The Lost Notebook

Things You Already Know You Are Going To Lose

2011-01-20T04:25:00.000-08:00

(I wrote a version of the first part of this as a reply to an entry in Kona McPhee's excellent blog, then realised I hadn't chronicled a couple of important stages in the saga of the loss of bunnets. Here's an attempt at remedy.)

The Encyclopaedia of Lost Things has an entry for Things You Already Know You Are Going To Lose: its metaphoric trees are dark, for instance, with flocks of gloves. (The trees themselves have a distinctly umbrella-iferous air, useful for obfuscatory shade.) I have a single woollen glove at the moment I simply swop from hand to hand as each gets cold, popping the exposed hand casually into a pocket. Its twin lives with that grey scarf I still don’t know how I lost, but a friend’s scarf hangs unworn on the back of my office door awaiting reunion with its forgetful master. My proper gloves, bought in the cold snap before Xmas, were lost on Xmas Eve on the Metro while I tried to catch up with present-buying.

But beneath certain roots in the Forest of Lost Trees are the truffles of lost black bunnets. My current black bunnet was temporarily lost earlier; in fact two bunnets went missing in a row: a brown one apparently speeding from a car like a spare wheel as Yang Lian and I alighted at Ustinov College to give a reading. But its black companion turned up, placed perkily on a bollard opposite our house by a helpful passerby. Once it had dried out it was fine, albeit slightly misshapen. As we speak, it and, oh the irony, my memory stick are both currently back in the limbo that isn’t quite the house or the car or the office but from which they will probably/hopefully turn up.

But it is the black bunnet’s predecessor, the Moscow bunnet, which I wish formally to lament here. This was left on a train to Oxford in the following circumstances: I placed it on the overhead shelf while intoning ‘You will forget that.’ Then I forgot that.

I phoned train companies and lost property offices immediately on leaving the train, but nothing. This last item wasn’t actually lost for a short period of time, just increasingly out of reach. Perhaps that’s it: our physical relation to our possessions is simply expanding, just not evenly, and, thankfully, not at the same rate as the expansion of the universe.

I happened to have been wearing exactly this bunnet when, at Andy Croft's suggestion, I went to see Ian McMillan launch Talking Myself Home at Newcastle's Live Theatre, and, after the event, went up to get my book signed. Now, Ian and I know each other from quite a few Verbs and other programmes, but I could see the bunnet was having an anonymising effect, so removed it, and was recognised. This phenomenon, You Are Not As You Were So Who Are You, I used to get a lot when people who'd known a curly-headed version of me met the later, grey, depleted model. So I'd written a piece to the tune of Mystery Train about the Bunnet Effect, and now, attending the Brasenose College Poetry Festival (at the poet Richard O'Brien's invitation), I was able to rapidly revise the last line as follows.

- Before it follows, I must just remark that the way my choice of tune matched the future circumstances would suggest that the poor Moscow bunnet was indeed a Thing I Already Knew (At Some Level) I Was Going To Lose. Ah, the mysteries of brain...

Mystery Brain

(for Ian McMillan)

Book-queue signin, sixteen readers long,
Book-queue signin, sixteen readers long –
well, this new black bunnet makes my face feel wrong.

Moscow bunnet, sittin on, on my head,
Moscow bunnet, sittin on, on my head –
well, it took my name away from my friend with the pen.
(What happened then?)

Moscow bunnet, lookin cool, cool as toast,
Moscow bunnet, like a black ole slice of toast,
please be bringin my name back, cause I’m like a g-ghost
(like a g-ghost).

Moscow bunnet, coverin up, up my brain (up my brain),
Moscow bunnet, coverin up, up my brain (up my brain) –
well I left it on a train so it never will again
(will again).

Do svidanija!

A Flock of Sparlings

2010-12-05T09:34:00.000-08:00

(It is an unfortunate truth that I am so disorganised and xenochronicitous I have actually lost or failed to assemble or bring to a final edit several more or less complete books. By 'lost' I mean to so completely misplace some manuscript or other among the boxes and boxes of papers stacked in several rooms in several locations that I no longer know whether a copy exists or not.

One of these books, less lost than under-finished, is the collection of near- and non-short stories, Virtual Scotland, which failed to capture the imaginations of a couple of publishers in the late 90s and so went back to sulk in the aforementioned boxes. Some of it was no doubt not well served by my lack of interest in makie-up people. But other parts were what I would like to think of as a happier blend of fact and fable, like this little piece on a little fish.)

The recent discovery that the rare fish known as the sparling has again been caught in the waters of the Forth bodes well for the Scottish fishing industry. A distant cousin of the salmon, this little fish has for many years been caught by the tonne in the Tay, where it is considered a great delicacy because of its scent.

The sparling is also known as the 'cucumber smelt' for the simple reason that it smells strongly of that large oblong fruit. Fishermen in the Carse of Gowrie are able to detect a shoal of sparling from the river bank, simply by dilating an experienced nostril. Dundonians have long had their own piscine version of that English dainty, the cucumber sandwich.

Now geneticists, spurred on by ancient documents in archives in Dundee and Perth, are striving to reintroduce the sparling’s full range of subspecies. A cryptic note in the accounts of a Perth merchant for the year 1538 refers to 'thae puir soules wha depend sa on the Orient tae gust thair mowes, given hou hereawa is sic a fouth o spice fish.'

A Dundee chronicler in the late 1570s refers to 'the sparline, that is baith benigne and breme.' Scientists conjecture that there were once several types of sparling, and are experimenting with two new strains.

The first of these, the garlic smelt, looks like it may prove more popular for its eggs than for its flesh. The unfortunate fish smelt so strongly of garlic that the population of Newburgh were recently advised to stay indoors with windows shut while river police 'herded' the guilty shoal downstream.

The eggs, however, are odourless and may be eaten like caviar. Their beneficent qualities have already aroused the jealousy of producers of garlic capsules. River police have been alerted that industrial sabotage is possible, and spawning areas are being guarded round the clock.

The chilli smelt has proved slightly less successful as the fish have displayed a marked tendency toward spontaneous combustion. When one sparling explodes this sets off a chain reaction amongst the others. One fisherman, displaying a learned bent, has described the effect as resembling 'Greek fire': 'Ye can see the haill shoal burnin awa ablow the waater like a fire through a windie.'

Compensation comes for the sparling at least in the form of jet propelled excreta. Marine scientists observing the chilli smelt have established that the small fish can employ the considerable power generated by their unstable constitutions both to thrust themselves through the water at high speeds, and to repel attackers with a focussed squirt of shit. As one young diver put it, 'When the lot of them turn their backs on you it’s quite a daunting experience.'

It is hoped to eventually be able to produce varieties of sparling for each of the major spices employed in preparing fish. Those fishing communities which happen to occupy the estuaries of Scotland’s major rivers may be able to look forward to a decidedly less hazardous future.

Plans are already afoot to relaunch boats from Broughty Ferry on the Firth of Tay, for the first time since the 1930s. The commercial possibilities seem limitless. The hot-tempered little chilli smelt may yet become Britain’s ultimate fast food.

2010-12-03T04:20:00.000-08:00

(Here’s a little lost thing, recovered from the snows of Facebook.

I posted a link to this fine summation of Bruno Schulz’s work. Then I thought I’d just praise Schulz, but it began turning into a defence of the fabular. Then, despite that moment’s misgiving in which you think ‘Should I copy this just in case?’ -- I posted. Only to find the word-limit of the comment box had dispensed with half of my posting: the quote from the wonderful William Boyd about his adaptation of Any Human Heart, and my niggling reaction.

