Not a great deal of time to post today - been running around after the Hellbeast for ages, it seems. Yesterday was actually quite a good day, as it goes - took Alfie down to South Shields for a good run on the beach, and had the chance to show Michelle Juan Munoz's sculpture Conversation Piece .
(It's amazing what you can learn from the internet almost passively. For instance, in trying to find a picture of the South Shields piece, I learned that Munoz has done other Conversation Pieces in other cities too. There's one in New York , for instance.)
Yesterday, then, was a good day, which is nice. Because in the past few days I've finally started setting to work organising what will (once All Haste is from the Devil is out of the way) eventually be the next themed collection of poems. Obviously I don't want to say too much about these while the second book slouches toward the Lit and Phil , but it's fair to say this new stuff is not as upbeat as my earlier material. It's darker, it's more violent and there's every chance that when I'm through presenting it, you may not even want to know me. The working title, the label on the folder I'm keeping the stuff in while I thrash it into shape (though I feel more like it's thrashing me, some days), is The Mechanics of the Scissorhold. It's about pain, it's about the inherent allure of evil, about sex as violence and violence as sex; it's about how it feels to be trapped like a frightened animal, wanting to get out of the world's way but unable to; it's the death of hope, basically. There aren't many jokes, and Meat Loaf doesn't get a mention.
When you're spending large amounts of your time with your head in that kind of space, it's nice to get out and run around a beach with a dog for a while. I can almost - almost - see how people can live with the damn things.
Anyway, enough of my morose ramblings. Check out this event, involving the more sunnily-dispositioned Kate Fox .
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