhouse singer from Twin Peaks, erstwhile muse to David Lynch and talent-scout to Angelo Badalamenti. Dreams Top Rock is pleasurable like the memory of a long bath or a distant kiss. It aspires to Loveless, and it reaches as close as anything else ever has: closer even.
Cruise’s vocals are too sweet for me, too childlike and deliberately will o’ the wisp where Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher were uneasy, threatening, erotic. There’s nothing here as sharply shocking as the opening snare rap and impacting tumult of “Only Shallow”, nothing as airless, weightless and strange as “To Here Knows When”, nothing as future-past as “Soon”. “Flageolea” plays a slow space odyssey jazz, an elegy for dying aliens, taking the blueprint somewhere else, revealing a link that now seems obvious. “Time For A Lie” and “Time Catharsia MX” merge voices and melodies, treating them differently, while “Noise Academy” and “Have You Seen” defy gravity as well as anything Ride or Chapterhouse ever managed. Schmickler’s manipulation of glitch and electronic, a great deal more subtle than Medicine, say, marks an evolution since 91 that the original generation of shoegazers by and large failed to adapt to.
My copy of Dreams Top Rock was scratched towards the end of the final track – I must have listened to five minutes of true hum and glitch quite happily before I realised that time hadn’t moved on since 3:39. Tellingly, this was the part of the record that I enjoyed the most.
NJS
1/30/2004 04:25:00 pm
TNT
Are now claiming to have 'lost' my iPod. Rest assured I am putting their management through hell until they find it.
NJS
1/30/2004 01:19:00 pm
Thursday, January 29, 2004
Awesome
Just click.
NJS
1/29/2004 09:14:00 pm
TNT
Fucking shit service.
NJS
1/29/2004 08:00:00 pm
Bloody Hell
Just arrive already.
NJS
1/29/2004 02:44:00 pm
Football
Consider the clubs Dom & I follow; he's an Inter fan and I'm a Roma fan. Which posits us directly against Milan and Lazio. (Where Arsenal fit into this I dunno, but I am excited about Reyes.)
NJS
1/29/2004 09:35:00 am
Wednesday, January 28, 2004
Now With Added Comments
You'd better be nice or I'll fucking kill yer.
NJS
1/28/2004 11:22:00 pm
Historical Loon
You are Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad or Charles the Well-Beloved!
A fine, amiable and dreamy young man, skilled in horsemanship and archery, you were also from a long line of dribbling madmen. King at 12 and quickly married to your sweetheart, Bavarian Princess Isabeau, you enjoyed many happy months together before either of you could speak anything of the other's language. However, after illness you became a tad unstable. When a raving lunatic ran up to your entourage spouting an incoherent prophecy of doom, you were unsettled enough to slaughter four of your best men when a page dropped a lance. Your hair and nails fell out. At a royal masquerade, you and your courtiers dressed as wild men, ending in tragedy when four of them accidentally caught fire and burned to death. You were saved by the timely intervention of the Duchess of Berry's underskirts.
This brought on another bout of sickness, which surgeons countered by drilling holes in your skull. The following months saw you suffer an exorcism, beg your friends to kill you, go into hyperactive fits of gaiety, run through your rooms to the point of exhaustion, hide from imaginary assassins, claim your name was Georges, deny that you were King and fail to recognise your family. You smashed furniture and wet yourself at regular intervals. Passing briefly into erratic genius, you believed yourself to be made of glass and demanded iron rods in your attire to prevent you breaking.
In 1405 you stopped bathing, shaving or changing your clothes. This went on until several men were hired to blacken their faces, hide, jump out and shout "boo!", upon which you resumed basic hygiene. Despite this, your wife continued sleeping with you until 1407, when she hired a young beauty, Odette de Champdivers, to take her place. Isabeau then consoled herself, as it were, with your brother. Her lovers followed thick and fast while you became a pawn of your court, until you had her latest beau strangled and drowned.
A severe fever was fended off with oranges and pomegranates in vast quantities, but you succumbed again in 1422 and died. Your disease was most likely hereditary. Unfortunately, you had anywhere up to eleven children, who variously went on to develop capriciousness, great cruelty, insecurity, paranoia, revulsion towards food and, in one case, a phobia of bridges.
Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.
NJS
1/28/2004 03:33:00 pm
You're Surely Not Still Reading This Sub-Adrian Mole Tripe, Are You?
I found my moleskine! Hidden deep in my desk at work. Sadly the people at TNT rang to say my iPod will be delayed until tomorrow. Hmph. Oh well, should have some Plaid and maybe even some Long Fin Killie to listen to when I get home.
NJS
1/28/2004 01:23:00 pm
Time
Argh. It's still not here. Some bugger's driving round Exeter with it in a van still. Asshole. Here is a picture of a cookie.
NJS
1/28/2004 11:28:00 am
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
Much Travelled
Certainly better travelled than me.
Taiwan>>>Luxembourg>>>Belgium>>>Holland>>>Exeter
Imminent...
NJS
1/27/2004 11:40:00 am
Monday, January 26, 2004
Shit
I've fucking lost my moleskine now, haven't I? It's got my address inside should anyone find it, so please post it back (like anyone who finds it would read here). I bet it's hidden in my desk somewhere. Shit shit shit.
NJS
1/26/2004 09:04:00 pm
Luxembourg
Still not here.
NJS
1/26/2004 02:39:00 pm
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