Tag: fiction

Intro for Maria Hardin 1/11/25

Pamphlets titled Sick Story spread into a spiral on a wooden table

Last night SPAM Press hosted the wonderful Swedish-American poet Maria Hardin at Mount Florida Books, Glasgow, alongside readings from Kate Paul and Jane Hartshorn. Here is the intro I read for Maria.

I want to begin by reading a poem by the late Rhiannon Auriol, who was a kind, talented and sharp-minded poet. She had a voice that felt genuinely fresh and we were always excited to get something new from her in our inbox. We published her in the Plaza and our online magazine several times and when it came to putting the lineup for tonight together, both Kirsty and I had the thought: I wish we could invite Rhiannon to read with Maria. Rhiannon forever.

Here’s the poem, which was published in pif magazine back in 2021.

I drop into this poem and I am petalled. I have put my hand in the new burr grinder of how I am learning to read in grief. This self-petalling is a relief. I will soften! I will become rose water, distilled into essence! Energised by short lines! There is something ugly-beautiful about my becoming rose-water of the nominative. Yes I was born with the middle name ‘Rose’ and also the first name Maria. Rhiannon writes of ‘the moon particularly / at sea’. Maria and I share a name meaning ‘of the sea’. We found each other via the kismet of poetry, and her poem called ‘Mariaology’ which features ‘a cascade of every maria’ which I first received as an iPhone photo. Last week I was researching something and stumbled on the phrase from the website MindBodyGreen which said, perfectly: ‘caffeine can disrupt your hormonal cascade’. I don’t know what a hormonal cascade is but I know I have felt it in poetry. Yes, for you I’d drop everything.

By some miracle of the ether Maria is now here in Glasgow tonight and we are launching her pamphlet and I am CAFFEINATED. My being caffeinated will never truly replenish my energy. There is a tale here. Rest without respite. Sick Story. I like to think of this as a sister pamphlet to Maria’s earlier work Sick Sonnets and also a cellular cascade of the voltas played within them. We have dying bees and the premise if not promise of healing. In Maria’s sick sonnet ‘Glossolalia’ the Steinian rose becomes a rat becoming also a rose and the speaker reads ‘emotional responses to the end of nature’. I have always loved the general mood of melancholia in Maria’s work, the way a speaker can latch, mutate and render ornate a feeling, an image whose origins remain mysterious. One never feels quite settled; there is a rat-like restlessness. Is that it? But also the still, slow burgeoning and wilting of the rose. Of devotion. Hours of languishing. The void is decorated all the better to feel it. The void is remixed. If there could be endless Proustian bedtime there could also be a pain psalm and a ‘baited lamb’. 

Sick Story looks for alternative narratives in its telling of chronic illness. It asks ‘what is the shape of a sick story?’, with an eye to Bernadette Mayer’s Story and Ursula Le Guin’s ‘carrier bag theory of fiction’ by way of explanation. For Le Guin, the carrier bag narrative is shaped like a bag, not the arrow of phallocentric linearity. Mayer’s Steinian Story bundles riddles, matter, anecdote, the stuff of ‘things’. Nothing feels pre-determined, destined for an ending; rather, all times rub their quantum shoulders in the bag. Have you ever rummaged in public for your medicine? Have you ever written notes on the back of your hand, worried the ballpoint would seep beneath your skin and stain something irrevocably navy? Have you ever shaken your life up so much you could almost smell its perfume? 

Here is a snippet of Mayer’s Story:

Voices fall.

It may be seen feeding on this under one of those tropical things.

The time or place of starting. 

He throws a hat on a seal’s head and a piece of his pack into a whale’s mouth, marking their characteristics. 

Lamp, lucite and plastic. 

I saw one once in a book, but I didn’t rip it to shreds, or even divide it, as I could

have (snap), but left it whole (shot), which it could never be unless it were left 

that way. 

Will that have anything to do with this? (67)

Mayer’s storied ingredients are packed upon each other like the storeys of a building. She disrupts the assumed causality of narrative with a prompt — that of the child’s or editor’s: ‘Will that have anything to do with this?’. I am at the soft mercy of every bedtime story. Once gathered into the bag, is everything relevant? And where does it take us. Details are listed like precious cues. Lamp, lucite and plastic. The pronoun ‘it’ bears wild liberty in its free-kicking materiality. I trample ‘it’ under the ‘perfect lucite heel’ to which the speaker of ‘Mariaology’ prays. I sub ‘it’ under light, lux, something solid and transparent — the supposed clarity of what I am trying to say, what does it all mean. What is the ‘time and place of starting’ when it comes to illness? From where do voices petal and fall? Are they, like rain, a kind of interference? Mayer asks ‘What did the rose do?’ after the word ‘History’. I think Maria is answering that question in her remix. We invent from adjacency some kind of story. Is the rose sick, is it guilty? How to place these scenes. I think of something Jane wrote in the same issue of SPAM magazine where we first published Maria: ‘Houses appear / where once there was marshland, a thin burn threading / between them.’ My imagination shrinks these houses to the size of pages and now I want to live in them. And you can too.

Here’s Maria Hardin, thanks everyone.

🌹

You can buy Sick Story from SPAM Press here.
It is SUCH a cute edition (A6 pocket-sized) and the writing will stay with you a long time. Carry it with you!

You can buy Maria’s debut collection, Cute Girls Watch While I Eat Aether (2024) from Action Books here.

Here is a long essay I wrote about roses, via Idlewild/Stein/Lana Del Rey/Joyce et al, back in 2017.

A second smaller heart: on writing The Indigo Hours

The first song I was ever obsessed with was Suzanne Vega’s ‘Marlene on the Wall’. It was on a compilation CD called Simply Acoustic that I’d found somewhere in the house. I’d listen to it over and over again on the CD player in my room. What I loved about this song was its narrative possibility. The protagonist triangulates her love affairs under the watchful eye of ‘Marlene’ looking down at her from the wall. My child’s mind made up all kinds of stories about this. Marlene could be an older sister, a mentor, maybe the lover of one of the men that passed through the life of her. Marlene seemed cold. She was not a jealous lover, she didn’t act out. Anything advised by Marlene is provisional, ‘what she might have told me’. I imagined her having very thick eyeliner.

