Oh me-oh, oh my-oh, oh Youngstown, Ohio

I got the green light to come to Ohio and work for Obama-Biden until Tuesday. I've been instructed by the insistent people who call me that I can't blog about campaigning, because... why? The 20 people who read this thing might pass on our tactics to McCain? Anyway, what I will say is Christie threw up three times before we even got out of New Jersey, we got stuck behind a terrible-looking accident, listened to the first part of an audio history of Lincoln and a lot of Bruce Springsteen, arrived at our delegate's house a couple of hours ago, then went for dinner at a place called Sunrise where everything, but everything, is deep fried. I'm pretty sure we'll be going there every night. The delegate is putting us up and is one of the most motivated and all-round impressive people I've ever met. I'm so relieved to have something to take up almost all of my brainspace.

This is my mood-lifting song at the moment.

Oooo

Hmmm.

Is it just a gimmick? I don't think so; I think it's a valid study, although I don't think I'd want to read the whole thing. 'O' is my favorite vowel.

My (work) diary look like someone was sick on it

Friday is empty because I am - hopefully - going to Ohio to campaign for Obama for a few days.

The spider of time is climbing over the ruins

I started listening to Kate Bush again a few days ago, having not listened to anything by her for a year or so. Coral Room is so, so beautiful. If there's a more moving song about grief, I've never heard it.

Running Up That Hill is the song that turned me onto her in the first place. She's a fabulous woman and I love that she's kept such a tight grip on her integrity. It means her videos are exercises in acute self-indulgence and eccentricity, but good for her.

I keep writing about music on here because I don't really want to write about anything else. I wonder if it's possible to feel so sad about something and be so consumed by it for such a long time that you eventually stop feeling anything at all and it's almost like you made a deal with it and it releases you.

I can't get up in the morning

In Moby-Dick, which sits half-finished on my bedside table, Melville writes about the fact that you can only really enjoy being in bed when a small part of you - a foot, a hand, your nose - is exposed to the cold. The pleasure for the rest of your body is wildly enhanced by that reminder in an extremity of what you're hiding from:

"...to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself. If you flatter yourself that you are all over comfortable, and have been so a long time, then you cannot be said to be comfortable any more."

Anyway, it's getting to the cold-nose time of year now and I can't get up.

last.fm really is wonderful. Today it played me this song by The National, which I have overlooked previously. It's lovely, then in the last 90 seconds or so it changes and becomes even lovelier. I seem to gravitate towards songs like that of late. Perhaps I'm becoming more patient.

"...a very sad song that leaves you with optimism and hope. A beautiful thing."

Michael Stipe said that about Pyramid Song:



I'm going to write about a river.

I'm also going to write some poems about my mother, I think. Yesterday, I was remembering that she used to go to night school when I was little. I was very young and it wasn't long after I became aware of death, and I was terrified that she was going to die. I'd stay awake in bed, waiting for her to come home, and I could only relax when I heard the clip of her high heels coming down the hill, past the front of our house and round to the back door. Then she'd come in and say goodnight to me.

Repeat

Listening to lots of Yann Tiersen. It's the best stuff to write to, but I have to switch it off every so often and check it's the writing that's making me sad and not the music.

This tune is so lovely and so melancholy, the way it builds and builds. It's similar to the music he wrote for the Amelie soundtrack, but feels utterly hopeless.

I've never heard him work with a singer before. Loved this.

Just finished a new, short chapter. Here are the last few lines:


It was so quiet. Just the wind and
Creaking joints murmuring. He had her

Buzzing in his head; even his rare
Choice to be among people had failed
To clear her, her snatched, negative glare

Scratched on the inside of his eyelids,
Trailing between painted lanes, boxed by
The anti-suicide cage, the grids

Spoiling his view of the winking town,
Reaching the point above the quayside,
Stopping. Nose to the wire, he peered down

As a flash from the umbered, dead-leaved
Park sirened back at him, then two more
In quick succession. “Say cheese,” he breathed.

Burn out

God, I just listened to this track for the first time in seven years. It smells of cheese toasties and marijuana, i.e. sitting in the window of Tim's room in 2nd year of university:

last.fm: could be addictive.

I'm listening to that remix I linked below on repeat at the moment. Tom dismissed electro, saying, "it sounds to me like nothing but someone continuously pounding on a futuristic door." Yep. Love it.

