Avalanche Christmas Album

The Savings and Loan have a song on the new Avalanche Christmas Album, a cover of "Christmastime in the Mountains" as popularised by the Palace Brothers on their album, Hope.

We're in good company, with Broken Records, Frightened Rabbit, Meursault, Ballboy, Eagleowl and all your Scottish festive favourites. The full tracklisting is at the foot of this post.

The album is available from Avalanche Records in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and via the web here. It costs a mere fiver, and proceeds go to street children in Africa and sick children in Edinburgh.

Godspeed you...

Temporary Poems (1995-2008)

For a period of maybe three and a half years, when I was at university and deep in my Bukowski phase, I wrote perhaps three or four poems every night on a student's A4 notepad, propped up in bed.

Most of these were just noise, workouts, a means to cut through the chatter and approach the clang of something sure and lasting: the few. I kept those ones; the others got binned every time I moved house, and some even earlier.

Each flitting presents a chance for reappraisal, and some poems that had made it through the previous filter inevitably got caught up in the next. Which now makes me wonder whether I threw out any good ones, impatiently packing my stuff through a hangover cloud, but you can't dwell on things like that.

Reading the handwritten sheets is weird: the survivors. My handwriting has changed, and the paper itself has yellowed - some of it at least - despite being kept out of the light. I guess it's a chemical thing.

So out of the thousands of A4 pages, these are the ones that lasted. They've been joined by more recent lines, lines that wouldn't fit into songs, or wouldn't fit my voice. Lines with long Scottish vowels that jar when sung. Would and could.

On reflection, I should really have preceded the poems with a quote from Gwendolyn Brooks: "Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there." I love those words, but maybe they'll work for something else in time.

Available from lulu.com

Paler Aye

So, the haiku book has been typeset and is now available to buy from lulu.com

I'm quite pleased with the outcome, which is a result I suppose. Learned a few things about a few things while writing it.

That said, when I didn't have to write anything on January 1st, I didn't miss it. What's that quote again? I don't enjoy writing, but I love having written.

Spot the fuck on.

Six thousand two hundred and twenty two

So I'm nearing the end of my haiku diary, having written one every day of 2008. So far anyway. When it's done I'll have 6222 syllables (17 x 366) to play with. A numerologist would like this number: 6 = 2 + 2 + 2. Coincidence? Probably.

But it's good to count. Like Beckett's Murphy...

"Seven scarves held him in position. Two fastened his shins to the rockers, one his thighs to the seat, two his breast and belly to the back, one his wrists to the strut behind."

One wonders where the final scarf is tied.

I've enjoyed bits of the experience, although I'll smile on January 1st when I don't have to write one.

Meantime, if anyone knows a good illustrator...

Goodbye Muirshin Durkin

"Anybody can be a non-drunk. It takes a special talent to be a drunk. It takes endurance. Endurance is more important than truth."
- Bukowski

"Coffee's for closers only."
- Mamet

So, the endgame: I'm chasing closure. The way things are panning out, my last drop will be in Sleazy's on Friday. Given the 13th Note's tribulations, this is pleasantly fitting: I pretty much started my drinking career there, fifteen years ago. Half a lifetime, so far.

I've made peace with the Leith and Old Town places, with the possible exception of Robbie's. Took a walk around the Shore yesterday at dusk, just to double-check. But no, we're good.

So that leaves Glasgow. Sleazy's is taken care of, 13th Note's just a shell, Victoria is no more, and I'm dealing with the Scotia and Clutha tonight.

Where else is there?

• Old Shipbank - maybe, but I don't have a sunny spring Sunday left in me, and Tony's in Leeds anyway.
• Stravaigin - hmmmmmmm.
• Doublet - hmmmmmmm.
• Wintersgill's - vicarious.
• Chinaski's - not enough history in its current shape. But the Cross Bar, boy...
• Ben Nevis - pointless without Walter L. RIP.
• Kelly's - again a shell. For me it once had a time and a function. But I wouldn't want them back.
• Heraghty's - can take it or leave it. Same with the Variety.

