I started this blog on a dark and gloomy night in the closing days of February. Now it is five months later and I’m somehow still going. It does pain me somewhat to say that I’m going to have to stop, at least for a little while.
Category Archives: Ramblings
The Simple Things
Sometimes I think that we, the reading public, can be real snobs when it comes to books. We tend to subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) judge people based on what they’re reading. So many of us, including myself, lambaste the popularist novels, decrying the works of Dan Brown and J K Rowling, or in the case of the Song of Ice and Fire, claiming we read it before it was “big”. It’s book-hipsterism and it makes me feel a little dirty.
Stories from Old London Town
Last Friday I was in London. London is a city I’ve never really liked. I’ve never really been able to put my finger on the reason why, but I suspect it’s something to do with the bustle and the pervading sense of grime and dirt. You can never quite escape the weight of all those people. A population of nearly eight million is something you can smell in the air and feel in the ground beneath your feet, it’s an ever present fact pushing down on you. The sense of unease and oppression I feel in London is likely rooted in my roots as a quaint country lad. Throughout my life the only cities I’ve had regular cause to visit have only had populations around the 250,000 mark, some 30 times less than that of our heaving metropoloid capital. The population density of London according to data from 2009 is 12,773 souls per square imperial mile. Do you know how that compares to my quaint northern homeland? It has a population density of 160 people per square mile. One hundred and sixty! It is perhaps no small wonder then that London puts me on edge and fills me with an unspoken bitterness. Perhaps there’s also a small current of paranoia there too, as if I think the Southrons are out to get me; Northmen do not really belong in such a place as Old London Town.
The Ghosts of Childhood
A man I know on the intertubes named Sir Marc of Jolt has a blog. Over the past few months he’s posted a few pieces describing memories from his childhood. Most recently a tale about butterflies that is at once both tragic, monstrous and terribly touching. It is in essence, childhood crystallised into words. All of these stories paint a picture of a joyful childhood, I like to think it’s done in watercolours; slightly washed out and made indistinct and fuzzy by the passage of years.
The Funk
Recently something awful happened. I became ensnared by something I simply refer to as: “The Funk”. The Funk is a terrible, terrible thing. It’s not tied to anything so delightful and buoyant as the thrumming beat of funkadelic jazz. The Funk as I know it harkens back to the older meaning of the word. That great yawning abyss of empty futile hopelessness. I’m not depressed. Oh no, life’s just about as grand as it gets for me right now. This mood that’s gripped me is something pertaining more exclusively to the creative arts. It’s something quite different to writer’s block. Writer’s block is a situation where despite wanting to, you can’t think of anything to write. The Funk is something of the inverse; having plenty ideas to write about, but not the will to do so.
I had an adventure
Last week I had a package delivered. Rather unsurprisingly this happened while I was at work. And while my housemates were at work. So what was the poor beleaguered delivery man to do but slip a little card through the door telling me that we’d need to pick it up from the depot. Naturally, there were complications. The main complication being that the depot in question was six and a bit miles away in the industrialised wastelands that surround the city where I live like they do so many others. What ensued was a frantic search to find a way to get there within five days before they invoked “return to sender”. To make matters worse this was all occurring across the four-day Easter mega-weekend, scratching two possible days I could collect it. What with the depot being closed and its occupants rather inconsiderately taking the day off. Most people might have been content to wait, but not I. I wanted that package. I wanted that package bad.
The Source
Ideas, when you get right down to it, are bastards. Without them any artistic venture simply cannot get off the ground. Without an idea what do you write about? What do you paint? Not only do you have to start somewhere, but you’ve also got to actually go somewhere. Without an idea you’ll just end up sitting at your desk twiddling your thumbs and resisting the urge to trawl the sordid nether regions of the internet. But as I said ideas are bastards; they are things of whimsy and caprice. They’re not something that can just be summoned or called upon at a moments notice. Ideas aren’t something you can simply manufacture, trying to is equivalent to a blacksmith trying to hammer a sword out of the wind. A good proper idea is a rare gem, something forged in the bowels of the earth of countless millennia, something which you’ll have to shift a metric fuck-ton of shit just to get to.
Keepers of the page
When talking about books and writing there always seems to be one little thing that is forgotten and pushed to the back of the discussion. Perhaps not quite shunned and ostracised but certainly ignored for other more weighty matters. It’s like the person who stands alone in the corner at a party; not because they’re a social leper, but simply because everyone else is too busy with other things. I am of course talking about bookmarks.
Bookmarks are those little stalwart vanguards of the reading world. They held your hand when you cried during that romance novel of yours, they stood resolutely by your side as you struggled your way through that big, high-brow classic that hasn’t aged too well and doesn’t make a lot of sense, they never left your side when you were reading that trashy novel you bought at the airport which everyone said was great but was actually really shit. They didn’t judge you. They were with you every step of the way. They did all this without expecting any recognition nor thanks, because they’re inanimate objects and such a thing would be impossible for them, but they were still there! Despite the fact that we don’t give them half the credit they deserve, bookmarks are extraordinarily important things. They are a simple little device which holds our place for us, it lets us remember where we were. They are our anchorage amidst an angry and uncertain sea of words. Nearly everyone has one, even if they don’t read. They’ll be some in a box somewhere gathering dust.
Abominations of Technology
In my last post I briefly touched on the subject of e-books. Well, I didn’t so much touch upon it, as glance at it from a great distance through a pair of high-powered binoculars. Something akin to a stalker of conversation points; it’s like birdwatching but metaphorical. That and my tea is in a mug as opposed to a Thermos. There’s still sandwiches though. Sandwiches with pickle.
Now I suspect I should attempt to capture the aforementioned lesser-spotted speckled conversation point with my net of bilious words and angry grammar lest it dash off into the bushes or get eaten by a cat. It is at this point my metaphor begins to shake violently and collapse in upon its own absurdity.
So e-books then…
The Rogue Verbumancer 