Regular Size Ants

2011-08-29T17:05:00.000-07:00

"Whenever he dreamed of them, glory and death and woman were consubstantial. Yet when the woman had been attained, the other two withdrew beyond the offing and ceased their mournful wailing of his name. The things he had rejected were now rejecting him."

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea

perfect endings (i)

2011-02-01T09:50:00.000-08:00

One of the faces I love most in the world.
Martin Donovan when he was young.
Why are the faces we love also the ones that haunt us? There is memory of rain, particular rain, past-eleven in the morning rain, in all the faces I love. Being able to remember the exact light, the exact feel of the fake-marble cheap table under my hand. The cheap coffee. The exact light. Rain smells of the pavement it falls on. It's grey.
The needless tragic ending of Amateur. Which is not to say it's not a perfect ending. It's perfect because it didn't have to be tragic. The randomness of its tragic outcome is what makes it perfect. What makes it tragic. It's not the blood, it's not the death. It's the fact that there could have been not-death, not-blood.

i want my tongue to be my own again.

2010-12-18T03:09:00.000-08:00

It's not as easy as saying I don't write in my tongue to hide myself. I run away from my language because I cannot face it. Nor can I face myself, my family, my landscape. There are bits of December sunlight in Madrid that I miss. There are streets in the gay neighbourhood. Sounds. Cafés and bars and certain menus handwritten in chalk. Because I run away from the town I cannot return to the town. Because I run away I miss it.

And then the faces, which are not the faces of my friends. I miss my friends but I do not think about the faces of my friends. I think about the faces of actors. The face of Tristán Ulloa, whom I've been in love with since Mensaka. The face of Roberto Enríquez. The face of Alberto Jiménez. The face and the voice of Marta Belaustegui. Also Leonor Watling whom I've last seen in Lope and who was incandescent in it. Lope is a very mediocre film but it made me long for my mothertongue. We all have secret saints we construct secret private altars to and mine is Lope De Vega. For him I do not dismiss my mothertongue completely.

That is to say, I miss the films of my country because I miss people's faces.

The problem of how to write in your own language when one has felt so divorced from it. The other side of the story, I have help there: if I feel anguish about writing in a language that is not mine - an imprecise language, words that don't come naturally to me - then I turn to Nabokov and his own anguish. But, how to come back to the other side?

I am losing my language word by word. And each word is illuminated, at the same time. I am falling in love and I have no language to speak my love. In love with the loss of my capacities. To seek out the cure I read: that which I love, I read Pablo Rivero, Javier Calvo, Luna Miguel.

To return I read Lope De Vega.

69 by ryu murakami

2010-12-12T03:35:00.000-08:00

This I know.

This landscape is familiar. These boys, sitting on the grass reluctantly sharing a bento talking about Rimbaud and Godard, making up impossible stories to satisfy their egos. The revolution will not come: they are just looking to shag some girls.

I am at ease here and though much of my approach to reading is find out that which I know nothing of sometimes I fall in love with familiarity. Here is a book I can recognize, it is foreign to me and yet it makes me think of all those years of Japanese cinema, it makes me think of my love for Oshima, which is true love no matter how you look at it, his youth films, his pessimistic disillusioned youth films. The memory of a conference by Robert Cueto about cinema and taboo, with bits of Tokyo Decadence shown, with the exploration of masochism as something cathartic. The memory of the years and the thousand of hours of loving fictional japanese teenagers. Everybody falling in love with Ryuhei Matsuda in Blue Spring while I was busy falling in love with Hirofumi Arai. Falling off rooftops. Rooftops are a very japanese fictional device. Now I think about the end of 21st Century Boys. Now I remember all the rooftop scenes in all the doujinshi I collect. My Prince of Tennis doujinshi are full of rooftops. I want to write books full of rooftops. I can't remember if there are any rooftops in All About Lily Chou-Chou but whenever I think about Japanese teenagers I think about Shunji Iwai's film. Now I can't listen to Debussy without thinking about the green grass of Lily Chou-Chou.

All this inform my reading of 69, and my love for it. My love and frustration at Murakami's novels Almost Transparent Blue and Coin Locker Babies. The other ones, In The Miso Soup and Audition, were easier to read but maybe for that very reason I liked the earlier ones more. 69 is like the earlier ones but also easy to read.

It's also a very funny book.

