room ten-oh-nine

Strands of her

2011-04-10T17:57:00.001+01:00

Baby pink. Barbie pink. Princess pink. Lipstick pink. I’ve-never-outgrown-pink pink. Pink-cheeks-and-a-baby’s-raw-ass-pink. Onomatopoeic pink. Poetic pink. Strands-of-candy-floss pink. Strands-of-bubble-gum pink. Stacks-of-post-it-notes pink. As-much-pink-as-I-can-get pink. Roses-on-your-birthday pink. You’ll-always-be-my-baby,-baby pink. It’s-not-you-it’s-me pink. Pink like-the-Virgin-Mary-if-she-weren’t-so-into-baby-blue pink. Diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend-pink. We-live-in-a-material-world-and-I-am-a-material-girl pink. I’m-the-girl-next-door pink. I’m-young-and-the-world’s-at-my-feet pink. I’m-still-a-virgin pink. I’m-a-born-again-virgin-pink. I’m-just-going-to-powder-my-nose pink. I’m-just-going-to-stick-powder-up-my-nose pink. My-room-was-pink-before-I painted-it-black pink. It’s-hard-to-be-a-rebel-in-pink pink. I’ll-steal-your-boyfriend-and-look-angelic-doing-it pink. I’m-a-waitress-at-Dennys-but-really-I’m-an-actress pink. Big-titted-celebrity pink. Tits-and-ass pink. Cancerous-tits-and-a-flabby-ass pink. She-was-so-young-what-a-shame-what-a-waste-of-potential pink. She-was-so-old-so-who-cares pink. She-kind-of-looked-like-a-transvestite-anyway pink. Monthly-self-exams-in-the-shower pink. There-used-to-be-a-tit-here pink. You’re-only-half-a-woman pink. You-ugly-bitch pink. Shut-up-and-be-pretty pink. She-isn’t-pretty-but-she’s-got-a-great-personality pink. She’s-fat-but-what-a-pretty-face pink. Blank-faced pink. I-wear-power-suits-even-though-the-eighties-are-over pink. Because-the-eighties-are-back-and-so-am-I pink. Understated-pink-for-the-working-girl pink. We’ll-all-wear-dentures-one-day-anyway pink. Oh-God-how-did-I-get-here?-pink. I-used-to-be-beautiful-and-all-the-boys-liked-me pink. I-wanted-to-be-a-movie-star-and-I-could-have-too pink. You-look-so-much-like-my-daughter-but-she-hates-pink pink. I-still-get-my-nails-done-sometimes pink. Palatial-pink-was-my-favourite-shade-it’s-a-shame-they-don’t-make-it-anymore-and-what-did-you-say-your-name-was-again? pink. Pink-for-the-romantic-in me. Pink-for-the-wilted-rose-in me. It’s-amazing-what-some-flowers-can-do-to-brighten-up-the-room pink. Oh-my-but-I’m-tearing-up pink. Why-are-you-crying-little-girl? pink. I-was-the-prettiest-girl-in-the-world pink. If-only-I’d-been-pretty pink. I was-pretty-but-nobody-knew-it pink. I was-pretty-because-everybody-said-so pink. This-pattern-of-wallpaper-used-to-be-all-the-rage pink. We’d-just-finished-redoing-the-bathroom-the-day-they-took-her-away pink. I-only-buy-pink-toiletpaper pink. I-only-wipe-my-ass-with-pink-toilet-paper pink. My-daughter-only-uses-brown-ecofriendly-toilet-paper-God-knows-why-I-mean-we’re-all-going-to-die-someday-anyway-even-the-planet-so-why-not-enjoy-some-colour-until-then? pink. I-want-to-be-buried-in-pink pink. She-wanted-to-be-buried-in-pink-but-I-just-couldn’t pink. Mrs.Pink-was-buried-in-a-lovely-understated-grey-and-her-bitch-of-a-daughter-didn’t-even-cry pink. And-me?-Me-I-walked-home-from-the-funeral-and-looked-at-the-people-on-the-street-and-marvelled-at-the-sunset-streaking-the-sky-in-striated-ribbons-of… pink pink.

vagabundear

2010-10-15T22:55:00.005+01:00

The last ten days are a blur of disorientating images and sensations – flavours seen, sights heard, sounds tasted.

An experience whose strangeness stems from the sense I had, throughout, of having stumbled into another’s narrative, of making my way not through the districts of a city, but the pages of a novel.

Streets I had visited in poetic passages suddenly manifested themselves ‘in person’. Words and phrases first encountered in text now emerged from the mouth of a bus conductor or tobacconist.

And there were signs, signs everywhere: a novel fragment reproduced on a building facade. A poem graffiti’d onto the pavement. The stencil portrait of the national poet, Fernando Pessoa, winking at me from the back of a garbage truck as it heaved its way slowly into the night.

I glimpsed these images, fleetingly, while crossing streets, while looking out windows, while walking a city that was not my own.

And now London. The persistent feeling that accompanies me as I walk home from the tube station dragging a suitcase twice as heavy as the one I left with, as I enter the house and greet my flatmates, as I set about re-inhabiting my old life with an ease and immediacy that scares me, is a desire to ‘fix’ those impressions. To ensure they don’t vanish.

I have brought back books. I have brought back food. I have brought back the habit of saying Obrigada and Ola and asking for um gerotto instead of coffee.

I have brought back postcards, maps, two memory cards’ worth of photos, and a notebook of phrases copied from every monument, billboard, street sign and shop window I came across.

Please let this assemblage be enough. Please may these objects continue to exhale life.

May they provide breath for me to blow back into my already deflating memories – those structures that like some kind of marquee of the imagination appear already on the verge of collapse, falling in upon themselves mere moments after they have been constructed. Please let these souvenirs help me souvenir.

Souvenir: From the Latin subvenire: to present itself, to come to the rescue
An object that recalls a certain place, occasion, or person; memento.
To steal or keep for one’s own use; purloin.
To come to mind.
To keep in mind.
To recall.
To recollect.

I want Lisbon to remain impressed upon my brain. I want a trace of its contours to be visible the moment I shut my eyes. I want it to come to my rescue. And, in turn, to let me collect it, gather it up in my arms like a foundling.

