Time turns into something else when you travel. That feeling of constantly trying to stabilise, big wave emotions that dump you on strange shores, planning, not planning, doing, not doing, shards and glimmers. Before I left I had grand plans about hiring a car and driving all over, so many gardens and museums and neolithic sites to see! But many places require advance booking, and everything is wildly expensive. I read this article and thought okay. I decided that rather than try and see all the things I would set to experiencing local joys, and that little shift made a big difference. There has been art and eats and swimming and charity shops and top decks on buses and retracing my steps and thinking about how things have changed, how I have changed.
I have, of course, bought a stupid amount of books and now have to decide which ones will make the journey home. I’ve just whipped through Hua Hsu’s coming of age memoir Stay True. I loved it. He writes about his college years at Berkeley in the early 1990s, his friend who died (a random killing), zines, ndie music, mentoring, activism, the world of ideas, Asian American history/identity, self-making and letting go.
“At night, Paraag, Dave and I lay in our bunks, arguing about inane, deeply important things, like whether Boyz II Men were better than the Beatles. Why our room, which was meant for three, was smaller than the doubles down the hall. Who had eaten the last of the samosas his father had dropped off at our dorm. If we would ever experience true love, and whether we would stay friends for the next four years. Tommy Boy versus Billy Madison. Was Ken Griffey Jr. the greatest ballplayer of our lifetime? Where did the weathered Bob Marley CD constantly playing in our room actually come from? Is X-files actually going anywhere? Were video games a real sport? We spent so much of our time in this mode - sifting through culture as evidence, projecting different versions of ourselves based on our allegiences and enthusiasms. We weren’t in search of answers. These weren’t debates to be won: certainty was boring. We were in search of patterns that would bring the world into focus.”
In this time away I have been thinking about my works in progress - novels, and non-fiction - and what it might mean to actually pick one and see it through. To do this I really need to sit with the work and make some decisions. I used to be great at decisions, or maybe I was just better at not over-speculating. If I’m going to get anywhere beyond my 15000 words (which is invariably where I stall and start something else) there needs to be some bravery. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to a wealth of others. I have lately been thinking about game design: how you have to choose and your choice pushes you forward and things proceed Ikea style. I dream of a system for writing, but writing doesn’t work like that.Not for me anyway. But the disruption a holiday brings to the regular is the perfect space for such contemplation.
I had my Churchill Fellowship interview in a cursed Air B’nB at 7.30 in the morning on no coffee and found out a couple of days later that I didn’t get through to the next round. I’m proud I made it to the first interview stage, I just wish the timing had been different so I could have done it in person. My project was/is to explore place-based creative programs and alternative libraries in the US. I have been so inspired by The Prelinger Library and ARAS’s educational programming. And reading more about Marlene Creates, and her beautiful project of place. So, lots of ideas.
Anyway, I ramble. This week’s pictures are muddy again.
This is an anxiety dream that ended up okay (I think?). It involved flying, dark buildings, a canal, face-glitter and a starry cape.
This is my interpretation of Edward Burne-Jones’s Flying Figure. Seen in a cool room at Leighton House among work of ther symbolists Watts, Millais, Robinson. Leighton House in Holland Park is the home of Victorian artist and art collector Lord Frederick Leighton. Famous for its incredible Arab Hall, as seen in the videos for ‘Gold’ (Spandau Ballet) and ‘Golden Brown’ (The Stranglers). (You’re welcome!)
This is two horses drinking in the River Darent, Farningham, Kent. We were a bit worried that the river would be dry, but no - it was running and people were paddling and then two shirtless lads parked their dray and brought the horses in.
This is a scene from the Donald Cammell film Performance (1969). In the late 1990s I lived in Powis Square around the corner from #25 where gangster Chas (James Fox) hides out and is seduced into bohemian weirdness with Turner (Mick Jagger), Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and Lucy (Michele Breton). Last week I had a couple of days in Westbourne Park walking old haunts. I loitered out the front of the three places I’d lived in (the council house, the Powis Square apartment, the Pembridge Rd ‘pent-shack’), and remembered nights riding my bike home from work, the noise of the Westway, taking pictures of Trellick Tower and Portobello Market, where I used to buy tulips. I poked around the old bookshop and record shop where I worked and tried to find evidence of my past in the CD card hand-writing and the layers of old signage. I am always going back to sites of self-creation or emotional significance. Merleau-Ponty wrote “The body is our general medium for having a world.” I haven’t done a heap of writing since I’ve been away but I did finish a memory map/illustrated essay and I think before I leave I’ll do one for my time in W11.
Lovely meandering with you. Those swells and dumps of travel impressions and the impulse to return are so powerful.