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A test file with b3nutters to see how soundcloud uploads to tumblr

#SoundCloud #KMcCarthyWoolf #techpoetry #poetry

Poetry is philosophy when God is allowed to exist.

My thoughts have been on practicals: like how to find the £4.99 required for continued existence in the Ideal Land. I've decided to be both proactive and reactive. However, this morning could have been more productive. My notebook has been reduced to a loose A4 sheet with a pencil scribble:

Published work...

experience of teaching

referee:

Onwards.

My T-Shirt Says...I've spent the past couple of weeks preparing for panels and practising presentations. Panels make me feel like I'm being interrogated by the Gestapo, however friendly they try to be. A bit like the bit of lead in my knee when I accidentally stabbed myself with a pencil when I was 15: a relic from childhood I never knew would hang around so long that might be making me slowly and slightly mad. In any case, one of the presentations was for a commission for a festival for 15 minutes of new work. I proposed My T-Shirt Says... where I write new 'found' poems from people's T-shirts that I photograph around town and festivals throughout the summer. I did a lot of work with Malika Buddy and a run-through with her and Suzanne which helped a lot. When it came to the presentation on the day, it was a breeze! I really think it went well - and while that often means you don't always pass the exam - I'm happy because I gave it my all. And I think they liked it. I like it. And I like putting my work to music which was also a big part of the proposal. Soundscapes. What would have for this? Purring and scratching and ...cats are quiet creatures when they're not yowling and howling...hmmm. So now I know that. More on this later...I'll let you know if I get the commission.

Science Notebook. Excerpt from Page 1.

Cellular: a load of stuff tricky to understand yet simple (egg, tadpole tails, explosions on a minute yet catastrophic scale). Mitochondria needs looking up for clarity and exclusion. All of what we have: more and less. Melanin, slim ankles, duck feet, genetic propensity for diabetes, fibroids, receding gums, born with the taste of bloody...[illegible] on your tongue, knowing the seven scents of mango and exactly when it will go over. Ortanique: not quite an orange - a hybrid, Chinese, Arab - unspecified African parts.

Life Imitating Art

Freud: So you say you left your laptop where?

Me: On a chair in a clothes shop while I tried on a dress.

Jung: In the changing room?

Me: No there was no changing room so it was out on the shop floor.

Freud: So this was a shop that only sold women's clothes?

Me: I don't know it didn't have a name it was one of those wholesale places that opens to the public every now and then.

Simon: So you just left it out in the open in the middle of the West End?

Me: Yes, while I was trying on a dress. I know, it was an unassailably stupid, careless even reckless thing to do!

Police officer: So do you think someone swiped it.

Me: Yes. There was this moment when a few people came in the shop and something wasn't quite right but I wasn't sure what. Then I looked over at the chair and my handbag was there, with my phone out on the side. All I could see was the phone. From that moment on the laptop became invisible. In the shop and to my mind. A woman I thought for a minute might be dodgy smiled at me and then I forgot. If a thief looks you in the eye at the moment they're robbing you they can cast a spell and become invisible. It's happened to me before and I've still not learnt.

Hercule Poirot: So you realised at which hour, exactly, that you no longer were in possession of the laptop Madame?

Me: Not until I arrived home and then it hit me as soon as I stepped through the front door. I started to panic. Couldn't think. Felt sick. Then the spell started to wear off.

Dr Watson: Have you informed Scotland Yard?

Me: Yes, I have a crime reference number now. The thing is, this thought struck me while I prayed and prayed for my laptop not to have fallen into competent criminal hands. I felt so vulnerable, everything was on there: all my photos, my proposals, invoices, tax returns, poems, stories, plays, THE LOT.

Sensible Citizen 1: But of course it's all password protected, right?

Me: No, the whole thing was open, even though the machine was fitted with fingerprint recognition I never bothered to activate it.

Nurse Ratchett: It's time for your medication now.

Me: Of course I felt sick inside at the thought of what might happen but there was also this other voice at the back of my head, a tiny little whisper, and that's when I realised, my IDENTITY was on the laptop, but my HEART was in the notebooks.