I want the paths that the Portuguese sun has charted on my skin to endure. Stopping just shy of my neckline, discreetly skimming the bottom of my skirt, this pattern of brown against white is itself an inscription. It says that I am taken. That my body belongs to somewhere else. That it has been laid claim to by another.

I want to continue seeing anew.

There is a Paul Simon song I used to love as a kid. I’d beg my dad to put it on the record player, then I’d spin around and around the living room while it played, spinning until I fell down.

‘A man walks down the street’ it goes. ‘It’s a street in a strange world. Maybe it’s the third world or maybe it’s his first time around.

And then: ‘Doesn’t speak the language. Holds no currency. He is a foreign man. He is surrounded by sounds. Sounds. Cattle in the marketplace. Scattering rings of orphanages. He looks around – around – he sees angels in the architecture.

Spinning in infinity.

He says Amen Hallellujah.’

I was that man.

As a child in my parents’ living room, and now, again, in Lisbon.

I looked around –around – and what I heard was the enigmatic sound of a language that privileges the sssshhh and oisshhh.

I saw streets named after states of being, and after the tradespeople whose shops originally lined them. Rua dos Cegos. Rua dos Sapateiros. Rua dos Douradores. Streets for blind people, shoemakers, gold merchants. I walked through signs.

On one building façade I read: Penso mas nao existo – I think but I don’t exist.

I spoke to others through gestures, smiles. I learned to widen my eyes to convey the strength of what I was feeling. By the second day, my eyes were perpetually escancarados. My mouth remained perpetually half-parted.

On the flight back from Lisbon, I was reading the London Journal of Flora Tristan, 1842. The epigraph that introduces the third chapter, ‘On the Character of Londoners’, is an extract from ‘Great Britain in 1833’, by the Baron d’Haussez.

Who is the Baron d’Haussez? I have no idea. Who was Flora Tristan? No clue. I had picked up the book in a café in the Bairro Alto on my first day – there it was, amongst ten-year-old Lonely Planets, earmarked mystery novels and the French (Spanish, Italian, German) versions of Harlequin romances. Alongside these texts was the incitation to take one and, should it strike a particular chord, to make it your – my – our own. It was a veritable invitation to take, to feed, on words.

So I did. Or rather, I bit into the epigraph – swallowed, then choked.

‘There must be some kind of defect in the character, domestic arrangements and habits of the English, for they are not happy anywhere’ it read. ‘They care little for their comfort as long as they are somewhere else. That variety and diversion which other nations seek in the territory of their imagination the English seek simply in going about from one place to another’.

Standing in the café, half-leaning against that bookcase, I felt my face grow warm, as if I had caught someone scrutinising me deep inside. I’m not even English. I spluttered to no one in particular. And then: There is nothing wrong with my domestic arrangements. And then again, My imagination is plenty varied.

Imagining I was silencing the voice that had first uttered those words, I snapped the book shut, thrust it into my bag, and left the café.

I cut across the Principe Real, thinking, I am fine just where I am, in this place between places. And when I got to the Mirador de Caterina, I stopped, felt the heat of the sun on the nape of my neck, and said to no one in particular, Pleasure resides precisely in this going from one place to another.

Pleasure resides in imagining one’s self em outra parte.

It was on the flight home that I pulled the book out again, reading and re-reading that epigraph, and then reading the narrator’s own diagnosis of a people who, in her view, had lost their sense of place, resigning themselves to a life of relentless wandering and searching, an aimless quest to find that displaced – what? Home? History? Destiny?

And surely it wasn’t – isn’t – only the English who felt, or feel, this way.

It was, after all, the words of the ever-wandering, ever-seeking, Alvaro de Campos that first captured my imagination – that spoke to my restless state before I even set foot in Lisbon: ‘Não posso estar em parte alguma. A minha Patria é onde não estum.’ (‘I don’t belong anywhere. My country is wherever I’m not’). And ‘Eu não vou ficar muito tempo, pois eu nunca ficar muito tempo’ (‘I won’t stay long, for I never stay long’. And again: ‘Giro, rodeo, eu engenho-me’ (‘I turn, I spin, I forge myself’).

Since the flight back – a flight I only narrowly caught, boarding precisely seven minutes before take off – the phrase ‘She cares little for her comfort as long as she is somewhere else’ has continued to echo in my mind.

As long as I am somewhere else.
As long as I can re-capture Lisbon – take those small, still-frame images I can still recall, and transfer them carefully, one by one, onto the landscape, the objects, the things that surround me here.

I will superimpose images of Portuguese tomate, pepinos and pimentos onto the vegetables in the Sainsbury’s produce aisle. Over each pallid tomato will go one whose vivid colour re-affirms all that should be.

I want to hide the taste of sardinhas up inside the roof of my mouth, and ensure that there it stays.

On the commute to and from work, I deliberate how best to preserve these impressions. How do you write a travel experience?

How can you ever adequately narrate what you’ve seen? There are the images in my mind. There are the photographs I’ve taken.

There is the page here in front of me.

And there is the sense that whatever I will write will be inadequate, that nothing will be able to replace, or re-produce, Lisbon herself.

This is possibly the reason why, in the eight hours between landing and going to bed, I did everything but write.

Why, when I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep, looking at the silent walls around me and resenting them for not reverberating with the movement of lumbering trams or the sound of that old garbage truck, I turned to books already written.

Digging out Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon from the pile of the books I’d bought during the trip, I hoped to find those motifs already fully formed – transposed from city to page, ready for me to re-discover.

But they weren’t. Or rather, they weren’t enough. It wasn’t my experiences that I read. And it wasn’t the Lisbon I remembered that I found: neither the one I had first encountered, in the poems of Pessoa and the stories of Tabucchi (texts read sleepily in my grandmother’s reading room one summer years ago, then read again in the university library this past winter), nor the one that met me as I stepped off the plane, hurling itself at me in a bombardment of colours and sounds.

300 pages and no feeling. No spirit. And – ironic, for a novel so concerned with the proclivities of the mind and intellect and the longing of the soul – it didn’t have the necessary depth. The espessura.

Espessura: density, depth, volume. Oh, the wonders of a language that has a word that both denotes the concentration of content, and itelf re-enacts that concentration! A word that both conveys substance and elicits a desire for it…

I am drunk on Portuguese.
I am subsumed by a language I barely know. In my hand I hold five or six words. I hold them, touching them gingerly with the reverence you reserve for those things you still can’t believe you’ve found. And they, oh so few, hold me.