For a long while, Marlene was a kind of angel to me. I saw her wherever I saw people on the wall. A Picasso print of a woman drinking coffee on a balcony. I haven’t been able to source this painting except to remember there was long dark wavy hair, the colours purple and yellow, coffee. I remember thinking it looked a little like my mother. It’s not something we kept when we had to clear her flat this summer. Maybe I took a picture, but I don’t want to look for it. Marlene showed up in my dreams. Marlene was there in my imaginary stories. I could never tell if she was the protagonist of a life or someone to whom things were done. She seemed to encapsulate a distant sexual maturity while also representing ‘the impossible’ and so, the untouchable.

*

I see 2018 as an apex year in my life. I remember dazzling summer nights, two kingfishers, kissing in the midst of cinders, hiding, my phone pinging constantly, no homework, sparkle emoji. This was the year I wrote the novella that Broken Sleep are publishing next week. I started writing The Indigo Hours partly in solidarity with a close friend who was writing a novella for her Masters degree. I was a year out from my MLitt and waiting to start a PhD. I don’t think we shared any work in progress; we just swapped manuscripts when we’d got to the end. I don’t remember writing this book. I don’t remember if I wrote it on my phone, a library computer, the Chromebook in the restaurant I worked at. Maybe it bounced between these locales. Maybe the bouncing was painful. It involved data loss. When I meditated today the AI-generated female voice said ‘find a point in your breath and this will be your anchor’. The point in my breath is a ‘flashing’ spot in my chest. It is an anxiety motor. It cannot be my heart because it is too centred. But of course it is my heart. Sometimes I think I have a second smaller heart lodged in my sternum, where I used to get an ache from purging. This heart is blue, a mottled and gold-streaked blue, and it is rare like the blue version of the rose, my middle name. Semi-precious.

I wanted to tell this story about two people kissing illicitly in a garden, surrounded by white poppies and mystery. I wanted to write about the indigo hour of midsummer dawn, when you are up all night with someone, the breath before a comedown, before it’s all over. I wanted to write about a relationship that felt like that and whose dramaturgy was always the dawn. I wanted to write about something that was ending over and over again, and the ending wasn’t the point. There was a life and people drifted in and out of it. I wanted to write about arousal and attention, sentiment and giving up.

The summer before The Indigo Hours took shape, I was writing a thesis about the curatorial novel, about object-oriented ontology. I was interested in what Ben Lerner says about fiction staging encounters with other art forms. For that to be embodied and taking place in a credible present. I was interested in the refrain of unseasonable warmth that haunts his novel 10:04, the way the narrator might have these hotspots of medial feeling owing to places in New York City where he received such and such a text. I was reading a lot of books that take place in the disintegration of some kind of love affair — Joanna Walsh’s Break.up and Lydia Davis’ The End of the Story (also loaned by the novella-writing friend). I don’t remember the plots of these books at all but I see them essentially as ‘novels that walk around, receiving and metabolising messages’.

Turning to write myself, I wanted to create a fictional world in the aperture of indigo, the special hours of Scottish nights in June and July where it never really gets dark — there remains this blueish glow to the sky. I knew these hours to be indigo because I didn’t really know what indigo looked like, only that it was some kind of shade of blue and everyone seemed to disagree about how light or dark it was. A morning and eveningness, a not quite. More like a mineral or texture.

How deep in the woods to go to get this indigo. How deep in love did we go, or in druggy reverie. It all felt so subjective, translucent. The love I was writing about was already belated, collaged and distributed unevenly through various places, fantasies and timelines. What could I say about it? This love that made an ‘I’ into both subject and object. That distorted the closure we had been raised on to believe was love’s destiny. It was an ambient intimacy, then. It was in medias res, ongoing. The midtone of indigo. In the process of editing the raggedy manuscript (what I referred to, in an email to the poet Callie Gardner, as ‘the trashy wee thing’) a couple years later, I discovered the phenomenon of indigo children. Since then I have learned more about what it means to be an indigo from the writer Laynie Browne. I relate this to a phenomenon of emotional & intellectual hyper-attentiveness my ex and I used to refer to as ‘shine’, also to a feeling of hyper-empathy and sensitivity not just to the mood of a room but to the mood of anything more-than-human. If you are capable of shine, if you are inclined to indigo, your presence might follow a gradient opacity. In Committed: On Meaning and Madwomen, Suzanne Scanlon has a chapter ‘Melting’ which talks about what it feels like to have ‘no glue’ and no security: ‘You could melt into another person, or melt into a place like this [a psychiatric hospital]’. This melting is akin to what Stephen King calls ‘the shining’ or what others call ‘sensitivity, insecurity, shyness. Fragility’ (Scanlon). I’m interested in how to put that kind of melting character on the page. What would her voice sound like?

A vessel, a leaky container…a watercolour palette smudging ceaselessly in stroke after stroke…Being an indigo is a lonely experience but one that lights up at the world. Pure indigo has a high melting point; when heated, it will eventually decompose or sublimate. For some people, reading indigo must surely be excruciating. For others, it is true. I think indigos come from elsewhere, they remember other times, their memories mutate and take form in their dreams, they bear an awful gift, they don’t belong to any fixed thing. What could be their future, is it possible. It doesn’t have to be something that makes you special. There is a kind of love that makes you indigo, opens you. For a lot of my life and even now, I walk around like an animal or an open wound. These are cheap metaphors. It is more that I walk around like the weather. No, I walk around like indigo. I freeze-dry experiences into crystals and exhale them on the page. I can’t say whether this produces realism; it’s very smudged.

Trying to put Marlene on the page was an act of transmutation. I read Timothy Morton on beauty’s perception as an act of ‘attunement’. I wondered if my attempt at fiction was really just an attempt at sensing beauty. But there is a lot of horrible stuff in this book. A lot takes place in the shadows. A lot of the scenes are decontextualised and in a sense ‘free-floating’. We don’t get heightened climaxes and denouements so much as vignettes melting into one another. In Reading Machines: Ambient Writing and the Poetics of Atmospheric Media, Alec Mapes-Frances talks about the ambient poetics of Lisa Robertson and Tan Lin as a ‘vaporisation of the lyric subject or self’. I saw Marlene as a soluble force more than as a coherent character, a stable subject. Marlene was a problem to be solved; she was able to be dissolved. I needed the temporal mode of fiction to play this out over time, place and encounter. Ambience refers to the surroundings of something, the environment, a kind of base existence (there is light, it is blue; there is this mood; the room is cool) tinted with some accompaniment, encompassing. Can we plot ambience the way we might plot time? This was something I was concerned with when writing the book.