So I’ve attempted to recreate this just-lost portion, making a strange, self-enfolding, self-aware structure of this posting, only possible because of the net – but in itself relevant to the point I was trying to make.)

How dearly I love Bruno Schulz. His stories -- along with along with Bulgakov, Pamuk, Murakami, Kadare, Pavic -- made me understand that Borges and Kafka weren't just isolated counter-eddies in the great tide of makie-uppie.

He never succumbs to the slippage William Boyd (someone whose work I admire) implies (and I did get this from the Radio Times!) when he says (and he was comparing the medium of the novel to that of film): '...the novel is effortlessly subjective. Getting inside someone's head, discovering his or her most intimate thoughts, is the easiest operation in the world.'

Despite my provisos, what troubles me here is that this is a version of realism's fable about fiction, that somehow it's (really) just like reality.

Whereas Schulz is always aware that the head you get inside is a construct, in which the author has created intimate thought-like things for a purpose which is both structural and swayed (I might even have said 'skewed') by desire. And that this is the hardest thing to do.

I then concluded that Schulz's fables, by contrast, are not only compelling, but are a more direct engagement with why we are compelled to make things up.

(In summation: convention shields us from desire, and realism and fable offer two ways of responding to that very human crisis: one positions the desired thing, here interiority, at a conceptual arm’s length, so that it can be examined more fully; the other makes a structure which is itself explicitly shaped by the effort to become fully aware of one’s desires.

Realism relies on the suspension of our disbelief, our investment in its fable, and risks losing or at least overlooking the author’s complex intensity. Fable relies on the manner in which that intensity reconfigures representation in the story -- makes birds of fathers, for instance -- and risks the person of the author himself or herself becoming lost in obscurity.)

Three Lost Books

2010-11-23T08:00:00.000-08:00

I’m not a generous giver-away of books. Something about the physical presence and psychological resource of a book as a piece of technology brings out the miser in me, the indiscriminate collector. My first copy of Auden or Keats fills me with greedy nostalgia as well as being the readiest resource – I know where the poems are in a way I don’t with other volumes.

But I’m just as avaricious with these feelings by proxy – the coverless copy of Phantom Lobster I may have ‘borrowed’ from David Craig’s office in Lancaster is almost as exciting for me because I can sense or imagine his relation with the book, and, almost as good as that, the lonely edition of James Liu’s Art of Chinese Poetry that Bernhard Widder picked up in that marvellous second-hand shop in Novy Sad, which I somehow persuaded him to make a gift of to me, fascinates not just because it is a fine book, but because I can conjecture about the journey which brought it to that shelf in Voivodina at that time.

So when a volume is renounced, ‘lost’ in the terms of this blog, I’ve come to realise it is almost always a gesture of some significance – a significance I was usually only partially aware of at the time. There are, as ever, three such instances I can recall in any detail.

The first is a How To: the teach yourself classical guitar book which, as far as my reconstituting memory can distinguish fact from desire, took you through the major issues of harmony and composition as well as the minor ones of technique and -- I don’t know -- how to actually play. I received this when sixteen from a dear friend, Debbie, while I was going out with the first love of my life, Diane. I had barely begun to read it (hence the marvellous gauze drawn over its actual contents) when Diane and I found ourselves in yet another of our interminable squabbling rows.

I’ve since learned that all such rows – which recur through the few major love affairs of my life – are invariably my fault. They tend to originate in some emotional issue I can barely articulate, which the other party only discovers in the process that they have very strong opinions about. In other words, I stir up stuff best left alone, then don’t know how to back down. In the early days I hadn’t even gathered that I should back down: I could suddenly see, through gabbling on, both issue and argument in a magnificent clear light and couldn’t bear to go back to the darkness. But the darkness is where happiness lives.

Most of our arguments, because we were teenagers, lived in the cold. We were forever pacing the streets of Broughty Ferry, standing out of the grim wind off the Tay if possible, or sitting on red wooden benches in the full blast if not, or sitting, as on this occasion, in the park on the Monifieth Road, tearing goosebumpy strips off each other.

Diane, having had enough of my exasperating refusal to ever cede any point however minute on whatever matter however trivial, decided that she might as well give up and stomped off home. I, perhaps because the subject had related in some way to our undying devotion to each other and how there could be no others ever, decided to stage a counter-stomp and, as a gesture visible to seagulls and angels alone, left the book.

Presumably I meant something along the lines of: another woman gave me this. But she is a friend: you are my love. Yes, it is a valuable book, but I only have (admittedly bookish) eyes for you. But she had, I should reiterate, already gone.

I doubt she ever had the slightest awareness of the symbolism I was committing to the gaze of eternity, but it had a couple of far-reaching repercussions. One was I gradually understood the deeply reprehensible solipsism of my emotional world; the other was I never really got anywhere with playing the guitar. Although other books were bought, and half-hearted self-teaching recurred on and off over the years, it was never going to be the love of my life.

The second book also involved Debbie at a slightly earlier point. Through one of those mysteries of the commodity which can no longer be reproduced in the world of universal internet access, I happened to be standing in a bookshop prior to departing on (perhaps) a package holiday. I was (maybe) thirteen. I noticed a set of Spike Milligan books which seemed marvellously cheap and intriguing. These, The Little Pot-Boiler, etc, slotted exactly onto the end of my humour spoon, extending it from the parodies of the Moc Gonagall, of which more elsewhere, to just out of reach of the slightly-used realm of Python.

In those days it was obligatory to have one member of your teenage circle who could recite reams of Monty Python sketches verbatim doing all the voices. It was also obligatory for this person to be unable to stop mid-sketch, and to have no neck. I tired of his pauseless, neckless litany, and warmed to the gibberish and scribbles of cut-price Milligan. I therefore bought the full-strength Complete Goon Show Scripts from a school book club, a large squareish yellow-backed book that blew my tiny mind.

Soon I and best pals Neil and Ian were prattling in silly voices into a tape recorder at Neil’s house (where I would later complete my first mural – a reproduction of the cover of Disraeli Gears), and I was planning a 16th birthday celebration with Debbie and our pal Alison, whose parents were having some work done in the extensive basement of their large but modern house also just off the Monifieth Road, in which I would swing a sock filled with custard against a currently-unused wall. This, as with many other things around the age of 16, was more fun in the anticipation than the execution – but still pretty exciting in a manner than doesn’t bear Freudian analysis.

Naturally, I wrote to Mr Milligan to inform him about this, naturally expecting a gleeful endorsement by return post. Two years later, while in my first year at university, while trying to explain my deepest convictions to my new bestest friend, James, for some reason I gave him my copy of the scripts.

Now, when I look back on this donation, I realise that there were a number of intervening moments of significance. At school my interest in absurd nonsense had developed in parallel with a growing involvement in drama. No-one now remembers my Lear of Albion Crescent, though there may still exist somewhere a grainy video of Ernie’s Incredible Illucinations.

But somewhere at the bottom of an unhappy cardboard box there will be the scripts (the first by me, the rest in collaboration) of a one-act farce, a pantomime, and the sketch show An Evening with the Drastic Party, written within the first year of Thatcher’s accession and performed one year later in Edinburgh’s world-famous Bedlam Theatre. It was not during the Festival. Perhaps ten people came all week.

By that point there was a select company of us, including another James, the novelist known as Meek. But sometime in the midst of this I gave away my copy of the Scripts. Why?

The best stab at this I can make is that it was round about the same time that I started going to the Oxford Poetry Workshop, and it was certainly true that by then, though several of my friends were actors (though not James), I had decided not to audition for anything. In other words, as with the guitar, I was renouncing some part of the complex composite that makes up the early psyche. Dear Fry, I was saying (James was, I suppose, a lot posher than my friends from the Ferry), I won’t be playing Laurie.