Pessoas. Ciudade. Dessossego. Extraviado. Abstraiendo-se. Amor.

There was a Spanish woman staying in the room next to mine: a Madrilena. We’d meet, almost every day, in passing – each on her way in, out, to, from someplace in the city.

Propped in the doorway, she told me how Lisbon was but one stop in an itinerary she was making up as she went along. Last year had been a clown workshop in Dublin followed by a photography course in Philadelphia. This year, backpacking in Cambodia and perhaps – because yes, this city was enchanting, more enchanting than anyplace else she’d been – Lisbon again. Or maybe not.

‘I like life more, now that I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow’ she said. ‘I have my translations, which I can do anywhere. And they keep money in my pocket – Portuguese is very good that way, very remunerative. Is that the right word? Remunerative?’

In Italian, my mother tongue, the word for ‘wandering’ is vagare. A vague person is vago; a person who wanders vaga. He ‘vagues’. The Portuguese equivalent is vagabundear, like the Italian vagabondare. In other words, to vagabond.

I know this not from the pocket dictionary I carried with me, or from Google translate, which I’ve been relying on since I returned, but from an Italian biologist I met on my last day in the city, in the sort of encounter you only have on holiday.

When your mind is already creating stories – when the people around you have started to appear as emblematic as the signs you see on buildings.

I had been walking in the Jardim Botanico, the botanical gardens, when it had started raining – suddenly, the way it does at the end of summer when the season is ready to turn.

There we were, in the middle of the Jardim, by a moss-covered fountain full of goldfish, and with only trees for shelter. Drenched within minutes, we stood under the trees, and smiled foolishly at each other, making gestures towards the sky and towards ourselves, expressing little beyond a kind of mute solidarity.

We watched the rain cut through the sunlight, creating prisms in the air. We watched it strike the surface of the water while the fish underneath continued swimming, unperturbed.

We shifted our weight from one foot to another. It seemed rude, in a sense, for one of us to leave the other there – and yet for my part, I was too embarrassed to actually look at him, either to gauge where he might be from, or to initiate conversation based on those impressions.

It was only when I saw the book in his hand – a mystery novel with an Italian title – that the awkwardness broke. I could say something.

And so it went: Sei Italiano? Anch’io. Nervous, then relieved, laughter. E di dove? (From where?) E perché Lisbona? (And why Lisbon?) And why the Jardim? And why this rain? And, after all, why not the rain? What a perfect place to be caught in it, no? And then the shared enthusiasm at being caught unawares. Of being away from home, without a plan, vagando.

He had just returned from a year abroad, at the University of Texas. He would have to go back to Siena to do some teaching, yes, but he had no intention of staying long.

‘Like you’, he said, ‘I am vagabundeando.’

We talked.

‘Texas?’ I said. How funny – I had grown up in the Midwest. In Minnesota.

‘But your accent –?’ he puzzled.

‘My parents are Italian’, I clarified. ‘They met in the US. But now I live in London – moved there ten years ago. It is –‘ I almost said ‘home’ but stopped short.

‘Ah, so you were born a wanderer’, he laughed.

It kept raining. He took a photograph of me with my camera (I couldn’t resist asking – I’d been doing this for the whole trip), grinned as I squinted through the showers. Then, while handing back the camera, he pointed out a plant, just inches away from my foot.

‘See that?’ He asked, crouching down by my feet. ‘It’s a gameophyte Psilotum. They’re not-quite-ferns’. He touched one, gently. ‘You see? No true leaves, no true roots. It’s why biologists used to see them as primitive. The way –’ he smiled. ‘Perhaps the way the first American settlers viewed the nomadic tribes. Inferior beings for what must have appeared to them as a lack of place, or “community” in their sense of the word’. His smile broadened. He fingered the wet plant, then straightened up.

‘Except scientists found out, more recently, that these early plants are far more complex than they had originally thought. They have this structure, this vast’ he splayed his arms wide, ‘ this vast, branching, underground structure. They are rooted – but more like –’ he paused again. ‘Have you read Deleuze?’ I shook my head.

‘No but tell me’ I said. Thinking – this is not happening.

He smiled. This man’s face, when he smiled, was so open.

‘Deleuze sees nomads as more fixed than anyone else. Their fixity, so to speak, lies in their always moving between places. That is what centres them. And for Deleuze, societies, and knowledge, should be modelled less like a root-tree structure, and more like a – ’ He spun his wrist around and around, opening and closing his fist, ‘more like a rhizome.’

I didn’t ask what a rhizome was.

He knelt down again, at my feet, at the plant’s feet, and plucked a miniscule bulb off its top. He looked up at me. ‘It’s okay,’ he smiled, seeing my look of surprise.
‘It’ll grow back.’

He stood up again and handed me the bulb. ‘I look at these plants and I think this is how we should be. Like Deleuze says. Like these plants have known for centuries. Growing – evolving – by vagabundear.’

I nodded – stunned. And then we watched the rain. When it stopped, we smiled at each other, exchanged emails, and went our separate ways. Before parting, he squeezed my shoulder, briefly, as if we had known each other a long time, long enough for it to be difficult to say good-bye.

In the space of 30 minutes – 40, at most – I had travelled in space and time and language and – and it had all felt so immense.

I have sat in the lap of a city whose softness, whose enveloping embrace, has turned me into a being who again sees the whole world in texture and sound.

Somewhere along the way between reading a poem and descending from a plane, between booking a flight and walking in an urban garden, between finding a book and rejecting its argument, something in her awakened. Something in her came alive.

The tan, the city’s inscription of itself onto my flesh, will fade. Soon, I will no longer wake up at night, attuned to the slow heaving sigh of a garbage truck as it trundles its way through the alley below my window with the deliberation of a mule. I will no longer expect to hear the shattering of glass bottles against the pavement, or of garbage collectors vociferating amongst themselves.

The phrases that had become second nature will no longer spring from my mouth without my needing to recollect them. I will once again go back to ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’. I will forget to look up Deleuze. My emails to the biologist will, very likely, remain unsent drafts. But before that happens –

Antes –
Antes –
Antes –

Let me get this all down.