My friend Stuart read an early version of the manuscript and said something about it being constructed around several pillars or towers. I think he was referring to place, as it stands in the story. The central (unnamed) city, Berlin and the prairie. I imagined these towers as constructed of fragile pixels. A little data moshed and crumbling. The movement through the story might be closer to a dérive or distracted wandering (I imagine readers skipping over, revisiting, forging microloops as I did in the writing). Insofar as I can remember writing the book (which I cannot) I was doing so in order to ‘read’ a relationship. This took place in a series of loops and compressions. Similar things said, the same mistakes, rotations of closeness and distance. My towers were constructed to make something semi-permanent of a very dissolving time. Aaron Kent’s cover for the book invites you to choose from various alcoves and passageways, or drift onwards into mise-en-abyme. All the while, in the company of clouds. I recently rewatched season 2 of Twin Peaks and the finale, in which Agent Cooper slips in and out of red curtains while seeking Annie, or answers, resonates. Disorientation. Passing through thresholds. Trying to save your love from evil. And what if it was not one love, but a concatenation of shadows?

Evil was also the ravages of shame and depression, the doubling of seeing the dark in yourself. Or, depression was a particularly sensitivity to evil. I get into these loops about it. There is so much evil in the world. For much of my life, I have not felt like a person. There are clouds drifting in that part of my soul that is supposed to feel warm and full. “I am okay” etc. I am like a child, lily-padding over the clouds. The same child that needed Marlene to guide me. I experienced love as something annihilating and so bright. The blue-heart anchoring pain in my chest. Hawk tells Cooper that if you go into the Black Lodge ‘with imperfect courage, it will utterly annihilate your soul’. What does it mean to give your narrator courage? I wanted her to have the courage of suffering and to see that in others. To suffer what would never work out. A constellation of burst blood vessels around the eyes. To have the strength to look in them, for that look to be a holding place, then a continental shelf, then nothing.

A foothold, even. For someone climbing the tower, trying to get to the kissable moment again and again. For the tower to be a text. I go to the tower, I spiral in stairwells, I see a prairie stretching farther and farther, I get so thirsty.

*

Are such towers architectures of refuge or incarceration? Here’s a passage from Hélène Cixous’ Hyperdream, a novel about grief, love, friendships, telephones and mother-daughter relationships (I will never not be obsessed with):

We don’t stop killing ourselves. We die one another here and there my beloved and I, it’s an obsession, it’s an exorcism, it’s a feint, what we are feigning I have no idea is it a sin a maneuver a vaccination the taming of a python the fixing-up of the cage, it’s an inclination, we don’t stop rubbing up against our towers touching our lips to them

Haunting the novel is this allusion to 9/11, but the towers as totems seem also to be something else, much more imaginary: ‘I saw it shimmer in my thoughts’, Cixous says of her ‘dearly beloved originary tower’. In an early document for The Indigo Hours I had this epigraph I haven’t since been able to locate from Morton, something about beauty being a homeopathic dose of death. I see my love go out the wrong door, I see a certain look, a turning back. Towers of collapsing sand. I see Marlene on the wall. Marlene from a tower. Marlene as the mother-tower, no, the sister. All my life I have said, who is she? She whose name means ‘star of the sea’. I rap at the door of Montaigne’s library tower. It survived a fire.

The homeopathic dose of beauty, like Cixous’ vaccination, prepares us for exquisite loss (and so soaring, to tower over). In a way, The Indigo Hours quite simply plots the disintegration of a what is now called a situationship. But really it is a book about everything happening in one plane, each shifting tense another groove of growing older. Growing into the old you were before. Essaying through this experience via encounters with art — everything from installations to Lana Del Rey (on whose early albums the narrator delivers protracted sermons — this being a book loosely about finding meaning in the spiritual emptiness of the 2010s). No, it is a book about things and time and pleasure.

Only recently did I look up the meaning of the song ‘Marlene on the Wall’. Apparently Marlene was the German actress, Marlene Dietrich, whose heavy gaze looks down from a poster. Maybe this is why my protagonist so frequently visits Berlin. Vega talks about writing the song for Dietrich after turning on the TV one night, her ‘beautiful face in close-up’. ‘Marlene on the Wall’ is a coming-of-age song, it’s also about power and violence, beauty and changing. There’s a butchershop but also a rose tattoo. I saw the song as an eternal love story with destruction as its anchor point. ‘Even if I am in love with you’ being the parenthesis through which to begin the working backwards of what Joanna Walsh calls the ‘fresh and terrible’. If I carried around that song I also carried the ghost-image of Marlene’s televised face in monochrome. How alien those brows, the beauty of another time. When I read fiction, when I edit fiction, when I approach a story, so often my question is ‘so what?’ I am looking not for answers, but for experience. Fingerprints.

Vega’s opening: ‘Even if I am in love with you / All this to say, what’s it to you?’ could be the central premise of The Indigo Hours. So for this book to be ambient is to be deeply interested in the ‘it’. Of love, of the being-in, of melting into the world, being washed continuously in its blood, its indigo, its chlorinated swimming pools. To look for explanation is one of many reasons for fiction. If Marlene peeled off the wall, I saw her growing along some trellis as a rare blue flower, a wallflower but livid and shedding, changing. I would write to water her, I would coax my clouds for a little rain.

Blurbing The Indigo Hours, Amy Grandvoinet (brilliant critic of Surrealist & avant-garde psychogeographies) writes generously of ‘a languageful love pulsing constant’. A blue heart plucked and buried in the book, behind some cloudy curtain. This heart is sequined to the rhythm of life. If there is a cadence to the book it is love and love’s chaos sewn into patchwork. Marlene returns to Berlin to see her friend. She sees an old friend and cannot bear to reach him because there is this substance between them. She paraphrases T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’, she almost leaps the mirror fence. There are indigo seeds in these stories. I hope whoever reads it finds their own pulsing constant.

You can order the book from the publisher here. It is out on the 31st October.