This is the kind of humour I want in a book. Here is my fondness of unreliable narrators (here is me thinking about Kyon in Suzumiya Haruhi and here is me thinking about Tomokazu Sugita's voice, which is the voice I hear when I read the Suzumiya Haruhi books, which I read in Spanish, so really it is Tomokazu Sugita's voice speaking into my head in Spanish, a very private experience). (Now I can't listen to Satie without thinking about Suzumiya Haruhi). The adventures of the narrator trying to shoot a low-budget film reminds me of reading a biography of Shinja Tsukamoto. It must have been 2001 or 2002. I still have that book. I have all the books on Japanese cinema that I once bought. I have sold many of my books but not these. In 69 I find all that I love about Japanese fiction, about why I love these films, these manga. When I say love I realize I should be saying "obssession". But in 69 there's also the protagonist's obssession with the French. With the nouvelle vague. With looking like Alain Delon or feeling like Jean-Paul Belmondo, or the other way around. About dreaming of French movies he has not seen. In this I recognize myself almost painfuly. I spent my youth dreaming of French movies I had not seen.

69 by Ryu Murakami is the anti-Haruki Murakami novel. This is a good thing.

My love for this book works by association. When the protagonist says that terrorism is the only option I remember all the Wakamatsu films I've seen. All the Wakamatsu films I haven't seen but I say I've seen.

All books should have a scene where two teenagers share a bento in the grass. (They also should have a character that could be played by Tadanobu Asano because if not, what's the point in writing a novel?) Now I remember how, last year, I wanted to write a novel which was a sad, gay version of Touch! I wanted to write about the relationship between the silence of unrequited love and desire and the silence of mute manga panels. I still want to write this book. All my books are a form of fanfic.

Of all the novels I've read this year 69 is probably my favourite.

I don't know if I can really help you through your uncertainties.

2010-12-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

As far as missing out on life because of devoting your time to writing, I don't think you need to worry about that: life will happen to you no matter what you do. There will be joys and celebrations. There will be nights crossing bridges you don't know the name of when some unspeakable beauty envelopes you.

Dean Young.

all of this can be broken

2010-12-04T02:52:00.000-08:00

I might be apart of this
ripple on water from a lonesome drip
A fallen tree that witness me
I'm alone,
Him and me.

Laura Marling

narratives of vengeance (not)

2010-12-01T12:45:00.000-08:00

I am not interested in the narratives of vengeance.

I am not seduced by them.

But I'm interested in their by-products. All those doors that vengeance forever closes. All those what-ifs all those possibilities. Walk away and take my hand and forget about all this. Love as the opposite of revenge,if only you could allow yourself the possibility of love. If Hamlet had stayed with Horatio meaning of course he couldn't but sometimes I like to wonder. I'd like to write about it.

The way Neuro is destroying my soul because I know what happens. Spoilers are a blessing and a curse. The way it is destroying my soul because I cannot stop the what-if. I cannot stop trying to open the doors that will forever be closed. Because I'm too old to be obssessed with age-difference relationships but I am still obssessed so there you have it.

le monde vivant.

2010-11-28T02:24:00.000-08:00

I am binded by words.

and it rains.

2010-10-22T13:00:00.000-07:00

and I read Dennis Cooper.

rejection - romance.

2010-10-14T02:34:00.000-07:00

I recieved a very nice, very positive rejection for my novel from Canongate (big damn heroes, and yes that would be my choice of publishing house if I could publish with anyone in the world). The only thing that bugged me is that they said they rejected the novel on the basis that they didn't publish romance genre. Uh. I don't think my novel is a romance. Sure, I have joked that the closest thing to definition for it would be experimental chick-lit. I wonder if their answer would be the same if they didn't know I was a woman. Plenty of writers turn in novels that are basically a love story but no one would dream of calling that "romance". So the basis of my book is a romantic/erotic relationship but that doesn't make it of the romance genre anymore than you would consider The Bird Room or Apples romances.

In any case I think I've learned a lesson: I changed the synopsis I'm sending out a bit to include the other elements of the plot that have nothing to do with romance genre (the non-chronological narration, the music, the imaginary construction of the city). And just in case I've only put my initials so that nobody can tell if I'm a guy or a woman at first.

the writer is a receiver and the content is already out there.

2010-09-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

The question is: what is culture for? Is it a vanity mirror for liberal society to see itself reflected back in the way it wants to see itself? Or is it something else, something more disruptive? I think culture should disrupt; it should be troublesome. If it's a mirror, it should be the cracked one that Joyce talks about; or Lewis Carroll's one that opens up on huge abysses; or the mirror in Jean Cocteau's Orphée, where you look in to it and you don't see yourself reflected back, instead you see the void – you see death at work, "like bees in a hive of glass". Fucking great line.

interview with Lee Rourke and Tom McCarthy at The Guardian.

the artist, after the accident.

