I’m sometimes teased, when reading to S. that I don’t pronounce the characters' names correctly. Partly due to my incompetence this is also because I often join the reading of a book late, cos I have been away for a week or whatever, showing up at a point where the names have long since had an (arguably arbitrary) pronunciation attributed to them. This is esp true for fantasy/other-world parallel universe adventure stories of which S. reads quite a lot. How are you going to pronounce Ffarreijl? First one to tackle that question is bound to be right.
I’m also known at storytime for being the one that doesn’t really do the voices when reading – adopting a blankness (but lots of energy), as a counterpoint to the accents and attitudes other people bring to the job. They do it well! For once I’m not arguing with someone else’s performance style here. This is a bloke that won’t let his ‘experimental theatre monotony-voice’ go, not even for a kids bedtime. Someone should call social services.
This evening though I came across a note on the computer saying simply 'Robot Voice'. A single phrase in an otherwise comprehensible list of 'things to do' or 'things to write more about' this was evidently something I’d meant to go back to... but I could not remember what.
Finally it came back to me that when S. and I were reading the other week I'd rather randomly started to do an accent for some character or another… and since that’s far from being my strong point the accent had become more and more like a Robot. Pretty soon S. and I (and D.) were all crying with laughter as every time this poor character spoke he became more and more a robot and every time S. would interrupt to remind me (remonstrating and laughing at the same time) that Mr. XXXX was not a robot. At this the character voice would revert to human. In the end I took the robot thing to the max and was arguing with S. that my onterpretation was at least valid. My line was that whilst the book - I cant even remember what it was, but not too exciting I think - did not say that Mr XXXX, the protagonists uncle, was a robot it did not say either that he was not a robot. The text - I argued - remained ominously silent on the topic of Mr XXXX and his robot-status. If nothing else I'm sure S. will give his English teacher a run for his or her money when the time comes.
Now we are reading Russel Hoban’s The Mouse & His Child. We read it before and now we are reading it again. We don’t need to invent Robots in this one. It’s already got enough ideas and ontology questions for S. and I. We are just at the part where the Muskrat is teaching the mouse child and the mouse the Them Times Tables. He is talking about Much-in-Little Thinking. Beautiful, beautiful. Reading this once again makes me think of his books for younger kids too. We loved those so much – They Came From Argghhhh was one of them. So brilliant. So many sentences and ideas you want to read a second time to S., or where S. himsef would say “that’s brilliant, lets have that again”.
M. was telling me after that his son is mildly autistic, which to me is also in [his] work somehow, in that really comforting and driven thing about repetition which is beautiful and mad at once. Anyhow he told a story about how someone gave his son an invisible-ink pen with a special
torch at the other end which makes the writing visible after. One night
his son beckons him into his bedroom and switches out the light - shining
his torch, he shows his dad the walls of his room, now covered in lists
and lists and lists in invisible ink - lists of his soft-toys birthdays,
lists of things to tell his Mum's boss etc. etc. He said it was frightening, he said like a prison but I thought surely also beautiful, a
treasure cave.
Something so strong about this mapping of language and thought onto the physical landscape of the room. Place and state of mind conflated. I mean a bedroom is always a mental space, an index of ts inhabitants consciousness, a mental map in any case and this act of writing on it just seems to make that more concrete. I could feel the nightmare aspect of it too and I was also thinking about this writing's status as public secret (something open and closed at the same time), a secret performed/ played privately into in public space. An amazing image in any case.
*
For some reason Kate's text also made me think about the story James from my EndlandStories collection, perhaps cos James sometimes writes these kind of lists, defining his world in a cataloguing way. I looked back on the story and found this:
In the morning they set off again going many leagues to the westerly direction and within a day or two they caught sight of their destination - the city of C____ in the province of D______ where men call each other ‘brother’ and where the women are dark haired, long legged and free.
Dad slammed car doors and walked into the Hotel De Ville, demanding room 236 and leading the kids up there in confidence. It was a small room, just like he remembered, closed tight on a double bed, with shit brown curtains and a picture on the wall that caught James’ eye.
Dad broke open the mini-bar and reluctantly shared a vodka bottle with Olivia while James stared at the picture, stood up on the bed in his muddy shoes, but no one really cared.
*
The picture: one of those allegories popular in former times. Service Stations Of The Cross. Baroque detail. A masterpiece of luminescent highlighter pens. Christ on The Forecourt. Crucified. The gay centurions. Posh Spice at Christ’s feet, wailing and weeping and washing diesel off of him with her long black hair. In the background Peter, Paul & Mary. A pair of winged pump attendants hovering in the air and sporting the fluttering banner in typical period style:
”LORD FORGIVE THEM THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY MOBIL”
James stared at the picture and an hour passed in an instant and it seemed to him so real he could smell the sand, and feel the breeze in Peter's hair.
*
The German edition of Endland - from Swiss publisher Diaphanes is on it's way later this year. The new book (I mentioned before here) will feature the stories from the original Endland
collection, as well as a collection of further stories in related
territory, many of which were written for other projects, notably
Barbara Campbell's 1001 nights castand Kate's own performance Loose Promise.
I just got the cover for the German Endland. It uses a great wrap-around photo from an installation called Pygmallion by Swedish artist, Charlott Markus who's based in the Netherlands. You can see her work here - I love the feel of it and the scrappy, violent dysfunction of it plays really well to Endland's landscape. The image from the cover is about number six in the sequence. The cover itself, below, looks lovely.
Another extremely positive review of That Night Follows Day from the Tramway performances here (second piece on the page, with the title slightly wrong!), this one from the Scotsman.
*
Liking this violent and endlessy convoluted Guardian piece on drug gangs in Liverpool, especially the overload of nick-names, and jargon explanation.
They call it Easydrugs. With counter-narcotics officers able to monitor emails and telephone conversations, the latest modus operandi of Liverpool's cocaine dealers relies on catching budget flights from Merseyside to contacts throughout Europe, relaying messages and instructions in person, often returning the same day...
Smigger decided to front it out. He was a good blagger. He told the
people from the Faraway Place [the Liverpool mafia's nickname for
Colombia] that the load [of cocaine] was probably rotting on a dockside somewhere in
Holland and that he knew nothing about it.
And later in the same piece:
The Colombians contracted a top emissary in the Flat Place [underworld
slang for the Netherlands] to recover the debt. He went to Amsterdam,
but he was shot by Smigger's firm.
Spending hours on this kind of thing at the moment. Great chunks of time getting transcribed from video tape, compared, annotated, re-done, rehearsed, edited, tweaked then re-transcribed, annotated and re-done. It can get to feel like you're in Tom McCarthy's Remainder (I wrote about it here). All towards the new Forced Entertainment performance Spectacular which opens this Thursday here in Essen. See the FE site here for more details.
Overheard from the troubled looking Tour Manager, talking on his mobile in the hotel breakfast room.
Yeah.
...
Look. The problem is that onstage theyre just not the same sympathetic band they were before.
...
They're all past their 40th birthdays and they're all complaining about the breakdown of their marriages.
...
Yeah.
...
Well, you can deal with Greg then...
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