And once I have, let not me, but something – someone – somewhere – else translate all of that which I have seen… into all I have yet to see.

And may it allow me to maintain alive this new-found desire to wander. To vagabundear.

bukowski

2010-09-15T17:56:00.005+01:00

on the phone, you recite:

“i am upstairs in my underwear/3-day beard, pouring a beer and waiting/ for something literary or symphonic to happen”

and I say, oooh, keep going. What comes next?

you skip to another page – piss me off with references to virgin 35-year-olds too old for love or poetry, redeem yourself with the one about the girl who writes like a long nozzle. one button after another, you press them. I wait for you to arouse the next emotion.

next, you say: “hello, bitches, he answered” and I say that’s not very nice, and you say hey, i’m just reading what’s here. wait, i’ll skip to a better part.

I can hear the page turning, your laborious breathing. I shudder, fulfilled and expectant both - and I think how much easier it is to wait for stories than for babies but I don't say it since you’d wonder who’d said anything about babies.

and then I’d have to answer:
you didn’t. but some women, they think about babies 24/7
and i'd have to decide whether to admit that I’m one of them.

but you’re reading again, telling me about living a life with drugstores, cats, sheets, saliva, newspapers, women, doors but nowhere a living man
and I’m shuddering, shuddering with such pleasure
and can feel you grinning at the other end
because you know i love it when you get lyrical and quote-heavy

(you don’t know that it’s because I need to imagine you as somebody else, pretend you’re a sober bukowski, didion with a dick, a straight o’hara, hell, any eloquent American w/whom I’m just vaguely aware of enough to know that they are the reason why I write or the reason why I want to write since actually I don’t really write I just take notes, I put down quotes for posterity or to give myself the impression that I am being productive, here at my desk with the draft from the window and the wind banging on the glass and the depression lamp helping me feel happy and the whirring noise of the computer reminding me that one day I will lose all my work but what does it matter when there is no work to lose? And what I was meaning to say really is that I keep the phone pressed against my ear, clutching it hard, clutching it eagerly, clutching it strong as if I were holding onto what you’re saying, these lines of verse upon which I hang everything, demanding they carry me into the week and hold me up at least until Wednesday, please let them last until then, on Wednesday I’ll be at the used-book stand again and then I’ll drop off what I’ve found, drop it off at your place then wait for you to call, you appeasing you, you generous you, yes Wednesday night you’ll be giving me other lines, I’ll have found some other writer to satiate this hunger, this ravenous rage, you know what I’m talking about, right? this desire to inhale every sensation in sight, the bottomless pit that is my stomach, the dissatisfaction that needs words if it’s going to be quelled in the slightest, if I could switch it off I would but I can’t so I need you to feed it or at least keep it chewing, I need you on the phone reading, spinning sentences repeating a reality I would dive into if I could, I’d smother myself in it I would lurch through it, unstable in my orthopoedic shoes, holding my balance with my hands as I walk precariously, cautiously, on injured legs pain pain pain pain pain and replay these words and use them to imagine myself one day esconced at a sun-warmed desk like the ones in those photos of writers who are there, who’ve made it, who’ve got it, who’ve had it and now flaunt it, who have a method a voice a process a story a vision a school of thought a following and a. place. to. call. their. own. oh to have a voice! oh to hear a voice! ah, but it is there, that voice – and I am there, holding onto a phone and imagining you are the man I love… and that we are on a page – a great, big, white page, wider than a king-sized bed and just as vast to fuck in.)

keep reading to me, baby. keep going.

quote me bukowski one more time.

Change here.

2009-10-18T18:38:00.005+01:00

The whole outside universe is composed of souls different from mine, but, in effect, similar to mine.

Au fond de on, en cherchant bien nous ne trouverons jamais qu'un certain nombre de ils et de elles qui se sont brouilles et confondus en se multipliant.

Gabriel Tarde: Les Lois Sociales

Whenever you want to understand a network, go an look for the actors, but when you want to understand an actor, go and look through the net at the work it has traced.

Bruno Latour: Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social

I went to Carnaby Street today to exchange a pair of shoes.

I came out of the shop and it seemed foolish to go home right away, the city was teeming around me, it was Saturday evening and what was I doing going home at this hour and there was no way I was going to finish reading the Latour text even if I did go home.

It had been a trek to get into town in the first place. Arsenal were playing around the corner, Finsbury Park station was full of yobs, and once I’d gotten through the yobs I was in the middle of a bunch of goddamn tourists coming back from Primark.

The London I envisage in my mind is rarely the London I encounter when I leave the house. When it is, it makes my breath catch. When it isn’t, I want to destroy her. Not the people – the city itself. They can’t help it if they don’t come up to scratch. The city can. She should be above disappointing me.

Right?

I went to Carnaby Street today to exchange a pair of shoes.

I had taken the Piccadilly Line to get into town. London Underground is running a campaign on the line to ‘generate a more positive atmosphere during peak times’ and encourage staff and commuters to ‘re-enter the environment of the network’. It’s titled ‘What is the City but the People?’ after the Coriolanus quote.

Fuck the people. That campaign was designed for me. And me alone.

Fuck networks. The beauty of cities is that they allow you to disappear into the throng. And in that throng, to create a reality that is yours and yours alone.

A tube journey isn’t just a way to get from point A to point B. It’s a way to get to point B without seeing the derelict areas you wish would disappear. The ones that insult your aesthetic sensibilities.

The walk home on weeknights through Highbury & Islington or Barnsbury is a way to pretend that you, too, are posh. You live in a house with a Smeg fridge and a Gaggia espresso machine and someone you pay to iron your clothes.

On the weekend, you visit Hampstead and walk the streets and pretend that the houses whose interiors you see belong to writers and artists and families like the one you, too, will have one day and that the books on those bookcases – because these houses have lots of bookcases, that’s why you walk there in the first place – are obscure. Or old. Or gifts from someone long dead.

On weekday mornings you get off at Farringdon instead of Barbican even though it’s farther from the office – because it’s more cinematic, this way. You are a city worker, you tell yourself. You work in the city. This will never cease to amaze you.

Reading Villette a few weeks ago, you ferociously underline the passage in which the protagonist is first seduced by London, ‘wandering whither chance might lead, in a still ecstasy of freedom and enjoyment’.

