Archive for November, 2007

I’m languishing at the airport in New York, my flight delayed, but coming back all the same. The terminal is full of roving Londoners, who in their way look quite distinct from New Yorkers, and we’re all gazing mutely at one another between watching tv on laptops, reading, or spending the nine dollars BA gave us in compensation for the delay. I had a Big Mac.

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Apparently so. There’s been an uproar amongst mullahs and government officials in Afghanistan, who found a televised concert by the tightly clad Shakira too provocative, despite her breasts being pixellated. Gyration may be a humorous word, but when commited by pop stars it joins US foreign policy and Zionism as the “causes” of terrorism, with a pro-government newspaper actually stating that it will provoke suicide bombers.

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I am the mute god of the blank stage. I am the imperiled waif hungering for nothing to say. By a spasm of my hand I write and instantly lapse back to null. These words carry the same pointless burden of everything: the city scurry for coin, the lustful grasping and panting, the wanton embrace of objects aging into landfills. My desire, grilling me like fattened pork, tricks the eye and I see the scale of a world not breathable. This realm hefts itself up from the couch of heedlessness and punches you full-bore in the stomach: the breath leaves you: there shall be no drawn air.

My soul is the monolith of certitude ringed by tripwire and barbed coils: confusion in my dance towards clarity. Obdurately and with malevolent stupidity I try negotiating with the fortifications. They answer without thought the blithe and bastard no of indifference. read on »

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I am enveloped by a strange quiet. It is 3am and much too late to write. But I find myself strangely drawn to the old powerbook, and onto the Neocrats. I have perused some old postings, from long before I joined these ignoble ranks. Fantastic controversy, debate and reflection, it seems, were once just a day at the office for the Neocrats - yet these have sadly slipped through the cybercracks in recent months. Where to exactly? Facebook? Paper? Dimentia from time’s scythe? Have the Neocrats and co., against all odds, lost their muse and slipped into a stupor of creative lethargy, lethargy of conversation, of discussion? Or have they focussed their energy on bigger and greater things? If so, I want to read your novels and essays. And wither the friends? The likes of the Humble and oft Humane Owl, Sanisha and other subjects of this Neocracy are missed. I know that in my life I have experienced a quiet before the storm. Whether that storm be thunderous with roars of cyclonic winds and terrential rains, or one of those ‘partly cloudy days with light drizzle’ that forecasters vaguely predict, remains to be seen. Certainly some trough is troughing and some high pressure system is shifting.

Friends, where does your trough lie? Shall we discuss our commitment?

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