Rejected Prologue.

This is the old prologue to something I'm working on at the moment. I quite like it, but the tone of voice is all wrong, and part of the reason for putting it in the so called public arena like this is to place it effectively out of reach for any further tinkering or assimilation within the current project. In the first part the experiences of the two protagonists alternate on a sentence by sentence basis, a device which was supposed to foreshadow the dual narrative of the first section (now rejected). The second paragraph is a more conventional trawl through the pool of their supposed childhood memories. So it goes.

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from Lectures on the English Poets

William HazlittAll that is worth remembering in life, is the poetry of it. Fear is poetry, hope is poetry, love is poetry, hatred is poetry; contempt, jealousy, remorse, admiration, wonder, pity, despair, or madness, are all poetry. Poetry is that fine particle within us, that expands, rarefies, refines, raises our whole being: without it “man’s life is poor as beast’s.” 

The Twelve Blogs of Christmas.

I came up with the idea of twelve blogs in as many days on December 11th or thereabouts, because I knew that I was going to be the only person looking after our son and daughter for the two weeks between my wife going back to work and the holidays beginning. I figured there wasn’t going to be enough time for sustained work in between schlepping to and fro from my son’s day-care (in the thirty-five degree heat) and tending to my five month old daughter’s waking/feeding cycle. However, by grabbing an hour here or there, I hoped I would be able to keep a foot in the world beyond tummy time and bottle preparation. Plus I had a ton of half-finished documents in my blogs folder that I thought would supply me with more than enough material for twelve posts (not true, as it happens). Now, surveying the overall tenor of the twelve posts, it’s hard not to assume that living with me is the domestic equivalent of watching the Ring Cycle on DVD, on repeat, forever: death, homelessness, heartbreak and architecture, for god’s sake. But, of course, man cannot bear too much reality. Thankfully, for all those times when you can’t bear to think about all the heavy stuff anymore, there’s your wife and your kids and a crappy blockbuster or a terrible pun. Speaking of which, I’ve got some Christmas silliness to attend to. Adieu and god rest your merry chestnuts.  

On Flaubert’s Beach.

Chesil Beach in Dorset. You have to imagine the parrot.I finally managed to post this last night at 2.37am having got started on it at midnight and my computer dying on me just as I finished formatting it. As a result, I thought it was going to appear with the date of the 23rd and therefore screw up my plan to get the remaining 3 blogs done by the 24th. My response to this eventuality was to write a long, splenetic, poorly reasoned and partially obscene rant about it really being the 22nd still. I clicked on post and it came up with the date of the 22nd, because it had managed to save a draft when the computer died before 2am here, which is before midnight GMT, hence it had the date I wanted. So, it appears that I'm still on track, seemingly, to get all 12 blogs done by the 24th, crappy stomach, wonderful family and last minute preparations permitting. All the best with all your stuff.

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A London Evening.

OK, so we skipped an entry yesterday because I was laid up with a particularly vile and antisocial stomach bug, the kind that got bullied by all the other stomach bugs at Gastric High, and is now taking its belated but nonetheless sweet revenge on my intestinal tract. I'm still pretty much doubled over with it, but I can kind of wedge a keyboard into the pathetic gap between my legs and churning stomach. Witness the lengths I go to in order to fulfil my ridiculous, self-imposed writing regime. Anyway, this is No 9/12 in the 12 Blogs of Christmas, and it's a series of vignettes about London, set over the course of one evening. Hope you enjoy it or that at least, unlike me, you don't shit yourself.

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