The third book is in some ways the most intriguing. As part of that unconscious choice to fix on poetry, I attended first the OPW, then added to that the Old Fire Station Workshop (started by Anne Stevenson, and then under Tom Rawling’s acerbic but benign tutelage), then, mid-eighties, we (the unit of writers thus built up) inherited the University Poetry Society and started running a weekly sheet of news and poems the details of which, as with many of my activities by that point, evade me.

Somehow, I seemed to be President of OUPS (a most appropriate-sounding acronym), and we began inviting the most interesting writers we could think of. These were often linguistically-innovative figures from the previous decade or so – Eric Mottram, Tom Raworth, Robert Creeley. And it must have been around this time that I gave my old copy of Norman MacCaig’s selected poems, New Maps and Old, to Keith Jebb, my old pal of the preceding five years.

Now this was not, apparently, a radical gesture, as I had a good number of MacCaig’s individual collections, and simply meant to buy up the rest in due course, so filling in the gaps, as it were. I was, again, informing someone about myself and my background by indirect means. I’d been very lucky to be taught MacCaig’s work at school at the same time as I was renouncing classical guitar and banging custard-filled socks off walls, and MacCaig had a big influence on my first poems – I moved from a metrically-clogged style to what I thought of as stripped-down work.

But round about the mid-eighties, the triple influences of MacDiarmid, W.S.Graham and Frank O’Hara were working in me, and Keith and I embarked on a long series of collaborations, poems in dialogue with each other and others – Nietszche, Ted Berrigan, and the mad Victorian artist Richard Dadd pop to mind – in which MacCaig-like clarity seemed to be the last ingredient in the mix.

Gradually I built up a style in English that incorporated Language Poetry, misheard song lyrics, druggy states and a generally dislocated messthetics that I called Unglish. My Poems in Unglish remains a lost vol: ungathered, incomplete and unpublishable.

But watching the carefully elusive, witty subtlety of the man himself in ‘None A Stranger,’ the programme that celebrated his eightieth back in 1990, I could see that handing that copy of MacCaig over to Keith was equivalent to putting a side of myself away, hopefully for safekeeping.

Found Book Noted

2009-03-14T10:49:00.000-07:00

One of the minor miracles of coincidence happened upon me today, though one that needs a bit of set-up to establish its (admittedly deeply subjective) level of astoundingness.

Among the many books, comics and writings of my own which have been archived in my personal Library of the Lost, there was one scifi novel I remember with great fondness from my early teens. Bought from SteppenWoolworths in Broughty Ferry for a derisory sum, it was a time travel adventure starring some special agent battling foes in far-back Mohenjo-Daro. It got swept away in one or another of my mother's clear-outs (following the dusty path to oblivion first trod by my infant companion, a panda, of which more later, and accompanied by many 'Commandos' and 'Astounding Stories'), and all I really remembered about its protecting-the-timelines shenanigans was that the lantern-jawed hero was accompanied by a symbiotic telepathic assistant made of jelly who disguised itself as his shoulderpads.

When the internet made it apparent that everything could be retrieved, reissued, or simply downloaded in a new format, I made a few desultory efforts to track it down, but, without title or author, it was never going to be easy. So an alternative scheme, roughly parallel to the theme of this blog, soon occurred to me: I would write it again. Or rather I would write a scifi novel of my own, based on what I could remember plus what I could fantasise about what I could remember.

Back in January, I was in Sofia after a series of translation sessions with Bulgarian friends and fellow poets, and myself and the poet VBV were strolling from his flat into town. We began chatting about the odd nature of the imaginative quest -- when some goal sets itself you instinctively feel is worth pursuing, and how different such quests are in the era of universal access. We realised we both employed a series of what I used to call (rather grandly) stochastic limitations -- basically self-imposed obstacles -- in order to allow the actual purpose of the quest, which is just contemplation of a theme associated with the goal or object of desire, to take place.

An example of this would be my search for the original seventies editions of the Gene Wolfe fantasy, Book of the New Sun, a book I've since bought in a current edition, but want with the Bruce Pennington covers, as I associate Pennington with Ashton Smith, Lovecraft, and that whole strain of Thirties US Wierd Horror I was so into in my quarantined-off-from-healthy-teenage-stock style youth. So far I have volumes 1 and 4, but I'm quite content to mooch around second-hand bookstalls in Tynemouth Station Market etc until the very thing crops up.

Vassil admitted to similar one-hand-behind-the-back contests with synchronicity, and talked about a project of his which was also to rewrite a novel he'd encountered years before about a fictional revolutionary figure. He knew he could probably pick up a copy through book traders (though at what expense?), but that wasn't really the point.

He mentioned a children's book he'd loved and how, when he'd got hold of it, he was amazed to see how little of what he remembered was actually written down. This, the teeming inner world of the young reader's engagement with even quite sparse text, as long as their imagination could inhabit, renovate and extend that text, was what I was after. (More on that walk elsewhere, later).

Then, only last weekend, I was in London for a couple of meetings, and caught up with old school pal, the novelist James Meek. Among many topics of conversation (bears, plus fours of Shoreditch, narcissism in Vietnamese restaurants, the name of Shakespeare's first theatre, marital contentment and dogs, narrative voice in nineteenth-century Russian fiction, slow reading), I thought I'd throw in the line that I'd finished the fantasy novel he'd told me to write.

In fact, a character in his last novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent, begins such a trilogy but abandons it in self-disgust, but it was nonetheless worth it to see his reaction. Yes, I continued, it's a tetralogy, the working title is My Mid-life Genre Crisis, and I'm half-way through the western. None of which is is exactly true (I still have a scene to write of the fantasy one, and I'm no more than a third at the most through the western). But I realised that I'd talked the project a step closer to actuality. It had begun to have textual presence.

I'm followed around by lots of books, plays and poems I'd like to write if I had the time. Some of them are just ludicrously Not Me, some of them are just ludicrous, some of them are perfectly reasonable, and some of them will never happen simply because there is No Time. But they all exert a magnetic pull on my imagination, they all demand to be treated as though they were real texts. And there is a sense in which the concept of text is related more to this idea of presence than to the physical artefact which most people think they're dealing with.

Think, for instance, of that current chattering point, the book you claim to, but have not read. You nonetheless have a degree of awareness of it, you know something of it in synopsis, or through adaptation, or intertextual allusion -- and you feel a degree of guilt about it. You imagine it, perhaps even inhabit it or hear it or have ideas you know can't be terribly accurate about it. You are a kind of reader of your own confabulated version of it, and you have imagined this as though it were text.

That's how it is with my unwritten books, and that is also how it was with this long-lost pulp scifi novel. Because, as you've known from the start, because this was a narrative necessity, I found the book. To be more precise, I took my daughter and dropped her off at a cafe I didn't know, but guessed was probably near this bookshop I'd visited once with the novelist Laura Fish while we were killing time before a school visit. It's called Black Flame Books, and I highly recommend it to you, especially if you have any lost cause searches.

We'd had a cup of coffee in a branch of Boarders earlier, and I'd said to my daughter just to drag me out if I started looking at the books, given the entire bookcase I could fill with my unread purchases. So when I'd parked my car by Black Flame, I'd first of all smiled at the notion of having a browse, then, after a slight swither (was something calling in a high-pitched voice only literate dogs could hear?), in I went.

Almost the first thing I saw was Hemingway's Across the River and Under the Trees, the title of which comes from the dying words of Stonewall Jackson. He (Jackson) was shot by 'friendly fire' returning to his own lines after the Battle of Chancellorsville, but died a few days later not of his wounds but from pneumonia. In his final delirium, after issuing several orders to absent troops, he'd said, 'Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.'