If I was really going for form I'd end up at the State, jaked and alone. Suppose it could yet happen.

And Jesus, the QM. Do I need a last pint in Jim's? I can't decide. It could break me.

"I can't rise above the church"

Saw Kristin Hersh last night at St Cecilia's Hall, which is a museum for musical instruments most of the time.

The show - KH reading from her memoirs, accompanied by her own guitar, and punctuated with live excerpts from her songs - is called Paradoxical Undressing, which is the hypothermia sufferer's act of removing clothes/ blankets despite the cold.

It was... moving. She really can write like hell, not just lyrics but prose that just grabs and rattles and shakes. It was sunny when I walked in; rain drummed on the glass ceiling during the second half of the show. I'm not big on performance, but this was powerful and twisted my head backwards and made me look.

So, fragments of the last fifteen years’ listening...

- stumbling into 'Not Too Soon' on The Chart Show: assuming TD was the group's frontwoman: a tiny KH strumming rhythm, almost off-camera.

- The Real Ramona, my first ever album, bought with Christmas vouchers from English relatives.

- a live version of 'Mania' tearing me to pieces on a walkman in a blazer in 1993. Downstairs at the Sauchiehall Centre food court, if memory serves.

- 'Cry Baby Cry' done acoustically on a bonus disc. "I'm not ever getting out, I'm always getting sicker."

- playing Hips and Makers for my cousin while we studied. "Bit depressing for me," he says.

- "They can no longer move: I can no longer be still."

- Stealing 'Touching Like Spacemen' for a title of an undergraduate work.

- a gig at the QM, having driven a hired car down from Mull or Inverness or Wester Ross for hours through the black rain. KH blank-eyed and screaming into the middle-distance, her sound almost metal, alloy.

- appalling excitement when the Muses' debut was reissued with demos: almost choked with anticipation.

- "How do they kill children, and why do I wanna die?" Touché.

I’ll add to these, but they’re all from the past. I don’t feel things as deeply as I used to.

Call me. Call me.

Ethical football

I support Celtic; I watch Hibs. At what point is it appropriate to trade one shade of green for another?

We've lived in Leith for about three years, and in that time I've been to Easter Road maybe five times more often than Parkhead. Can I support two teams in the same division? (I already know what happens when they play each other: any Hibs sympathies go out the window for 90 minutes. Maybe there's my answer.)

But perhaps I'm worried about loyalty, about authenticity. Should I be? I've noticed my accent becoming a bit more east-coasty, more sing-songy. Natural, I suppose.

And last but not least, I walk to Easter Road; getting to Parkhead involves only carbon footprints. Surely it's the right-on thing to support local.

Stupid modern dilemmas. Life's simpler when you stay put. But worse.

Time to market

The urge to express oneself, what is it?

I suppose it's a repeated ph(r)ase: means-tested, needs-assessed.

Yesterday I doled out 5 CDs to friends and a mag, and today I find myself blogging. Or perhaps meta-blogging. Increasing my sorry output by blogging about my sorry output.

An unsustainable strategy. And the poetry collection's been typeset for months...

Ah well. I've published two papers so far this year without lifting a finger. Delayed publication from when I was at the DCC.

Product. "Horse it into you, Sur."

I'm awake when the singing starts

Re. the insomnia: it endures. Got to sleep around half-one and woke up at half-five, for maybe the 10th time in the last two weeks.

But this morning was the first time I turned on the computer, and I have to say it's helped. Not 'helped' in the sense of getting me back to sleep, but helped with putting things in perspective. I'm awake, that's all.

A couple of months ago, my strategy would have been simple: a dram and a dose of Derrida or Deleuze. The only effective cure for sleeplessness I know, and I mean that in the kindest way.

Others have recommended: baths, bananas, and glasses of milk.

My mother will always sing the praises of Radio Forth. When I was a baby, Forth was the only all-night broadcaster and when I woke up crying she would switch it on and sit with me till I slept again. It's easy to forget how much of a godsend that must have been then, when the 4am television was nothing but static.