Responsible Individual 14: Have you filled out an insurance claim?

Me: I've been playing with this idea Notebook vs Laptop vs Blog vs Private vs Public space in an almost academic way, well that's how it turns out when you write a proposal, but here it was, the cold, hard 'he who feels it knows it' fact of it: the really secret stuff - my thoughts, fears, confessions, admissions - not my national insurance number - stayed on paper, in notebook after notebook, in a little wooden cabinet next to my desk. They're full of I don't know what, but that's the space where I write as illegibly as I can, so that only I can read it. The words I write for me. They're worthless and priceless.

Freud: Tell me, does the laptop resemble your mother? Or your father perhaps?

Me: The fact that these things - these words, scribbles, ejecta - were safe was a comfort. I realised what was important to me. It made me never want to have a laptop again. It made me want to audit my notebooks, write up ALL the poems and destroy them in a big bonfire in the back garden. It also made me think that perhaps I should just post them up - AS IS - the real rough stuff - so then I'd have nothing left to fear but identity theft and death.

God: I'm not sure what you're on about but if it's any consolation you looked good in the dress.

I'm working out of several notebooks currently. I bought this at the British Library bookshop, which was once a good place for stationery. I bought my favourite notebook ever there years ago, which was a bespoke commission from Redstone. The Leonardo. It had everything I could ever want from a notebook. Pockets, varieties of paper (rough purple, smooth cream), Leonardo sketches sprinkled throughout. This was the best they had and overpriced at £3.99.

It wasn't until I was a third of the way through that I realised I'd been using it to struggle on with a poem I've been trying to write for years, now titled My Mother's Wedding. I like the subliminal coincidence of Oedipus and a narrative which concerns an anguished separation from my mother: did I want to marry my own mother? Freud's Oedipus Complex has become a shorthand for lusting after one's mother, but in fact Sophocles' story is more about the relationship to prophecy and fate. Oedipus doesn't know he's marrying his mother and it is his (and his father's) attempt to circumvent the prophecy that ultimately makes it come true. In common parlance we call this Sod's Law. Oedipus ends up blind and in exile. Just as the Oracle said. You cannot escape your FATE. Or your parents' fates?

How does this relate to My Mother's Wedding? My mother was half blind literally and figuratively: actually, subconsciously that's the sense I've been trying to get across. The sense of being DAZZLED. Light so bright you can't see. Captured underwater above ground in a heatwave, where the air is so warm it bends and slows things like water. Sound is muffled. Senses simultaneously heightened and dimmed. Malika said the poem was searching for an epiphany that doesn't arrive...but there is no epiphany that day. Just the sunblindness. The dazzle.

Angel Darhouk at the Poetry Society in London just sent me this: pick 3 stories form Google News, using only words that occur in the first 3 paragraphs of each story, make a poem with 3 stanzas, 3 lines each.

Malika's new notebook.

I bought this notebook for myself. But it wasn't right. I knew I'd have to give it to Malika. But I wasn't ready back in November when I bought it. Or at Christmas. It sat in the corner of my study. Eventually I gave in and handed it over to its rightful owner on Tuesday night.

A chat about notebooks with a writer friend.

Last Friday, well the Friday before last I taught a workshop session at Malika's Kitchen.

I was there to talk about form in the collection. And the form of the collection. I'm supposedly 90 per cent of the way through my first collection according to Selima Hill, who mentored me on putting the manuscript together. I like form and for the most part think she doesn't. She said that sometimes I use it in a 'ta-da! Look what I can do manner'. This is true sometimes. But I like form because it's an oportunity to play. To play with language and structure particularly. I also find the discipline of rhyme patterns and syllabics takes my mind off the bigger stuff ie what the poem is actually ABOUT enough to relax and forget about it long enough to find out. Form is also the shape of the poem as you see it on the page alongside traditionals like sonnets and sestinas. I was chatting with Francesca Beard on the bus on the way back from Bookslam with William Boyd and said I did a sonnet workshop with Don Paterson and he was very sniffy about sestinas. She liked that phrase. I like them though. They are sort of sudoku for poets. I like the Chinese puzzle of it. Tricksy. Like hurdling through a bramble patch. FB also said that she thought I 'could have done anything I wanted' with performance and was surprised I hadn't. That stayed with me, one because it was good to hear, but two because I felt sad and wistful about lost opportunities. It's strange, possibly typical that I haven't - I do LOVE it. Is that why? As if the reason is REALLY because I can't remember the poems. What a joke. I will learn one a week. In the shower. Can't be THAT hard now can it? I would like to do more performance this year.

