From the top of my head down to the tips of the toes on my feet

Tweet I promise, I resolve, I will blow the cobwebs off this dusty old internet hole over the coming weeks, to keep it ticking over so that the moss doesn't grow over it and the squatters don't move in.

rad owls: because, why not?

As I explained before, I've been dividing my time between work and writing fiction, and I'm hovering in an anxious limbo, where everything is a work in progress, incomplete. Because of this, whenever my thoughts turn to this blog, it is with a bit of guilt, the guilt that the time could be spent writing the draft novel or whatever. And it is a properly anxious limbo, because, not having submitted the draft to anyone yet (it's some ways off that), I have no idea whether or not the whole endeavour will amount to any more than a big hill of beans. 

Though that's not entirely true. Because even if I never get published, the process of taking the time every other day to write something as long as a novel has enriched my life. It has enriched my reading life for a start. I now notice how books are engineered, how some novels might as well be cobbled together from pritt-stick and sellotape, though others, the ones touched by greatness, still seem as smooth as hewn marble from where I regard them. So, yah, I suppose that writing has taught me (slow learner that I am at the age of thirty two) to become a more discerning reader.

Writing has also taught me to notice things. And noticing things has put the brakes on time in a way. I carry a journal with me everywhere, and scribble down anything that strikes me as worth filing away for future reference. These are the writerly little details that will help me win my battles against cliché, I tell myself, as I jot something like "dapper old fella with snaggle tooth and cane... a parakeet among dun-coloured sparrow ppl on no. 11 bus." The more of these details I write down, the more I record my days in this way, the more time seems to slow. Nothing makes the days rush by like blind habit does, that shuttling along through workaday routines. Slowing down and noticing things, savouring the world, mitigates against this. 

Try it.

In music news, I'm going to see Danny Brown play the Sugar Club at the end of June and I can't wait. I might go to the Longitude festival thing too, probably on the Kraftwerk day. My favourite album this year so far is John Grant's Pale Green Ghosts though Vampire Weekend are currently threatening to usurp this. GMF from the John Grant album is easily my favourite song in yonks. You can watch it below.

If you still read this blog, a very real thanks for sticking with it through a fallow period.

taken by trees

Tweet Of all the dumb shit my father has gotten up to in his back garden, last Friday's dumb shit was the dumbest shit yet. And before anyone calls me out for being a bit hard on the man here, I'll add that I was very much complicit in the dumb shit.

A couple of weeks ago, the monstrous leylandii trees which towered over my family home for three decades were cut down by a tree surgeon hired by the local residents' committee. The endeavour left the back garden looking very baldy and grim, though I'm sure summer's growth will temper some of the severity. It also left one tree behind, a silver birch that had forced itself up among the leylandiis, becoming shaped by lack of light into extreme, spindling lankiness. Imagine a 40 foot twig. That is what this silver birch looked like.

The tree surgeon told my parents that there was some sort of clause in his contract preventing him from cutting any trees other than leylandiis and this is why the silver birch was pardoned.

My father couldn't bear the sight of the silver birch. He anthropomorphised it (like he anthropomorphises all things, animate and inanimate), and the first thing he told me when I visited last weekend was, "that's an awful sorry looking excuse for a tree. The other ones destroyed it. We'll have to put it out of its misery."

Not long later he was sitting in its crotch, twenty feet above the ground, ready to engage in some DIY tree surgery with my mother's least favourite item in the entire universe, a chainsaw that he impulse bought in Lidl last year (actually, the chainsaw might be her second least favourite thing. Her least favourite is the portrait of Michael Collins that my father keeps placing in innocuous places around the house in a game of cat and mouse that has been going on with her for years).

While my father sat perched in the tree with his chainsaw, and my mother (and all of our neighbours, I later found out) watched with dread from the kitchen window, I stood in the football pitch behind the garden, holding a rope tied to the piece of the tree he was to cut off. The idea was to pull the piece of tree free and into the football pitch so that it didn't damage the shed on its way down.

As ideas go, it turned out to be a pretty bad one.

When I pulled on the rope and the chainsawed piece of tree came away, I knew that things were going to go tits up, mostly because they started to happen in slow motion. I watched my father flail in slow motion, then topple sideways in slow motion, then fall fourteen feet onto the shed roof in slow motion. The next thing I remember is holding him in place on the shed roof as I screamed down the garden at my mother, who stood frozen and ghost pale in the window.
"Ambulance. Ambulance. Call a fucken ambulance."
I think that's the gist of what I shouted.

This is the actual tree - the red arrow shows the point from which he fell.

