woobiquity

London, a work in progress

While I was away this summer, I had time to run through whole imaginary conversations with people who were back in London or thereabouts. Often these conversations culminated with some variation of this sentiment: ‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life? I don’t know about that. Sometimes he’s just tired.’

But the exhaustion capital (really, it’s such a drain, this place – stand on the right!) is also the infinite renewer. And so it was that I turned a corner near the South Bank on Saturday and saw this spirit lifter.

Cue controlled lighting and knowingly nodding onlookers. It was as if one of the artsies from Tate Modern, which is just around the corner, had gone walkies, stopping for a rest against this unfinished building, hoping to blend in. But, of course, who wouldn’t notice this beauty?

Pete has been visiting. He kept a photo diary of what he saw (here and here). Some of the photos are breathtaking, some sublime. Many are of things we Londoners pass daily without a thought. As always, it’s not so much what we see but how we look at it, or whether we really look at all. Mind you, Pete is a Londoner. That he lives in Belfast makes no difference. Anyone who’s tired of Portsmouth or Milan or Berne might like to think on that for a while.

Photos, from top: The nearly finished Coin Street Neighbourhood Centre, by the architects Haworth Tompkins. Ghost feet, Tate Modern (by Pete).

Constantly traveling

While catching up on podcasts recently I heard this lovely description of the writer's life, from the writer Mark Slouka, whose new book, The Visible World, includes both a memoir and a novel.

"I’m constantly traveling, in dreams, through the things that I read on a daily basis, to the places I’ve been, to the places I’ve imagined, to the ones that I’m capable of imagining. So it’s this dance, this continual dance between worlds, between not just the visible and the invisible, but the ones that are unfolding this moment in the nick of time, and those that have already passed me by."

This phrase, constantly traveling, stuck with me, not least because I've spent the last few weeks traveling, both in the way Slouka describes and in the more conventional sense of the term. It's invigorating, this mix of stimuli, and the two types of travel surely feed off each other. A writer, like any creative person, needs to feel that the world or worlds he inhabits contain an abundance of things worth discovering or rediscovering.

So as I set out on a final long drive of the summer, passing things like

and

abundance was soon off the gauge. By the final stretch of the drive, with a gigantic sun resting on the treetops and bluegrass playing on the radio, I was in a state of rapture. Travel of the mind and the travel of actual motion were, briefly, one and the same. I was on a magic carpet ride. The sun was setting, but I felt more awake than ever. I felt like a writer.

It couldn't last. The catch: you can't drive and write at the same time. Traveling and 'traveling' might occasionally fly along side by side, but they always have to split ways again. Usually one must stop so the other can start again. Even Jack Kerouc had to pull over to type, etc. (Okay, bad example.)

If I live in the moment, experiencing every tingle and oddity and taste and annoyance, as I did during a three-week road trip across the USA last summer, that's great. Travel opens that stuff up. If I really feel it, that's research -- and an added bonus. But the part of me that might do something with these discoveries, the writer, needs a lot more than three weeks to re-live and re-imagine them. In life, 10 states in three weeks is about right. In writing, a year has passed and I've only begun to deal with all this material. I may need another year yet. No end is in sight.

Driving down that country road on Friday, I felt a rush of ideas and emotion. Stories and characters and roadhouses and song were all part of the fleeting dance. I felt sure that if I pulled over I could write an epic poem in minutes. I also knew that if I pulled over this confidence, like the journey, would stop. So I kept driving, and the sky eventually darkened, leaving my imaginings nowhere to go but to dance among the tail lights before returning to rest, changed, electric. Until tomorrow.

(Photos, top to bottom: Highway 54 at sunset, near Carrboro, NC; Seafood shop, Beaufort, NC; Tomorrow today yesterday, Kinston, NC. All taken on Friday.)

You can hear the full version of Mark Slouka's interview here. It's well worth a listen. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Outliving all your houses

In case you didn’t know it, a house is not a home. It’s an insurance liability. Do not be shocked or alarmed, then, if you look up casually while driving one day and see that an old house you thought you knew well is suddenly gone, replaced by a much smaller building that clearly arrived at the site needing only to be attached at the seams, leaving a lawn of raw clay where the spacious front porch used to be.

