Sitting in the Pret a Manger by Leicester Square tube station, watching the tourists/visitors go by. And the occasional Londoner. It's a warm day and colourful-informal is the uniform. With sunglasses. T-shirts with Union Jacks on them. Guy in his fifties, Londoner, with a rockabilly look, said something about the devil on his tee. Everyone's in a good mood, it seems. Saturday shopping in the lazy sun. Nice breeze. Not sticky.
I'm cycling home shortly to dig around in the back garden and listen to the cricket. Might get the Janelle Monae cd before I do so.

Poem

I've been rooting through some old boxes of work. Scraps of plays, ideas, letters to artistic directors, old programmes, that sort of thing. Some of the script stuff is old enough to have been written on an electric typewriter rather than a pc, and - get this - some of it's in LONGHAND.

Anyways I found this old poem - 15 years old? I wish I'd stuck a date on it - and rather than stuff it back in the box I thought I'd make a digital imprint, right here.



Jupiter's Moons


I would observe you, nightly
your complex orbits
your features so very well defined

the moonshine went to your head
haloed and enhanced
the image resolution

eye pressed to the rusted telescope
above the clifftop cafe
below the boundless

you narrowed the parameters
navigated galaxies
drank in the Milky Way

my naked eyes swam
across space, tracing the sea-lanes
playing naughty join-the-dots

'I can see Jupiter's moons!'
you whispered disbelievingly
like a butler at a key-hole

and swooning stepped aside for me
to focus on the fantastic system
the Satellites, light-minutes away -

no Io, no Ganymede, no one.
just blinking Jupiter, impossibly
distant, disdainful cat's eye -

'made you look!' you laughed

I admit I wasn't quite prepared for the brilliance of this novel, which was Pamuk's debut according to the cover but I seem to remember this was contradicted by the article I read in the LRB and which persuaded me to get hold of this particular book in the first place*. Whatever the case, debut or simply early, The White Castle is powerfully imaginative and seductive. Even more so for me perhaps in the present moment in that superficially some of its aspects dovetail with some of my current research. I'd best leave off talking about that here as I'll tie myself in knots trying not to give too much away. Forgive me, I'm rusty at this. Point is, read Pamuk's book, it's really very remarkable.

MEANwhile I realise I forgot to record here that I had an operation last week. I mean, I'm out of the habit of diarising but I just wanted to set it down. It was nothing too worrisome or drastic - a double hernia repair. I like it that they call it a repair. I took the bus very early on a freezing Monday morning last week, to Homerton hospital. By 8.30 or so I was prepped and ready to go. B collected me at around 1.30 I think it was. The memory is very hazy because of course I was high as a kite on anaesthetics and analgesics. While I was out they repaired the inguinal hernia (in the groin, that is), and the umbilical. So I am repaired. Nine days on it is still somewhat tender in the vicinities. But I am able to get around. I write from Charing Cross Road in fact, the revamped cafe on the first floor of Foyles (bookshop).

*The White Castle his third book apparently but first to be translated into English.

The pleasures of hibernation in a big city. Holed up all day playing with Buzz, washing up, sleeping. Glimpsing the garden wearing its fresh white mantle. Then heading out into the damp dark, buttoned and booted, to take the tube to town for a spot of reading. Wintering in the metropolis has much to recommend it. Incidentally I am still enjoying The White Castle but once again I find that in the act of reading literature in translation I am more than occasionally put off my stroke by inelegant constructions in the prose. I don't have Turkish and so cannot know, but I'm guessing Pamuk's style must be smoother, more musical, than the English version published by Faber and Faber.

Hello

It's been ages. I am glad to be back. This is something of a tokenistic post to remind myself how to do this. Since I last posted I have had a show on, and written half of another, and started plotting a third. So all is well on that front. Miniaturism has been on a little hiatus but should return in the spring.

I am reading Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle. And have been watching the darts, avidly.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of books I have read more than once. Not of course counting set texts, or stories I've adapted. Actually Lord Of The Flies is a special case, yes it was the set text, 1983 Ordinary Level Eng Lit, but I became a fan of Golding's in the process of failing my exam (the shame), and read all his stuff later on, including a revisit to the island of LOTF. Incidentally I think my fascination with Golding's prose style - it had me quite mesmerised - was a contributing factor in my Eng Lit calamity. While I was absorbed in trying to understand the profundities of WG's dark poetics, I omitted to memorise the sequence of events of the narrative, and when asked to comment on specific plot points was simply at a loss. (Something similar went on with me and the drama set text, The Crucible , if I remember rightly). I thought about retaking, as I had wanted to study English at university, but for whatever reason, a cocktail of embarrassment and inertia most likely, signed up for Greek, Latin and French A levels, with a General Studies chaser. Sixteen months after the LOTF debacle, on my eighteenth birthday if you please, I arrived in Oxford for two days of interviews to see if they'd let me in to read Classics. They did, and I became one of a type - the boy from the labouring classes up at Oxford, trying to keep his head, trying to keep up, among the sons and daughters of the moneyed and entitled.

All of which serves as a prelude to my simply recording - I am rereading, not just one of my favourite books, but one of my favourite things ever, Generation X. And looky. Just saw this. Mr Coupland has an announcement to make.

I am reading more fluently at the moment thank you, my relations with books have always been a little rocky but I have raced through a few things lately and am limbered enough to attempt something that's been on the list for a long time, going at Proust again. It was maybe a decade ago I got halfway through the second volume of what was then a new revision of the Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation, by DJ Enright. At the time, I fail to account for how, I had the six volumes in two different designs, in the Modern Library edition, even numbers had Impressionist reproductions on the cover, and sat easily in my small hands, and they alternated with pink and orange, less compactly formatted odd numbers, and that all seemed just fine back then. Coming back to the shelves after going round the Sun another ten times it seems the height of idiocy and waywardness. So I have set about acquiring the Impressionistic set, and I am much obliged to Abebooks in my search for just the right copies of the 1998 Modern Library Marcel. Except when I took delivery of Volume One yesterday (price £1.00) I saw straight away I had ordered a 1992 where I meant to have a 1998 - the muted silver and gold trim, and the photograph, fine though it is, of a rumpled pillow, could by no means take their place alongside my Volume Two, boasting this as it does



which is almost a discouragement to signing away all those hours and weeks to Proust's prose, when painting can do this for us in a matter of minutes, quarter of an hour tops. But but. There are miracles in great prose aren't there, the mystery and hilarity of communing with a great mind, that has so much to tell us. All six volumes of it.

When I ordered the Volume One, I was assured by the vendor that in spite of its cheapness, its only blemishes were as follows

Cover worn, marked and creased. Inscribed.

If I'd known it had been 'inscribed' with a hand drawn map of Europe, I might have paid a little bit more for it.