You are on the tube, about to get off at Farringdon, as you read the passage about her preference for the City over the West-end. ‘The City seems so much more in earnest: its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious things, sights, sounds,’ Lucy tells you, as you got off the train.

‘Lucy, You don’t know the half of it’, you think. But really what you’re saying is, ‘Thank you for allowing me to romanticise my life’. And, ‘You’re right, Lucy. But let’s keep this between you and me.’ And ‘For how much longer will I be able to keep telling myself this?’

Leaving Carnaby Street, you get lost in Soho like you always do. You’re looking for the fluorescent frozen yogurt shop whose garishness would insult Wilde’s sensibilities. You are buying time.

You don’t need frozen yogurt. You need ideas and a way to link them into a coherent narrative.

You need words and they’re not coming.

And you need to understand the text you’ve been avoiding.

Right?

I went to Carnaby Street today to exchange a pair of shoes and I came out at Piccadilly Circus and my mobile phone beeped and it was a text from my first love, this Italian from my mother’s home town who arrived at LSE last month, down the road from the school I’m attending, at LSE, would you believe it, at LSE, where the social theorist I’m reading used to teach, the social theorist whose way with words may be causing me to fall in love even though I don’t get what he’s saying and want to scream why aren’t you here to explain things to me? and this guy’s asking me why the dramatic tone and he’s not getting what I’m saying and I’m thinking about the ils and elles who’re brouillanting and confonduing and multiplianting themselves and my God this is all too much.

So I buy the frozen yogurt I don’t need and go back underground. On the tube ride home I hide behind the Latour text to eavesdrop on the Italians sitting in front of me. I edit out the parts I don’t like.

I went to Carnaby Street today to exchange a pair of shoes.

Tonight I will email my thoughts to a friend in Colorado who, while I’m sleeping, will use Google Maps to trace my path.

He will write me words of reassurance that by tomorrow I will no longer need.

Leaving the house I'll run past billboards whose facades will have changed overnight, past new roadworks and signposts and a faulty traffic light that can’t make up its mind whether to say stop or go.

On the Victoria line I will fall in love with the first passenger whose sleeve brushes mine. At Kings Cross, I will play matchmaker with the other commuters – on the Metropolitan, I will long to be the woman in the next carriage. I will come out at Farringdon sweaty and feverish but the city will understand.

Right?

The city lets me be all the characters I am today.

She, who changes in shifting swarms of people as they come and go and come again.

Tomorrow, I will remember a different version of this story. And she probably will, too.

Flirting with the page

2008-06-17T22:50:00.005+01:00

Weave a circle round [her] thrice
And close your eyes in holy dread
For [s]he on honeydew hath fed
And drunk the milk of paradise
- Coleridge

Dear Ben,

I have just come home from a day in a training session about writing for the web: eight hours devoted to learning how to cut out big words, simplify phrases and eliminate unnecessary 'waffle'.

I came out reeling.

I wanted to wail: "But waffling is what I do. What am I, without my waffling? Cut out big words? I need my big words."

I saw myself again, age five –

Plugging my ears while my father tried to coax me into learning a new song on the violin.

Screaming: "I don't want to learn a new song. I want to play 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star!'"

Stamping my foot and going red in the face and threatening to smash my violin on the floor if he didn't let me play 'Twinkle, Twinkle' right now.

Twenty years later, and there I was again, red-faced and wanting to smash something.

But it wasn't all bad. And although our instructor succeeded in systematically shooting to pieces all my ideas about language, the purpose of writing, and what readers want, he also gave us a piece of advice that (of course - what doesn't?) made me think of you.

"Think of your audience – your readers - as one person," he said.

"Give him/her a name - an age - a job. Make him/her real. It'll make it easier to know what your aim is, if you know for whom you are writing."

Walking home - it was raining, the air was heavy, but I would not be stopped, I had to get the afternoon’s coffees out of my system and my rushing thoughts to abate - I found myself thinking about the myriad of pieces ammassed on my desktop that start with the words "Dear Ben".

For example: “I am very judgemental, Ben. The first time I met you I thought you were immensely attractive and as a consequence I assumed you must be an asshole. Then I decided that you weren't an asshole – but I was still suspicious and figured there must be a catch somewhere. I assumed you'd been popular in high school and had always had it easy. And I equated the fact that I'd been miserable in high school with my being, essentially, a better person than you.” Do you remember this? It's from one of my very first letters to you.

Or: “Dear Ben, How is it that Florence becomes more beautiful every time i see it? If I could marry a city I would already be at the altar. Of the duomo, of course. No, maybe Santa Croce […] I love Italy, I adore Florence, I love a lot of people and a lot of things. Maybe the problem is that I love too many things.” Two summers ago, this was.

It's true, what the instructor said: identifying one's reader does help one to focus one's discourse. I should know: I have been using you to focus my discourse for years. Hell, I have been focussing my discourse on you for years.

But not only that: envisioning one’s reader helps to make the fictional seem real. It facilitates the suspension of disbelief: for in inventing a realistic reader, the author makes the narrative itself more realistic.

The very existence of a specific reader immediately creates a sense of time and place, of a before and an after. It implies that there is a story that pre-dates the account at hand (the history between author and reader), that there is a reason why the author is telling the story (presumably something between author and reader needs resolving) and that there are loose ends to tie, something to be resolved… and tension in the air (why else, otherwise, would the author be bothering to speak?).

But I have noticed something else. Having invented a reader, the author changes the hues with which he or she paints his/her canvas… not to convey his/her message more clearly, as the instructor in my class implied, but simply to convey him/herself in a better light.

Because with the invention of the reader, the account turns into a personal affair: a relationship is born, and the author’s mission becomes to appeal to the reader.

Appeal both in the sense of putting forth an argument (the reader as judge and jury), and in the sense of rendering one’s self appealing – ie, luring, attracting, ingratiating (the reader as prisoner).

And so the author leaves out material - in some cases, entire pieces of their life - that jars with the idea they wish their reader to have of them. They invent. They elaborate. In the very act of rendering the fictional ‘true’ they find themselves, paradoxically, transforming the truth into a fiction. Sexing it up, so to speak.

They find themselves using words and turns of phrase that show them in the best light - the literary equivalent of choosing the most flattering skirt length or revealing the right amount of cleavage.