Went to the last One Taste at the Bedford last night. And was inspired by all the great musical performance. Would like to develop something for the stage. An illustrated set - music and perhaps image - to launch or preface the book with. I felt wistful after we spoke. Like I'd missed the bus. But I was on it. On my way home up the hill.

This is my notebook plan for the Kitchen session. I set an exercise. This is it. It is in two parts.

List 10 poems you plan to include in your collection.

Read back the titles to the group.

Circle the strongest word on each line/title. As you listen jot down the words from other peoples' title lists that stand out. Group feedback on the titles. The sense they conjure up.

ii)

Write a 10 line narrative poem that tells your story as a writer.

Each line must inclue a circled word from each title. Spend 15 minutes on the poem.

I didn't get much from it but I was amazed at the depth of work people in the group produced.

I got not a lot:

'In the beginning I did not need 263 reasons

to know why I wrote or who for:

or whether my poem was a sonnet, a sestina or a list.

I would twist words in my hands until they snapped

back on the page, shiny and sacred as buddhas:

a route out of the dark, to Tokyo and back.

I cut a line about being skint and words making me wealthy. It made me cringe. The big payoff was having other writers really get something out of the exercise. We thought afterwards the exercise would be better if the 10 lines were amended to 14. So a loose sonnet form. Goes well with the love/hate affair we have with our work as writers. (I also think it's telling that I found thisi exercise difficult to achieve myself...)

I always seem to update when I'm in a BIG rush. I gotta go see a lady about a lot of digital dogs' ears! Yup. Yap. We're gonna run through cyber town making a whole heap of noise. I'll tell you about that later.

Jacob Sam La Rose posted this and gave me a heads up on Facebook. I think he might be trying to coax me out of my shell. And I will emerge soon. Jacob introduced me to Tumblr through his blog A Collection of Miscellaneous Items. I'm still playing around here but I couldn't resist sharing this notebook. I like Muji much better than Moleskin which I don't so much care for. Particularly as I have had a bit of a notebook travesty in the past week. No I've not lost one. But I'm working out of 3 or 4. I wanted to go and get refills for the lovely green and blue shinies. The website was a joke. A revolving Flash display and nowhere to order. I was down at the Royal Festival Hall - actually met an actress/script producer to talk about Dido - in the NT. They have carpet and distressed concrete walls. Cosy and brutal. Balance. Anyway, cut to the chase: the notebooks were not only sold out, but had been on sale. I missed them. I think I might get obsesssive about them. They were my ideal size. We bonded. They had plain and ruled so you could work from front to back and back to front at the same time. Meanwhile I think I'll share some pages from the Andy Warhol. And others. Note to self. Put that up. Loads more to yak about.

The post disappeared somewhere. To the notebook I hope. Spent the day working on a digital marketing campaign proposal for a new book about economics. It took ages to gather my thoughts and put it all together. I know proposals are like that but I must get quicker. I'm also contemplating 'coming out' and telling a few people about the blog. I do want to refine it. OWN is the Notebook only space. Rough Stuff for this process tumblings.

Wow. Technology is starting to take over. I've got notebook stuff to post. Pages and updates. On teaching. Writing. Meetings. Dogs Ears. I just got given a Mac Mini. It was my mum's. She upgraded. I switched from PC. I was glad she gave me something material. I'm always hungry for that. Now I'm posting from a widget called a tumblet on the desktop. More soon but this is easy enough,

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