I've been trying to find a copy of Amazon Beaming which I wrote about in my last posting but without success. Morningside library do not have a copy and tell me that it's not held by any Edinburgh libraries, though it might be in the National Library. It's on Amazon but cheapest one is £62 for a second hand copy and from there the price jumps to £670. The price on eBay is similar, so doesn't look as if I'm going to get a copy. If you should happen to have a copy or know where I could lay my hands on one please let me know. Failing that I will read it in the National Library sometime soon.
Last night Emer and I went to the Traverse Theatre to see A Girl is a Half-formed Thing which is based on the award winning book of the same name by Eimear McBride, "an instant classic" according to the Guardian. Emer and I were both hugely impressed by the performance, which was harrowing from start to finish, I was thoroughly exhausted and quite glad when it was all over. I can recommend it but be prepared for some hard hitting drama and not for the faint hearted or children.
Tonight I'm going to the Book Festival with my good friend Anne to see Tracey Thorn talk about her books. She used to be in a band called Everything But The Girl who some of you may remember from the nineties, I think, or thereabouts. She's had two books published in past few years so am looking forward to hear her speak about Dennis Potter and Dusty Springfield amongst other things. Will let you know how it goes. Oh, and I think she also speaks about her singing career. I'm looking forward to it.
Right now I'm packing my bags and getting ready to go home tomorrow. Home being the Isle of Lewis for those of you who don't know. This will be my first trip up there since 2012 and I'm trying hard not to think of it as possibly my last trip there. Whatever way I view it, it's going to be an emotional experience, I think tears are likely when I leave, but will try not to make an idiot of myself crying in the streets. I don't want to let the side down, now, do I?
I'm trying to decide on me reading materials for Lewis. I recently finished Ali Smith's book How to be both and loved it. Great writer, huge imagination, made me want to go to Italy to see the places she set the second (or first) part of the book in. I also just read Colm Toibin's book Nora Webster. Quite brilliant. He's now my favourite living author, since my old pal Roth decided he'd written enough. I think I've just about read all of Colm's books and everyone of them is a great read, definitely recommended.
I'm currently reading Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez which I saw being performed in La Plaza Isil Theatre in Lima, a few years ago, in Spanish of course. I've not read the novel until now, even though I always meant to, having enjoyed the performance in Lima but not fully understood it. I'm glad I've remembered now to read it. I shall quote the first line which I'm sure will make you want to read it too:
" On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on."
Friday, August 28, 2015
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Moving On
I write some rubbish then I read it and delete it. This is why you've not heard from me for some time. That and a combination of extreme tiredness and maybe some degree of laziness, and also the Edinburgh Festival keeping me busy and leaving me no time to write and not a lot of surplus energy when I do have time. But the thing is that writing is good therapy for me so I do it anyway and some of it you get to read and most you don't.
I hope you liked my poem a few posts back. I'm not expecting a rush of publishers seeking the rights to my completed works, but there are some more poems which I might inflict on you. So if you want to see them you have to ask nicely.
My plan is also to write some little bits of family history before my time runs out. The plan for it is in my head and on various scraps of paper, so all I have to do is get it out of my head and off the scraps of paper and into my blog. I want to do that before it gets too late, and I feel if I say it here it will be some kind of prompt for me to get on with it.
My memory is not serving me well these past few months when it comes to my writing. It gets increasingly difficult to find the right word to use. I know it's there some where but I struggle to bring it forth from the depths. I eventually just have to move on without it or use a word that isn't quite right. Even Roget and my dictionary don't help much, as you really need a word to begin with.
I seem to be rambling as per usual. All I wanted to say was that I've had a very good Edinburgh Festival this year. I've mostly missed the festival for the past two years because of my various cancer treatments, so it was good to be able to go to so many events and exhibitions this year. I won't bore you with the details but I feel I have to mention one show in particular at the main festival and that's The Encounter.
It's a play based on a book called Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu about the American explorer/photographer Loren McIntyre who set out to find the source of the Amazon but got lost and accidentally made contact with the Mayoruna people somewhere on the border of Peru and Brazil. It was the South American/Peru connection that drew me to the show and I am thoroughly delighted to have seen it.