2010-09-11T10:58:00.000-07:00

[x]

She thought that if she could not use her hands like this she would die.

Quietly, but she would.

She finds new strength in this new body, hers, because she has everything to learn. Again. Like a schoolgirl. Like a little girl making pigeons out of clay. This is a new chance: she thought she knew everything. This material, unfamiliar, hard, damp, alive. Musk of deep-red dirt. Her hands - the connections between muscles still asleep, the nerve endings in her fingertips still numb - carve out primeval shapes in the earth. Like the world after the rain, it is malleable. Crippled. It will learn to fly.

these are the terms.

2010-09-01T01:38:00.000-07:00

EVERYTHING we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.

Adrienne Rich.

2010-08-07T03:16:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think we should just live the motto: "All good things come from Manchester". But that's just me.

of rebels long gone,

2010-07-20T05:05:00.000-07:00

morning of listening to The Milkshakes. specially "Everywhere I Look". the heat. summer is a hideous thing, it should be banned. depressing, the impossibility of finding clothes my size. we got tickets for Inception tonight. i predict a fluke.

instructions for a sound & light machine.

2010-07-18T02:53:00.000-07:00

light constructs him visible. nothing exists in the pauses (the dark corners are dots not holes - something exists). repetition is the totem of poetry. repeat repeat repeat it until it's beautiful.

i like to read the lines of your face, your history in depth.

2010-07-17T03:24:00.000-07:00

There are few things in this world as poignant at Chris Eccleston's face.

Music My Father Would Like #1

2010-07-16T11:21:00.001-07:00

There's something terrifically nostalgic in going through the stacks of records at the Notting Hill Record Exchange (its sister shop dedicated to second-hand books is the closest to a home I feel I have in this city). Nostalgic in the way characters in animes say "nostalgic" (these days we're rewatching Toradora!, masterpiece) - that is, in reference to missing a kind of feeling that was never there in the first place. Feeling nostalgic for something that never happened in the first place. I become a well-intentioned poser in these second-hand record stores. I pretend to know more than I really do. I want to impress the people who work there; those long-bearded middle-aged men who mock the Rough Trade mania and seem impossibly cool to me in their disdain.

I wanted to buy a record for my father's birthday. I had a note with names of bands I thought my father would enjoy (but hopefully didn't already have in his collection). The note read:

~~The Fleshtones.~~
Cockney Rejects.
The Lambrettas.
*The Chords.
The Crack. ("In search of")
~~Mose Allison.~~
Purple Hearts.
Hersham Boys.
*The Dentists.

I forgot the note at home.

In the end I bought a rare cool-looking compilation that features three songs by Purple Hearts. The man behind the till didn't seem impressed by my good taste. I was going to buy a really nice double LP by Hersham Boys but it was too expensive and I love my father but I am poor.

And I don't even know if he likes Hersham Boys.

april 27

2010-04-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

Martín Ramírez Sin título (Ciervo sentado con rostro abstracto)
ca. 1960 -1963

Eco-taxis

by Clive Warner

Green eco-taxis gather at night
under grey concrete bridges
metal woodlice mount each other
flash mirrors bump fenders rub wheels
stick exhaust pipes into each other.
Radiators boil over, steam rises
oil drips amber from sump pans
transmission fluid leaks past seals
green water trickles from radiators
cooling systems fail in heat.
Ochre flakes fall from dented bodies
headlights wink in the darkness
turn signals blink red yellow red
springs relax tiredly under seat covers
taximeters explode in blue sparks.

lately i've been listening for sunshine.

2010-04-15T04:35:00.000-07:00

bulgakov vintage classic editions

2010-04-14T03:49:00.000-07:00

april 3

2010-04-03T09:42:00.000-07:00

photograph by philippe vogelenzang.

October

by Jacob Polley

Although a tide turns in the trees

the moon doesn't turn the leaves,

though chimneys smoke and blue concedes

to bluer home-time dark.

Though restless leaves submerge the park

in yellow shallows, ankle-deep,

and through each tree the moon shows, halved

or quartered or complete,

the moon's no fruit and has no seed,

and turns no tide of leaves on paths

that still persist but do not lead

where they did before dark.

Although the moonstruck pond stares hard

the moon looks elsewhere. Manholes breathe.

Each mind's a different, distant world

this same moon will not leave.

april 2

2010-04-02T04:40:00.000-07:00

photo by johan bergstrom.