Working at Footlocker

Tonight was the book launch for Tom Byam Shaw’s new short story collection, You Are Going to Regret This. Despite Storm Amy, Mount Florida Books was packed which is always so good to see (stay tuned as we’ll hopefully have another SPAM launch there before the year is out!). Tom read some pieces from the book — extracts from ‘Retail’ and ‘Arcana’. In conversation with Ian Macartney they talked about the New Weird, monstrosities and cannibalism as metaphors for capitalism, the world falling apart while people shop, continuity vs cataclysm, hauntology, real stories, Aberdeen, Glasgow, the Anderston motorway underpass (also a soft spot for me though I’m also partial to the Cowcaddens). They talked about a time when the Aberdeen open mic scene was so saturated there would be like seven different nights to choose from and regular performers would become minor local celebs. The shaping of each others’ work (both were members of the Re-Analogue art collective). At one point the word nice was said in a spiralling, elliptical comic-sweet way — I think they were reflecting on earlier days of friendship — and Katia was like this is nice ! bringing us into the present, that’s the point. The book looks great and sincere corkscrew really pulled a good number on the design. It will probably lure you into the basement which will smell of brand new trainers and you will have to confront something terrible. Everyone kept saying ‘for fans of Alison Rumfitt’. Yeah!

Afterwards we bandied out to The Ivory Hotel and with key questions bundled from some poetic eavesdropping of K’s café memories, I made people talk about the what and why of poetry, lifting these questions wholesale from said memories. Maybe having ‘a night off’ from poetry put me in this mood. Thanks to all who contributed. Everything was Guinness-flavoured and first thought.

J., Z. and K. shared their childhood guinea pig stories and we swapped anecdotes of encounters with rats (at home and in the workplace). The sorrow of a tiny animal curled around the absence of another.

Now the wind howls at the window.

New book: The Indigo Hours

🦋🌫️🍋‍🟩The Indigo Hours…forthcoming with Broken Sleep Books

In 2018, I wrote a novella about erratic romance/Romance and the lyrical space-times of its (im)possibility. The fictional ~situationship at the heart of this work is stretched into, over and through various places — real and imagined — which the narrator digs into as pockets of presence and meaning. With its wandering, non-linear plot, I’d describe The Indigo Hours as ambient fiction. It’s a little eclipse of a book. It was ambiently written (leisurely, over one summer, as a dare) and may invite ambient reading. Which is to say, a textual experience more inclined to ‘going round’ a thing, attuning to its surrounds, getting lost, adjusting the frequency of (dis)interest. This is like dating a semi-transparent person. To adore the ghosts of both of you. How might love halo or envelope one’s personhood? How might love’s presence be felt ambiently in the objects and subjects of everyday life? The work tests love against memory, song, travel and friendship. I was interested in the phenomenon of blue — specifically indigo — as a desiring filter. Indigo as a singularity. Indigo as language of variable opacity. Denim wash (to go someplace). The supernatural inflection of indigo children (as a vocalised attempt at performing divergence of attention, durée and feeling). The book is full of aura, fleeting connections, music, art, intimacy and loss. It will be out on Hallowe’en, 31st October 2025. 

Some nice things people have said: 

The Indigo Hours’ lyrical prose, daubed from a free-associating palette of sensory psychedelia, becomes a portal into a ‘blossomy blossomy realm of the possible,’ where sadness is a sexuality, jealousies cause for celebration, and love a drunken texture. Painterly, tender, and spatially generous, this affecting novella rewards re-reading, like a magic eye that reveals a new image, and perhaps new self, with every glance.

— Poppy Cockburn

The Indigo Hours is watery fortification. Beneath li’l triads of asterisk constellations, Maria Sledmere tells a post-Romantic tale of moonlit precarity and passion among pools & thunderstorms & prairies & airports, where feeling wretched wandering midnight miles is a complex freedom, as exposure on cobalt-lit webcams, dozing/dosing to dub deep trap techno, bruises so Blühen. Yet under cosmic circumstances that augur heartbreak, Maria gifts us the deep assurance of ancient-blue auras and a languageful love pulsing constant. For insomniacs-or-otherwise against analgesia’s ‘“who cares”’, a most vital and tender-prone tonic.

— Amy Grandvoinet

Preorder now from the publisher.

x x x x x x x

Every book I read in 2024

In loose order of reading. This year I made a vow to not let work ‘get in the way’ of reading. I was talking to a colleague about how every subject/specialism has one thing they are supposed to be really good at and actually kind of suck at. We agreed English & Creative Writing staff are often pretty bad at this thing that should be their lifeblood: reading. To prioritise reading is to affirm the necessity of thinking. I felt so burned out with the circuitry of the 2010s and the zoomageddon of lockdown, all those screens. Reading in scroll-time. I still love reading in scroll-time, but on the move only. Or in the midst of something else doing. It took me three years to get back into immersive, situated, FOCUSED reading again. I mean staying up all night to finish a book, crying at sentences, holding something to the light and putting it down and stopping and starting because you want to savour something and all the world of it following you into dreams. All reading started to plug into work. Good work. Channels. If I’m honest, I haven’t written a lot this year. I needed a break from concepts. I did a lot of editing and proofing and reading. I wrote a lot of emails and did a LOT of marking. I think of marking as writing time. It eats into writing time but it’s also a practice of sentence-making, observation, editing, rewriting. Eileen Myles says somewhere that when they write people recommendation letters and do interviews etc that’s a form of writing. So really there are very few ‘fallow’ periods. You’re always writing something to someone, for something or not. I have written over a monograph’s worth of student feedback this year, maybe more. Each paragraph of feedback is a micro-essay, a snapshot of orientation, a patchwork sample which stitches multiple discourses (genre, criteria, instinct, history) in ascent to encouragement and improvement. So all that feedback, I’m trying to say, means I also read a hell of a lot of student work. Hundreds of scripts. Marking trains my eye as a reader and writer. Still learning to toggle between different kinds of reading. Refusing the active/passive binary in favour of a continuum of generative involvement. A lot of what I read below was in-between other reading, but some of it is more explicitly ‘work’ reading. Or: reading as a way of connecting with friends, colleagues — their beautiful brains. Or: preparation for something as yet unknown. Working through personal syllabi. Refreshing the palette.

