napowrimo

napowrimo starts today. here's some prompt lists if that's your thing

napowrimo

found poetry review

paper swans

mslexia

george mackay brown

not every day you expect to come across a new story by george mackay brown but there's one here

reading the book

not so very long ago i was mulling about in that increasingly rarest of things - an actual bookshop - (true it was a waterstones but i've since been in the watermill in aberfeldy a couple of times but these days beggars can't be choosers) when i came across the pike, a biography of gabriele d'annunzio. oh, i thought, that looks interesting and put it on my to do list. a few weeks later and here's lucy hughes-hallett winning the samuel johnson prize with that very book.

which is great for her but commiserations for the rest of the shortlists, all of whose books i'd like to be giving a read. yes, including the one on margaret thatcher. sue me! it got me to thinking how much i miss browsing about around a bookshop, those chance finds you come across. true, it has to be said that a very small bit of careful googlemachining can provide the same, and possibly more, but sitting bashing away at a keyboard provides none of the same tactile sense.

in the interim i was up at the aberfeldy festival,. the poetry thing i was doing was packed - all manner of folk, all ages, all sorts. i was particularly impressed that they'd got a bunch of the local school kids in to do a group reading. which got me to thinking about a recent comment of noel gallagher's - that reading fiction was 'a waste of fucking time'. while it's just the sort of asinine statement that seems to constitute gallagher's career these days, constructing a false opposition between fiction and non-fiction (i can't bring myself to go any further beyond that!) and facilitating an 'argument' that has no good reason to exist rather than ask the deceptively complex question - why are people reading?

all of which got me to thinking about neil gaiman's recent statements on libraries and reading



i loved what he had to say about the escapism of reading. for me it never mattered whether it was made up or whether 'it had actually happened' so long as what i was reading took me somewhere i hadn't been before. imaginatively or intellectually it's all one. certainly as the years have gone by i find that reading is the one area in which i'm markedly more tolerant now than i was when i was younger. and, as a consequence, i'm far more inclined to be asking - tell what's good about that, than dismissing something because it was too mainstream/no canonical/not cutting edge enough. so young and yet so opinionated! lol

so far in scotland we haven't had the same pressure on libraries as south of the border but we shouldn't fool ourselves that it isn't coming. people just aren't using them. speaking to librarians where i live i find that i'm in the top two per cent if library users and i'm hardly the frequent flyer i once was. they tell me that less than ten years ago getting the mobile library around a circuit of the district took two days. now it takes an afternoon. then, it turns out, most of the people who go to the library aren't taking out books at all.

the reasons for all of this are many and varied and interesting. the great shame is that libraries and, i would argue, reading in the wider sense are under threat as never before. i can, just about, handle the loss of bookshops but i'd be bereft if the public library was to disappear. my earliest memories of books are of going to the library, the excitement of getting in the car, of being able to get a book, open the covers and vanish.

so one day soon i'm going to take a trip to early 20th century italy and meet gabriele d'annunzio. i'm guessing i'm not going to like him much but i'm looking forward to the journey. then i'll visit some graveyards, think about bees, romans and maybe even take a once around afghanistan. yes, noel, stories all and very much only a version 'of what actually happened'. more reading will reveal….more.

i read some advice by some writer somewhere recently. read, she said, read everything. can't say better than that.

iain banks

back in the day i used to have a mate of mine who loved the books of iain banks in both m and non-m incarnations. myself, i was never drawn to them, especially the culture novels, but, my mate being my mate, i read all the other books just so that i had substance to my continuing non-fussiness towards them.

eventually, what with the arrival of the internet, fanboy had been in touch with banks and was meeting him for a pint just down the road. i was well up for it but i was told, in no uncertain terms,  that seeing as i didn't even like his books i couldn't be trusted to go and meet him, my mate confusing, as it seems lots of readers do, the books with the person who wrote them.

which was a shame as i'd been anticipating a decent banter. tho in the end i never ended up meeting banks i know plenty other people who did and none of them have a bad word to sat about him. he seems to have been very approachable with respect to his fans and retained a genuine enthusiasm for his work.

it's curious to me to see a lot of what's been written about the 'loss' of the books he might have written as opposed to all that he left behind for when he wasn't there. from my own perspective where i have letters, pictures etc made by people no longer here it's a bittersweet comfort but a comfort nonetheless.

so it may be that i didn't like his books and it may be i wasn't the best fit for that scottish male, whisky drinker of a certain age who appear to hold him in a great deal of affection but i do have the sense of the loss of yet another of life's good guys. if anything banks' early demise is a reminder to treasure the people around us as there is never certainty as to just how long they'll be with us.

so fare well iain banks and all the other good guys who have departed. maybe keep a glass in the next world...

notebooks

it shouldn't need to be said that i'm particular when it comes to my writing materials. these days i use an ink pen I got from tesco's about five years ago. they don't make them anymore and i'm down to my last four or five with nothing to replace them. they're liquid ink - before that I had a box of ballpoints i got back in new York that lasted the best part of fifteen years. i'd hoped that my recent batch of muji 0.38's might have been the new pen but they have a scratchiness that just doesn't work for me.

and then there's the notebooks. for home use i've got a stash of a5 books i got in menzies - should've got more as they no longer do them. sturdy, leather bound, they're great. i do have a moleskin but I've never got on with them - the moleskin only serves as a training record. of late i've been using a very nice wee ordning and reda number. flexible, pocket sized with a horizontal band to keep everything in place. but, as with many things Swedish, there are times when I just don't want to be paying out that much money.

casting about i happened upon the leuchtturm1917. all the signs so far are good. beautifully featured with page numbers, stickers, index pages and tear outs and while it lacks the leather cover of the ordning it has a nice heft in the hand. I doubt it'll hold a pen as well as the ordning but that's the only quibble. certainly much better than an equivalent moleskin for me.

fixes vos pensees
aussitot qu'elles vous viennent a l'esprit
ou que ce soit

indeed.

now I just have to get a decent pen....

kanitta meechubot

one of the strands i look for in visual art these days is something that captures a sense of what it is i see and do at work. so i was browsing an old copy of granta this morning and came across kanitta meechubot. you can see more in this series here, catch up on her blog here and if you're in that london you can see her exhibition at the book club until january (should you want to send me the accompanying catalogue i would accept it with some gratitude!)

in contrast, and seeing as how i'm never going to get round to it, i've had a blog post kicking about in my head that's kind of jeanette winterson, kind of virginia woolf and a bit of a lament about the state of writing at the moment. maybe this is because i'm just after reading woolf's the waves, which if it was written today i'd hazard wouldn't have chance one of getting published, and a fair bit of la winterson, who i'm always surprised gets published at all.

there seems, to me (!), to be so much really excellent, thought provoking and generally wow-ish visual art knocking about these days (all hail the internet) in contrast to the written word. is it just because reading takes longer? are there repositories of genuinely dazzling writing that it just takes too long to get to? who knows? me, rather than reading i'm going off out on my bike with a head full of kanitta meechubot. that'll do me!