Meanwhile by Richard Siken

    Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make
                                                                     the new streets yours.
Trees outside the window and a big band sound that makes you feel like
                everything's okay,
    a feeling that lasts for one song maybe,
                                       the parentheses all clicking shut behind you.
                      The way we move through time and space, or only time.
The way it's night for many iles, and then suddenly
                                                                                                it's not, it's breakfast
     and you're standing in the shower for over an hour,
                                                         holding the bar of soap up to the light.
I will keep watch. I will water the yard.
                Knot the tie and got to work. Unknot the tie and got to sleep.
                                                                          I sleep. I dream. I make up things
      that I would never say. I say them very quietly.
                                                        The trees in the wind, the streetlights on,
                        the click and flash of cigarettes
being smoked on the lawn, and just a little kiss before we say goodnight.
              It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,
                                                                                           green beautiful green.
        It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green.

the breaks between research are for sleeping, not reading

2010-03-04T02:19:00.000-08:00

browsing through the latest issue of Action Yes.

in awe of the two wonderful poems by Amy Catanzano.

currently obssessed by the expression, "My lines keep falling through the false floor."

2010-01-04T02:28:00.000-08:00

favourite tracks of 2009

2009-12-13T04:14:00.000-08:00

10 - Rose Elinor Dougall - Fallen Over

9- Slow Club - Apples and Pairs

8- The Pains of Being Pure At Heart - Young Adult Friction

7- Eugene and the Lizards - Grogshop

6- The Editors - Papillon

5- The Dirty Projectors - "No Intention"

4- Girls - Lust for Life

3- Grizzly Bear - Fine for Now

2- Mumford & Sons - White Blank Page

1- Memory Tapes - Run Out

small-sized bites of ant food.

2009-12-12T11:16:00.000-08:00

1) There's an excerpt of Sasha Fletcher's When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill The Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs In The Clouds at Lamination Colony. The except is full of new & surprising words that you'll want to eat up. You can order the novel(la) from ML here. Wish I could order it now (but I'm afraid all my internet ordering funds were caught up in ordering ML's First Year Anthology). In any case buy it cause Fletcher writes pretty pretty things such as this little thing here.

2) Speaking of ML Press (& how it basically dominates my life in alarming ways), Molly Gaudry's We Take Me Apart is ready to go will soon ship. I was thinking how nice it would be if it were the first book I read in 2010...

3) Everything is Fine is a novel by Socrates Adams-Florou. Check the extract and cover and stuff.

4) I Hate Blake Butler Cause He Makes Me Feel Like An Ignorant Poser When He Talks About 25 Important Books Of The 2000s (Of Which I Have Only Read 2) could be an awesome title for a song, yeah. It's also very, very true.

5) Mmmm, you know, when I was little I used to had this irrational hatred of number 5. I don't know when that stopped. Maybe in college. I would like to know why it happened, though. The circumstances that conspired so that I'd stop hating 5.

hate to agree. but. uk film of the year.

2009-11-11T08:57:00.000-08:00

let's defy (define?) hyperrealism.

it's God you were looking for.

2009-10-18T05:07:00.000-07:00

Things that are brilliant this week:

- Early Sunday Morning re-watch of Bresson's Lancelot Du Lac. I only meant to watch a scene but it's so mesmerizing that I ended up going along for the whole ride once more.

- Louis Ferdinand Celine:

Long live Peter the Great! Long life to Louis XIV! Up with Fouquet! Genghis Khan, ten thousand years! Up with Bonnot-and all his gang! And anybody else for that matter! But weep ye no tears for Landru! Because every bourgeois has got some Landru in him. It's sad, isn't it? And there's nothing to be done about it either! The revolution of '93, in my opinion, was the work of the lackies! Lackies who took everything word for word, lackies who vociferated, lackies of the pen, who, one fine night, took over the castle, all of them crazed by jealousy, raving, riddled by envy, they pillage, slaughter, and then settled in to count up the sugar, the sheets, the cutlery... they inventory everything... they were never able to stop. The guillotine was an accounting office... on they go counting up the sugar lumps till they die... mesmerized by the lumps! You wouldn't even have to hunt them down to kill them-you'll always find them in the same place-down there in the kitchen, counting. They're still there. What can they lose by it! You can't take this pack of windy, intellectual, impressionist, confusionist, leftist, unreconstructed, conservative hair-splitting arguers-all of them up to the gills in ulterior motives-seriously! One look is enough. They'll go where you tell them to go. After the smell of lucre! Onto the soap-box!

- John Hopkins at the ICA, "Insides". Sometimes I wish I could write like music, liquid and lost.

- Gigantic Magazine is out and I've finally caught up. Loving the design so much. I also love this little piece of art intensely.

