Samhuinn
Sunday, October 31, 2004 , 11:24 PM
Tonight I attended the Samhuinn parade with Liz and Chris. Chris’s brother Malcolm was playing some sort of a — well, I’m not sure what he was. Liz and I decided he was The Judging Penguin, something that has a furry white head and plays a horn made out of a giant Christmas wrap tube. (Liz took pictures.)
We bumped into Ewan and his girlfriend Angel. Angel was new, at least to me. She’s American (how awful that anything positive following that word has to be prefixed with “BUT” these days) but she was really cool. Her reference-enriched sense of humour fit so nicely with his. The five of us laughed and made up stories about what the various bits of dancing and fighting in the end pageant of the parade were supposed to be.
One thing’s for sure: The Green Man was killed. Summer is dead. I love having participated in Beltane, then Samhuinn. There’s fire and papier mache genitals, there was a cool giant puppet thing we dubbed the mantiskeleton, there was edginess and danger, ritual and community. I love that this happens here.
I’m not big on fancy dress — I like being me — but a woman came around during the ceremony and daubed the five of us with greasepaint, making us part of the proceedings, and that felt good and right.
Here’s to transitions. I wonder what will come next.
Something good in the mix.
, 6:13 PM
I tore myself away from the computer for a while — a very good start to making life work better. I took a pad of paper, a bunch of coloured markers, The One True Writing Pen (which Liz helped me buy when I happened to bump into her last weekend, since I’d lost my good pen in Kinlochbervie), and went over to the chair where I work when I’m at home.
I asked myself what was going on lately, and a surprising number of answers came back. The jumble my outer world has been turns out to be a reflection of what’s inside me. I’ve got some work to do on that space, ’cause it looks like nobody’s been in there for quite a while. How can the world give me what I want when I’ve no idea what that is?
I came back to the computer just now, and I found an e-mail from my mum. God, I love her. In our (endless)phone call yesterday, she mentioned that she’d read the “Mixer” stories Mark and I wrote, and found them kind of sad. She wished she could write another one to offset them.
So she did!
It meant so much to me for two reasons. One, because she’s more creative than she gives herself credit for, and was brave enough to just go play in that imaginative realm that I treasure so much, even though she doesn’t think of herself as a “writer”. The other reason is contained in the subject matter of the story itself, which speaks worlds about how lucky I am to have her as a mother.
I also love what a creative conversation this story has been from the onset, with me writing a bit, then my buddy Cosgrove, then my mum.
So, yeah, things have been challenging for me this week, but this was a good reminder that, even if I’ve got some work to do, I’m still a rich guy in some important ways, and should appreciate that.
The off-kilterverse
, 2:58 PM
This week I was stood up four times — twice by the same person. On Friday night I was out with my best mate and he took off, just said he was going to the bar and left. It was the umpteenth time that’s happened.
I’ve developed cancer of the social life. What kind of vibe am I putting out that’s giving people the impression that these things are okay to do? It’s like I’m producing a radioactivity that kills off the little motes of attraction, loyalty, and thoughtfulness in people. Meanwhile, though, random folks on the ‘net have been saying the nicest things, and I got more good news about my book (which, for once, I’ll keep to myself).
I’m going on a “people fast”. Samhuinn is tonight, the Celtic autumn festival, and I’ve got a meeting on Tuesday with the people I’m producing a ‘zine with. Other than that, I’m checking out for a few weeks to figure out what this is about.
Homo kills pomo, news at 11.
Thursday, October 28, 2004 , 1:30 PM
Last night, I went to see Rufus Wainwright in concert.
Wow.
His sister, Martha, opened the show. She had obviously inherited all the ability that Rufus had from growing up in a musical family. But her content was… eerie. Rufus writes about yearning, and I think that’s part of why I love his music. Romantic love doesn’t work for me, so the yearning thing is very appealing. But Martha writes about pain. And pain is ugly. It doesn’t help when your opening song is called “Bloody Asshole Mother Fucker”. I kid you not. She’s one of those people who was born in an emergency room and never left. I had to wonder how Rufus feels, bringing this person along with him. Maybe he gets her, and doesn’t see it. He’s got his own issues, but somehow they’re much more palatable.
