Second place goes to this one:
Subject: On the site of each disintegration explosion, a fireball rose up first, immeasurably brighter than Sol itself.
First place goes to this one which came from my friend G. who just got
married. He was at the airport heading to honeymoon, sending and
checking last mail on wifi when it arrived.
Subject: In a lively row walking, drinking Sunset, voices, lights,
- all that's there, And at times lowering our eyelids Under someone's
assiduous stare.
The devil got all the best tunes but those spammers got all the best lines.
Really loving Dave Eggers' What is the What after strong recommendations from M John Harrison and from Hugo. I've always really liked Eggers as a writer of sentences. There's stuff in Heartbreaking Work and in You Shall Know Our Velocity
that has all the energy and verve of Kerouac at his best. I read
Kerouac at 17/18 I think, along with Burroughs whose hardcore cut-up Nova Express I accidentally picked up on Derby Market, having mistaken it for something by Edgar (Tarzan)
Rice Burroughs, whose probably stupid books about some bloke marooned
on Mars I liked. Oh well - I'm glad of these accidents of naming and
the alphabet. Some of Kerouac and Burroughs are really embedded in me
(though I think thankfully the Rice Burroughs is pretty well all washed
away). In Kerouac and Burroughs I found sentences, runs of words, but
more than that energies, approaches to language that I still draw on
from time to time, in that strange way that we do incorporate language
from other people, sample it, replay it, echo it, often unknowing and
unwittingly.
Despite the stylistic connection to Kerouac I've sometimes been
pushed back by the content in Eggers - the whole Real World/MTV thing
in the back end of Heartbreaking Work
I found too painful, or too thin, I was never sure which. In What is
the What though he's given up on the flowing, stream-of-consciousness,
post-Kerouac sentences and on the eternal teenager routine anyway and
replaced them with a very tight narrative structure and with what Mike
describes in his TLS review
as a kind of ventriloquism job; a manoeuvre that has Eggers inhabiting
someone else's life story entirely (that of Sudanese 'Lost Boy'
Valentino Achak Deng), whilst (at the same time) standing far back from
it (writing-wise) in order to let it breathe. No showing off, except
the kind of showing off that's all about not-seeming-to. Really great,
awful, disquieting, elegant. Funny too.
Before that I got about one third into We Have to Talk About Kevin.
I wasn't buying really. Didn't like the narrator, didn't believe in
'her/it' either and I really seemed to be being asked to believe. Had
that feeling I get sometimes with overbearing narrators that if I was
sat next to this person at a party or on a bus or whatever I would make
my excuses and leave. I guess the extended conceit (letters to the
ex-partner) started to drive me nuts too.
Listening (meanwhile) to No Age. Can't remember why a kind of lo-fi Los Angeles punk-duo crossed my radar at this point. Maybe via Other Music. The No Age CD Weirdo Rippers seems very cool I think, just playing some tracks from it here and there at the moment. In fact I am playing the track Everybody's Down many times over and over and the neighbours are fucking loving it. Ha ha.
Last weeks image residue: canisters of something called patio gas,
grinning burning men wrestled to the ground out of flaming Cherokee
jeeps by random have-a-go holiday-makers, cops in those white boiler
suits again, a forensic facility in Kent called The Igloo, flooded
streets, sunken cars and floating skips. Must be Summer.
Early morning, not even properly awake my brain grabs the first thought
that flits through it and somehow won't let go. Since I'm barely
conscious this thought - whatever it is - runs like wildfire, a
computer virus that's gained control, a rogue thought running
everywhere... This morning it was Shakespeare. I had some image of
Shakespeare, I have no idea why. Maybe from the Dr Who
episode that had him in a while back. Maybe cos we walked near the
Globe a week ago. Or I dunno. But suddenly I was thinking Shakespeare
and Time Travel. And then, still lying there, in the bed you
understand, eyes not even open yet, I was thinking about what if you
could make a movie about Shakespeare travelling in time. This stupid
thought then skidded around in many ways I can't even recall but soon
became an idea of a movie where Shakespeare arrives in Hollywood and is
put to work writing movie scripts. The whole thing seemed to be in the
area of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure... (which I can
hardly remember.. maybe I didn't even see it).. But in this idea that
was happening pretty well unbidden in my head Shakespeare was going
round LA to pool parties, heading out to the desert and having script
meetings..
But then, off to one side, there was a variation on the idea that it
should (or could?) be two modern-day scriptwriters that have somehow
gotten hold of Shakespeare, maybe abducting him via time travel and
keeping him locked prisoner in a motel and where he can work on scripts
for them; they have some heavy deadlines for costume dramas. Before
long I was thinking maybe these two guys might have a whole stable of
writers from the past locked up there in little rooms - Hemmingway
maybe, Austen, Conrad, Tolstoy - all of them working away in their
rooms with the curtains drawn, on projects they can hardly understand.
The two scriptwriters would be trying to keep their captives a secret
but also at the same time they'd have to introduce them to the 'modern
world', blowing their minds so speak with information and situations
they could use in their scripts. taking them to kewl parties, driving
them around in 4x4's, showing them TV, internet gaming etc.. Bill & Ted/The Man Who Fell To Earth...
And then I was thinking yeah but how do the two guys get the
time-travel to abduct these writers from out of chronology in the first
place? What's that all about? Is it like the geeky-kid brother of one
of the scriptwriters that's been dabbling in home time travel and
offers to help them when they get to the first impossible
writing-deadline on some historical movie?... Or?... And then finally
(I am waking up more properly by this point) I start wondering the
really big question - i.e. why am I even thinking about this stuff in
the first place? Its totally stupid.
Shit. If there was a way to direct (and harness) these early morning
flashes of mental energy I think they could be pretty useful. But in
the meantime I'm destined to produce more half-baked ideas for movies
that couldn't really be made and for which there's no particular use,
rhyme or reason.
My performance-for-sculptures collaboration with Elmgreen and Dragset, Drama Queens gets last word(s) in each of two round-ups about the Münster Sculpture Project this week; here from Ossian Ward in Time Out and here from Adrian Searle in The Guardian.
If I remember correctly it is hillarious according to one and "not
pompous" according to the other, which has to be good news. Münster runs until 30th September.
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