Witness the author, flirting with the page.

I imagine you smiling as you read this. I can see the sideways grin as it slants slightly to the left of your face while, legs crossed (your surprisingly feminine Meg Ryan legs… I still remember your bewilderment when I spotted the resemblance), hands clasped around your knee, foot swinging, you lean forward, the better to understand. Intent, as always, on garnering the full meaning – on observing, assimilating, pondering (My opposite, in every way).

I imagine you, captivated: my captive audience, my trapped judge and jury.

Laughing at the absurdity of what I am saying.

But is it so absurd? Rather, is it not inevitable? After all, to write is to perform – and a performer keeps one’s audience enthralled by attracting them more easily than by repelling them (the idea that there is a fine line between the two will have to be the subject of a future letter).

Moreover, if to write is to exhibit, bare and conceal, the writer isn’t merely flirting: they are veritably performing a strip tease.

Witness the writer, doing the dance of the seven veils.

“Think of your audience – your readers - as one person," our instructor told us.

"Give him/her a name - an age - a job. Make him/her real. It'll make it easier to know what your aim is.”

And so I have invented you, Ben: conjured a picture of you, the better to do my little dance (I doubt very much this was what our teacher had in mind).

Concocted an idea of your likes and dislikes in order to know what – and what not – to reveal.

Propped up your cardboard cut-out, life-sized paper doll figure, then switched on the table-lamp, draped it with one of my fuchsia scarves – the ones that bleed onto my other clothes in the wash and stream scarlet tears every time that, like today, I get caught in the rain – and proceeded to grind my hips.

Witness the writer, eyes closed in order to shut out the real and better embrace the ephemeral fiction she herself has created.

Fiction: in other words, lies.

I have a confession to make, Ben: I have lied throughout this letter.

The training session: it was over a month ago, not today. I didn't walk home - I went to Russell Square, to meet my parents for dinner. It wasn't raining, and I had not had so much coffee as to be buzzing. I had to invent all of that, to create a scene, to enable the suspense to mount. To draw you in.

Writers lie and manipulate even while claiming to confess - and when narrating, the distinction between mendacity and truth is far too easily blurred.

But do you know what I find fascinating? The truth that emerges from an accumulation of fibs. There are clues to be found in a fictitious account: the scene of the crime is littered with evidence, and the reader has only to look for what has not been said. To read between the lines, as it were. To envision the naked skin under the veils, and create for themselves a whole from the glimpse of an undulating hip or the hint of a nipple. To determine for themselves the 'true' version events.

After all, Ben, you didn't think I'd really strip, did you?

Truly,
hushawildviolet

Pink

2008-06-07T14:32:00.009+01:00

Barbie pink. Plastic pink. Candy-floss pink. Bubble-gum pink.
Tacky-tacky-tacky pink. As-much-pink-as-I-can-have pink.

Frosting pink. Lacy underwear pink. Princess pink. Transvestite pink.
Lipstick pink. Roses-on-your-birthday pink. I’ve-never-outgrown-pink pink.
Baby bottom pink. Cheeky pink. Ass cheek pink.
Onomatopoeic pink. Poetic pink.
I’m-a-romantic-at-heart pink.

Little girl pink. Training-bra pink.
Understated-pink-for-the-working-girl pink.
Old-pensioner-in-a-nursing-home pink.

I’m-a-waitress-at-Dennys-but-really-I’m-an-actress pink. I-wear-power-suits-even-though-the-eighties-are-over pink.
Acrylic legwarmer pink.
Because-the-eighties-are-back-and-so-is-pink pink.

Pink-even-though-one-day-I-will-be old-and-look-silly, wispy-haired-and-frail-and-docile- in-my-bedjacket-that-looks-so-much-like the-blanket-they-put-me-in-as-a-baby pink.

Prep school boy pink. Gay man pink.
Straight-man-who-can-still-carry-off-pink pink.
Uneducated-girls-who-don’t-read-books pink. Uneducated-girls-who-only-read-Harlequin-novels pink. Uneducated-girls-who’ll-never-amount-to-anything pink.
Educated-girls-who-still-like-pink pink.

Big-titted celebrity pink. Nipple pink. Aureola pink.
Monthly-self-exams-in-the-shower pink. Cancerous pink. She-was-so-young-what-a-shame-what-a-waste-of-potential pink. She-was-so-old-so-who-really-cares pink.
I've-only-got-one-breast pink. You’re-only-half-a-woman pink.

Shut-up-and-be-pretty pink.
You-ugly-bitch pink.
She-isn’t-pretty-but-she’s-got-a-great-personality pink.
She’s-fat-but-what-a-pretty-face pink.

Pink-like-the-Virgin-Mary-if-she-weren’t-so-into-baby-blue pink. Diamonds-are-a-girl’s-best-friend pink.
We-live-in-a-material-world-and-I-am-a-material-girl pink.
Took-a-while-to-get-me-here-and-I'm-gonna-take-my-time pink.
Let’s-get-this-party-started pink.

I’m-a-good-person pink. I’m-so-innocent pink.
Look-at-me-I’m-in-pink pink. Don’t take me seriously, I wear pink, pink. Fresh-faced-and-no-make-up pink.
You’re-young-and-the-world’s-at-your-feet pink.
Only-the-good-die-young pink.

I’m-still-a-virgin-pink. I’m-a-born-again-virgin-pink.
You-make-me pink. For-the-very-first-time pink.
You-make-me-feel pink.
Like-a-natural-woman pink.
Let-me-be-your-baby pink. You’ll-always-be-my-baby,baby pink.
It's-not-you-it's-me pink.
Ok-I-just-got-bored-with-you pink.
I’ll-steal-your-boyfriend-and-look-angelic-doing-it pink.

Seduced-and-abandoned pink.
No-one-gives-a-damn-pink.
This-is-not-the-time-pink.
Left-for-dead pink.

I’m-just-going-to-powder-my-nose pink.
I’m-just-going-to-stick-powder-up-my-nose pink.
My-room-was-pink-before-I painted-it-black pink.
It’s-hard-to-be-a-rebel-in-pink-pink.