Stuart Murray

I had visions once of myself as Glasgow's Bukowski, visions that in retrospect I'm glad I didn't pursue with greater purpose. But I recently stumbled upon this guy, who seems to be staking a claim.

Sample book titles: In Pubs, 7 Week Filing Job, People I've Met While Working...

He does simple but well-observed portraits of old men drinking and co-workers in shit jobs, with a bit of Tom Leonard in the mix too. He even worked for the post office.

Gaun yirsel.

Caveat abstainor

So, apart from a couple of quite deliberate leaps from the wagon, I've been off drink since late September. It's so-so: long-term abstinence might be right for some, but I don't think it's for me.

Chief benefits: improved bank balance, minor weight loss.
Chief drawbacks: sporadic insomnia, significant memory loss.

Yep, memory loss. I was recently looking back at my appointments diary for the last few months of 2007, and I realised that I can remember very little of what happened then. It seems kind of like a weird, absent dream.

Anneli thinks this might be because we didn't actually do very much over that period, apart from a trip to Skye which I remember fairly well. But on the whole it's a bit like someone else has been living my life for the past 4 months.

Curious. I guess this is what drifting involves. Still, roll on May 1st...

Clint Westward

We drove past Eilean Donan castle today, for the first time in a few years. They knew how - and where - to live in the 13th century.

Also saw a house on Skye called Gun Ainm, which made me smile - it means No Name.

An Fear Gun Ainm, feeling lucky.

I do not know

I just got two emails from people I know on a Friday night between 10.30pm and 10.45pm. And I was at a computer.

My wife's rearranging the spare room. Something's wrong.

But I was there...

iRiver moment this morning: "Losing My Edge" by LCD Soundsystem on random - just when I was thinking I was losing my edge. Boy, that's a song and a half.

How I laughed. Internally.

And according to wikipedia, "[t]he single is based around the riff for a Killing Joke b side"[1]

Now that's beyond fucking clever.

James Murphy - respect.

Fr Joe Donnelly, O.Carm

My uncle Joe died on Boxing Day. A few weeks beforehand I saw something on TV about screaming as therapy, and thought that that might be good for me.

The next day we drove up from Glasgow to Inverness. Clouds and rain, the usual. I stopped our car on Rannoch Moor and scrambled to the top of a small hill by the roadside. Anneli stayed put. There was no one for miles around, just rain and hills and small lochs. Lochans. Lochánnan. I don't know.

I looked out over it all, and opened and closed my mouth several times. Nothing happened: no sound. I was afraid of what it might lead to. I might have become inconsolable, and unable to drive.

So I picked my way back to the roadside and we continued on our journey, fearful, uncommunicative, not changed at all.

On Wednesday in Carfin I helped carry his coffin, a scream inside that I can't let out until the next time I'm in the middle of nowhere with nothing to be or do.

No idea when that'll be. I should probably make time for it.

Cork

Cork cork cork cork cork cork cork.

Go, little booke...

January will be the month for this. I'll type or be damned.

The heart of Friday afternoon

Lots of flashing lights today. It never really got light outside - an all-day bruise, of sorts - and now the dark is rising etc etc.

Thoughts on the nature of performance. Stuttering, barely glimpsable.

Don't just book it....

Arranged this summer's holiday at the weekend. Have managed all of fifteen posts since returning from the last one. A slow year, then, apart from the one item of big news.

So it's Greece this time, or rather a Greek island. Read a few reviews online - mixed, I think is fair.

Ach, time will tell. At the moment we're looking forward to anything, anything at all.

All that new stuff sucks, but it's over there

Just found myself thinking about Kids in the Hall, one of the all-time gems.

Bruce: I want you to steal a car...
Kevin: I have a car...
Bruce: Steal a car!
Kevin: Steal a car!!
Bruce: I want you to get in it and drive West. Play the tape full blast. When the tape ends, get out and get into a fight, then get back into the car, come to town and meet me at the Carcas Club.