My father was bleeding from his nose and he looked at me with an intense, weirdly innocent gaze I never saw before - confusion, desperation and fear all mixed up together. His trousers were torn and one bare leg jutted up away from him at a bad angle. He made a low croaky whistling noise - air going back into winded lungs. Naturally, I thought he was dying. So did many of the neighbours.

It transpired that almost every neighbour with a line of sight on our garden must have watched my father's ill-judged battle against the birch, because, within moments of his falling, the garden filled with people. They all helped out in a cool, sensible manner, calming my mother's nerves and helping me put my father into the recovery position. In stark contrast to the neighbours were my parents' chickens, which streamed maniacally through the back door, into the house, squawking and shiteing as they went, confused by all the people in the garden.

By then, my father was sitting on a chair, joking that he had messed up his hair, and insisting "no, I'll not bleddy go to the hospital." He signed a report, filled out by the flummoxed paramedics, describing how he had been implored to go to the hospital four times, in front of witnesses, and had refused to go four times, meaning it was his own problem if he died during the night.

taken by trees

Later that night I woke up chewing the air, chattering curses to myself. The back garden had filled my dreams, rolling far into the weird, space-and-time-traversing geography of sleep. All night, I dreamt of people falling out of trees. At 4am, I went to check on my father. He snored away peacefully, as if nothing had happened at all.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Tweet I'm acting upon a dream I had last night where, I shit not, popular Irish music blogger Niall Byrne was trapped within the trunk of a Leylandii tree in my back garden (turning into wood like something out of this radiohead video) and we had a lengthy conversation about music blogging. So here I am, driven by my vision of Nialler, trying to dust off the compost heap for the second time this year.

In the meantime, I've still been writing. Here's something I wrote for Siren magazine, who have relaunched with a great website. Stick around and look at other stuff on the site. They ostensibly cover feminist issues but their remit is very broad - there's a lot of great writing there. Good luck to them, I say.

I've also entered a few short story competitions. These things spring up all over the calendar like mushrooms - every small town in Ireland would seem to have a literary festival and short story competition attached. So I sent a few stories off to various corners of the country and will continue to do so as I write more/ the rejections pile up.

chipper lane is in my ears and in my eyes

Which brings me to something very cool and Kells related ("oh, look, he's put the words 'cool' and 'Kells' in a sentence together again: YAWN" - you, probably. But wait... this is very cool. I promise). Kells, through some desperate gimmicky fluke (or, more likely, astute maneuvering by bookish people in the chamber of commerce) has ended up attached to Britain's biggest literary festival, Hay. So, at the end of June, the town is going to play host to a bunch of well-known writers such as John Banville and DBC Pierre. I wonder will Banville have a full Irish in Taypots? Will Margaret Atwood survive a lock-in in Smokey O'Rourke's pub? Will DBC Pierre pass out with an open batter burger on his chin in chipper lane? Only time will tell.

EXCITING, ISN'T IT?

The format of this blog dictates that after I waffle for four or more paragraphs I should mention music in passing. So here's some music in passing.

My favourite producer, DJ Koze, has a wopper album out named after a deeply primordial part of the brain, the Amygdala. Perhaps too wopper (it's 80 minutes long and feels a little bit stout around the middle), but the highlights are a blast, such as the following collaboration with Matthew Dear which, in addition to being a squiggly neon techno slow jam, gives great life advice: when life throws you lemons... take a bath.

I've always thought DJ Koze's colour is purple, and this album has a nice purple tinted cover (with the man sitting on a reindeer and wearing a crash helmet, I might add) to go with the very purple music - purple's funky, right? Get on it, like a sonnet.

Fun facts: I'm on the bus to Kells and this blog was written between Cabra and Navan. Not bad, eh?

I'll be back again very soon. Promise.

spotterflies

Tweet Walking to the shop in Ranelagh I noticed a touch of Spring in the air. A few small things - the bright sunshine, a small breeze running over a pygmy daffodil in a garden, and construction workers laying down tarmac in the main street - heralded the change. So, I took out my phone and texted to myself "write a blog about Spring being in the air" - because that's how us bloggers perceive the world, as potential content. Then, at that precise point, when I was thinking of new life and regeneration, what should roll slowly through the main street? Only a full funeral cortege. The universe having its laugh.

I spent a lot of my extracurricular time on two activities this past week, curating the @Ireland account on twitter and messing around with spotify (which I only began to use recently).

The moon over Ranelagh last night - photo, as usual, from my crummy phone

The @Ireland account, which you can view here, has 12,700 followers, so it was very interesting to experience twitter through that lens. I can see how having so many followers might go to your head. For example, any tweet you write, no matter how mundane, will gather at least a few favourite stars and perhaps one or two retweets. That's for 12,700 followers. Now, imagine being a celebrity with ten times that figure. You'd surely end up deluded, feeling like Moses coming down from the mountain, your every word, even the clichéd old "toast for breakfast" tweet, taken as wit or wisdom, gathering retweets, favourites and responses galore.

