she is reading

nothing lasts forever by sidney sheldon

its great she says. three women, one investigates a murder, one gets murdered and the other sleeps her way to the top!!!! i should use more exclamation marks to get across the enthusiasm with which she describes her read. she's totally into it and doesn't do that 'you must read it' thing - for her the read is something she totally disappears into. talking to her gets a smile on my face tinged with regret that i don't seem to have that total absorption any more.

i do have another candidate for tonight's reader but the book she's reading is in russian. you should know what it's about she tells me. come on, i protest, i only learned a few words of russian when i was six. she laughs dismissively at this and tells me that she could tell me what she was reading but how would i know it was the truth. those bulgarians! lol

writers

bum to it all
i'm going to die
i'm going to cut off my
head and fry it in garlic
fry fry fry
then you will all see that
i am not
alive anymore

"Garlic head Death", Sylvia Plath

so says the uncyclopedia on writers
very funny and worth checking out if only as an escape from all this relentless rain

Frank M. Chipasula

The Burning Rose

an elegy for Mkwapatira Mhango

You handed them a rose of truth
but they pitched it in the fire

The rose burst into Lux in Tenebris and raged
across the early morning lake
from Mulowe to Monkey Bay
And the rose rose and bled and fell down,
rose and bled, rose and bled, and flew
up in one raging flame that licked your house
and ate up your wives, swallowed your children
and your guests like a rose hungry for love;
And the rose flapped against the walls
of the house that rose in flames like fiery roses;
And the rose bared its thorns like in a lovely snarl,
Thorns hefty liked a crazed cow's goring horns,
Hoofed with hatred, while a blazing petal
Wagged its long tongue up through the roof
And licked the children's cries
that rang like cathedral bells clanging
in the bald-headed tyrant's ears. And the rose,
Kyrie Eleison, fell like showers of clotted
blood poured in lavish libations on the kerosene
rose that bloomed from a terrible matchstick.

sotto voce at the spl

so we pile into the car and dash off to the spl for the sotto voce slam, arriving with mere seconds to spare meaning, handily, i don't get my name on the list so i can sit back and enjoy the readers.

a high standard and a wide range was set and congratulations to claire for walking off with the magnificent statuette. her poem about miners was, i think, my favourite of all the poems i've heard/read by her even if it was her granny poem that got the crowd going (and t blubbing in the car in the way home - mark of a good poem claire!)

it was good for me to sink myself in an evening of poetry as i've been feeling poetically out of sorts lately. i was restored by the range of material on display, from some deft wordery by some young bloke whose name i immediately forgot to anne connelly's clever spin on the doping, in the aeronautical sense. t esp liked her poem about sailor's knitted jersey - ganzie? sometimes it's easy to get into a state where you feel a bit isolated so it was great to be in about a group of like minded people. work for both of us meant we had to dash off so apologies to those we didn;t get a chance to blether to.

and it turns out it was t's first time in the poetry library! i can;t understand how this can be. so next day off we ave together it's definitely a visit back.

marianne moore

The Fish

wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
adjusting the ash heaps;
opening and shutting itself like

an
injured fan.
The barnacles which encrust the side
of the wave, cannot hide
there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,
split like spun
glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness
into the crevices -
in and out, illuminating

the
turquoise sea
of bodies. The water drives a wedge
of iron through the iron edge
of the cliff; whereupon the stars

pink
rice-grains, ink-
lilies, and submarine
toadstools, slide each on the other.

All
external
marks of abuse are present on this
defiant edifice -
all the physical features of

ac-
cident - lack
of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and
hatchet strokes, those things stand
out on it, the chasm-side is

dead.
Repeated
evidence has proved that it can live
on what can not revive
its youth. The sea grows old in it.

colin mackay

Pigs

Morning sky
blue as the robe of glory
warm as my dreams.
What still lives in the meadow
settles on what doesn't.
The butchered grow a million
black buzzing wings.

In the burnt-out cafe
stray pigs from a nearby farm feed
on Ivan the chef and his two pretty waitresses.