I watched her strum away at her guitar, looking from a distance like Maggie Gyllenhaal dressed up in an 80s costume, her legs akimbo as she stomped and wailed. She has a good voice, with an Emmylou Harris quality, but the stuff she was singing… It was like hearing someone’s recovery journal put to music.
Then Rufus came on and made everything cool. He’s weird and fruity and his sound ranges from soaring anthems to heart-squeezing ballads to vaudevillian numbers. He wore tartan trews for the occasion, and made a few awkward jokes about Edinburgh. Happily, he restrained himself, jumping straight into the music, as if he’d been tightly coached (like a presidential candidate in a debate) to stay on-program.
And a long program it was, too! It ran for quite a while, and we even got two encores. I thought his voice was strong before, but I didn’t realise until hearing him live just how strong it was. Hours later, he was still in full voice, with a sound that reaches right into your head to tickle your thoughts, and into your chest to get your heart beating faster.
During one of the encore numbers, Beautiful Child, I figured out what his music feels like to me: It feels likemy times, like someone’s putting music and words to the days I’m living — not with any apology, and with none of this shite “It’s all been done before” postmodern cynicism, but like it matters right now, more than anything. It’s Bohemian, it’s raw, it’s authentic and heartfelt.
Words are great, words are everything to me, but if the soul has a language, it’s music. And Rufus Wainwright is a damned fine musician.
Content update
Sunday, October 24, 2004 , 4:41 PM
Last night, I poured myself a glass of the absinthe I brought back from Paris. I felt like a heroin addict, pouring water over a cube of sugar into the glass. Really, though, it’s just booze. The active ingredient in absinthe, thujone, is barely present in most modern-day brands. Still, I gotta say, the stuff is liquid happiness. I took the cloudy green drink over to my desk, sat down, and did some writing work.
I know, it’s all very cliche.
I didn’t actually write anything, but between last night and this afternoon, I tidied up a lot of loose ends around my personal writing. I created some submission packages so I can start sending out Idea in Stone to some more publishers or agents. I’m torn, though: I actually really want to work with the people who already have my ‘script. Instead of contacting anyone new, I should really just write them. Thing is, I don’t want to be a pest. I’m grateful that they’ve been so positive about the story, but the waiting is killing me.
I redid my letterhead with the new logo I’ve created for myself, and you’ll notice that, other than in the actual URL and the masthead, I’ve changed references to me to “Alistair Hamish MacDonald”. There’s another Hamish MacDonald in Scotland who’s a writer (go figure), so I’ve got to stake out a different territory. (I’ve also snagged the URL for my full name, though at present it just redirects you here.)
Kinlochbervie Pics
Saturday, October 23, 2004 , 10:16 AM
Patrick has posted an enormous gallery of photographs that he and Liz took on our trip to Kinlochbervie. You can find them here.
Piccie-posty-thingy
Wednesday, October 20, 2004 , 4:12 PM
HAZZAH! I finally have a replacement for iPhoto, as Google have come out with their own image management program, Picasa, which also interfaces very sweetly with Blogger via a program called Hello. I’ve finally looked up the programs Google’s developed, and they’re sweet. (I just want to know how on earth Google snagged the domain name “hello.com”. I suspect bags of money were involved.)
iPhoto was always very good, and made the business of putting together photo albums painless. I’ve got a pile of pictures I haven’t posted specifically because it’s been such a schlepp to do it. No longer!
I’m in a good mood today. I’m being really productive at work, which feels great. I’m clear-headed, it’s easy to focus, and the words are coming easily. Ahh.
Kinlochbervie
Tuesday, October 19, 2004 , 9:19 PM
This weekend I went with Liz, Patrick, and Karen to a place on the top-left corner of Scotland called Kinlochbervie. Liz and Patrick took hundreds of pictures, so if you want to see a little bit of what we saw, go over to their blogs!
I’m also happy to link you to their blogs so that you can get a wee taste of their minds. Liz, Patrick, and Karen are very quick-witted people. We were all so ready to jump in and add facts to whatever any of us was talking about; it would have been annoying, except that we’re all so interested. “Oh really?” we’d say, wanting to hear more, instead of feeling pulled up short.
The countryside varied from low and rolling to steep and mountainous, but all of it had a look like titanic stone dogs who’d been sleeping so long they’d grown vegetation. The ferns and heather were brown, rusty, and purple. The trees were yellow and green. The rocks were grey or black. And the beaches were white against turquoise water like sea-glass.
