Just Writing Week

I've christened this week (roughly this week anyway - from last night to my gig at the Jazz Cafe on Thursday) Just Writing Week, in my world anyway. I'm paring my tweeting and my Facebook participation back to less hyperactive levels and trying to spend the time writing instead. This is pretty much worstdrafting - throwing words out and seeing what happens - but I thought it would be interesting to post up what emerges on here, given that this is, y'know, sort of meant to be a poetry blog and that.

So, here's the first result. It doesn't have a name yet and it's maybe a little misshapen. Cradle it gently, as you might tend a wounded bird:

I come to again
in this hotel room dark
where paranoia eats the curtains
like a fleet of moths

the wine and whiskey in my bloodstream
laying plans with my enemy hormones,
chemical defence to make my body
shuck my soul, leave me just another zombi
in the low sun light of day

so inviting
this annihilation

all you have to do
is one more whiskey,
let yourself go under

be submerged
in dreams of other flesh, memories
of her piano
and the screams still ringing
their defiance
on this too-tame night

and now the sun’s too bright
through these windows
which do not open fully,
a suicide and lawsuit prophylactic,
this attempt to dodge
the human liability

this sun too bright
and last thing I remember
it was night

(and yes, I am reading Caitlin R Kiernan again. You should be too.)

I Love It Here

And one of the reasons I love my job is that every now and then someone comes along looking for something that isn't shit. Yesterday I had a guy buying a couple of good books on US history. I had a guy who wanted me to find the new Arthur Ransome biography for his wife. I had a young guy come in wanting a copy of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and a couple buying a shedload of heavyweight literary fiction. I even had a guy buying both the Guardian and the Mail who laughed when I made a joke about the inevitable cognitive dissonance that would result.

These are the good guys. They're the people who haven't yet let their brains atrophy, the people who still believe in good writing, good art and good culture instead of unit-shifting celebrity bullshit. These are the people who help those of us in the book trade who also believe these things to keep the faith. And if you're reading this, then you're one of those people. And I'd like you to do something for me.

Tomorrow is payday for most of us. The day we get our hard-earned money. And what I'd like you to do is take some of that money and go to your local bookshop. Could be an independent, could be a Borders, could be a branch of the W; could be a Barnes and Noble if you're in the US. Hell, if you're in the UK, it might even be a branch of WH Smith *shudder*.

Go to your local bookshop, and buy something good. Doesn't matter what genre. You like biography, buy a decent biography. You like sci-fi, buy some good sci-fi. You like crime, buy some good crime. Whatever. Buy something that rocks. Something where you know the guy writing it played from his fucking heart, in the words of the late Bill Hicks, instead of just advancing a career or servicing a demographic. Buy something that you know the writer burned to fucking write. Buy something that you burn to fucking read. Buy that book you always said you'd get around to. Buy some Nabokov, some Proust. But buy something good. Something written by a writer, not a celebrity.

Because if you do this, you'll make the person behind the counter feel, just for a second, that we are out there. We haven't stopped resisting. That the world of literature is indeed a fine place, and is indeed worth fighting for.

Because, dear reader, there are people out there who don't actually care. People who think that unit-shifting's the whole of the game, that books are the same as bananas and lager, a commodity that should be sold for maximum profit and no more. And these people need to be reminded that, while they want to impose a moronic monoculture on us all in the endless quest for profit, some have different dreams. And, in the days of shame that are coming, in the nights of wild distress, those of us who share those dreams of a vibrant, smart and genuinely beautiful culture are going to have to stand up for them.

So let's stand up together, tomorrow. Because after all, it's not too late to make a better world.

Unputwhattable?

I have a weird voice. Always have done. Despite having been born in the North East of England and having lived here all my life, I speak in an odd mid-atlantic accent which leads people to think I'm actually either American, Australian, South African, Canadian, Dutch, Danish, or even a Kiwi.

Because it's an odd voice, it commands people's attention, and it can be quite nice to listen to, when I pay attention to my diction and avoid eliding words like some stoned Californian. So I often wind up doing the sales announcements in the shop where I work. Today, I made use of that rather ugly portmanteau word 'unputdownable' in the course of an announcement, leading a customer to query whether 'unputdownable' is 'actually a word.' It's certainly an ugly word, two verbs colliding like cars between prefix and suffix: but is it an actual word?

A quick googling showed that most online dictionaries think it is, and also showed up two interesting articles, to which I link below:

Here, Andrew Brown has a good hard bash at the sort of crap perpetrated on the reading public by his namesake Dan, and here, Elizabeth Bachner wonders about the good/bad-putdownable/unputdownable continuum, in the process concocting an extended gustatory metaphor and having a swipe at publishing tastes. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did.