The previous day I'd seen one of my PhDs, the very talented Tara Bergin, who'd shown me a poem on the death of Stonewall Jackson containing these lines, and, unrelated to this, we'd spoken as we have before about the role played by coincidence for writers, how it is often interpreted as reinforcing a creative decision, and how difficult it is for critics to acknowledge and indeed incorporate such an irrational methodology in their writing. As soon as I saw it I went to have a look at the scifi section, thinking my luck was perhaps in for another volume of the Gene Wolfe.

Soon I began coming across a familiar publisher, Star Books. Many of the Woollenworth vols had been from this publisher -- in fact I found one with their sticker for '9p' still on it, and I realised that there were a lot of books from the period of my missing vol. Still, I didn't quite believe I would, as I inevitably did, come upon not just it but another book in the same (presumably extensive) series. There it was, cover and title instantly familiar though I couldn't have described it seconds beforehand: The Emerald Elephant Gambit by Larry Maddock, 'starring' Agent of T.E.R.R.A. Hannibal Fortune (published by Ace Books in 1967).

The cover is the quickest sketch: a bald man in a sky-blue tunic, heavily armed with bow and quiver over one shoulder, curved sword and dagger dangling from his belt, is clutching the eponymous pachyderm. He is set against as though encased in a custard force field like a giant helmet against a background of vertical green streaks, which looks like it's raining snot. He advances up a gentle incline from left to right whilst looking back over his shoulder at a feathery boneless flying grey thing, limbs trailing, two saucer eyes staring out of the picture from its swirl of a head. Inside the book, it claims the cover is by 'Sergio Leone'. You can see at once why it might appeal to a fourteen year old boy.

I remember being tremendously excited by the setting: historically verifiable while fabulously distant. I was used to Robert Howard's pre-glacial Hyborian age, or Ashton's Smith's dying future Earth of Zothique. Somehow the idea that the author had done some research as well as invention was very appealing. The other volume, as it turns out, The Golden Goddess Gambit, simply ramped up the coincidometer to eleven by being set -- apparently, I haven't read it yet -- in Minoan Crete. Contemporary Crete, of course, is where I wrote my own equally trashy fantasy novel over the last two summers.

Found property

2009-02-17T04:36:00.000-08:00

This Guardian feature suggests that what we lose might be more interesting than what we own. It's hard to cherish that which you can no longer hold, but we seem to manage it with ex-people.

This prompts some good news (nearly recent): the black cap I bought in Moscow, which went missing around the time of the notebook, turned up under the sofa like a hibernating hollow dusty cat. The notebook wasn't in it, like a dehydrated mouse.

This was got in Izmaylovo Market, bargaining over kopecks whilst being stalked by two large gentlemen who had earmarked me as a tourist (Vernisazh, next door, is where the real souvenir tat seekers go, and where I got my genuine rat-fur shapka on a previous visit).

They were then obliged to act as audience while I pulled my 'A ridiculous price!' face and pointed 'the walk away of disgust' directly at them. They looked massively unimpressed, but did retreat slightly.

It says on the inside 'made in America,' then, on a label tucked under the brim 'made in China.' But of course I bought it because it looked Russian.

Lost beginnings 3, the end (of the beginnings)

2009-01-06T14:42:00.000-08:00

I've known from the outset that I possessed a certain amount of the notebook's early entries -- the parts that followed my daughter's dedicatory note -- because I plundered those first few pages when I was setting up my MySpace page for the Poet to Poet project. I stripped out those entries which (sort of) filled the boxes MySpace sets for its profile. When I went back and stripped them out from that webpage, something occurred to me which relates to those 'lost' books.

I have a great deal of unpublished poetry from the eighties I never quite got round to finishing off or sending out (the tentative volume Poetry in Unglish), partly because the work was inferior or uncompleteable, partly because I was trying influences on for size, discarding some, amalgamating others, and moving on. By the end of that period, one of the styles I'd settled into, alongside the pieces which went into my first books for Bloodaxe and Arc, was montage, where I'd borrow phrases I found and liked the resonance of, and create an amalgam of these with phrases I was generating anyway in a fairly continuous manner.

This wasn't a fifty-fifty split: the proportions would vary wildly from just an epigraph, to an almost completely collage of 'foreign,' though the challenge of course was to create a voice which was itself slightly foreignised. Both Ashbery and MacDiarmid were behind this mode, and I suppose I grew out of it as slowly as I grew out of them, wanting to bring other elements into the work to roughen up its technique, resisting perfectionism and repetition. (Though repetition has its role.)

Anyway, when I abstracted from MySpace those entries I'd already removed from the notebook, I was reminded of that process of assemblage as digestion, drafting as rehearsal for the voice. No doubt, eighteen years or so ago, I'd have been dividing and reassembling these phrases, trying them out in couplets, tercets, quatrains, improvising parallel or contrasting lines based on tone or image or rhythm. No doubt to some extent that's exactly what I continue to do, just as these have lost some reference points only to begin to gain new ones.

One of the things I think I'm engaged in at this point in my writing life is a reassessing of the selves, consecutive or otherwise, an attempt to integrate those ways of working and thinking into a bundle, to echo Yeats, that is both coherent and incoherent in characteristic ways. I'm trying to see what has to be in the painting alongside such self-portraiture, and to accept that this composite self is a much smaller part of a larger multiplicity of patterns than these previous selves assumed.

I already know that its supposed integrities are much challenged by those patterns. I'm curious what the consequences of this is in terms of new work, but I suppose I'm equally curious in relation to old, 'lost' work.

Lost beginnings 2, the middle

2009-01-06T14:40:00.000-08:00

I am seven-sixteenths Cherokee.
None of these sixteenths is inside my body.

I don't have the time to be as obsessive as I would like to be.

It is only by not being able to do anything right
that I have ever got anything done.

I am a Time Peasant (if only I could remember
the past or indeed the future in any detail).

I am relieved to know I am not a Golem.
Nor, apparently, am I the King of the Echo People.
(Though this may go to tribunal.)

The great thing about nowadays is that you can talk to yourself
in public and everyone thinks you're on the phone.

I've got a fever and the only prescription is COWBELL.

I used to shave elephants.
Elements. I used to shave elements.

My favourite was fire, because
the red hot stubble was immediately ash.

With water I only got that brown foam
that washes up on non-Blue Flag beaches.

Air didn't care, but I only took
its oxygen molecules.

If you shave earth you get chocolate.

I'm totally mired
in that portion of the soundscape occupied
by non-human creatures.

The long-maned stumpy horses eating grass
between the yellow mini-pylons
arranged in a grid before runways.

An old schoolfriend with a moustache
where his teeth should be (that's right,
growing from the otherwise empty ridge of his gum).

Men who buy the model aeroplanes
of the planes they are sitting on
in the hope of completing their collection
(of model aeroplanes of the planes they have sat upon).

Jelly Ibrahim! Hands of Shine!
Babies that double up as cameras and MP3 players!
Thomas Jones: a great painter of Mediterranean walls!
Captain Crinkle: imitation without an original!

Lost beginnings 1, the beginnings

2009-01-06T14:36:00.000-08:00

Every night, when I attempt to re-imagine the notebook, I project myself back into the summer, when it sat beneath my Greek pillow; I remove it and look at its cover (the spine repaired by a black masking tape with a slight thready pattern on it, moleskine's black elastic band holding it shut). I open it and pass over the empty space on the first page where the address should have gone, turning instead to the first entry, a note to me from my daughter.