~

Robert Glück, About Ed (2023)

Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…, trans. by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (2006)

Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness, trans. by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie, Sebastian Truskolaski, Antonia Grousdanidou (2023)

Marie Darrieussecq, Sleepless, trans. by Penny Hueston (2021/2023)

Joey Frances, Takeaway Night (2024)

Teju Cole, Black Paper (2021)

George Saunders, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain (2021)

Megan Ridgeway, The Magpie (2024)

Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. by John E. Woods (1924)

Andrew O’Hagan, Mayflies (2021)

Tabitha Lasley, Sea State (2021)

Zadie Smith, Intimations (2020)

Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. by Barbara Bray (1986)

Donna Tartt, The Secret History (1992) 

Oli Hazzard, Sleepers Awake (2024)

Courtney Bush, Every Book is About the Same Thing (2021)

Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time, trans. by Beverley Bie Brahic (2016)

McKenzie Wark, Raving (2023)

Rachael Allen, God Complex (2024)

Elle Nash, Deliver Me (2024)

Joshua Cohen, The Netanyahus (2021)

Andrew Meehan, Instant Fires (2022)

Michael Eigen, Ecstasy (2001)

Noah Ross, The Dogs (2024)

Jennifer Soong, Comeback Death (2024)

Barbara Browning, The Gift (2017)

Cynthia Cruz, The Melancholia of Class (2021)

Courtney Bush, I Love Information (2023)

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star (1977)

Barbara Browning, The Correspondence Artist (2011)

Hilary White, Holes (2024)

Laynie Browne, Everyone and Her Resemblances (2024)

Deborah Meadows, Representing Absence (2004)

Holly Pester, The Lodger (2024)

Terese Marie Mailhot, Heartberries (2018)

Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band (2015)

Lauren Levin, Nightwork (2021)

Oddný Eir, Land of Love and Ruins, trans. by Philip Roughton (2016)

Danielle Dutton, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (2024)

Elvia Wilk, Oval (2019)

Nisha Ramayya, Fantasia (2024)

Joanne Kyger, On Time (2015) 

Jean Day, Late Human (2021)

Lisa Jarnot, Black Dog Songs (2003)

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (1980)

Mariana Enriquez, Things We Lost in the Fire (2016)

Ben Smith, Doggerland (2019)

Ricky Monaghan Brown, Terminal (2024)

Wendy Lotterman, A Reaction to Someone Coming In (2023)

Joseph Mosconi, Fright Catalog (2013)

Tao Lin, Taipei (2013)

Haytham El Wardany, The Book of Sleep, trans. by Robin Moger (2020)  

Lucy Ives, Life is Everywhere (2022)

Maria Hardin, Cute Girls Watch When I Eat Aether (2024)

Brian Whitener, The 90s (2022)

Jamie Bunyor, A stone worn smooth (2022)

Lucy Ives, The Hermit (2016)

Brenda Hillman, Cascadia (2001) 

Bhanu Kapil, Incubation: a space for monsters (2006)

Peter Reich, A Book of Dreams (1973)

Steve Orth, The Life and Times of Steve Orth (2020)

Lindsey Boldt, Weirding (2022)

Christa Wolf, The Quest for Christa T. (1970)

Hannah Levine, Greasepaint (2024)

Joe Luna, Old News (2024)

Maggie O’Sullivan, earth (2024)

Ian Macartney, sun-drunk (2024)

Sébastien Bovie, Longing for Lo-fi: Glimpsing back through technology (2023)

Steven Zultanski, Relief (2021)

Lionel Ruffel, I Can’t Sleep. trans. by Claire Finch (2021)

Noémi Lefebvre, The Poetics of Work, trans. by Sophie Lewis (2021)

Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence (2019)

Marie Buck and Matthew Walker, Spoilers (2024)

Ed Steck, David Horvitz Newly Found Bas Jan Ader Film (2021)

Ammiel Alcalay and Joanne Kyger, Joanne Kyger: Letters to & From (2012)

Lyn Hejinian, Fall Creek (2024)

Etel Adnan and Laure Adler, The Beauty of Light: Interviews, trans. by Ethan Mitchell (2024)

Rick Emerson, Unmask Alice: LSD, Satanic Panic, and the Imposter Behind the World’s Most Notorious Diaries (2022)

Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, Decomp (2013)

Miye Lee, Dallergut Dream Department Store, trans. by Sandy Joosun Lee (2023)

Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, The Grand Piano: Part 1 (2006/2010)

Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

Ian Macartney, Darksong (2024)

Chris Tysh, Continuity Girl (2000)

Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Ted Pearson, The Grand Piano: Part 2 (2007/2017)

Andrew Durbin, Mature Themes (2014)

Johanne Lykke Holm, Strega, trans. by Saskia Vogel (2022) 

Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (1985)

Robin Blaser, The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser (2006)

Daniel Feinberg, Some Sun (2024)

Maria Hardin, Sick Story (2022)

Lieke Marsman, The Opposite of a Person, trans. by Sophie Collins (2022)

Nadia de Vries, Thistle, trans. by Sarah Timmer Harvey (2024)

Rodge Glass, Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir (2024)

Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf (2024)

Giovanbattista Tusa, Terra Cosmica (2024)

Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad, Poor Artists (2024)

Andrew Meehan, Best Friends (2025)

Courtney Bush, Isn’t this Nice? (2019)

Meghann Boltz, Cautionary Tale (2021)

Ariana Reines, Wave of Blood (2024) 

Dalia Neis, The Swarm (2022)

Ian Macartney, Secret Agent Orca Twelve (2024)

Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine (1988)

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle (1963)

Molly Brodak, A Little Middle of the Night (2010)

Bernadette Mayer, Midwinter Day (1982)

Anna Kavan, Ice (1967)

Molly Brodak, Bandit (2016)

Charles Bernstein, Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (1986)

Anna Gurton-Wachter, My Midwinter Poem (2020)