The play was written , directed and performed by Simon McBurney based on his interpretation of Amazon Beaming, with the help of brilliant sound technicians. It's a one man performance lasting for two incredible hours where he takes us right into the Amazon forest and river, and to the village where the Mayoruna live. If you ever get the opportunity you should see this astonishing piece of work. I hope to find the time to read the book and also look at some of McIntyre's publications. He studied ethnology at Universidad San Marcos in Lima. Which is nice. He also did discover the source of the Amazon in Apurimac region of Peru and it's named after him, Laguna McIntyre.
The best way to give a flavour of the play is with a little quote taken from the book:
"There was always the same question when opening the unknown: What to do with it?
Thoughts, thoughts. Like spaceships, whirling somewhere in a sort of suborbital space. Lying in his hammock, shivering from the cold and hearing the sounds made by the tribespeople who were still awake, McIntyre was aware of a subsphere of his mind in which a different species of mental processes, less explicit and formal, were forever meeting, colliding, mixing. The tribe he had just encountered was part of them."
I hope you liked my poem a few posts back. I'm not expecting a rush of publishers seeking the rights to my completed works, but there are some more poems which I might inflict on you. So if you want to see them you have to ask nicely.
My plan is also to write some little bits of family history before my time runs out. The plan for it is in my head and on various scraps of paper, so all I have to do is get it out of my head and off the scraps of paper and into my blog. I want to do that before it gets too late, and I feel if I say it here it will be some kind of prompt for me to get on with it.
My memory is not serving me well these past few months when it comes to my writing. It gets increasingly difficult to find the right word to use. I know it's there some where but I struggle to bring it forth from the depths. I eventually just have to move on without it or use a word that isn't quite right. Even Roget and my dictionary don't help much, as you really need a word to begin with.
I seem to be rambling as per usual. All I wanted to say was that I've had a very good Edinburgh Festival this year. I've mostly missed the festival for the past two years because of my various cancer treatments, so it was good to be able to go to so many events and exhibitions this year. I won't bore you with the details but I feel I have to mention one show in particular at the main festival and that's The Encounter.
It's a play based on a book called Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu about the American explorer/photographer Loren McIntyre who set out to find the source of the Amazon but got lost and accidentally made contact with the Mayoruna people somewhere on the border of Peru and Brazil. It was the South American/Peru connection that drew me to the show and I am thoroughly delighted to have seen it.
The play was written , directed and performed by Simon McBurney based on his interpretation of Amazon Beaming, with the help of brilliant sound technicians. It's a one man performance lasting for two incredible hours where he takes us right into the Amazon forest and river, and to the village where the Mayoruna live. If you ever get the opportunity you should see this astonishing piece of work. I hope to find the time to read the book and also look at some of McIntyre's publications. He studied ethnology at Universidad San Marcos in Lima. Which is nice. He also did discover the source of the Amazon in Apurimac region of Peru and it's named after him, Laguna McIntyre.
The best way to give a flavour of the play is with a little quote taken from the book:
"There was always the same question when opening the unknown: What to do with it?
Thoughts, thoughts. Like spaceships, whirling somewhere in a sort of suborbital space. Lying in his hammock, shivering from the cold and hearing the sounds made by the tribespeople who were still awake, McIntyre was aware of a subsphere of his mind in which a different species of mental processes, less explicit and formal, were forever meeting, colliding, mixing. The tribe he had just encountered was part of them."
Thursday, August 13, 2015
Festival Time
I think I'll just put the kettle on before I start. That's better. Like the old lady used to say, there's only one thing beats a nice cup of tea, and that's another one.
It's festival time here in beautiful Edinburgh and I feel I should make the most of it. But that voice keeps coming back to me and won't let me forget that this could be my last Festival. I feel reasonably well most of the time, though I'm mostly incredibly tired and lacking in energy. It's difficult to accept that I will never get my old fitness levels back. I grieve for my old self and suffer constant feelings of loss for the person who I used to be.
But I've learnt to live with who and what I've become and I'm determined to make the most of whatever time I have left. With that in mind I bought myself a new car, which cost £250 more than I paid for this flat back in 1978. Or was it '77? It's a lovely wee car, Ford Fiesta Titanium Turbo they tell me. Very powerful and too fast, with lots of high tech which I'm finding difficult to come to grips with, but getting there, slowly. My first biggish trip will be up to Isle of Lewis, tickets booked for ferry on 31st August, will drive up on 29th and spend two nights in Inverness then a week in Stornoway.