- Dogzplot call for submissions for their next issue is on the theme of MAGIC. For some reason it made me think of Jonathan Safran Foer's short story for A Convergence of Birds and how I read it as a re-telling of Death in Venice but I never really knew what it was about. Maybe I should write something about magic.

- This poem by Evie Shockley at the Winter Issue of Le Petite Zine.

- Any poem by Bernadette Mayer.

- J.A. Tyler's review of Blake Butler's Scorch Atlas:

Scorch Atlas is a world of mold, a world of festering wounds, a world of hurt. Scorch Atlas is a carefully and meticulously distraught world of language, a trembled and shaken line of thought, a vibrant dead trance of phrasing, the measure of words put together all and in the right ways.

why we love fyodor

2009-10-08T03:56:00.000-07:00

"Loose women would gather in the house right in front of his wife, and orgies took place."
The Brothers Karamazov.

Apart from being a kickass writer in the truest sense of the word "kickass" reading Dostoevsky is always an exercise on regaining the pure, unadulterated joy of late-teenage reading. It brings me back to the time I first started reading Borges, Cortazar, Faulkner. Because, and this is something I don't hear people say nearly enough, reading Dostoevsky is a lot of fun. The kind of books you lose hours of sleep upon, reading into 3 or 4 in the morning for the sheer pleasure of the story, the language, the pathetic and unforgettable characters, the dry sense of humour, the humanity. 2007 saw me falling in love with Crime and Punishment. Last year I read The Idiot voraciously and loved every page of it. I decided to tackle elusive Karamazov (I remember trying to read it when I was 14 in an atrocious Spanish translation, I gave up after 100 pages or so). Sleepless nights to come.

Other cool things read this week:
- Andrew Borgstrom's "Stories with teeth in them" at Lamination Colony. Clever with great turns of phrase.
- JA Tyler interviewing Sean Lovelace for the new Chapbook Review.
- Jimmy Chen's "Check, please?" which I have no idea why I hadn't read before. Sometimes it's hard to be up to day with favourite authors. Also, May was a difficult month.
- Page 94 of Le Clezio's The Book of Flights, specially "let me see the reverse, the interior, life's red hollow, the fissure..."
- Bookslut's interview with Brandon Scott Gorell. I find it hard to talk about poetry, not because I don't read a lot, quite the contrary. What I mean to say, Scott Gorell is amazing.
- George Saunders' "Sea Oak" at the Barcelona Review. For some reason the line "It's Father Brian with a box of doughnuts." has stuck in my head.
- Adam Thirlwell's Miss Herbet, which I've been reading on and off in the uncomfortable couches of Foyles South Bank.
- Senses of Cinema's article on the Straubs & Cézanne. Quite rad. I've only started getting into Straub's and Huillet's work seriously this past summer, it's heavy stuff, even for us former film students but it's completely gorgeous and essential art. It makes me excited about cinema again. Also, glad to be reading Senses of Cinema once more. I had lost track.

Also, Blake Butler got a deal with Harper Perennial. That's really great news. I can think of few authors that feel more exciting than Butler nowadays and it's great to see cool people doing well.

Also, ML Press is going to publish an anthology with all their chapbooks. I am so tempted to pre-order like right this very instant. So many amazing stuff in there; Brandi Wells and Jac Jemc and Brian Evenson and Peter Markus and Johannes Goransson and Eugene Lim and... Well, you get the picture. I wish I wasn't broke (and/or saving for a trip to New York next spring). Maybe even so I will give into the temptation. It's damn cheap, too, if you ask me.

Question: Could buying another edition of Chris Killen's "The Bird Room" just because it has a different cover be considered a waste of money? If the answer is yes, I don't want to know. After all, I own 6 different edition of "Lolita", thank you very much.

you have been selected at random

2009-10-07T04:24:00.000-07:00

My complimentary issues of Mslexia Magazine arrived in the mail yesterday.

It doesn't really help to read all the people who won the competition that I did not win.

On the other hand, Blake Butler's list of towering literary artists makes me happy. Specially Amy Hempel of course.

Rejection, but with a smile

2009-09-25T12:43:00.000-07:00

My story "European Nights" was rejected by Thieves Jargon. It's not a very good story and I sort of submitted it on pure faith but the rejection email by Dan signing for co-editor Steve Young was short and nice and made me feel good about the rejection and he even suggested some reading, which I think it's beyond cool. And he welcomed me to submit again, which I will totally do, cause I love TJ. A rejection that does not crush my soul? Yep, they exist.

youtube alerts sometimes conspire against you

2009-07-07T15:49:00.000-07:00

Chris Killen reads from "Paul Simon Gives Chevy Chase The Finger" at Rough Trade East.

