Noether's New Writeups

A note on arrival (idea)

2003-01-20T20:04:00Z

The boxes are swollen
and tense, holding their breath

I lie on the floor and
the stacked boxes tower
threatening to topple

At the weekend friends come around
and the boxes gasp open, books
spill onto shelves, computer networks
assemble themselves, and packaging
leaps into the loftspace

Now, the silence spoons me, and I hear
all the tiny sounds of the house:
the faraway whoo of the boiler
flue, the spluttering exhalation
of the fridge

And, like the boxes, I am
learning to breathe again

I need to write more unconsciously (idea)

2001-05-29T15:35:01Z

By this I do not mean that my prose might be improved by a pistol-whipping (although some might think it). Rather, I'm referring to the dual roles of the conscious and unconscious in writing. I first encountered this idea in Dorothea Brande's delightful Becoming a writer (and, like all really good ideas, once I'd heard it I was sure it was my own).

Briefly, she suggests that it is useful to separate the conscious and unconscious, to allow them to give us their greatest benefit in the areas where they are strongest. So, the unconscious is the creative force, unfettered by conventions, allowing us to tap the area of the mind between sleep and waking, or when we daydream. Whereas the conscious organises, vets, patrols, adheres to rules. Of course we need both, without the unconscious we would never produce anything, or only something horribly stilted, and the conscious is required as critic and reviser, to reign us in. I don't take this idea of Brande's…

What I deduced from his reading matter (person)

2001-05-24T14:23:08Z

Whenever I visit someone I look at their books, and the fact that I do this probably tells you something about me.

His are imprisoned behind glass doors in an ornately carved, antique cabinet; the light reflects ghostly readers on its limpid panes. It has a key. HA! So, these books are, at least to some extent, for show. If you really enjoy reading you keep your books accessible and they sneak off their shelves to lie besides chairs and into dense little piles of paragraphs.

I scan the spines and I see some familiar titles, he has all the usual Booker and Pulitzer fodder but, oddly, he rarely has more than a single book by a given author, whereas, when I find a writer I like, I tend to compulsively acquire their complete works.

Later, coming out of the bathroom, I can't resist peeking into his study where I see shelf after shelf of science fiction and fantasy -- books whose covers…

alternately warm and cool (idea)

2001-05-13T20:47:22Z

She is wrapped warmly around one leg and the electric fan blows coolly on the other, like a lover. I am sweaty, sleepy, sated. Her head exerts a steady pressure on my chest and I'm sure she can hear the slow reassuring thump of my heartbeat. I want this moment of wordless closeness to be extended forever.

The fan moves in a semicircular arc and with each sweep it makes a creaking noise, which I've only just noticed, an insistent, metronomic creaking.

Creak. Each individual hair is lifted up by an invisible finger's caress. Creak. My leg becomes almost imperceptibly warmer as the cool air is displaced. Creak...

My whole being is tensely concentrated on the deafening creaks and I would like this moment to stop.

jeunesse dorée (idea)

2001-05-10T16:01:20Z

This French phrase means luxurious, fashionable, sophisticated young people; it translates literally to gilded youth.

* * *

They gather at the local Co-op store, which I associate with the return of profits to consumers via stamps to be licked and stuck in books. "Do you collect stamps, love?" The once dowdy Co-op is now open twenty four hours selling maple-syrup-saturated pastries with pecan nuts, Häagen Dazs ice cream and expensive bottled beer, all to be paid for in graduation debt.

When the store is busy it is filled with a hormonal fug; everywhere the restless, gilded youth look at one another while appearing not to look. Longing trembles in the frozen foods aisle and serendipitous fingers linger over spiny courgettes. A boy boldly seeks a (redundant) opinion on cooking times, as a pretext to begin a conversation with an attractive other, but mostly such approaches are endlessly postponed; inconvenient desires…

Impressions from a young revolutionary's life (idea)

2001-04-25T17:26:15Z

From birth I was immersed in The Struggle, breast-fed Bolshevism, and suckled on the synthesis resulting from the battle between thesis and antithesis in a steady diet of dialectical materialism.

Early, at a rally of The Party, I was exposed to the brutal realities of The Revolution, when I was aroused from a peaceful sleep by the cry of Trotsky as an ice pick was plunged into his head, in a consciousness raising re-enactment. The Party boasted some of the country's finest thespians amongst its members, and if I had been perhaps a little older I might have appreciated more this coup de theatre. Sadly I wasn't and scared out of my childish wits I bawled uncontrollably.

It was here that I encountered The Leader for the first time. He was a powerfully built, balding man, every inch the intellectual-hailing-from-an-indeterminate-east-european-country. When he addressed the shock troops of the revolution (as we considered ourselves) he gave a…