Her handwriting is growing more oval as she enters her teens, but eighteen months ago it still had a childish roundness that's echoed in a few of the phrases. She still calls me 'Dada,' a nomenclature I encouraged past its usual sell-by date because of its echo of Dadaism, and she concludes with my affectionate title for her, 'Best Bug,' the origins of which even I can't quite remember. In between, however, the message has her characteristic insightful maturity.

Although I can't remember the words exactly, I know what their content was: 'this is for you to look at when you're away from home, so that you feel comforted by the thought that I, we [I can't remember whether she includes Debbie in this or not] are thinking of you and love you.' I was touched and reassured by it throughout the time I was able to look at it: it did fulfil a function of bringing my imagination back to my family when I was, sometimes, very far away.

And it still performs that function now, each time I (partially) recall it, before I turn to the last entry, the phrasing of which I can never quite recall, and have to rehearse; then turn to the crucial missing section in the middle, picturing the drawing of Twisty Jesus from Komsomolskaya, remembering how I went through the entries drawing a circle in pencil around each station, so that I'd be able to find them quickly when I finally got round to transcribing them. I was already thinking of each entry as little sketch poems, like the ones I made the first time I visited the Uffizi, later setting them out in lines.

That reminds me that there are other, more subtly misplaced pieces of writing that I still claim to possess:

That journal I kept when I went to Italy for the first time with James Lloyd, with whom I recently got back in touch after a gap of almost thirty years. I typed up its pseudo-Kerouackian passages and called it Travelovel, circulating it around a few friends, one of whom, James Meek, still assumes I keep diaries with that degree of detail. The 'poems' were immediate reactions to the paintings, something I did in approximately the same manner in Rome, though fortunately those were in my pocket sketch book.

That verse play improvised directly onto an old electric typewriter called, ludicrously, Pannini, based on the painter of Roman scenes that montaged Classical ruins and contemporary scenes for the eighteenth century connoisseur market. There were a couple of canvasses in the Ashmolean by him that fascinated me, and the play, such as it was (it was like The Draughtsman's Contract, but with less happening) arose initially from speeches by the statues and bas-reliefs, before adding monologues by Pannini and dialogues between him and his patrons.

The novella Virtual Sideboard, which I wrote on holiday in Lanzarote whilst drinking cheap Spanish market brands of whisky and staying up all night, which consisted of extremely convoluted sentences about the onset of responsibility anxiety in a new parent, and fantasias-within-fantasias, retreats into the world inside the old sideboard that sat for decades in my grandmother's living room and now languishes in the asbestos-roofed garage of my parents' house. Somehow, I never quite got round to typing this up.

These unfinished, unpublishable, never-quite-relinquished pieces of writing are supposedly among my endless heaps of paper. Pannini turned up, briefly, when I got a young writer in to help tidy things up, and I imagine Travelovel is recoverable, not least because the original journal it was taken from still exists. But I haven't seen Virtual Sideboard for years, rather like the synopsis of a verse novel I mislaid when we had to move out of the lighthouse so its floors could be rehung, and never located again, and therefore can never quite get on with writing.

(The atavism of my compositional process lies close to the heart of this project: how can I proceed if I don't have those very scraps of paper?)

There was an incident which still gives me the cold shivers, when I found my research assistant throwing out letters from the 80s because they wouldn't be of immediate interest -- there had been one day previous to that when I hadn't gone through the material being dispensed with, and I keep thinking 'What if?' in a most unjust and ungenerous panic.

So how do these effectively lost pieces compare with the actually gone notebook I try to reconstruct in my dozing mind's eye? How will the piece of work I'll have to produce without it compare to the pieces I could produce if I were to find and edit those missing items?

The Ghost Notebook 1

2008-12-26T05:41:00.000-08:00

I noticed in my recent self-hypnosis sessions (a nice and oddly seasonal way to send yourself to sleep) that I was putting the lost notebook to quite another use: ghost-writing new entries.

Specifically, in the Hypnopompics, I find myself noting down those texts or fragments thereof I've been composing in the dreamworld. (My sleep world equator of the Dead Zone of the true middle of the nacht is approached through the Madrugada Straits, thence into the Hypnogogics. After a refreshing taza de chocolate caliente with Christopher Walken's hair, it's back out via the Hypnopompics before landing on the Bloody Radio Fourland.)

I tend to have flicked to the back of the Lost Notebook for this purpose, finding myself a clean page rather as one turns over the pillow, and noting down those remarks I have for years tried to memorise as I fell asleep, or find myself scribbling frantically on melting sheets of paper and stuffing under dream representations of said pillow in the sad belief they'll still be there when I wake.

The few entries copied down so far therefore define a new ethereal identity for the notebook, which reminds me of a remark Rachael Ogden made about the entries I'm planning to make in this blog, but have not yet written down. She noted that this was another reliance on memory very like the use I'm trying to put that ramshackle device to in relation to lost items: a virtual notebook of future entries, instead of a lost notebook of actual entries. And now there's a ghost notebook of dream entries.

So far there are five notes, a pentatonic arriving in the following order: one was a memory of a dream from a previous occasion I scribbled down once I realised this was an option; three were the actual texts I was waking up with when I realised I could use the notebook; and the last happened on the morning when I remembered I would have to begin this entry.

They mark another stage I realise now has been holding this blog back a little: the inclusion of actual entries, rather than my thoughts about losing said entries. I do have a reluctance I've noted elsewhere about including online what I persist in thinking of as the real thing rather than mere verisimilitudes thereof -- light verse rather than poetry, previously published reviews rather than straight-to-blog cultural commentary. This relates, I think to the identity scatter I practise in relation to sites in general, and possibly to the manner I assemble poems into books in particular.

Of course this can simply be assigned to the virtues of protecting one's sources (don't poke the muses with a stick being pretty good advice) and most becoming modesty. But that would be rather less than half of the inconvenient facts. The truth is, technique arises in part from habit, and, at earlier points in my career, I may well have used text in a rather passive-aggressive manner to, simultaneously, hide and display, with the result that a weary world picked up on one or two fragments. Although I'm trying to approach greater directness, still, who's got the time to put it all together? Is there even any evidence that I'm putting it all together?

Why I do this is presumably to do with my background: as the self-styled gifted child of a dominating parent from a lower middle class background, I classified myself as exposed by my own 'gifts.' By which I meant such terrifying crises as being at university, or getting published. I was used to the almost self-sufficient world of the only child, which confuses inner monologue with the right to dictate terms, even though I thought of myself as possessing little or no bargaining power.

Dundee, despite the overlooked presence of what now seems a veritable microAthens of peers, was an empty city where the big ghostie people pursued the phantom of that existence I had found so enigmatic and significant as a boy, while my imaginary insect self buzzed around the giant gutters. Oxford, far more so. I was simultaneously too close to and too far away from my subject to be able to put it into any thematic context.

Much of that case persists, especially when it comes to the small matter of handing over the sweeties: I don't like sending poems off to magazines in any constructive, tactical manner, whereas, if someone asks me, I'll usually get round to giving them some. Ditto with reviews, articles, broadcasts -- while others tout, I wait politely to be asked. The amazing thing is that anyone ever asks me to do anything.

Part of the whole endeavour here and elsewhere is just not to recover the notebook, but understand why I made it and what its loss signifies. To move from that corner of the overly-detailed fresco back far enough to get some idea as to what the whole thing might actually be, accepting that it just might not be either representation or abstraction.

