Drama queens
Drama queens...He died thinking of her, and knew when dying
She’d been the death of him. The world well lost?
It might not seem so when we count the cost,
But if we call him thoughtless we are lyingAbout ourselves and those long nights of stewing
In our own juice about someone who tore
Our lives apart and whom we still adore –
And all the time we knew what we were doing.Clive James, ‘You, Mark Anthony’I’m reluctant, at first. It’s still difficult, to lie there, duvet-cocooned by a plasterthin wall knowing they’re entwined on the other side. Almost tempted to call it a tangle of traitorous limbs. Melodramatic and undeserved, but rejection (et tu?), my lifelong blade, remains.***We’re watching Brecht, expecting a gunshot that never comes. Sipping away, I’m struck by how little I like this man, this stilted, shouting essayist; an unmodulated, atonal voice seeking righteousness, locating only Sturm und Drang. Passing out at six, I woke to sunlight and silence and brandy on my clothes; later that night, in a blue-lit bar, we toast Hardy with two bottles of sweet red wine. We giggle through Webster, recall weeping to Bruch.A bad poet calls me a bad poet, but beneath the contempt I know I can write. Metafictionists – Coover, Barthelme, Gaddis, Gass. Proto-postmodernist John Hawkes: I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme.Gordon Burn - “being a collector and disseminator of high-toned arcana is a kind of self-focusing activity which can bring more pleasure to the teller than to the told. It leaves the writer connecting with himself rather than looking outwards into the world.”
I’m wary, and aware.Hours later, rejection, but the loss doesn’t sting. I look at her and know that some things endure. The red flag, the limelight, holding hands.
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose leaves
The way I feel today - 10 July 2004
Just seventeen - 17 March 2004
Roads to freedom - 25 February 2004
Confessions of a failed self-harmer - 25 February 2004
Manchester, united - 25 February 2004