when it's time to work, WORK.

Originally uploaded by themarkpike

************BELIEF & TECHNIQUE FOR MODERN PROSE******
List of Essentials

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1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy

2. Submissive to everything, open, listening

3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house

4. Be in love with yr wife

5. Something that your feel will find its own form

6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

7. Blow as deep as you want to blow

8. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind

9. The unspeakable visions of the individual

10. No time for poetry but exactly what is

11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest

12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time

15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye

17. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself

18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea

19. Accept loss forever

20. Believe in the hold contour of life

21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind

22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better

23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr monrning

24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge

25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it

26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form

27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness

28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazzier the better

29. You're a Genius all the time

30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

as ever,

Jack

[By Jack Kerouac, exerpted precisely as published [sic] from a letter to Don Allen 1958]

from Heaven & Other Poems, Grey Fox Press, San Francisco 1994

a little bit light, a little bit dark

Marcel Dzama's new music video for Department of Eagles is the stuff of (dark, engrossing, fantastical) dreams...

care to dance?

i was going to say, 'should i ever get married...', but screw it, i'm just going to dance to it now, whilst taking lessons from tammy terell in the fine art of eyebrow batting.

the day gets bigger

Originally uploaded by Jaako

Reading the lovely Scout’s blog, I come across Maira Kalman, whose name I have never heard before, and am intrigued. I start digging and find a book, a wonderful TED talk, a website, and a NY Times column. She’s wonderful. The world cracks open slightly and is brighter.

I want to know more about her: does she have children? Where does she live? Does she have a pot-bellied pig, a fancy studio, red tights like the ones I’m wearing today? If I understand her life more, can I live more like her? Can I live better? Can I die better? (Because like her, I think those are the only two things worth dedicated yourself to the study of.)

I find out she has two children, a series of children’s books, a mischievous face. I find out she had a husband, Tibor, a renegade graphic designer now dead. Renegade graphic designers – my specialist subject. I read his obituary.

It mentions how he went to live in Cuba, his politics, and that he wrote a rare book called Chairman Rolf Fehlbaum. I look to the left of my desk: I have this book; it’s been there for months, untouched.

I read this book, and it makes me marvel. The world cracks open slightly and is brighter.

I go back to finish reading his obituary, feeling I’ve found new friends today. At the end of the obit, one of Tibor’s friends gives a wonderful testimonial: "He remained charming and prickly and funny literally until the end. Since people our age have not yet died in great numbers, it's a great model for us all as a way to die, not just with dignity, but with effervescence."

The friend is Kurt Andersen, a writer, whose name is at once new and familiar. I realise – yesterday, waiting for a friend, I picked an old magazine from a rack and opened it, randomly, to a writer’s description of his perfect final meal. The writer was Kurt Andersen, and I had never heard of him until last night.

I sit here and the world feels bigger, and smaller, and brighter, and closer, and strung through with possibility.

giddy

spike jonze + dave eggers + arcade fire + monsters + MAURICE FRICKING SENDAK? ladies and gentlemen, that wild rumpus cannot start soon enough.

someone i know: rach

The day that Rach started at the place I used to work, I knew we would be pals. I remember talking to her that first morning in the office’s kitchen as I unloaded the plates from the dishwasher. We were both wearing jeans and trainers; the talk came easily. That night, sitting at the big kitchen table in my borderline-derelict share house, a housemate asked how my day was. I answered happily, ‘I met a girl who’s going to be my friend!’

Rach was different to the other girls who worked there, who were mostly pretty, primped and perky account managers. She swerved between effervescent enthusiasm for obscure kinds of pens and cats and art and baked goods, and moody, solitary disdain. She liked Roots Manuva and Steve Reich. She could draw better than anyone I ever saw. She talked about the full sleeve tattoo she wanted an artist to design for her, about swanky hotels she wanted to stay at, about Sweden in summertime.

We went to New York together and she was sad and distant for much of the time, struggling to be away from the boy she was falling in love with. But the freezing December day we got the Circle Line ferry around Manhattan, she suddenly sparked into fizzing life and drew, with utter ease and certainty, the skyline of the entire island.

For a few years we dated boys who lived together. We saw more of each other than at any other time in our lives. But it was less somehow – both preoccupied, running in different gears.

I left that job; took another. Rach and her boyfriend broke up. She changed jobs, too. We drifted.

I don’t even remember how it was resuscitated – just suddenly, there she was again, and we were eating lunch together, talking about men with beards and hatching plans to make robots out of cardboard and watching John Cusack films and trading pictures of cats with weird expression to shake each other out of the doldrums.

For Christmas, just before I got on the plane to fly home to Australia, we went out to drink martinis and Rach gave me one of the most wonderful presents I’ve ever had. It was a care package, full of everything she thought I’d need for such a long flight – Green & Black’s chocolate, small felt-tips and a colour-paper notebook from Muji, a tiny tube of Chanel face wash, an Iris Murdoch book we’d talked about, an eye mask and earplugs that allowed me to carve out 5 solid hours of sleep in that endless night.

She hates having her photo taken. She teaches herself impossibly difficult programming languages on the computer. She dances better, makes better chocolate cake and wears the best socks of anyone I know. My friend said, after meeting Rach for just a few hours, ‘She can do anything, can’t she? Talented gal.’ He’s right.

I call her Razzamatazz, or sometimes Racquel, or Razzle, but she’s one of the few people in the world whose true name is the one they were given at birth. Rach.

(belated) tuesday: i know this much is true

after we moved to australia, every week, my mum would get two aerogrammes in the post, one addressed in my nana's dense scrawl, and the other bearing my aunty peg's spidery handwriting (she was actually my great aunty peg, but woe betide anyone who called her that...). every week, without fail, they sat down to take stock of the days, think of my mum across the globe in this scorched new place, and fold up their observations and ideas and missingness.

i remember how my mum would sink into them, how she'd become far away, how she'd stop being mum for a few minutes and become someone's daughter.