Ah, memories of school. For misery and joy in roughly equal measure, accept no substitute.

Word of the day II: Menefreghismo

It's Italian for the particular quality of not giving a damn. I like the fact that the Italians have a word for this. So it gets added to the list, along with schadenfreude and sisu.

- The Italians have a word for it
- What word what is it?
- A thunderbolt or something
- What, you mean the Italian word for thunderbolt?
- Yeah, something like that. I don't speak Italian myself, you understand
- No.
- But I knew a man who did.

The mime of the ancient mariner

It occurred to me this morning that the weather influences more or less everything I do. Have neglected the guitar for a while, after a reasonably fertile singing/songwriting period from November to March. But I'm more into writing and reading these days, and I feel a pattern coming on....

April-August - prose and novels
September-March - songs and music

It's tidy enough, and there's a likely correlation there with the (main) university terms. Feel a bit like Coleridge, who couldn't finish anything, except a bottle. These novels have been swimming around in my head and on bits of paper for almost ten years now. Will Edinburgh be the catalyst for getting them done?

Clink.

I think I'm going back

To Edinburgh, to live, in September. Almost twenty-five years since I left the first time. And to Selkirk, to visit, in June. Twenty years since I left there.

So a new(ish) town to inhabit, new football pitches, bar prices, bus companies, open stages. And we can live our days instead of counting our years....

A ride.

Four months in the blink of an eye

Okay, so it's been a while. I do not know where the days go. Anyway, this could become a countdown blog after all: I'm getting married in a year.

Know happiness.

The sun shines, opportunities glint. Time for a drink, I think.

'She wears denim wherever she goes...'

So, concept albums: yea or nay? I have to say I'm edging towards the former.
That is all. I may commit soon.

Ding dong, the bells are gonna chime....

Dread God.... and do well

Saw this motto last week on the wall of a tunnel carved through a hillside somewhere between Strathcarron and Kyle of Lochalsh. Was about to leap out the car and take a photo but the weather was forbidding, and I dread the wind and rain as well.

So we're back now from the land of the Wee Frees, unReformed but knackered. Good fun all in all, although the rain was incessant. Back at work in the tower today, where the rain remains and the wind howls in the quads below. On the whole I think I'd rather be in Philadelphia.

It's a long time between posts. Aye, and it's a damned long time between drinks.

Eleven: eleven

On the Firhill field of dreams tonight, swaddled in the green and white. Should be good.

The first of how many

First iRiver moment yesterday. Leaving the Chinese takeaway, beef chow mein in hand, and what comes on? Why, "Werewolves of London" of course.

Spooky stuff. The chow mein was alright; the hot and sour soup to die for.

By Force of Mourning

Who could ever speak of the work of Louis Marin?

Who would already know how to speak of the works of Louis Marin and of all the work that bore them, a work without measure?

Work: that which makes for a work, for an oeuvre, indeed that which works--and works to open: opus and opening, oeuvre and overture: the work or labor of the oeuvre insofar as it engenders, produces, and brings to light, but also labor or travail as suffering, as the enduring of force, as the pain of the one who gives. Of the one who gives birth, who brings to the light of day and gives something to be seen, who enables or empowers, who gives the force to know and to be able to see--and all these are powers of the image, the pain of what is given and of the one who takes the pains to help us see, read, and think.

Who could ever speak of all the work and works of Louis Marin?

As for this work--but what does one do when one works?

When one works on work, on the work of mourning, when one works at the work of mourning, one is already, yes, already, doing such work, enduring this work of mourning from the very start, letting it work within oneself, and thus authorizing oneself to do it, according it to oneself, according it within oneself, and giving oneself this liberty of finitude, the most worthy and the freest possible.

One cannot hold a discourse on the "work of mourning" without taking part in it, without announcing or partaking in [se faire part de] death, and first of all in one's own death. In the announcement of one's own death, which says, in short, "I am dead," "I died"--such as this book lets it be heard--one should be able to say, and I have tried to say this in the past, that all work is also the work of mourning. All work in general works at mourning. In and of itself. Even when it has the power to give birth, even and especially when it plans to bring something to light and let it be seen. The work of mourning is not one kind of work among other possible kinds; an activity of the kind "work" is by no means a specific figure for production in general.