Hi Sorry

Hi Sorry

Hi sorry it took
so long to get back to you
we’ve been super busy here you know I
know am going there now fine
be with you in five. Not. Ten. Fine. Can all
support workers please email
in with completed timesheets by the end of the week before
right yes okay, did you
see the edinburgh rainbow I am
a bit confused as to where to find this building
you come pick me up right. Yes. In the morning. Yes.
It’s staff spa day I am a bit
nevermind. Right. So if you. Yeah I’m good it’s been
Ok let’s try this instead. Alright you know maybe
did you check the reference I think that’s
What was wrong no no one’s gotten
Their feedback yet have you considered.
I am going there now yeah that’s so true
The link seems to be broken can you
Hit resend yes it’s in the attachment not
This one this other. Sorry. Can I send you
the month again
I think I’ve been spotlighted and muted
at the same time
I mean if you want to you could always
no that one’s closed have you
checked out the right books
so sorry! I mean fine I’m good yeah
You know I am alright I can order another
So if you check on the library resources
Tab yeah you’ve got. I totally understand!
Sorry for your understanding
I’ll take care of that, would you. Ok.
Where’s my phone? So you see it does
Not allow for templates so what you do is
Put the big red box. Right. And then
The blue box and the green. Right. Could you…
It would be great to be in the big black box
Which you put in the bin. Totally! Uhm, the poem’s not
Opening are you sure you sent it yes
It’s not a PDF though it’s literally inscribed on the stars.
Right…. Do you have a skin by any chance
Can I put it in your poem? I think it’s in my pocket
That’s so fucked? I’m so sorry?
Can you put my head on the maintenance portal?
Okay. I need your help and expertise unravelling
One of the world’s longest standing misconceptions. Right.
So I think mobile view is a write off?
Have you tried emailing them? Yes they’ve sent in the letter.
Please hold the line for the council.
I am the council. I am the Queens Park Hello Kitty.
You could apply for a partial refund just answer
A couple of questions one
Have you. Yes. I am applying for emergency
funding for my damp lifestyle. Do you want me
To pin the window on the call so folks can have a better look?
Can I sit right next to you? Is it Ok?
I can stand where you need me hey Maria
The file is so corrupt
THERE IS NO AUDIO why is he
Making inchoate humming noises can you
Take over the cat from me? Haha it’s Ok I guess I’ll just
Fill up the bathtub with cat food. Are you in tomorrow?
Are you offering anything? New deal on flaking.
I am just totally zoomed out. Well, I’m a tiny speck
On the furniture. I don’t think the wifi is working
Why you ask. You see the password?
Let’s take it from there. Okay. Are you sure
You want to send it without a subject header
Like are you totally sure? No I’m sorry
It’s Mau but with like a ‘oooooooooooo’ at the end.
Think of cows! Happy in the field. Grazing on liberty caps.
Ma – ooooooo. Yes! You’ve got it. Not many people can do that.
Can you please ring me back. Hi it’s Amy
And Georgia. I’ve filled in your invoice for you
Sorry about the cuts. Hahahahaha
Love you! I want to get on my knees for you.
I’m on strike. Trust me I have a good reason
To look? Hello?
Hey how are you I hope

Reading this Saturday at Burning House Books

Hello everyone!

I’m thrilled to be reading at the launch of Stacy Skolnik’s The Ginny Suite this Saturday at Burning House Books. The novel is one of my favourites in a long time — a pearlescent, speculative many splintered tale of mystery, hysteria and the world fuckery of technology evermore. I savoured it and reread certain pages with a dreamy clarity because deja vu was the narrative logic that I could most accurately access. When I finished it, nestled at the airport waiting lounge, I immediately wanted to read it again but I’m almost afraid to. I talked with Courtney over email and we agreed that the book lodged in our brains. That might be the most proper description. It crystallised the eerie fourth space feeling of proximate and synthesised intelligence. It was strange and razor-edged and a glut of forms and genres stitched up in this thing called the novel. My favourite thing about the novel is when it can serve as a kind of nervous container of multiple ideas and concepts playing out in time. The book itself is experiential prosthesis.

More info:

‘Information didn’t need to be remembered; it remembered her…’

A mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. While the number of sufferers grows, so does our protagonist’s paranoia—of the media, her doctors, and her husband. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.

Born in Belfast on Valentine’s Day, Suki Hollywood is a writer and poet. Her work has been featured in Gutter, Deleuzine, SPAM, Water Wings and more. Her debut novel ‘Jesus Freaks – a queer thriller – is available now via wwww.sukihollywood.com.

Maria Sledmere’s latest collection is ‘Cinders’ with Krupskaya Books, 2024. She is managing editor of SPAM Press and a Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. With Kevin Leomo, she is one half of Project Somnolence: a portable lab for exploring speculative approaches to sleep across art, literature and daily life. Her next book, ‘Midsummer Song (Hypercritique)’ is forthcoming with NoUP Press in 2024.

Stacy Skolnik is the author of the poetry collection mrsblueeyes123.com (self-released, 2019), the chapbook Sparrows (Belladonna* Collaborative, 2023), the workbook From the Punitive to the Ludic: Prompts for Writing Public Apologies (with Thomas Laprade for Montez Press Radio, KAJE, 2022), and the chapbook Rat Park (with Katie Della-Valle, Montez Press, 2018). She is a co-founder and co-director of Montez Press Radio, the Lower East Side-based broadcast and performance platform. The Ginny Suite is her debut novel.

Book free tickets here ✨

In s(w)ervice of attention

I wanna show up for poetry every day for the rest of my life. There’s this word for when food continues to cook itself — carry-over — like tortiglioni warm and slippery in the colander needing to be eaten. I wish poetry could do that. A. says it does, doesn’t it? When you remember a line sometime down the line and it occurs to you: a new meaning. Or when the poem you wrote marinades in the background all to be felt with alternative pressure. I guess to write then is to throw out your salt or chuck a glass of water behind you as you leave the door of the document. Poem to set out for the day each day.

When I say I want to show up for poetry it’s not just that I want to hear or write or feel it live. Is it that I want to pay it attention? Who or what is poetry and where do I go to do this?

Right now, I’m going to fiction.

Recently I attended a joint book launch at Waterstones, Glasgow with Elle Nash and Kirsty Logan. Nash said the thing about fiction, her philosophy, is that she wants it to bring the reader to their knees. Logan said she wanted fiction to be like telling the reader a story. Both are forms of surrendering and/or attention. I don’t remember being held in the cosy space of storytelling at school because my brain was off on its own adventures. I categorically could not pay attention. Or maybe I practised another form of attention. I had it for free, and didn’t need to pay anyone anything. Something I was scolded for. Maria, pay attention. Was I failing to pay some kind of respect to the storyteller? Part of me wanted that form of listening attention so badly, to be wrapped up in the words of another and so in the folds of the room, but I just couldn’t surrender like that. I would look around the class and be hyper aware of a hundred things at once. The pins and needles in my feet; the subtle vocal inflections of the reader; the question of whether or not this teacher had sex and surely they had because they said they had kids but could I imagine them having sex and then when I tried I could not stop imagining them having sex and it was awful; what would there be for dinner tonight and would I have to cook it; does anyone in this room have a cute dog; when will I be old enough to smoke; which of these characters should I care about; why does my nose itch; when will I get my first period; why does my friend think everyone’s a lesbian; is everyone a lesbian; what does the word bedraggled mean; I think I know what lethargy means; what is the word for….; when can we go outside; I hate going outside; wonder why the publisher gave the book that cover; wonder why there are dots in the ceiling tiles; whose body odour is that etc etc etc. I’ve already forgot what this paragraph was supposed to do or say. At some point in my school years I would just nod off.