Nursing-home-pink. Blank-faced-pink. How-did-I-get-here? pink. I-used-to-be-beautiful-and-all-the-boys-liked-me pink. I-wanted-to-be-a-movie-star-and-I-could-have,you-know pink. You-look-so-much-like-my-daughter-she-loved-pink-too pink. Palatial-pink-was-my-favourite-shade-of-nail-polish,
they-don’t-make-it-anymore, it’s-a-shame-and-what-did-you-say-your-name-was-again? pink.

Pink-for-the-romantic-in-me pink.
Pink-for-the-broken-old-souls-who-want-cheering-up pink. It’s-amazing-what-some-flowers-can-do-to-brighten-up-the-room-
don’t-you-think? pink.
Yellowing-dentures-with-pale-pink-gums-smiling-from-the-glass pink. I-still-get-my-nails-done-sometimes pink.

Bathroom-enamel-pink.
Enamel-pink-bathroom-where-I-sometimes-like-to-cry pink.
Cry-baby-pink. Why-are-you-crying-little-girl? pink. The-most-beautiful-girl-in-the-world-pink.
The-sluttiest-girl-in-the-world pink.
If-only-I-were-pretty-pink. I’m-pretty-but-nobody-knows-it pink. I’m-pretty-because-everybody-says-so pink.

This-pattern-of-wallpaper-used-to-be-all-the-rage pink. If-only-we’d-had-time-to-redo-the-bathroom-
before-they-had-to-take-her-away pink.

God-you’ve-got-cheekbones-to-die-for pink.
Anybody-else-would-look-like-a-whore-in-that pink.
Why-do-you-insist-on-looking-so-cheap? pink.
You-fucking-cunt pink.

I-only-buy-pink-toiletpaper pink. I-only-wipe-my-ass-with-pink-toilet-paper pink. My-daughter-only-uses-ecofriendly-toilet-paper-God-knows-why-
I-mean-we’re-all-going-to-die-someday-anyway-even-the-planet-
so-why-not-enjoy-some-colour-until-then? pink.

I'm-leaving-instructions-to-be-buried-in-pink pink.
She-wanted-to-be-buried-in-pink-but-I-just-couldn’t pink. Mrs.Pink-was-buried-in-a-lovely-understated-grey-
and-her-bitch-of-a-daughter-didn’t-even-cry pink.

It’s-a-shame-nobody-wears-pink-anymore pink.

2008-04-29T13:15:00.002+01:00

Dear Ben,

Tonight I am full of unspoken words.

Brimming, despite the fact that I have spent nearly all day talking.

On the phone, to my mother.
On the phone, to Girlfriend Number One - Girlfriend Number Two - Girlfriend Number Three.

It is hot out: the heat arrived suddenly, this morning, taking the city by surprise. The streets were full of people with winter-blanched skin and slumberous gaits, eyes hazy with disbelief at summer's sudden appearance. I felt like I was coming out of a collective hybernation.

London, awakening.
London, squinting in the sun.
London, not - quite - ready.

Now, at 11 at night, the room retains the heat of the day. The sliding door that gives onto the terrace is wide open and the hanging laundry on the cold radiators gives off an almost pungent scent. As if it will rot before it dries.

I have been thinking a lot about decay. And destruction. About what makes things fall apart.

Have you read Yeats' 'The Second Coming?' I am thinking, in particular, about the beginning of the poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity

It is a piece about the second coming of Christ, actually. But I rarely pay attention to context, when I recall lines of songs or poetry. When I get words stuck in my head that won't go away.

The centre couldn't hold, Ben. Things fell apart.

I am giddy in my confusion.

After death comes birth. From the flames, the phoenix. When everything breaks down, it is time to re-build.

In my head, I see visions of creation.

I went out today and bought a £175 dress to be a bridesmaid at my best friend's wedding - after having broken up with the man I had, at one point, thought I was going to marry.

I didn't cry.

I walked among racks of dresses - and what dresses, Ben, what dresses! - and I ran my hands through the different fabrics. I fingered the shoes on display and imagined myself buying armloads of them.

Then I took the escalator down to the ground floor and trailed through the maze of perfume and cosmetics counters. I sprayed myself with Issaye Miyake and spent the rest of the day sniffing my wrist.

I rang my mother.
I rang Girlfriend Number One, Girlfriend Number Two, Girlfriend Number Three: "I found the perfect dress!"

On the train home, I sat, holding the bag with the dress pressed against my chest, wondering at my own elation.

And I didn't cry.

2008-04-05T12:14:00.001+01:00

The first time I see him is at a party. A friend introduces us. I stare.

The second time - a drum and base night for students. He's wearing a white t-shirt that looks fluorescent under the blue lights. He dances like a crazed person, eyes closed. I wonder if he's on drugs.

The third time is at a meeting for creative writers.

"Write for Tallulah and see your work in print," says the flier in my pigeon-hole.

I'm 19, one month and a handful of days.

I'm 19 and I want to be a writer.

I'm 19 with all my hopes intact.

I tell my roommate I'm going to a meeting of writers. I tell her I'm going to get published.

I wear pink shiny trousers to the meeting because I don't know any better.

Because I'm only 19.

The meeting is in a stuffy room at the end of a labyrinthine corridor. Outside it is raining and the floor on one side of the room is cluttered with wet umbrellas. The air is damp and sticky, and smells vaguely of body odour. The bottoms of my trousers are muddy, my hair streaming. My broken umbrella is in the bin by the door, locked with someone else's in a spidery embrace.

There's a fat girl with pigtails at the front of the room talking to a small group of earnest-looking students. I didn't know writers could be so unattractive, and for a moment I'm caught off-guard. Then I remember the newspaper photograph of Margaret Atwood hanging on my dorm room wall. She does not look anything like the other women who crowd my walls - Liz Hurley, Elle MacPherson, Natalie Portman, the doe-eyed brunette in the Magnum ad.

But fat?

I decide now would be a good moment to choose substance over form. I avert my eyes and try to listen.

She talks an awful lot about creativity. About releasing inner energies. About 'finding space inside to nurture one's self-expression'. She is breathless in her enthusiasm and often trips on her words. Someone near the front sniggers, but her look of hurt bewilderment stops them.

And then a phone rings.

It is the pink panther tune, and it comes, loudly, from the other side of the room.

The girl keeps talking, undeterred, while the phone rings on.

