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Travelling Poets & Tower Block Vampires
Aug. 21st, 2006 09:14 pmSo what are we doing exactly? We are touring a poetry library round Europe. We are carrying this all in a rucksack on our back. We are also couchsurfing the whole way as we can’t afford to pay for hotels, hostels, beds, floors or really anything except maybe a meal a day. oh yeah, and coffee obviously. We definitely can’t afford our usual Guardian newspaper habit that's for sure. We are interviewing poets at each place we get to. And producing a podcast, i.e. MP3 audio file of the sounds and poets and stuff we hear along the way, from each city or country. Why? Because we had the idea in bed one day.
- Learn more about the travelling poetry library
Although I live in a tower block with twenty floors -- four apartments per floor -- I never see anyone when I make my way to work or come home. This is particularly strange since in every other building I lived in, I always shared the elevator in the morning with other human beings. You grew a dislike for certain people who never said good morning to you, or who bothered you too much with small talk. But this building houses vampires. They come alive at night (I know my neighbour does -- she's a nightshift cleaner somewhere), with their washing machines that screech over our bed at 1am, their drunken shouts for Shannon to let them in, their children riding up & down the elevator because they have nowhere else to burn their energy.
In the kitchen, I hugged Kevin after we decided to dine on pasta with olive oil, garlic and parmesan cheese. I could see Canary Wharf lit up in the distance and, closer, Kevin's reflection in the kitchen window. He looked like a cat.
I'm glad Big Brother is over. I come home and have these hours to work on my writing, to catch up with journals and friends, then drift towards bed time with a half-hour read of Will Self's The Book of Dave, without having to worry about what's going on in reality TV land. My estimation of Will Self had gone down after I'd started reading his column in the Evening Standard, much like I've grown to hate Tracey Emin for her gibberish over at The Independent, but I really like his ideas in this novel, what he's trying to do. He never quite succeeds in engaging his readers emotionally, but it's fun to see him play with language and the meaning of life in modern London.
Postcards have arrived in the past weeks, one from a gorgeous mother in California, and two from a pair of lovely redheads in New York. They are lying on my desk, waiting for a spare moment when I'll bluetack them to the wall with the others. I am the Ed Gein of the postcard world.
- Learn more about the travelling poetry library
Although I live in a tower block with twenty floors -- four apartments per floor -- I never see anyone when I make my way to work or come home. This is particularly strange since in every other building I lived in, I always shared the elevator in the morning with other human beings. You grew a dislike for certain people who never said good morning to you, or who bothered you too much with small talk. But this building houses vampires. They come alive at night (I know my neighbour does -- she's a nightshift cleaner somewhere), with their washing machines that screech over our bed at 1am, their drunken shouts for Shannon to let them in, their children riding up & down the elevator because they have nowhere else to burn their energy.
In the kitchen, I hugged Kevin after we decided to dine on pasta with olive oil, garlic and parmesan cheese. I could see Canary Wharf lit up in the distance and, closer, Kevin's reflection in the kitchen window. He looked like a cat.
I'm glad Big Brother is over. I come home and have these hours to work on my writing, to catch up with journals and friends, then drift towards bed time with a half-hour read of Will Self's The Book of Dave, without having to worry about what's going on in reality TV land. My estimation of Will Self had gone down after I'd started reading his column in the Evening Standard, much like I've grown to hate Tracey Emin for her gibberish over at The Independent, but I really like his ideas in this novel, what he's trying to do. He never quite succeeds in engaging his readers emotionally, but it's fun to see him play with language and the meaning of life in modern London.
Postcards have arrived in the past weeks, one from a gorgeous mother in California, and two from a pair of lovely redheads in New York. They are lying on my desk, waiting for a spare moment when I'll bluetack them to the wall with the others. I am the Ed Gein of the postcard world.
