Living just to find emotion

BB 11's Logo

As a self-confessed Big Brother fan since Season 3 onwards (with a small blip around Seasons 6-7), I have thoroughly enjoyed the sheer oddness of watching this year's BB cast audition and perform their own version of what seems to be an episode of 'Glee', complete with nerds and nerdettes, jocks and cheerleaders. The culmination of all of this will be on tonight when apparently, the two worst singers in the house will have to sing live on Channel 4 in front of the viewing public.

So, as I say, the auditions were excruciating and hilarious and now Their Music Video...

At least Steve and Rachel can sing, but most of all Andrew in the diary room on air guitar, that's what I'll take away from this final season.

I bit of very light entertainment for a Friday afternoon...

You've been the song playing on the background all along

Photo from the collection of Vincente Wolf, in the book "Frida Kahlo," edited by Elizabeth Carpenter

I'm going in and out of reading 'The Lacuna', a small problem as I have it on loan from the library (for the second time) and I'm only on page 244 out of 670 pages and I've just received another overdue notice... It's a slow and sumptuous read but very historically dense in a way I'm not used to seeing in novels. What really struck me today as I was reading is the amazing ability Kingsolver has of taking the narrator, when he writes to Frida, from a third person address into second person intimate register, all in one sentence. As a writer, I feel a bit giddy when this happens in the novel, a bit like I'm on a trapeze and flying through the air and then suddenly caught and passed on into my next mid-air somersault. There is no doubting the craft and skill of her writing.

Here's a passage where this happens. Context: the narrator, Soli, writes a journal about what happens in the Diego/Kahlo household while they are keeping Trotsky safe. Here Soli confronts Kahlo about an affair she has with someone he is in love with.

'She sank delicately into one of the wooden chairs at the yellow table, perched like a canary. "Oh, Soli. You know the frog and me. We can fight about any stupid thing."

"Not to mention the things he doesn't know about."

You looked up then with a child's dread, clutching your shawl as if it might protect you from bullets or ghosts.'

And further on the page, Soli ends this passage:

'This is what it means to be alone: everyone is connected to everyone else, their bodies are a bright liquid life flowing around you, sharing a single heart that drives them to move all together. If the shark comes they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.' (pages 241-243)

*******

Today's music selection is from The Fray's newer album. I always find myself listening to The Fray when I'm in a sombre mood. Some sound bites--


Say When
Enough for Now

When I woke up it was like this

My mood today must be influenced by this film I saw last night right before going to sleep. The type of person the woman in the film is, before she meets the guy, reminds me so much of myself and where I am right now. And waking up, my mood was, is, introspective and very quiet. Today is a new song I'm hearing for the first time. It is warm with a cool breeze, it is what I hide and what I reveal. It's loud throbbing dance music and slow melancholy ballads. It's red carpet and wood floors, memory and imagination, things that are too tenuous to express in words. It's melting butter on hot boiled eggs, leaving the radio off instead of listening to the chat. Today is aloneness and meeting with others. Today is finding out why and how and what next. Today I am all of these things and a vast ocean of unsaid just beneath the surface skin. Today is hope and exhaustion, poetry and silence. It's another page in a chapter all filed under the Book of Love.

I took the stars from my eyes and then I made a map

Sometimes it's so odd how many different images / words / sounds float around in my mind all at once and crash into some weird collage of stuff that becomes a blog post. This week that collage is made up of sound (I've only just finally started to like Florence & The Machine), more sound from the poetry I've heard and read this week, and inevitably, words words words. I'm always going through a series of conversations with The Muses and this week these Muse-ladies are Florence, (and, as usual) Jo Shapcott and Barbara Kingsolver. On my reading list this week:

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (I'm still reading it slowly and taking it in like honey)

The Lacuna (I started this ages ago and finally got back to it having decided that Kingsolver's non-fiction voice is different enough from her fiction voice to read two of her books simultaneously)

Of Mutability
Phrase Book
(1 just published and 1 long-since-published collection of Shapcott's)

From all of this reading I've been so inspired--and here I want to say, so inspired to write myself, but instead I've been inspired to read even more! And to share with you the best of what I'm reading. Here is the best poem: (Jo Shapcott)

Muse

When I kiss you in all the folding places
of your body, you make that noise like a dog
dreaming, dreaming of the long run he makes
in answer to some jolt to his hormones,
running across landfills, running, running
by tips and shorelines from the scent of too much,
but still going with head up and snout
in the air because he loves it all
and has to get away. I have to kiss deeper
and more slowly - your neck, your inner arm,
the neat creases of your toes, the shadow
behind your knee, the white angles of your groin -
until you fall quiet because only then
can I get the damned words to come into my mouth.