I spent most of my weekends at Rough Trade East and yet I was not here. I did not know Chris Killen was going to be there. I have missed my chance to stalk him.

You still can submit something to the Guardian Short Story competition. I am going to. It's a story about nazis and Sotheby's auctions.

I went to a classical music thing about Robert Burns today. It was in a very small church in the City. All the musicians were irreverently young and odd-looking. It felt like I was witnessing some sort of Nodame Cantabile cosplay.

How would I ever become a serious literaty author if I keep referring to Haydn in terms of japanese manga for girls? Maybe then I do not want to become a serious author. Does Ian McEwan casually quote Hana Yori Dango at parties? I wouldn't want to be Ian McEwan in any case.

The BBC documentary about Rufus Wainwright was rad.

on the shelves (or not): Loops #1

2009-07-05T04:27:00.000-07:00

The first issue of Loops magazine is out. It includes new fiction by Chris Killen, whom, after reading The Bird Room, has become my latest literary crush. His story is titled "Paul Simon Gives Chevy Chase The Finger". Here's a bit from an extract in their website:

Paul Simon picks up a controller and presses a button, and the Yo La Tengo best-of CD Prisoners of Love starts playing throughout the house. Paul Simon sits on the salmon-coloured leather chair and listens to Yo La Tengo and closes his eyes as his cornflakes become soggy. Paul Simon wishes he could somehow saw himself free from the rest of his life, and go into a flotation tank and just listen to Yo La Tengo forever. He would eat using a tube and soup, maybe.

My current broke-ness* prevents me from picking up a copy right now. So my game plan these days is reading the whole issue standing up at HMV. This has started (yesterday, HMV at Covent Garden). You can also find Richard Milward's "Drugby Union" in it. Richard Milward is too young to have published two books and though I enjoyed Apples a lot I think I hate Richard Milward for being too damn young. Or maybe I just hate myself for not having two books published and poor Richard Milward has done nothing to deserve my hatred. Also, I must remember I liked people from Middlesborough because Mendieta played there for about five years.

If you can buy Loops #1, do so. It's edited by Domino Records and they produce Eugene McGuinness so even if record companies are always evil at least Domino's evilness has brought Eugene McGuinness to the world. Eugene is a force of Good. In any case, the magazine is fun to read.

* my current pathetic monies situation will become worse if I get selected to do this course. I would use that year to write a novel about britpop called "Song nº2" possibly. Or chick lit fiction. Or my planned series of YA novels about steampunk and Jack the Ripper and aliens in Victorian sewers and alchemists and Fredrich Engels. One of those three. Or not.

in defence of the mediocre (that's me)

2009-06-29T10:55:00.000-07:00

you know, i get why contest have entry fees but on the other hand, I just spent 7 quid entering the Bridgeport Prize and it kinda hurts. (and with a story that, in its first incarnation, was already been rejected by Ambit Magazine so I don't know why I bother - but I am secretly gleeful that at least I know one of my heroes Ali Smith will be reading the entries, so there's that).

And then there's the Manchester Fiction prize, which I really want to enter but oh well IT'S 15 BLOODY POUNDS. surely, the prize is £10,000 but most of us won't win that so. Getting shortlisted for that would be the coolest ever, wouldn't be? I mean, it would give me a proper excuse to finally visit Manchester, land of Thomas De Quincey, Jeanette Winterson, the Hacienda, Life on Mars and the 1999 football team of everybody's dreams.

In short: I want to enter literary contests but have no money. Entry fees are unfair (for me right now, I'm sure if you give me five minutes I'll come up with a good defence of contest entry fees but right now I'm hungry and can only afford Dae Ramen noodles as dinner).

I also had an excerpt of my novel, The Cardiff Affair, rejected by Dogzplot. And it's only Monday. Let's see if I can get to my birthday with at least five rejections this week.

It's really hot in London today and I don't feel like buying groceries. I stay in my room and go through the "very awesome writing" folder in my bookmarks and I wish, more than anything for a moment, that I was as talented as Matthew Kirkpatrick.

it's not that i don't like lit mags, it's that they don't like me.

2009-06-26T03:32:00.000-07:00

Another rejection, this time via anderbo.com, for my poor story about gay footballers (wait, you say. aren't all your stories about gay footballers? most possibly, yes). I didn't have much hopes for that one cause it wasn't exactly anderbo material. In any case, I'd thought I'll start posting about these things, at the risk of turning this blog into a chronicle of my failure.