The Consolations of the Lost

2008-10-26T10:35:00.000-07:00

Perhaps one of the most famous lost notebooks is a collection of the mathematician Ramanujan's notes from the last year of his life, though it was only designated as 'lost' when it was found. This is, I believe, an example of irony, or at least it appears as such from my perspective. The line that it was, for mathematicians, the equivalent of discovering a tenth symphony by Beethoven for...er, non-mathematicians, is interesting. It implies that Ramanujan's book could be somehow appreciated by mathematicians in much the same way as a Beethoven symphony could by music-lovers (a set which of course would include mathematicians), and this is obviously flawed in just the right way to point up one of the central concerns underlying this blog.

That enquiry is: what is the relation between a thing (obtainable or otherwise) and those other things that are asserted to be its equivalents? What can I really produce here: an imitation of the notebook, or a type of detailed allusion to it? The role of will is obviously crucial: the original notebook was constructed by a series of accumulations of more or less unrelated decisions to write, and its identity as a single notebook was not particularly intended. By losing it, however, its identity has now become unfortunately singular. But is the act of will required to produce a version of it, however fragmentary in process or result, similarly singular?

While I ruminate on this theme (which has, naturally, only presented itself as a result of loss), I thought it might be entertaining to begin a list of the lost. There are, of course, lots of far more prestigious examples of books gone missing than my miserable case, and many of these were gathered in Stuart B. Kelly's witty Book of Lost Books, a highly-recommended guide for those struggling to come to terms with this particular experience. The consolation of contemplating just how many books -- philosophic treatises, novels, plays and poems -- have gone missing over and because of the millennia is, to put it mildly, debatable, but in the absence of other effective therapies, one can but try.

I rather liked this passage in Charlotte Higgins' piece on the Greeks in the Guardian a few weeks ago:

'We will never completely grasp ancient Greece. An enormous wealth of literature, art, architecture and other artefacts have survived but, for every survival, there are a thousand losses. We have 20 dramas by Euripides, but we know that his complete works numbered 90 plays. For Aeschylus, we have seven out of 90 extant. And for Sophocles, just seven out of 123. Works that were seen as masterpieces in antiquity are nothing but dust, ashes and the occasional quote in other texts.'

During the same summer that the notebook recorded with a degree of closeness I can fantasise about, but no longer assess, I was struck by a passage in Maria Rosa Menocal's fascinating book on what we persist in thinking of as Moorish Spain, The Ornament of the World. She was writing about Ibn Hazm's little book, The Neck-Ring of the Dove, an impressively influential work: its brief catalogue of thirty of the major tropes of Arabic love poetry finds echoes in the troubadours, courtly lovers, sonneteers and concettists of successive centuries. Menocal says, 'This resume of complex conceits, and some of the poetry that exemplified them, was a work of powerful nostalgia and recolection, both personal and communal...The Neck-Ring was a tribute to a world of courtliness that Ibn Hazm had just seen obliterated, and that seemed every day more likely to vanish completely.'

As pertinently for this blog, it was among the few which survived of the works of this cantankerous old man of eleventh century Andalusian letters, who wrote around four hundred books.

Another important Medieval writer, this time from the Abbasid rather than the Umayyad end of the Arabic world, was the tenth-century traveller from Baghdad, Mas'udi. I bought his Meadows of Gold in that nifty little Penguin series on Great Journeys (everyone should acquaint themselves with a few of these -- Chekhov's account of his journey to Sakhalin Island, for instance, has already marked itself as one of those books that people 'borrow' from me and never return). It's full of what often turns out to be the first appearances of nagging little details you remember from elsewhere -- the Jewish kingdom of the Khazars, for instance, though one that stood out for me was the first reference to what is present-day Somalia (I was translating the great Somali poet Gaariye with Martin Orwin throughout this period): 'The whole of this coast is without resources, and its one export today is the incense called kundur [frankincense].'

As you've no doubt anticipated, Mas'udi wrote thirty six books, of which only two survive, the titles of which are delightful enough to require quoting in full: The Meadows of Gold and Mines of Precious Gems, and The Book of Admonition and Revision. That latter name could well stand as a draft title for the final goal of this project, a version of a notebook that was never intended to be a book, a version which is inevitably incomplete, but only in reference to that notebook, itself an extract from an ongoing project.

Any further examples of lost works you care to send me will receive a sorrowful welcome here.

A Visit to the Hypnotist

2008-10-22T07:26:00.000-07:00

In recent weeks I've taken to wandering the streets crying out like the ghost of Whitman, 'Oh notebook, my notebook! You were my library and playpark, my outer dream and my inner net!' I also hang out in North Shields Netto asking the refrigerated chickens in a Ginsbergian frenzy, 'Are you my notebook?'

No I don't. I'm so busy I'm struggling to put down the next five entries for this blog which I have 'written' in my head (more on this concept of what is already 'written' in the mind elsewhere.) But recently (before I went off to a festival and on a tour and embarked on mucho teaching), having just done a reading, I was having a quiet pint outside Venezuala's Bolivar Hall, just off the Tottenham Court Road, with brother brodyagi Andy Croft and Paul Summers. I'd gone through the potential scenarios of partial recovery, including a return to Moscow, when Paul said why not visit a hypnotist?

This immediately seemed a necessary part of this very project -- and I was encouraged by his tale of a composer who had retrieved an entire lost manuscript by this method, which put a similar goal in my mind.

I didn't only want to know where and when I might have lost the notebook, I wanted that particular twenty page passage from it concerning the trip we had taken to Moscow. Here were the closely-detailed descriptions of stations and passengers -- and the beginnings of drafts -- I particularly needed if my portion of the book was to go ahead according to my usual compositional method.

So I duly visited the hypnotist, who lived in a bungalow in Ponteland and specialised in past life regression, and found he was an old habitue of the Newcastle writing scene, and had known the likes of George Charlton in the early nineties, before I'd moved to the North East. Perhaps this (hypnotism? reincarnation?) is what happens to a percentage of all writers or readers of poetry. Whether influenced by his own past or not, he was certainly happy to try regressing me to two periods -- one the week before when the notebook had been lost, and the other six months previous to that in Moscow -- in the hope that some key details would re-emerge. But, he warned me, chances were fifty-fifty in such cases.

I set out the same recorder I'd taken round the Metro, capturing the clangs and whooshes, thunderings and clip-footed hurryings of that underground system, and was first relaxed, though without the twangs, plinks and plashings of the proffered muzak, and then encouraged to visualise a Secure Place. This, for me, is our bed in Crete, enveloped in the great cube of a mosquito net (or whatever you call a box where the sides are rectangles), but with window and french windows open to the hillside. I used to like sneaking in for a siesta and listening to the hoarse shout of cicadas on the the vine, a few tardy cockerels, and the sealion-meets-bicycle horn bark of a particularly unfortunate dog. In such scenarios, the notebook would always be tucked snugly under my pillow with a pen.

I was then taken back in what I supposed was a shallow trance (it was no doubt much deeper than I realised), attempting to access memories of first the more distant, and second the more proximate time. In each case I was surprised, firstly by how vivid the sense of inhabiting the memory was, and secondly by how much an act of will this was, by how clearly it was a memory I was riffling through as one riffles through papers, and not a reliving of a preserved experience.

I had, for instance, a strong impression of walking backwards and forwards surreptitiously recording the sound of the escalators in the first station we visited, Planernaya. I also had a vivid image of my feet marching along beneath me as I headed for the car on the fateful morning of Loss of Notebook. But everything was shot through with unlit spaces in which I began to distract myself half-consciously, half-hypnogogically with the image of the notebook as a koala bear's nose. Some aspect of me clearly wasn't taking things seriously enough.