Life is not literature, and even if it was, Dickens, Poe, Faulkner – these guys wore out the house as tragic metaphor thing a long time ago. This is not foreshadowing or a fall. It’s convenience. Not progress, true, but not a slip backward into the vines either. Here is a town that is treading water, a town with plenty of time for allegory but no need for it at all.

A man needs a roof over his head. The council recognizes this. The motion to grant exception to zoning laws and beautification passes unanimously. Take the insurance money, sir, and begin the demolition.

However, if you are the 105-year-old woman who used to live in the house, you may choose to think it rained in there, condemning it. You’ve earned the metaphor. You were raised by the weather. Besides, the fire wasn’t much of a story, not like the water that drowned it dead. And before it was soaked, this house was always just a hardcover around a story collection.

And it wasn’t home, not like the boarding house you left because you were too old to make beds, or the house beside your grocery store, which closed because people wanted a supermarket, or the only home you wrote poems about, the one the bulldozers shoved into the hollow when it was known to be harboring rattlesnakes.

Of course, you resurrected that house, single-handedly and for your own pleasure, over and over when you were too blind to read, when you weren’t tearing down the house you were shut into and rebuilding it in the home place’s likeness. How do you like my new house? you’d ask every week, bracing for the reply. As good as it was, you were never satisfied. It was never quite like you remembered it.

Asked how she felt at her 105th birthday party, which was held in one of the public rooms at the ‘home’ she now lives in, my great-grandmother replied: Happy.

(Tenuously related photo: sandcastle, Ocean Isle Beach, c.1985)

No cause for alarm with these simple rules

Subtitle: Spare / vibrant /details

To flush the toilets, press down on the lever,
count to three and release. It won’t harm you
to take your time. There’s no reason to rush,
since we’ll be here, all of us, for at least two hours.

Make sure your parking brake is set.
If your brake isn’t already set, please set it now.

Smoking is not permitted on any of our ferries.
This includes inside your vehicle with the windows up.
We had this rule handed down to us in April 2007.
We didn’t make it, but it’s our job to enforce it,
so please help us out by not smoking.
If we see you smoking, we’ll just have to come
down to your car and make you put it out, so don’t do it.

If you have children or dogs, please –
keep them with you at all times. Children and dogs
should not be left unattended anywhere on the vessel.

If you wish to feed the seagulls, please lean out over
the water and throw the bread several feet away from you.
This is to ensure that the birds don’t poop all over us.
Seagulls should be fed only from the stern –
that’s all the way at the back of the boat – and not by
children who are unaccompanied by an adult.

Parents with small children who wish to run
around like monkeys to pass the time should do so
only near the bow – that’s the front of the vessel –
and not so close to the edge that you might fall off.

Those who have satellite radio and want to set their journey
to a soundtrack, like from a Richard Gere movie,
should tune their radio to station 74 now, before
the quaint little buildings near the shore are too far
away to seem nostalgic in our ever-widening wake.

We will not be passing any wild horses during our ride today.
Those hoping for dolphins may be on the wrong ferry also.

The sun will be setting to our right, once Harold gets us
turned around here, any time now, anytime Harold.
If you wish to photograph the setting sun
when it looks like a citrus popsicle there on the horizon,
with the darkest, orangest sugars settling in layers
before the whole thing melts into the low-lying clouds,
please be considerate of those taking pictures either side of you.
We have had serious elbow injuries in the past because
people did not heed this advice. Furthermore, experience
tells us that these pictures never turn out any good.
Honestly folks, a disappointing snapshot isn't worth the pain.

And finally, anyone who bought fish curry
from the overpriced Thai place on the island
hoping the food would taste better with scenery
should be aware that feeding spicy foods to dogs
and other people’s children is prohibited.
Again, this is to ensure we don’t get poop everywhere.

And if you have any trouble in the bathroom,
be sure to let one of us know. Otherwise, enjoy the ride.

(Photo: General Alarm on the Ocracoke to Cedar Island ferry, yesterday. I need one of these at home.)

Coffee for the twilight hours, ahhhh

Masterful product naming from a small coffee roaster with a big way with words. Why define decaffeinated by what it lacks when really it's a way to extend the coffee continuum into the wee hours? Coffee and the fading blue light in a single bag of beans. I'm addicted already.

(Coffee dispenser, Earth Fare, Raleigh, NC, Wednesday.)