We tromped through brush, over dunes, and across jagged rocks to see what we were after. All the driving left me feeling like I’d spent whole days on a slow-moving roller-coaster (the feeling hasn’t left me), and as I looked out at the sea stretching away, seeming strangely higher than I was, I felt…
Unsure.
I wasn’t sure what I should be doing with all this beauty. I could only witness it. Happily, my friends were full of ideas for what to do next, so I followed along, feeling a bit guilty I wasn’t contributing more direction to the weekend.
My PDA broke, and I lost my favourite writing pen. Something about the gravity at the centre of my universe is a bit unstable. It’s uncomfortable now, but I’ve a feeling something good will come of it.
On our last night, Patrick directed us to Oldshoremore beach (though a sober Liz Only-Coca-Cola-runs-through-these-veins Babb did the actual driving). You might remember the dinner I had with my “muses”, my female poet friends. That night, Wendy gave us each a circle with a swirl of text on it describing a “magic moment” for us. I’d been carrying mine around, blessed by the promise of it, cursed by this piece of paper that kept reminding me that I’d still not done it. Patrick knew about this, and took us all to the beach so I could fulfill this charge.
We got out of the car and fumbled through the darkness. Of course, the only path to the beach was through an old graveyard. I’m generally not afraid of anything (except for dangers to my family), but I have to admit that my “kid fears” did come out from under the bed in my mind. We made it to the beach without incident, though…
And we marvelled.
The sky overhead was not a “net of jewels” or a “pin-pricked blanket”. It wasn’t an arrangement of constellations that formed Orion, Cassiopaeia, the Pleides. It was nothing the human mind could wholly encompass. It was an endless spread of lights, varying in size and constancy. The Milky Way ran from horizon to horizon over our heads. I saw no less than ten shooting stars, and made wishes on each of them (one was a repetition, for emphasis).
We lay down on Patrick’s car blanket, and we passed a bottle of whisky back and forth. I held some in my mouth as long as I could, until it started to burn, then gulped it back and breathed immediately over the vapours. For the first time in my life, I liked it. I lay back and, for a moment, experienced stillness, bliss, quiet. It was what the late monologuist Spalding Gray called a “perfect moment”. Or a “magic moment”, as Wendy had promised.
We each walked up and down the beach on our own, then with each of the others, and wound up in a human houndstooth pattern, each of us with our head on another’s stomach. We talked and laughed and lay silently for some unmeasurable amount of time, until the clouds came in and it was time to go back to the hotel.
Home again
Wednesday, October 13, 2004 , 10:15 PM
I’ve got a pint on the table beside me. I’ve found a nice, quiet, not-so-smoky corner in my local pub.
It’s time.
I got back from Paris a week ago, and I haven’t had a chance to write anything about it. I’ve had work to do, and quickly got overwhelmed by all the social calls I had to make. I’ve been out every night this week. As someone who’s complained in the past of having no life here, I appreciate that this is a good state to be in. But as someone who also believes he should constantly produce, create, build… It’s a conflict. I have to adopt again an old habit that worked for me in Toronto: writing nights. Book it in, the thinking goes, then I can protect it, do it fully while I’m there, and live my life without guilt the rest of the time.
Okay, I’ve pencilled in Tuesday and Thursday next week as Writing Nights.
This weekend, I’m going with Liz, Karen, and Patrick to Kilochbervie — another feather in my “see Scotland” cap. I’ve hardly seen any of the country, I know, but having driven to some places now, I realise how very much smaller it is than Canada. A five-hour drive in Ontario would have just got me from Toronto to Algonquin Park. This Friday, it’ll get me right across Scotland.
Right. I’m still not talking about Paris.
It’s intimidating, though. Three words — A Moveable Feast — make me feel like I shouldn’t even try. And this is the sense one has in Paris: it’s all been done, and probably better. It’s hard not to be painfully aware of how much one, in being there, is living out a script, stepping into those stories that have gone before.
Here’s the trick, though: it’s not cliche, it’s not fabrication. All those things really are Paris. Yes, it was like that in the past — the cafes, the little streets, the grand buildings, the endless art and culture — but it still is that. The place is stuffed with things that predate this age, that have managed not to be subsumed by it. I love that about Edinburgh, and I love it about Paris. Edinburgh is like a man I’ve fallen in love with; Paris is his sister I barely know, and I’m starting to wonder if they might be twins.