Somewhere
the thud of mortars
somewhere the splatter of shots
the scream of an incoming shell,
but beyond the blackened hole
where the window used to be
under the still functioning Coca-Cola sign
the pigs feed on.

And I gape at them,
I can't take my eyes off them.
Everyone else is appalled, but
I laugh
because it is so funny to see pigs
sitting in a cafe eating roast humans
that I laugh
and can't stop laughing
until a medic in a blue helmet
comes and sticks a needle full of something
into my arm and I fall asleep.

And dream of the morning sky
blue as the robe of glory,
warm as my childhood,
which stretches all the way back
to Scotland where
the office will be having its coffee break
about now and the Number 27 bus
will be halfway up Dundas Street
and no one will believe that
any of these things are happening
in the same world as the office
and the 27 bus.

Dreaming, they will say, dreaming,
you have cracked up, you
can;t tell dream from reality
any more, and perhaps they are right -
certainly they are right.

But the pigs are still feeding
on Natasha's breasts and Ivan's buttocks
done to a nicety and crisp round the edges,
and the morning sky
is blue as the robe of glory
and warm as my love,
so glad to be alive
to make these ashes speak.

magi gibson

Bat Song

So, our features offend
you, . Too shrunken-
skulled, too rat-eyed
ugly web-winged embryos.

Skinny in leather and slinky
fur, do you find our forms
too nazi for your
civilised sensibilities?

You blame the moon
for our presence.

But we have always been/are
always here -

armies of us sleeping
in your soulless churches
fornicating in the rafters
pissing on prayerbooks and pews.

Or lurking in dark dank
places your kind once too
inhabited.

We stream at dusk like smoke
into your streets, scribe
the thin black air with
strange graffiti.

You claim we make your
flesh crawl, appearing
out of darkness and silence.

Is it our fault, Sir,
that you are deaf
to the beauty of our songs.

she is reading

songs of the humpback whale by jodi picoult

which she bought along with audrey niffenegger's time traveller's wife for 2 for £7 if tesco while food shopping on the way to work.

she's read picoult before she says and likes them for their lightness but gets frustrated by the 'moralising' and the way the characters 'seem to think far too much about everything'. she reads these books, she says, for light relief and that her shelves at home are occupied only by medical books.

as usual with any of these exercises the questions you ask other people aren't really so much about them as yourself. i'm realising i'm unsure why i read books - that sense of escape i got when i was young seems wholly absent yet at the same time i can still find myself enthusing about something or other.

the last two days readers ask me what i'll be reading on my days off. i dodge the question. i read many things at once. i've already admitted to them that i make assumptions about people based on what they read - how do i escape second guessing myself!

she is reading

twilight by stephanie meyer

so what is it you're reading? oh i can't tell you she says. is it twilight i ask?
her sixteen year old sister recommended it to her. it is true she says that not much happens, that a long time is spent with the main characters looking at each other, but as her sister assured her, once she started she found she can;t put it down. so what's the attraction i ask? oh, she says, it's edward cullen.

really?

oh yes, she says, i tend to skim the bits he's not in

she is reading

say goodbye by lisa gardner

you can't beat a good murder mystery on the night shift she says. she has discovered that this is part of a series but that she's reading it in the wrong order. she tells me she's recently taken to shopping for books in oxfam and recommends it.

(the idea for this taken from people reading
where, hopefully, i'll send this and others. i'm more self conscious about it than i expected!)

the elvis blog

have had a couple of folk asking what's up with the elvis blog.

i think, to be honest, it's on a reasonably permanent hiatus.
reasons for this?
they are many but mainly it's started to feel like a bit of an effort.
(esp the parts where i'm trying to get decent images of paintings! i'm so irked with this currently i may have to go to some professional type and forego the bother. but that's a whole other story.)

anyway, that's that so thanks to all who viewed and commented over the last year or so.

back to edinburgh

back to edinburgh today to read at the scottish poetry library. as ever with this place it gets even better the longer the absence. they have more books, they have more spoken word and the ivor cutler exhibit is a treat. and that's before the journal section.

i bring along poems suggested by the rain. so the rain stops, the sun shines and we all sit outside. i may have to do this more often! there's only about seven of us but for me, it was a lovely vibe, i liked what was read and felt quite ennervated by the whole affair.