I shouldn't have been surprised by that strong sense that this was not a live unfolding of a somehow recorded event, having done a collaborative project on the nature of memory with the eminent neuropsychologist Martin Conway, and having had conversations on this subject with the novelist and neuropsychologist Charles Ferneyhough, I was quite aware that each memory is a construct, rebuilt each time according to the viewpoint of the self you are at the point of recall, rather than a distinct object, perfectly preserved in the brain. I was even aware that this concept of the memory was likely to interfere with a process of hypnosis which assumed the possibility of perfect recall. I was all round too aware for the kind of flat-out sybilline intoning I had hoped for.

Equally, I knew fine that the carefully-assembled visualisation I was attempting was a mild version of the sort of inner journeying I had embarked on during my more chemically-stimulated twenties, and that a vivid interior life, borrowing from the eidetic states between sleeping and waking and including marsupials and, frequently, Mark E. Smith, was already very much part of my creative processes.

But I was heartened by the hypnotist's advice that this was a process strengthened by practice, and to a certain extent this has proven to be the case. I can now, through a process of self-hypnosis roughly parallel to the state of savasana I've been popping myself into since adolescence, strongly imagine the notebook and very roughly 'read' its contents, even though this does not amount to a process of dictation from some inner muse, and this in turn stimulates more detailed memories of the Moscow trip than I would otherwise experience. Hope stirs in the busiest of pigeon-shaped bosoms.

Of course, when I checked, I found I hadn't switched the recorder on.

Categories of loss

2008-09-11T16:59:00.000-07:00

There are a number of types of entry I would usually make in a notebook, as opposed to the various other books and devices in and on which I record my adrenaline-driven ramblings. By listing first these types, and then those instances of these I can remember, even just as headings beneath headings, I will then try to recall the few fragments I can of the lost entries. Realistically, of course, I can only hope for a tiny rate of recovery, but then I have rarely been realistic about any creative goal I've set myself, and it would clearly be counterproductive to start now. Each heading will eventually be expanded into an entry, however tiny, however, to adapt the terminology of Wikipedia, stubby.

Drafts

(The beginnings or constituent parts of actual poems. Here I'm fortunate, in that I'd recently gone through the notebook and extracted these up to about the middle of August. Including these will be a propaganda victory in the war upon oblivion.)

Quotes

(From books, newspapers, films, radio and television. Many of these are of course permanently lost, but, as I often respond directly to my reading, it may be possible, through the simple agency of speed-reading everything I looked at over the last eighteen months, to recover some of these.)

Examples:

I was very struck by a review, probably in the THES, of a book by Paul Ricoeur which had a concluding chapter on the ethics of translation. This was probably Reflections On The Just. I've since picked up if not waded through a few of Ricoeur's works, and could no doubt retrieve the very review from our senior common room.

A subsection of this would be notes on overheard conversations:

I can for instance remember sitting in S-bux listening to a young woman expostulating on how extraordinary she found umbrellas (as sentiment I heartily agree with), and how grossed out she was by 'elderly' mothers (don't concur with her on this.

Then there was the ex-serviceman in the Tynemouth Lodge who delivered a few insights into the actions of the Paratroopers on Bloody Sunday. The worst part of the loss here is, of course, the particular phrasing, which had a lot to do with me copying a statement down in the first place. I remember him remarking on his age and health, 'I'm clinging to the gutter by my fingernails.'

Booklists

(One of these will be easy to construct, as Debbie bought me almost everything on it for my birthday. The last such I can probably remember with a trip to the bookshop where I made it. It was focussed, like much of my recent reading, on Mediterranean and Eastern European history, and there was definitely one book about The Siege of Vienna in the wake of reading Lords of the Horizon and talking to Austrian poet Bernhard Widder.)

Journal entries

(These are entries I should have made in my journal, but which, for convenience's sake, I jotted down in my notebook. These go to the heart of the project, as I was having a torrid time in relation my workload/creativity balance, and made lots of plans and observations I would dearly like to remember.)

Examples:

At present I can remember one reflection on the flaws in our definitions of nothingness that has an ironic tang now. It was made by the light of my mobile phone as we were driven through the countryside between Shanghai and Anhui Province. Then there was a puzzled entry on what a 'world poet' might be at the present time.

Plots and plans

(I frequently note down ideas that are meant to get me into some project or other that has stalled or that I have stalled before starting.)

Examples:

Foremost amongst the stalled would be the McGonagall book, a novel which I have written plenty of fragments for without really getting stuck into: two ideas were outlined in the notebook. The Sleeper and the Twelve Tasks. I'll go into these in more depth in separate entries. One subtitle I happened upon thanks to the Goodwin book was The Autohagiography.

The other main area I'd welcome total recall in relation to would be the long poem I was contemplating as a sequel to the (not very successful) Laurelude. This languished under the under-inspiring title The Discursion, and apart from deciding that every poem would have a definite article in its title, I also went on at length about the various combinations of stanzas that made up the mystical unit 28. (Why 28 is at all relevant to the process is another enigma I wish I could remember.)

Riffing

(This is the best title I can come up with for the sort of doodling and play with languge which was one of the notebook's principle purposes. I'd play with a phrase, sometimes a mishearing, or list odd rhymes I rarely got round to using, or produced parodies, or just sketched with language, an action halfway between recording and drafting.)

Examples:

Likely to be far and few because of the nature of these beasts.

Projects and places

(Because I am very much a poet of passive response, often to place, projects and places are pretty much indistinguishable -- if I went somewhere, I usually wanted to write about it. And I went somewhere a lot during this period, too much in fact and therefore was in the midst of various projects, including the central loss this project is about, the Moscow trip. These will have to become separate headings)

Examples:

Gurnards Head (Cornwall) - early 07

Copied out quite a lot from two texts there: Bruce Chatwin's magisterial What Am I Doing Here? and Tom Baker's dippy 'Who Is Tom Baker?' The questioning seemed very appropriate to the place I found myself in. The first was an extract about Herzog and walking, the second about ironing. I slightly prefer the second activity to the first.

Athens, Georgia (and Asheville, NC)

One of my favourite clippings came from this short stay: an account of a mobster shot in the head but saved by his hatband, 'I din't do/feel nuthin,' he mumbles, and must be retrieved.

Crete at Easter

Jerusalem in May

Rome in June

- I remember copying down the name of the 'rampa' near our hotel, called after a linguist or 'glottologico'? And the remark of an old man on the bus when the air condition started 'raining' on us: 'In Roma, null e impossibile.' (Though of course my Italian will be out for both of these.

Crete in the Summer

Guangzhou in September

- I remember one phrase in relation to a jade-clad figure recovered from a royal tomb: 'green lobster man'

Yellow Mountain in October

Poland in March 08

This was Lodj, which we (a group including Kate Clanchy and Christopher Reid) were driven to from Warsaw. I remember writing down 'komputery' because I was fascinated by the way a Polish plural became, homophonically, an English adjective. And the word for 'beware.' And some details from a setting of Auden by the daughter of the architect Lutyens that I can probably research without difficulty. There was probably quite a lot about borshch, the 'Jewish' restaurant and statuary -- their much-polished noses in particular being echoed/reflected in Ploshchad Revolutsiy metro the following month.

Moscow in April/May

South Wales in June

Crete in the Summer

Novi Sad (Serbia) in August

Last entry, first recovery

2008-09-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

On Friday night I threw down my chopsticks, leapt up from my usual semi-comatose position in front of telly and takeaway, ran to the kitchen, extracted my notebook from my jacket pocket, and wrote down the following:

'Your opinion's not valid, because you're not wearing a disguise.'