I can’t recreate the trip here. It’ll take more time than you or I have, and it’s an experience that belongs to the four of us who travelled together. All I can do is give you some snapshots — verbal ones, since I’m a terrible photographer.
You never know how people are going to be as travelling companions. Great friends can become albatrosses, and near-strangers can become instant companions. I travelled to Paris this time with three friends from work, Ross, Gaynor, and Julia.
To start with (from my perspective), there was me, whom you know or don’t to whatever degree. I flew from Glasgow on an insanely cheap flight thanks to Ryan Air — a penny each way, plus a bucket of taxes.
I landed in Paris Beauvais (which is a bit like taking a ship to “Earth Moon” that deposits you on the moon). I started walking, which I love to do in a strange city. The taxis looked different from one to the next, were all occupied, and the Metro didn’t seem to connect with the closest-to-home station, Jussieu. So I walked… For three hours. I walked under the setting sun to the Arc de Triomphe, in the dark along the Champs-Elysees, past the giant Egyptian obelisk, across the Siene, criss-crossed around St Germain-de-Près, and then finally found the flat. Luckily, I had the buzzer for the gate, a door blocking the driveway-sized entrance, and walked into a beautiful courtyard of white walls and shuttered windows with waterfalls of plants and flowers streaming from them. On the ground level, an Italian restaurant’s windows poured laughter and music from what looked like an engagement party…
Aargh. I can’t do it. I’m sorry. I started describing my friends, and I realised that it’s not my place to talk about them here — even when it’s good, since we turned out to be great travelling companions. We saw a thousand things, and I can’t do them justice here, nor is there really a reason to: I had that trip, I made little notes (“Market, nasty pommes-frites, the little old woman, dusty bottles of wine, catacombs…”), but ultimately, it was our time together. You had to be there.
I couldn’t come back here, though, and start writing in the blog again, until I’d said something about Paris. Sorry, that was it.
Tonight I saw a movie with Liz and Fiona, The Motorcycle Diaries, about the early years of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Afterward, I split off from Fiona then Liz, and walked here in the light rain, wondering if I needed to do Really Important Work, if I should get involved in something grave to give my writing some sort of deep social justification. My brother and my dad are both social workers, and I was brought up with a strong sense of social justice. I struggle, though, with a moral relativism: ultimately, individuals don’t matter. They all die, so it doesn’t make a difference. In a couple million years, the sun will expand, and none of this will have made any difference. At the same time, though, I hold the paradoxical belief that every individual the most important event-thing ever, and everything in our world revolves around the fate of each single person.
Other things I’ve been ingesting lately:
Books, from Paris, bought at Shakespeare & Co., a kind of writer’s Mecca, a shop on two floors, one of them doubling as a residence, its crooked walls stuffed with books for sale. Hemingway used to borrow books from the woman, Sylvia Beech, who ran the store’s first incarnation. Even now, when I sat in the tiny cubby on the second floor — a tiny nook with an old chair, a single bulb, and a blue typewriter — I felt like I could create anything.
Unfortunately, the first book I bought there was clever in all its parts, but a disappointment overall: The Dreamers, by Gilbert Adair, which I realised only when I started reading it, was an adaptation based on an earlier novel of his and a screenplay he wrote for the movie of the same name. It poses as something daring, risque, and does a nice job of capturing the romance of Paris in 1968, when riots took place on the street, but it ultimately chickens out and shies away from connecting the last two dots in a love triangle.
In the airport on my way to Paris, I’d bought another book which I finished last night, called Paras over the Barras. Every time I’ve gone to The Barras, a dodgy sort of black market in Glasgow, I’ve thought of it as the kind of place that must have been exactly the same in WWII — except instead of DVDs and software, they would have sold stockings and sugar. This book was set in that era, which I’ve always been fond of, and followed a fictitious family who live near the Barrowlands, or “The Barras”. It’s full of pun-humour, is as broad as a Christmas panto, and, despite the fact that the typesetting is terrible(someone at some point had no idea about closing quotation marks, or putting paragraph breaks between lines of dialogue), I still found it charming, like a story your grandfather tells you that, while dated, is still kinda good.
The other night I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was pure fun — mainly because it didn’t suck (a quality that’s rare to find in a blockbuster movie these days). It was the mental equivalent of a massage.