I have never been someone who could digest a book, slowly and thoughtfully, and then be able to recount the significant actions and characters and narrative highlights back in a considered, ordered and clarified way. I come at it sideways and can’t talk about it without finding a new angle each time. I need to talk to people about books who can work with the zig zag.

I need writing to ‘strike’ like a match or lightning. I need to read to fall off the edge of reading.

Piece of feedback from a student: you know you teach better off the book.

Been thinking a lot about what that means and what the book is and how to cultivate a kindness towards an open style of teaching.

Been thinking about the way Emma Stone drives that aubergine Dodge muscle in the new Yorgos Lanthimos movie, Kind of Kindness (2024).

Sometimes I can’t pay attention to my own teaching. It happens on auto-pilot and I’m saying things and all of a sudden it’s the breathless bell supplement of the passing hour and people are packing their bags, and bizarrely I’m starving and it’s over. What does it mean to trust the other self that takes over? To walk into every classroom unsure of what will happen?

Sometimes, crash. Often, swerve.

I would describe my reading style as lackadaisical, dyspeptic, errant, passionate, half-awake. Why would I expect my students also to listen with 100% unadulterated attention, when this is how I go about my own learning?

At her recent Good Press event for the launch of Lessons of Decal, Sophie Seita spoke of asking her audiences to ‘absorb [her] words like a piece of music, where the words come in and out of consciousness’. To be given permission for that form of drift and daydream to be okay is a huge relief. If I’m at some event where it feels cool to whip out your phone and notebook, I usually enjoy it a lot more. It’s relaxing to pay attention by not paying all your attention. Allowing my attention to go stereo is sometimes the best way to listen (this was one of the things I loved about the poet Callie Gardner, the way they would often whip out a notebook during a reading, and by extension granting a kind of permission for others to do the same). Seita spoke on what a non-extractive form of attention might be, and might it be that more ambient, absorbing, blurring and responsive mode. I sometimes let the sentences snake around me, other times they cut little jewels, hardening and cleaving and polishing the soft matter of my thoughts. Sometimes I mishear, overhear. In lockdown readings and lectures, I’d participate heartily in the flowing ticker-tape of the Zoom chat and its various overspills onto group chats and discords. I liked the sense of multiplying conversations happening simultaneously, emoji splurging.

⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳ ⟡﮳﮲✧﮲⬫꙳⋄﮳⋆꙳⬫꙳✦﮳⋄⋄✧⬫꙳⋄﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋆꙳﮳⋄⋆꙳✧⬫꙳⋄﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳ ⟡﮳﮲✧﮲⬫꙳⋄﮳⋆꙳⬫꙳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳﮳⋄✧⬫꙳⋄﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋆꙳﮳⋄⋆꙳✧⬫꙳⋄﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳⬫꙳⋄﮳✧﮲⋄⋆꙳﮳✦﮳⋄⋆꙳ ﮲

I went recently to Inside Voices, a free night of ambient music and poetry held at King Tuts and hosted by anoraq. I love these nights because I always fill up my notebook. There were readings from Medha Singh and Ian Macartney, a performance by Dronehopper. While listening, I pondered especially what the percussive parts of language were. Little coughs, plosives, hovers of breath while the performer altered their pace of attention.

I want a manifesto for ambient attention. The closest I have found so far, aside from the classic 1978 Brian Eno piece, is a university project: ‘A Manifesto for Ambient Literature’ (2017) co-written by the Ambient Literature team. Here’s a snippet:

I take this to mean affirmation of porosity between texts, but nonetheless one that holds true to the material reality of a text’s construction.

There’s an iPhone that crops up in some kind of poem and whatever it’s doing there, I start to see it running the whole text, a little monstrously. The poetic subject becoming a mediating interface. When I asked the jetpack AI to give me more emoji string, it granted me a handful more stars.

I like books for being (in)complete worlds perforated with holes (words and the gaps between them). A night (sky), variably rich.

My lover sees me drop the book and flop sideways three times before taking it off me and shutting the light. I try to read and the whir of sentences stirring up is somehow the kind of stimulus to send me to sleep.

When I wake early, as I often do, to the dawn screeching of gulls, I keep the light off and try to read by the dark. It’s every sixth or seventh word I miss. The full stops slide away, smudge into dimness, and I read sentences continually — sloshing into one another.

Sometimes I think I read off the book. Like, the reading comes not when my eyeballs are actually skimming the lines on the page but in some kind of preliminary or afterglow moment.

What about the content?

I once had to do a medical questionnaire that asked me if I ever struggled to understand the motivations and emotional behaviours of fictional characters. This was a fascinating question. I let it cook for a few days before answering on the numbered scale.

Hovering with my ballpoint, I kept thinking of that Virginia Woolf quote from ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924): ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’.

Maybe I didn’t know why characters did things, even as I sat in rooms and offices and Zooms with students, discussing with great sincerity and intent the mechanics and motivations of fictional bone collectors, world-savers, serial killers, suffering girlfriends etc. Maybe I could only attend, momentarily, their tendencies; and so fathom a pattern or path from there.

What does it mean to give your full attention, to pay attention or to offer it?

I’ve started to think paying attention means there might be such a thing as ‘attention debt’. Is that the same as ‘attention deficit’? If I were to somehow skip the NHS diagnostic waiting lists to find myself looking at a special time-release pill on a silver platter, would that pill buy me attention? And would I somehow have to give it back, eventually, foreclosed or with massive accruals of cognitive interest? I start to think about the speed of my heartbeat in time to attention.

When I press my ear to your chest, and it’s your heartbeat I hear: am I witnessing the cost of attention?

Paying attention = being a cognitive agent of capitalism?

Does the heart hold the indelible mark of other attentions?

I would save all my heartbeats for you in a heartbeat. I hold them back from work. I save them in service of love and its ghosts.

Sometimes I want to be sharp; other times it’s better to blur.