then i bought a stack of books. standouts so far are magi gibson's wild women of a certain age which i was glued to over coffee and colin mckay's cold night lullaby, a collection of searing poems about the conflict in bosnia. i sat and read all of this when i got back tonight. it's like being reminded of what poetry can be for. such a shame when i googled him to find out he had died. of the pair of them, more later.

then off to see a man about another collaborative project. can;t say more about this for a while but all very interesting and may end up doing some things i'd never considered before.

and still time enough to get into the russian-scottish place to see the gennadii gogoliuk i missed last time round. definitely worth the detour

sharon olds

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
Gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth, whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio
vascular health - just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

this weekend

was the weekend where the endless rain was just getting too much and i had to get out anywhere. even so my prospective trip to the north west was still being washed out so thanks to a brief flicker of memory we ended up going to fochabers for 10 more in moray where, quite unbelievably, the sun stayed out and, aside form the drive up, there was no rain!

see the proof here (scroll down for 10 in moray)

what a brilliant day! i started off ignoring t's advice that maybe racing with a cold wasn't the best idea and despite paying for that these last two days i've no regrets at all. the course was easy, easy, easy but that meant you could fly round it and properly race if you wanted to, something that's absent in too many scottish xc races. not only that but as i got used to it i could go faster.

true i've been neglecting my back exercises of late and equally true it did feel on my last hard tail lap as if my spine was going to pop out. and even more true it wasn't a course that needed a full suspension device but, given the back pain and the rattling, it was the right bike for me to finish on. i'd been a bit ginger the first couple of laps but on the full suss i had some catching up to do. there was a lovely swooping section of single track with a nasty right hand bend over a far too large drop that was the only potentially dangerous bit and a brilliant rooty singletrack downhil at the end. after my previous caution i remembered that rooty singletrack is what i cycle on and it was dry so flew down it with a big fat grin on my face.

it wasn't to last. my lungs were sounding like an old accordion and my legs were cramping up despite the attentions of the very nice massage man. i had a very close off with a pedestrian on the last lap - why do they do these things! - and decided that tiredness + speed was definitely going to equal crash. i'd been blethering with some bloke earlier about laps and he'd said that he didn't much care, what was important was coming away with a grin.

and that's what i did. a great day on the bike. very mellow, very laid back, lots of kids running about and none of the tension that seems to affect the likes of tenundertheben. next year i may give that a miss and focus on moray again and kirroughtree. nice one fraser et al.

and of course many thanks to t, who packed the van, got me into it, filled me full of beechams, drove me home and poured me into bed

top bike books

seeing as i'm waiting for some paint to dry it's an ideal opportunity for a list inspired by apprentice in the last post. what books could you buy for the significant cyclist in your life? i'd recommend the following -

the rider by tim krabbe
arguably the best sports novel in existence and certainly the best about cycling. a proper novel in every sense of the word. brilliant.

need for the bike by paul fournel
i don't need to say more about this? one for the bachelardians amongst us.

french revolutions by tim moore
thirty something bloke has thirty something crisis and decides to ride the tour de france route after 'training' for three weeks funny even you're just laughing at his self inflicted suffering

the escape artist by matt seaton
matt seaton documents his life in the saddle as while racing for his local club. at the same time his wife, fellow journalist ruth picardie is dying of cancer, so that the escape artist of the title becomes a different race altogether. more than just a book about cycling.

one more kilometre and we're in the showers by tim hilton
one for the purists really. hilton grows up with communist parents and escapes into the world of post war cycling clubs. filled with beautiful detail from a not so distant but very different past. tweedy, nerdy but great.


that should about do it and thanks for that. there must be a meme in their somewhere. how about the five niche books you just couldn't do without (i'm avoiding the obvious desert island reference) and when i say niche i mean get your anorak on and zip it up before you look at those shelves. top five books on snails? excellent. top five novels? small beer. top five novels about places i remember but really wish i didn't? now we're talking.


and a post-script - cyclist of a certain age should all own

dancing on the pedals - the found poetry of phil liggett. a classic