In happier news: the Esotika, Erotica, Psychotica blog reviewing Arrebato makes me very happy. It's a wonderful review, as are most on that blog. In this case I have seen the film, but sometimes I enjoy reading reviews of films I've never seen so I can imagine how they could be. Like I often enjoy writing synopsis for books that haven't been written.

Arrebato is one of those movies, well, in Spain, it is a very big deal. Unavailable for years I had to be content with reading a million essays about it during a long long time. Directors and writers I admired praised it as the most challenging Spanish movie ever made. Its director, Iván Zulueta is kind of a doomed figure. When I finally got to see it I was afraid to be dissapointed, as it often happens with movies of such great expectations. Still, Arrebato is darker and weirder and cooler than anything you can imagine beforehand. I got to watch it on cinema in a festival but watched at home on the small tv screen it is equally terrifying. And strangely exhilarating. It's also my favourite take on the old trope "cinema as vampirism". It made me afraid of Super-8. I like films that are not a representation of relality but a different reality altogether.

on rejection

2009-06-23T19:21:00.000-07:00

There's this wonderful thing Jac Jemc does in her journal: she posts about every rejection he gets about any of her poems or stories. It is intensely healing to read about those things. Writers sometimes feel very alone about this sort of thing, we often think we are the only writers in the universe to ever get rejected. I enjoy other people's misery stories as much as I enjoy their triumph stories. Both are inspirational in their own way.

I had a job interview today.

I really wanted that job. It's a job at the theatre. And- Oh boy, I was going to say "theatre is my thing" but it's more really a matter of theatre being the thing that I want to be my thing.

Well, needless to say -if you take a hint from the title of this entry- I did quite badly in the interview. I did horridly. Comically so. I should make a short film about the kind of incompetence I displayed today.

What is more, this week I got a neat letter from Ambit saying they weren't interested in my story. Thank you but no, thank you.

Writers are a funny lot. On one hand we tend to be quite ego-bound, quite tough in our arrogance to believe that we have something to add to the history of literature (that we have something to say and all those trite lines, etc). On the other hand the level and frequency of our exposure to REJECTION is amazing. There must be something masochistic about us. Even then most detached author has to admit that something quite secret and private goes into writing and piece and then to send it out in the world and have someone you've never met say "bleh, I don't like it" (& send you a letter about how they don't like it), wow, it's really a grim prospect. Why do we keep doing this?

So I got rejected by Ambit. And I obviously didn't win the Mslexia short story contest with my Shakesperean tale. Or the Bristol Prize. And I'm obviously not going to win the ABCtales contest with my shitty, juvenile story. And the Bush won't produce my plays. So yeah, rejection is in the air this summer.

Sometimes I worry I am not edgy enough. I look at the writers I admire, the writers getting published frequently are either on the side of weird, dark, or extremely experimental. I think I stick too closely to traditional forms (I'd like to blow them from the inside, like Sarah Kane blew half of Blasted). I wish I were weirder, darker or more experimental.

I also wish I was Samuel Beckett.

Actually I mainly wish I was Sam Beckett.

So today's theme is rejection. It always hurts, even (specially?) when we say it doesn't. I felt monumentally shitty after doing so bad in the job interview. And as I often do when I feel less than brilliant I walked into a bookstore. Surround myself with books, that soothes the pain somehow. That sounds really esoteric and wanky. Sounding like a pretentious 14-year-old was my main trouble in the interview. I have to look into it. Anyway-

This afternoon I sat down at Foyles and I picked up a copy of Chris Killen's "The Bird Room". I never put it back. I took it home.

it's a good idea if you click "masthead" there's a picture of a boat. at sea.

2009-06-21T21:58:00.000-07:00

I wish I could describe how this short story by Kevin Wilson makes me feel. I want to plagarize it or retell it or turn into a movie or paint a watercolour out of it or sleep with it and wake up in the morning with it. It made me create a new folder in My Favourites called "awesome short stories" except that I misspelled "stories" as "soties" and I am to lazy to change it so now it's "awesome short soties" whatever that means. There's only five stories in that folder until now. There are very few soties out there that can make me feel as failed and revolutionary as Kevin Wilson's.

Big Fat Failure days are pretty standard these days, I go to bed at dawn and sleep late and mainly write crap at night, or watch shitty CAM versions of new movies or read e-lit zines and feel bad and pretentious. Mainly I update Tumblr with pictures of Dirk Bogarde.

This post by Shane Jones is very wise. It makes me feel bad because I haven't bought "Light Boxes" (also makes me feel bad because I like the German NT). I don't know Shane Jones but his writing feels new and somehow like we need one of those out there, if you know what I mean. I really want to read "Light Boxes". I really want to not be without money.

