Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: writing

  • braincloud

    braincloud

    An acquaintance of mine was teasing after he inadvertently tapped into the ideas fountain and could not make it stop. We had brunch and he mentioned some frustrations he has been having with his business. I threw out about a dozen ideas to start with and then four dozen more whilst spooning up yoghurt and fruit. You know how one idea leads to the other. We finished our drinks and went out into the street where I turned to face him, still talking. “OR… you could try this, and that… Have you thought about trying it this other way?” ‘Well, mmm….’ “Another way to look at it would be…”

    Finally he put his hands on my shoulders to make it stop. “You know, it seems to be very brainstormy around here today. Must be a lot of brainclouds about. Now I am going to walk off in that direction and in a few minutes, I’ll be back.”

    So he went off to unlock his bicycle and left me there, standing with my mouth open in the pouring brain, in that chilly kind of sunshine with the icy wind that qualifies as Northern European spring; getting wet.

    H2O HoL glowing trash video bar west end

  • bunnyhutch

    bunnyhutch

    I was in the petshop section of a department store, because pets were next to pens, as if alphabetical, and it is remarkably difficult to find decent, practical biros in Deutschland that are not too fat to hold. Those I brought with me are all written dry. Standing gazing at the rabbits, whose noses whickered as they twitched and munched, I felt someone come up alongside me. This was an employee of the store, a brand-new rabbit clutched in her hands. She stood there regarding them. “So,” she said at last. “Ihre neue Kollegin.” (Your new colleague). “Be courteous to one another.” Then abruptly stooping she stowed the fuzzy bunny, a ginger-coloured flop-eared morsel, in the straw.

    Berlin has a higher population of dogs than any other city in Germany: a nerve-wracking place for a bunny rabbit. I watched. The other bunnies snuffled round slowly but no wars over straw started. After a moment the girl turned and went backstage again, to the ranks (I imagined) of yet-unlabelled white mice, Siamese fighting fish, ferrets, maybe camels. Her formality, her use of the polite form of “you”, the girl form of “colleague”, and the word “courtesy” – the use of the word “colleague” altogether, for bunnies – struck me as inexpressibly wise and drily loving.

    h2o HoL bunnyhutch

  • like a cake

    Went down to the print shop to ask him to make me a copy of one of the two novels I’m hoping to finalize this winter. Like a PhD student at the far end of his thesis I lean on the counter and say cosily, “I wrote all of that. Can you believe…?”

    The man laughs, a friendly laugh. I am thinking of the cartoon where the doctor examining an X-Ray tells his disappointed patient, “I’m sorry, Mr Bundle. I’m afraid you really don’t have a novel in you.” I say to the print guy, “I can see now why not everyone writes books. They are hard work.”

    He spends a long time stacking and restacking the pages with his expert hands, the paper silky and obedient. Turning the pile of pages to stand landscape, then portrait, then landscape again he deftly slaps all the spiky leaves into one great block. Then he stows the whole thing in an exactly A4-sized carton which springs open from flat stowage. Glancing at me he reaches behind him and takes another carton, which he fits over the top. “Like a cake!” I say and carry it home in two hands through the freezing wind.

  • je dis, elle dit, edit

    je dis, elle dit, edit

    I feel widowed. I am winnowing. Dancing through this manuscript one last time with my tiny stave ~ of ink ~ finding out the hollow places where the old log gives ~ and pressing down ~ and crumbling those away, a crocodile who stores everything edible beneath the melted snowline, in a slurry ~ these are final final edits, so I tell myself, believing myself ~ and I glean the tiniest changes, like when an apostrophe is shaped to the wrong font, and must be corrected. I winkle them out & fling them far far into the shoreline glimmering dislodged like oysters.

    The name of this collection is Comb the Sky With Satellites, It’s Still a Wilderness. And it talks about the world we live in and how we have failed to wreck it.