Keen followers of The Adverts will recognise this as being paraphrased from some bank ad or other, where the guy's fake moustache falls into his coffee. As ever, I liked it for its possibly inadvertent subtext that only those who assume the facade of authority, normality, maturity will be paid heed to. Also because it alludes to the independent life of moustaches, something I've long suspected.

Of course, because I left the notebook out rather than replacing it immediately, the circumstances leading to its loss could begin. Was it worth it for so trivial a note? But of course the whole purpose of a notebook is to cancel all such hierarchies as a first gesture. You copy something down because it attracts, even commands your attention, not because it's 'important'. It must speak to your underlying interests, themes and obsessions, even when you have not yet fully articulated what those are.

The part of you which copies things down, which jots down phrases and fragments before even knowing what they might form part of, which allows itself to be led by process, decidedly does not wear a disguise, because it is more 'normal', having assessed something as trivial, to forget it. That way nothing is begun, no articulation can be attempted, no conclusion will ever be reached.

The word 'trivial', by the way, comes from the same root as 'trivium', the first three of the liberal arts to be studied in medieval scholasticism: grammar, rhetoric and logic. It carries the definition in Chambers 'to be found anywhere' with the implication this makes it of little value. Its root in Latin is the place where three roads meet, 'tres via,' a place associated not only with decision-making, but with the uncanny through its associations with the goddess Hekate (Trivia to the Romans).

So which is being devalued by the modern usage: our learned ancestors or the chthonic goddess? It reminds me of the way as children in Dundee we used to dress up at Halloween before we understood this was supposed to be an American custom. We were supposed to be making the scary fun, though perhaps another interpretation would be we made it tolerable. Perhaps that's what to trivialise something means. Certainly we called ourselves 'guisers', to validate the exercise.

There's a nice confrontation here between the rational and irrational which matches my experience. The loss of the notebook is mysterious, so I attempt to deal with it first by logic, and then by assembling a sort of grammar of the lost categories, and a rhetoric of recovery, actions which in themselves are pretty barking. But then so was my initial note-taking. Was I abolishing categories or inverting them?

Whilst we're on latration (barking), Hekate always liked dogs. Dogs, horses and snakes. Not sure how she feels about moustaches.

Lost without rational explanation

2008-09-09T07:51:00.000-07:00

I always carry a notebook round with me, and a sketchbook, a clipboard, and a journal. Frequently I carry a camera, and a mobile phone. And a large manbag to carry these items plus books, pens, papers, a minature umbrella, a miniature copy of the Master and Margarita in Russian which I can't read, a phasin (stripy wrapround garment my brother-in-law brought me back from Thailand, usually for ladies), ipod, headphones, cables. In my pockets are various examples of plastic cutlery, either sugar or mustard, paracetemol or some other pills, earplugs (occasionally), frequently my passport. Receipts, postcards (one of Tommy Cooper, one of St George by the Cretan painter Emmanuel Tzanes), small maps of wherever I am. And my notebook.

Which is currently a small moleskine, though I resisted getting anything so brand-y for a long time. It was bought almost two years ago, and the spine started giving out a while back, so I repaired it, once unsuccessfully with some black tape that kept unsticking and sliding off; once, recently, at the kitchen table in Crete in fact, with a wide strip of ridgy black tape that seemed to sort it out. There are entries in it dating as far back as Jan 07, the beginning of a tumultuous period for me creatively, and continuing up till the night before last Saturday, September 6th. When I lost it.

How I lost it, logic tells us, must remain a mystery, though the specifics of this mystery are even more baffling than I usually find the universe. I was rushing to get ready for a trip to the Bristol Poetry Festival, but had everything together in just about enough time to get to the station. It was raining, heavily, and I had forgotten to get myself a raincoat, but it was just a matter of popping to the bathroom for it, unzipping its winter lining, and slipping it on. We jumped in the car and sped off to meet our first traffic jam. Was I going to make my train? Did I have the organisers' phone numbers? Where was my mobile? I felt for it in the phone pocket on my jacket -- and it was missing. Most unfortunate, but there was no time to turn back -- I'd have to take my wife's instead and she could use mine.

Now, there is a point where the memory resembles fiction, because, although you can remember something happening, you can't remember whether it really happened or you can simply imagine it plausibly happening. I 'remember' that, whilst checking for my phone in my other pockets, I noticed that I didn't have my notebook. I'm 'fairly sure' I thought something along the lines of 'I've forgotten both of them -- this is hardly auspicious.' I seem to have said something along these lines to my wife, because when she came home, she searched for both items, although the evidence is I only texted her from the station to say my train was delayed. That would seem to imply that I said something about the notebook as well as the phone, and that I did not have the notebook before I left the car at Newcastle Station.

Of course, I could have trapped the notebook between jacket and raincoat, only for it to fall out as I got out of the vehicle and hurried to my train. Would I have noticed? Possibly, as I had to get my bag out of the back of the car, so didn't just rush off. But the notebook could have fallen there and been swept away without being handed in to Lost Property (I've checked and rechecked, naturally).

Equally, it could have fallen somewhere between the house and the car, though the car was parked directly outside the house, and we did have a short conversation standing outside the house but within the garden about whether to take my keys or not. If it had fallen here, surely we would have noticed, or my wife would have on her return. That leaves the possibility it fell down just as I was getting into the car and that, in the time it took for her to complete her round trip, someone came along and pocketed or purposively threw away the item. Because it hasn't been handed in to the police (I've checked).

By the time I'd got on the train I'd gone through all my pockets and my bag again. I suppose I might have missed it, then it got lost whilst I removed my outer clothing in order to take off my jumper. I checked (and rechecked) that nothing had been handed in at Kings Cross. But of course, you would conclude, I would conclude, these are all less likely than the scenario in which it never left the house. Certainly, I assumed so and exhorted my wife repeatedly over the weekend to check in all the obvious places. Of course I'd been distracted by that business with the raincoat and its fascinating unzippable lining, and I'd simply left phone and notebook behind. Except she searched car, kitchen table, living room table, bedroom table, study table, and all points between, and couldn't find it.

Of course, on my return (the event went very well incidentally, despite all these harbingers of disaster to the primitive of mind), I would be able to see what she had not. I'm a good looker-for-things and she's not got the same investment in finding it. Except, after hours of searching meticulously in all the aforementioned places, going through all my papers, searching through drawers I might have stood near, looking under behind and within both sofa and bed, going though all the papers to be recycled, all the rubbish bins, several bags of papers that had nothing to do with the whole business but happened at least to be bags full of papers, and pacing slowly up and down the garden and indeed the street, peering under bushes and in gutters, I still couldn't find my notebook.

I searched in the dark, I searched in the daylight, I even searched in my dreams, finding it twice: once 'behind the seat, and to my left' (a fair description of the past), once in the fridge, where a helpful woman had placed it. I had actually looked in the fridge the previous evening, when things were getting bad. Eventually I had to conclude that, while the notebook presumably existed somewhere in the universe, and while all logical supposition would lead one to conclude the high likelihood that it was still in the house, no amount of looking could actually locate it. Moving rapidly from denial through depression to a sort of acceptance, I began to think about what I should do next.

There were a lot of units of writing of great personal value in the notebook, some of which were of professional importance to me (I'll go through the contents in another post), some of which, in a sense I couldn't do without. But here I was without them, so, still allowing logic its head, they would have to be replaced. That is the the purpose of this blog. I will try to remember, as far as is within my powers, the contents of the notebook. Many, perhaps the vast majority of entries are as lost as the physical object. But their categories survive, although I never thought of them particularly as categories. In some cases I can make a stab at reconstructing a fragment or a simulacrum of their contents. As I do so I will also go further into my motives for this exercise, and why I've decided to carry it out in a quasi-public forum.