I wish I was less addicted to online lit mags.

I wish one of them would publish me.

I wish I wasn't so scared to send stuff to the ones I really like.

I wish I hadn't bought Cathy Yardley's "How To Write Chick Lit" because I don't plan on ever writing chick lit so it was quite a ridiculous impulse buy and all of its pages make me feel bad about myself and the world.

love stories are bresson paraphrasing at best.

2009-06-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

when i was 18 i wanted to be chuck palahniuk for like two whole minutes.
i guess it's a phase we all have to pass.
oh edward
oh edward
oh
oh
o e

we've just lost the color red.

2009-05-22T06:06:00.000-07:00

MF: Fassbinder felt that film had lost a great deal of its original content in the process of commercialization. He often deliberately overused clichés in an attempt to show the emptiness of the Hollywood film. Do you think that Fassbinder was correct?

Steve Erickson: That may be Fassbinder’s version of why he used the clichés, but I think the real reason is he loved them. I think he loved all that classic iconography of “empty” glamour and artificiality, and some part of him yearned to make Now, Voyager. A gay German Now, Voyager, maybe, but still.

This interview with Steve Erickson is rad. Still reading my way through Our Ecstatic Days -not sure, if it's completely the right place to start (him) - but I can already feel he will become a major thing for me. I like the way his pages look.

also edible.

2009-03-12T06:49:00.001-07:00

Flat stone sometimes lit sometimes not
One among many moodswung creatures
That have settled in this beautiful
Uncountry of an Estuary

Swans pitching your wings
In the reedy layby of a vacancy
Where the house of the sea
Can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour

All you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
Is both a barren mudsite and a speeded up garden
Full of lake offerings and slabs of light
Which then unwills itself to listen

All you crabs in the dark alleys of the wall
All you mudswarms ranging up and down
I notice you are very alert and worn out
Skulking about and grabbing what you can

Listen this is not the ordinary surface river
This is not river at all this is something
Like a huge repeating mechanism
Banging and banging the jetty

Very hard to define, most close in kind
To the mighty angels of purgatory
Who come solar-powered into darkness
Using no other sails than their shining wings

Yes this is the moon this hurrying
Muscular unsolid unstillness
This endless wavering in whose engine
I too am living.

Alice Oswald.

of the day. story. stories. stores.

2009-03-06T00:04:00.000-08:00

jeff wall.

4.
The man is trapped inside her pillowcase. He thought he could escape, but then she put the pillow sham on and he couldn’t find a way out. After a bit, the pillow sham made him feel more comfortable, like she was the kind of girl that would piss with the bathroom door open and drink beers with him on Sunday.

Fifteen unrelated stories titled "The Man Inside Her Pillowcase" by Brandi Wells. Keyhole Magazine.

read. evacuate. sleep (not)

2009-02-28T00:27:00.001-08:00

f.goya

Think how words become benign in languages you don’t know; compare it to the satisfaction of a twist ending; remember smashing your forearm against the doorknob accidentally and admiring the deep shades of the bruise.

THE TACKINESS OF SOULS by jac jemc.

blurred in carbon, feet and hands, a whole movement

2009-02-13T10:05:00.000-08:00

jmw turner

At our feet they lie low,
The little fervent underground
Rivers of London

Effra, Graveney, Falcon, Quaggy,
Wandle, Walbrook, Tyburn, Fleet

Whose names are disfigured,
Frayed, effaced.

These are the Magogs that chewed the clay
To the basin that London nestles in.
These are the currents that chiselled the city,
That washed the clothes and turned the mills,
Where children drank and salmon swam
And wells were holy.

ua fanthorpe

the trouble with public places

2009-01-28T19:10:00.000-08:00

Trying to be the optimist here.
Maybe we'll have to redesign
the whole aparatus
or
make a window to match our curtains.

pic from apartmenttherapy.

is it a happy ending or a broken heart

2008-11-30T08:05:00.000-08:00

The optimism of the open ending of Wonderland is not synonymous with a perpetuation of the traditional values which govern "boy meets girl", it does not mean a silly and idealistic mystification of love, it does not respond to to a revindication of the adolescent fantasy of our other half, served on a silver plate by destiny. If the viewer experiences it that way it is because Winterbottom manages something which belongs only to the realm of good filmmakers: to know how to connect the soul of the viewer with that of its fictional creatures, to have finally broken Alice's looking glass, another looking glass.

Sergi Sánchez, "Michael Winterbottom: El orden del caos"