Ahead of doing the @Ireland account thing, I figured that I would have a lot to say. It turns out that I didn't really. I found it hard to maintain a daily presence and I ended up waffling about relatively tame stuff - garden birds, things in Kells, etc... There's no doubt that I'll probably spend all of the coming week having little ideas and saying "fuck, I wish I was still @Ireland."

One last funny thing about the account - there were people who treated it as if it were the official face of the country, like the office of the Taoiseach or some shit. As if the person curating the account at any given time has an obligation to pass comment on news stories relating to Ireland or the Irish. On the day the pope resigned, I had an apoplectic man tweeting "on the evening the pope resigns, what does the @Ireland account do? Tweet pictures of his dinner #fail." Clarifying his tweet later, he said he "at least expected some comment" - and then I briefly wished that I was, in fact, Muslim - as I might well have been - so I could properly show up the assumption about religion that was inherent in his angry tweet.

Spotify was my other distraction this week. I downloaded it for the first time a couple of weeks ago and began using the service deeply, in that I tried out features such as the radio and playlist tools. I love it.

I love:

(i) Being able to nose on my friends. Apart from the kick (don't call the guards. It's non sexual) I get from looking in townhouse windows at nights, I never thought of myself as much of a noser. Yet, looking at what my friends are listening to in real time on spotify is an unusually gratifying activity. I'll give a specific example. I have a friend, Ciarán, who is entirely obsessed with historic pop charts, and of a Sunday evening, I can watch his weird, hyper-specific, almost certainly OCD behaviour from afar - "Ciarán just added Joe Dolce's 'Shaddap Your Face' to his playlist 'English Pop Charts for the Week Ending Februay 21st 1981.'"

(ii) Making weird playlists. This is always a work in progress. Here are some of my playlists.

Drone lake
Songs that are probably perfect
Jazzberries

I like the app so much that I think I'm going to upgrade to the premium service shortly, if only to get rid of the annoying male voice from the ads. You know him; he's the smug knob who says completely nonsensical things like "plug in to the twittesphere", "I like listening to show tunes but I don't want my friends to know," and "EVERYBODY loves lists." If his only function is to drive people around the bend until they pay for the premium service, then I salute the genius in their marketing department.

you'd nearly swim in it

Tweet Suddenly, coloured lights swing up through the dark... a silver flurry of ribbon and paper falls from the ceiling and over the upturned faces of teenagers who dance awkwardly with their arms... here's a glam rock drumbeat and some descending guitar chords... Gary Glitter begins to sing... HELLO, HELLO, IT'S GOOD TO BE BACK.

gently, we sail back out onto blog lake

I took a couple of months' break to work on what I vaguely called 'a project.' It's actually a novel, but I was reticent to say much about it because that's a cliche that leaves you open to snark, isn't it? At least that's what the self-effacing chickenshit part of my brain (which is pretty much all of my brain) told me. I also remembered a pretty funny Peter Cook joke I read somewhere: "I met a man at a party. He said 'I'm writing a novel'. I said 'Oh really? Neither am I.'"

I've tried to say "I'm writing a novel" out loud without cringing, but I can't do it. I'm clearly battling some deeply ingrained prejudices of my own in that regard.

Yet the writing itself is coming along well. Up until shortly before Christmas, it felt like I was working on a dozen little vignettes and I feared that I lacked the skill or vision to draw them together. Then (in a moment analogous to one I experienced during my PhD write-up) I passed some invisible divider and found myself working on a relatively cohesive single thing. What a lovely feeling.

As with the PhD, once I got to this point I realized that vision might have less to do with it than bloody-mindedness; repeated evenings spent squeezing out reluctant words have brought about an accretion of material that reads more harmoniously than I dared hope. Whenever the blinking cursor tries to take the piss out of me, as it often does, I breathe deep and easy and then remind myself that anything - even one sentence - will move things along. So far, (55,000 words so far to be precise) stubbornness has served me well.

"But is it any good?" - Kells accented voice at the back.

"umm... here's some music."

"Is it drone? It behher be fucken drone."

"...none more drone."



Over the past couple of weeks I've listened to Mountains' new album Centralia a lot, so much, in fact, that I can second guess every little bleep, bloop and musical curlicue in its rich textures. It's as good a drone album as I've heard in years, especially in and around its middle section where a piece of music called Propellor manifests slowly and quite majestically over the course of twenty minutes.

At 9 minutes and 40 seconds all goes fuzzy, fuzzy, fuzzy - and it sounds so inviting and warm that you'd nearly take a swim in it.

Yum.