I've been to see the Lee Miller and Picasso exhibition at the Portrait Gallery and also the Baileys Starburst at the National Gallery, both excellent exhibitions and well worth seeing. Lee Miller was a war photographer, who knew Picasso from about 1937, and from all accounts probably knew him intimately and went on to take many pictures of him over the years that followed. Some great photos here, especially one of the two of them together after Paris was liberated in 1944, when she went direct to his studio having arrived in town with the soldiers she was accompanying.
I loved the David Bailey exhibition. So many people I've known all my life, brought back so many memories, very moving for me. He seems to have known just about everybody worth knowing or sometimes not so worth knowing. Great photos of Stones, with Brian Jones always side on and never full face, maybe he knew he wasn't going to be around for long. Also couple of nice ones of Dylan from 1986. Bailey was born in Leytonstone and started taking photos there in the early 60s of the East End's bombed streets waiting to be rebuilt, landscapes in ruins. My first trip away from Lewis was at that time and I kept looking for myself in any of his pics, but no sign of me.
There's an enormous poster of a photo he took of Alice Cooper with a snake draped around his body from 1977. Alice kept snakes as pets. The snake looks vicious as does Alice. There are also some harrowing photos he took of Ethiopian refugees fleeing to camps in Sudan in 1984, at time Geldof and pals did their massive fund raiser Live Aid.
You will like the one of him and Warhol in bed with Bailey taking the photo. Very strange, but it's what Warhol wanted. Such a laugh. That's all for now as I'm going to my first Festival event, a play at the Traverse called An Oak Tree, by Tim Crouch.
It's festival time here in beautiful Edinburgh and I feel I should make the most of it. But that voice keeps coming back to me and won't let me forget that this could be my last Festival. I feel reasonably well most of the time, though I'm mostly incredibly tired and lacking in energy. It's difficult to accept that I will never get my old fitness levels back. I grieve for my old self and suffer constant feelings of loss for the person who I used to be.
But I've learnt to live with who and what I've become and I'm determined to make the most of whatever time I have left. With that in mind I bought myself a new car, which cost £250 more than I paid for this flat back in 1978. Or was it '77? It's a lovely wee car, Ford Fiesta Titanium Turbo they tell me. Very powerful and too fast, with lots of high tech which I'm finding difficult to come to grips with, but getting there, slowly. My first biggish trip will be up to Isle of Lewis, tickets booked for ferry on 31st August, will drive up on 29th and spend two nights in Inverness then a week in Stornoway.
I've been to see the Lee Miller and Picasso exhibition at the Portrait Gallery and also the Baileys Starburst at the National Gallery, both excellent exhibitions and well worth seeing. Lee Miller was a war photographer, who knew Picasso from about 1937, and from all accounts probably knew him intimately and went on to take many pictures of him over the years that followed. Some great photos here, especially one of the two of them together after Paris was liberated in 1944, when she went direct to his studio having arrived in town with the soldiers she was accompanying.
I loved the David Bailey exhibition. So many people I've known all my life, brought back so many memories, very moving for me. He seems to have known just about everybody worth knowing or sometimes not so worth knowing. Great photos of Stones, with Brian Jones always side on and never full face, maybe he knew he wasn't going to be around for long. Also couple of nice ones of Dylan from 1986. Bailey was born in Leytonstone and started taking photos there in the early 60s of the East End's bombed streets waiting to be rebuilt, landscapes in ruins. My first trip away from Lewis was at that time and I kept looking for myself in any of his pics, but no sign of me.
There's an enormous poster of a photo he took of Alice Cooper with a snake draped around his body from 1977. Alice kept snakes as pets. The snake looks vicious as does Alice. There are also some harrowing photos he took of Ethiopian refugees fleeing to camps in Sudan in 1984, at time Geldof and pals did their massive fund raiser Live Aid.
You will like the one of him and Warhol in bed with Bailey taking the photo. Very strange, but it's what Warhol wanted. Such a laugh. That's all for now as I'm going to my first Festival event, a play at the Traverse called An Oak Tree, by Tim Crouch.
Sunday, August 02, 2015
The Spirit of You
The Spirit of You
Will I ever find you
Will we see each other again.
To hold you again
To feel you beside me
Your fingers on my skin.
To become one with you
Reach out and find you there
Your dark black eyes
Looking down on me
One more time
With that sad look you
Seemed to keep for me.
To walk along the river bank again
Hiding amongst the trees
The birds singing for us
My heart filled with
The joy of you
The spirit of you.
by Donald Maciver
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