Why do we say ‘pay attention’ and not ‘give attention’ or ‘do attention’? There’s a pretty useful article on this over at Grammarphobia:

English acquired the verb “pay” in the early 1200s by way of Anglo-Norman and Old French (it was paiier or paier in Old French), according to the OED.

The Old French verb meant, among other things, “to be reconciled to someone,” Oxford says, reflecting its classical Latin ancestor pacare (to appease or pacify), derived from pax (peace).

As the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology explains, “The meaning in Latin of pacify or satisfy developed through Medieval Latin into that of pay a creditor, and so to pay, generally, in the Romance languages.”

Some of the earliest meanings of “pay” in English are obsolete today—including to pacify, or to be pleasing or satisfactory to someone.

But senses relating to handing over money—or whatever is figuratively owed to someone—are just as old, and of course they’re still with us.

If I say pay attention, I’m not exactly doing so in the service of pacifying or pleasing. Much more likely that you’d take the phrase the way you’d take ‘pay your debt’ or ‘pay your letting agent’.

I don’t want attention to be an extractable value, but it is. We know that most of presenteeism at work is about being able to perform your paying attention for the sake of appearances. It isn’t really about productivity.

What if I let go of that presenteeism in other areas of life which demand attention? What if we got much more into improvising what makes for good listening? What if I wanted to watch television as a way of processing a complex emotional conundrum while also laughing my ass off at another life?

Would I write more? Would I understand human character?

Would I ~frolic in the generative plenitude of non-instrumental value?

✦

In 2017/2018, I saw Iain Morrison perform some of his Moving Gallery Notes at Market Gallery, back when it was in Dennistoun. The video I’ve linked above begins something like ‘right now, the time is 97%’. I feel my attention brimming like a healthy battery. Morrison’s poetic works comprise notes made while at various gallery events and artist talks. He describes the project as ‘a sequence that samples a chain of events, encounters, conversations, meetings, empty spaces and all the other things that make up the life of an arts organisation making its way through changing contemporary contexts’. Listening to the work is less about being presented with ‘content’ and more about being provided a poetic architecture in which to indulge great reverie. The content itself is also fascinating. Morrison’s gallery notes encompass everything from embodied experience to the yield of eavesdropping. The initial ‘splurge’ or ‘stream’ of notes goes handwritten onto the page, from the context of an event, and eventually gets whittled into lineated poetry. I found this description from Morrison’s blog, Permanent Positions, particularly useful:

The reason ‘notes’ is in the title of this and my earlier series, is because my first step for each poem is to choose an event at the gallery and write notes during it. When I’m making the notes I mostly write continuously, allowing whatever I’m thinking about – whether it’s things people are saying, or things occurring by association in my head ­– to stream onto the page, at the speed I can write at. My objective while doing this is to not worry about the appropriateness or relevance of what I write down. I try to get material down on paper, and there’s a hope that I can use my embodied presence – a thinking body in the space – to make myself into a recorder, one that acknowledges its subjectiveness, of the event. So this stage of writing can be a splurge. It usually is. I will edit these notes at the next part of the process.

This seems to me an ambient method of composition. It is open to digression, refuses to ignore the body and sees the self as both subject and ‘recorder’. Not so much Spicer’s radio here as the ZOOM H1n versatile pocket recorder.

Moving Gallery Notes is of course also a work of ekphrasis.

For my birthday, K. gave me a copy of Danielle Dutton’s Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (2024). Halfway into this delicious compilation of fiction and nonfiction is an essay on ekphrasis which discusses, among other things, Rindy Sam’s kissing of a Cy Twombly canvas in 2007 and Eley Williams’ short story ‘Smote, or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You in Front of a Print by Bridget Riley’ (2015). The idea of ekphrasis is presented as a kiss, a mark left more or left indelibly from one work to the next. Soon I will write a poem called ‘kissing cy twombly’ because aside from the brilliant parenthesis of the act itself, sullying a white canvas and paying one ceremonial euro to the artist for the privilege, it sounds like a CSS song or something. So I will commence the writing of the poem from the idea that I am speaking to Lovefoxxx or sprinkling tongue-glitter on crayola-smeared Moleskine.

I write this painting my nails Essie (un)guilty pleasures and trying not to leave such a mark on my MacBook keys. What shade of green is this? It’s too late. Everyone who has seen my laptop knows the key letters are tapped out beyond repair. Skin friction has caused the letters to smudge and blur into pools of acidic white light.

Milton writes of ‘th’ Arch Angel’, about to speak, in Paradise Lost: ‘Attention held them mute’. Meanwhile, ‘Tears, such as Angels weep, burst forth’.

Have I cried on my laptop sufficient to melt its keys? Do I write from speech or silence?

The OED reminds me that one can ‘attract, call, draw, arrest, fix‘ attention.

Thou art to wink.

What if we wept for attention. Made its call. Applied the right fixative.

Now we say something like ‘oh that therapy session totally ate‘.

✦

What I like about blogs is that they are deliberately undercooked. You basically serve them up to the world before you’ve had time to stew, finesse and perfect the product. This one I wrote this weekend while procrastinating emails, on a rickety bus and then rushed with sips of coffee before heading out to a festival. It’s pretty al dente okay sorry you’re gonna have to chew on it. I like that I can look at a blog post and think ‘that’s a fucking mess’ and then immediately post it.

I do think I am capable of being floored by good fiction. When I read Nash’s latest novel, Deliver Me (2024), I was sick with flu but the flu was on a kind of continuum with the book. I kept texting everyone: ‘no one writes sex and the body like Elle Nash!’. I read it feverishly, dreamed in it and let certain scenes linger in my psyche long after I’d folded the last page. I read it with a curiosity I don’t think I’ve had since the way I used to read the internet. By which I mean: I devoured its voices.

Similar thing happened when I devoured Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) in January. I was listening to the audiobook version and continually would have to stop what I was doing (walking to work, cleaning, washing my hair) to make copious notes. All such fiction makes me weak at the knees. And you know, it isn’t the characters or the plot that do this to me, but the language. Its essaying of life, presence, intimacy, repetition. The way narrative is a temporal prosody conducting attention.

I liked hearing about Nash and Logan’s manifestos for fiction, what they hoped to give readers, because it made me realise my own liminal, elusive bar for contact. I think about the text as a space, not just for the conveyance of meaning but explicitly for bearing its im/possibility and by extension, its potential for ellipsis, disappearance. That’s where the fun begins.

Maybe what I wanna do is s(w)erve attention. Keep showing up.