I crane my neck. At the back I see a bowed, blonde head.

It's him.

He doesn't notice me looking as he switches off the phone.

After the meeting, people are invited to mingle. I find myself cornered by an American exchange student with shiny skin and acne scars who has decided to tell me his life story while scrutinising my tits. I cross my arms over my chest and he continues to stare. I'm slightly cowed by his persistence. And confused - aren't Americans meant to be prudish?

I leave the meeting with an armload of brochures. I already know they'll end up in the recycling bin together with the archery, rowing, sailing, swim club, football, and various religious groups' pamphlets I continue to zealously collect in a bid to become part of the university community, only to lose interest after each introductory meeting.

It's fine, though. Because I saw him while I was talking to the American. And he was looking straight at me.

I'm 19 and it's enough for a guy to look at me - for a guy to look like he's looking at me, for it to not to matter that I have no idea how to 'unleash my creativity' -

that I'm not sure I have an aura I want to explore -

that, let's face it, I'm not going to get published thanks to "Tallulah" -

that I have the attention span of a gnat.

I'm 19 and I'd rather be the subject than to have to look for one to write about.

I'm 19 and I'd rather be looked at than look.

I'm 19 and I'm dying, dying, dying to be seen.

La piu' bella [scrittrice] del mondo

2008-03-29T23:12:00.000Z

I don’t want to be a writer to change people’s lives. Fuck that. I don’t want to make a difference.

And come on. Write about people? About others' experiences? Far-away places? I’ve no idea where most countries are situated geographically, and I’ve even less of an idea of what the people in those countries do, so why would I want to write about them?

No. Please. Let’s be honest (and honesty is my forte: I am nothing if not disarmingly honest. Watch me disarm you with my charming honesty. Just watch).

I want to be famous.

Correction.

I want to be faayyy-muss.

What I have been looking forward to since the age of three (when I dictated my first story, not knowing yet how to write) is the day when I can stand behind a podium in front of a room full of people whilst I wax eloquent on my youthful, naive aspirations (pause for a chuckle here and perhaps a self-deprecating anecdote or two) and on why I felt called to be a writer in the first place.

For there is no doubt in my mind at present, nor will there be in my mind ten years from now (max, twenty—Zadie Smith managed it at, what? 26? If I’m still unknown and unpublished by age 33 I’ll go die a solitary death in one of those obscure countries of which I’ve never heard), that it is a matter of being called.

Visited by the muse.

Plucked from the multitude of common people and pirouetted into the realm of the bold.

The bold, man. The bold and the beautiful.

Which brings me to my other aspiration—or rather, the aspiration which up until the age of twelve I considered to have already attained (can one attain an aspiration?).

To become – hell, to already be – the most beautiful writer in the world.

I’m not sure what I actually thought that meant, as a child. I think I vaguely envisaged a future of flipping my hair (it would have to be blonde, of course: though by what miraculous transformation I don’t know) casually and seductively over my shoulder whilst hammering away at a noisy electric typewriter that would give a triumphant ‘bing’ at the end of every line.

(Note that this was long before “Sex and the City” and Sarah Jessica Parker’s moments of pensive eloquence whilst sitting in her Manhatten apartment, generally in her underwear and strategically filmed from an angle made to make her look as un-horse-like as possible.)

It is, as it generally is, all my mother’s fault. Hers and that of our relatives on her side of the family, who told me, from the moment I was born, that I was “la piú bella del mondo” (note: not “the most beautiful girl”, “the most beautiful being”, “the most beautiful baby”, but simply “the most beautiful”, in general. Not a lot of people can claim that).

So naturally it was rather devastating when, the summer I turned two, whilst playing contentedly in the sand at the beach, I overheard the old women sitting under the beach umbrella next to ours cooing at her grand-daughter and saying, “Who’s the most beautiful girl in the world? You’re the most beautiful girl in the world!”

I immediately burst into tears and ran to my mother, crying disconsolately and somewhat petulantly, “I thought I was the most beautiful in the world.”

My ego miraculously survived the incident as well as the succession of events that, over the years, continued to indicate I might not, in fact, be “la piu’ bella del mondo”, let alone “la piu’ bella” writer.

In the fifth grade, for example, my best friend Emily and I spent our afternoons after school ringing up all the boys in our grade, asking them out. They all said no, except one who agreed to go out with Emily, which mildly puzzled me since I was so sure I was prettier and cleverer than her. I came to the conclusion that none of these boys could see just how beautiful I was.

It wasn’t until I was twelve that it dawned on me. My God: I wasn’t beautiful. I was, in fact, fat and hideous. Something had to be done: the ‘beautiful’ from my title would have to be omitted.

I would be “the most writer in the world” – without the hair-flicking.

However once one weathers adolescence, the values with which one grew up as a child (presupposing, of course, that one listened to what one was told—but then, as a typical first-born, I always did) tend to claw their way back,.

Thus, my teen years left behind, I accepted once again the importance of eating vegetables, going to bed early, indulging in Catholic guilt, looking both ways before crossing the street, reading books to improve myself, and the unquestionable reality of my infinite.

Which is why, at the age of 25, I still want to be the most beautiful writer in the world. Put simply, I’ve got no qualifications to do anything else.

I’ve been preparing for this beauty pageant since I was born.

I save all my emails on my computer for the day when my biographers (and of course there will be many of them) want to publish my correspondence, I make copious notes in the books I read so as to provide enough content for the publication of my marginalia.

Not to mention the journal I’ve been keeping since I was six. One day, the description of the story “Cat dog fish” in my first-grade journal, the list of “People I hate” and “People I sort of hate” in the 10 Feb 1995 entry, the account of my weight fluctuations throughout each day of 1996 (first thing in the morning, after breakfast, before my mid-afternoon shit, after my mid-afternoon shit, etc) will be the subject of innumerable studies of my juvenilia.

For much the same reason, I try to be in as many photographs as possible (and always ask for copies) so as to facilitate future documentation of my prime (essential, as even the most beautiful writer in the world “needs must wither” eventually).

As for actually writing anything, when anyone asks me about what I’m working on, I’ve gotten quite good at looking slightly vacantly into space, with just the right amount of sorrow in my expression, and saying in a subdued, almost reverential tone, “Ah, I’m actually blocked at the moment.”