The other book I bought from Shakespeare & Co. is called The Big Questions. It’s about using philosophy to build an approach to life. I’ve only read the introduction so far (this week has been busy, as I said), but I’m excited by the promise of it. Yes, I know it sounds like the literary equivalent of those little polystyrene chips you get with Chinese food, but it reads like the Number 7 Lobster Dish.
I’ve also read and listened to way more than I should have about the upcoming American election. It fills me with a pointless rage that feels borrowed. Deep down, I know that this is not my fight. Lord knows the world doesn’t need another of his creatures blogging about this event, so I’ll stop now.
Speaking of Himself, I read something last night in bed about the origins of Christianity. It’s the most concise and complete work I’ve read on the subject. In some places it seems a bit of a stretch, but overall, it pretty much makes the worship of a badly-photocopied version of the sun-god hero myth look kinda foolish. Still, though, even after leaving behind this tradition I grew up in, there’ssomething there to human spirituality I can’t let go of, that I’ve had too much experience of to disregard. I guess I need it, and it’s coming back as a theme a lot lately. As I keep living longer and longer, individual events are meaning less than the aggregate picture they present.
I could go and be a Che, to fight against something — say, the forces of oppression and injustice (God knows they’re out there, and at a peak of activity). But I’d be looking for a fight, looking for something to fill in an outraged blank. The training I did years ago held as one of its tenets “What you resist persists”. Instead of fighting against a thing (which ultimately ends up being about that thing, and paradoxically keeps it in existence), it’s better to work towards the preferred other, to “Be the change you want to see,” as Ghandi said. Maybe that’s why I burn out when it comes to the American election: there’s nothing there that belongs to the future I want to live.
I’m tired. I’m babbling. I’ve been very tired since I came back from Paris. I feel like something is gestating inside me. I don’t know what.
Speaking Welsh
Saturday, October 02, 2004 , 9:00 AM
Someone knocked at my door. I spun in bed and sat up, in the process swiping the corner of my pillow across the surface of my left eye. I answered the door in my T-shirt and boxers, wiping my streaming eye.
“Hello. I’m from the television licensing board.”
Oh.
Well, at last I could show them that I don’t have a telly, so they’ll stop pestering me with threatening letters. “If you have a television and aren’t reporting it…” I know, I know. But I don’t.
Even though it was evident that I didn’t have a set in my house, I still felt compelled to make my case, and mentioned what I do for a living, and that having a television at home would be too much of a distraction.
“Oh,” said the man from the board, “a friend of mine is a writer. Have you heard of Irvine Welsh?”
“Yeah,” I said in an ‘of course’ voice, and told him that I’d just read a short story of his on The Barcelona Reviewwebsite the other day. So he went on to tell me stories about things that had happened to them, and charted Welsh’s career progression for me (studied law, wound up cutting grass, went to work for the Council, and was working his way up when Trainspotting hit.)
I wondered how it felt for the man, an average Joe (or Jimmy, I guess you might say here), missing a tooth, wearing a licensing board jacket, toting a clipboard, watching his friend rocket ahead in the world. (Assuming, for a moment, the achievement model, rather than the being-here-and-now-is-all-there-is model.)
We finished our talk, and I saw him to the door. I turned on the immersion heater and cleared some bills off a side table, where the Hello! magazine was. I smiled, the similarity of the situation not lost on me. But I prefer the board-man’s version of it: as he left he said, “So you never know when it’ll happen for you.”
~
I’m off to in a minute. I’m finally going to make it to the farmer’s market, which happens every Saturday on the Castle Terrace, but I always miss it. Liz was the first of our gang to find it, and is slowly introducing everyone else of us to it.
I spent the evening of my birthday with Liz, actually. It wasn’t specifically a birthday plan, but we went to see the movie Hero together. She was great company, exceedingly tall and clever (unrelated, but both worth noting), and we both enjoyed the movie, which was a cross between a box of bright pastels and a great martial arts flick. Whenever I see one of these films, I think back to my days doing karate and aikido, and I long for the kind of discipline that demands. I look at my work habits lately, which, while productive, could do with some tightening-up. My brain is adipose, flabby, and prone to wandering.
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p>Must go bathe, grab my things, and leave for the market. Then, this afternoon, I’m off to Paris!
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