The geeks were right

The past week I've felt passive. I keep wondering if I'm teetering on the edge of either getting sick or having a psychological breakdown. It's really an unusual feeling, but rather a nice one. Just drifting along.

Good stuff is happening at work, so I'm a bit more engaged in my day job, which is probably healthy. Saw this guy on Friday night. Very good. Went out in Brooklyn afterwards. I love my neighborhood. Found a vegan junk food place nearby. It's brilliant. They have posters everywhere with charming statements such as, "Got Pus? Milk Does." Went to J's house last night for dinner with a bunch of his friends. Just as I arrived, they discovered their gas had been switched off, which made for a challenging dinner-cooking scenario, but it all worked out well. Chatted to a guy and couldn't fathom why he was so familiar. Then it dawned on me - it was napkin guy. You'd want this dude on your pub quiz team. Amusingly, when I asked him how he knew J, it turns out they also met while sitting at the bar in Zablozki's.

My parents just got back from a holiday on this island. 110 people live there. They bought lobster and crabs from the local fisherman and sat on their terrace looking at the sea in the evening. There's one tiny store and one bakery and that's pretty much it for civilization. I'm so envious. They're going back next October and I may go with them.

Sunday night electro:

A-Track - Say Whoa (Boys Noize remix)

The Faint - The Geeks Were Right (Boys Noize vs. D.I.M. remix)

Pleasing/uncanny

I'm writing a chapter that involves a character walking onto the Williamsburg Bridge. In another chapter, another character walks onto another bridge and I reference a bit of the bridge's history. I was wondering if I should do the same for this scene. 'Hmm. I'll look it up on Wikipedia and see if it gives me a hint either way,' I thought. (I often do this on the basis that if some intriguing fact jumps out at me, it's meant to be.) So I just opened up Wikipedia and what's the front page today? The Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge. Of the 2.5 million things it could have been, it was a suspension bridge in New York state.

It feels like *proper* Autumn now

And I like it. My mam was pretty strict about not letting me take days off school when I was a kid, but when I reckoned I could cash one in, it would always be a day like this. I like living somewhere with definitive seasons. It's healthy to have a meteorological reminder of the passing of time. I especially like it now I've been here for more than a year because there's a sense of familiarity, of being in an orbit.

Two verses

I left the apartment twice today; once to sit on the roof for a while, and once to buy a bottle of wine. The rest of the day, I've been sitting with my laptop on my knee, and I have 6 lines to show for it. All I wanted to do this weekend was write. Infuriating.

Love this song.

Update: 27 lines. The witching hour is always fruitful. To bed.

Anthems for journeys (Brandon's poems)

Much too simple for the seasoned soldier. Payments made to the gentle troll waiting in the hole. Such is a funnel. Reset, repeat.

Add new note. Rewrote that funny poem. Tokens only. Registered phony. Shaky grounds for any firm foundation. Flirting with fantasy.

Candlelit nothing. Romantic everything. First to know. In a quest for questions.

She lived with me for three years

K's fishy.

27

Mmm. Not so keen on that.

Cool/influential/legendary people have a habit of dying aged 27. I guess that means I'm safe.

If you look at it mathematically (and why wouldn't you?), 27 is 3 cubed, which means there simply couldn't be a better year to be writing an epic poem called One Two Three.

Funny (thanks, Marbury).

Funnier ("You're a cunt." "Thank you." God, I miss English sport).

Insightful (Marcus and Frank, beyond the wit of most men).

Tasty (Christina Black, culinary blogger and all-round delight, fed me this last night).

Eddy into eddy whirls

I like to leave myself bossy instructions in draft text messages. One such message reads, "Look into lark ascending." Presumably, I was listening to it on my iPod one day for the millionth time and decided I should find out the story behind it. So I did, and now I know it's based on this poem. Poor George Meredith - if anyone was inspired to write a piece of music a fraction as good as this by one of my poems, I'd sure as hell want to be alive when it happened. And here's a pretty good recording of the piece: part 1; part 2. Reader, I have no right to boss you around as I boss myself; nonetheless, 15 minutes out of your day listening to this are 15 minutes well-spent. Ralph Vaughan Williams, as I've said here before, creates an England in my head that no longer, and perhaps never, existed, except in isolated pockets. I've listened to this while driving through rural Northumberland and it's felt appropriate, but otherwise I associate it with pre-war England. Indeed, it was written just as the First World War began, and I'm not going to write something trite about that timing, but the whole piece, particularly the dissolved ending, is more beautiful when you know that, I reckon.