There is thus no metalanguage for the language in which a work of mourning is at work. This is also why one should not be able to say anything about the work of mourning, anything about this subject, since it cannot become a theme, only another experience of mourning that comes to work over the one who intends to speak. To speak of mourning or of anything else. And that is why whoever thus works at the work of mourning learns the impossible--and that mourning is interminable. Inconsolable. Irreconcilable. Right up until death--that is what whoever works at mourning knows, working at mourning as both their object and their resource, working at mourning as one would speak of a painter working at a painting but also of a machine working at such and such an energy level, the theme of work thus becoming their very force, and their term, a principle.

What might be this principle of mourning? And what was its force? What is, what will have been, what will still be tomorrow, the energy of Louis Marin?

From Jacques Derrida, By Force of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael Naas

First Derrida and now John Peel. Their work will endure. RIP.

[Listens to crickets chirp]

Please don't think I've been rude, there's just been nothing to say. What is there to say, apart from I have a new MP3 player, but I don't trust it. As Anneli says, the things you own end up owning you.

And it's rained and it's rained.

Haven't read much for a while, a bit of Burroughs on Saturday is about all. Preparation for something I have no doubt.

Which reminds me of the William Burroughs cutup machine, one of the first Web sites I ever saw, back in the good old world of 1995. I wonder if it's still online?

It is indeed.

From when the Web and I was young or younger. There was a Palace Brothers discussion list as well, from whence the title. I used to get drunk in the afternoon and then read John Cage books in the university library, and Sylvia Plath, and look at Palace Brothers emails, and Eric Cantona Web sites.

Funny the things you like in your teens, how they morph and sustain into your late twenties. Off to see the Magnetic Fields in Edinburgh tomorrow. Very indie, the kind of thing I loved when I was seventeen became the kind of thing I hated when I was twenty-one, and now I'm sitting here holding maybe 40% of my record collection in my hand.

Is it really nostalgia or something more innocent?

East by North East

I've lived here for 20 years now, and until last night I'd never been to Dennistoun. It's quite nice, but I'm not sure I want to live there yet. Glasgow's not New York, or Tokyo, or Mexico City.

God knows how you'd be expected to come to terms with those places. Actually, sometimes I feel like I know London better than I know Glasgow. Safety in ignorance. Watch the lights.

60 Yard Pass

Bukowski has a poem called '60 Yard Pass' about most people not being much use at what they do, getting discouraged with their existence. Today I know what he means. It makes you want to do worse yourself, just so the quality of your own work doesn't attract further hassles.

You know how geniuses sometimes act dumb because they're frightened of the power of their own minds? A bit like that, but without the genius tag.

Anyway, the sun's outside and soon I will be as well. Oh aye, and I just thought of an old Beat Happening song called 'Indian Summer' - currently languishing unplayed on vinyl in my parents' house.

Sad thoughts altogether: where's the space when you need it?

Conas tá tú?

Just remembered something strange from the holiday. Sitting with Anneli in a nice al fresco restaurant, a voice comes over from the right: Conas tá tú?

Turned to see a smiling waiter. Tá mé go maith, agus tú féin? Turns out he spent a few months working in Waterford and recognised the hoops. There was a map of Ireland behind the mixologists at the bar as well.

Weird, wonderful and genuine folks. I'll go back.

One-nil

And a peach of a Champions League draw. Something pleasant to come back to.

That and the week off. Ya dancer.

Guli-guli

Apparently Turkish for goodbye. Just back from Alanya - mid to late 30s every day; consequently we are quite brown.

And I'll have more people to say guli-guli to in the coming weeks, but email reveals that the timetable has been skewed while I was away. Such is life.

Reading Vernon God Little at the moment, uncomfortably. The humanity is too, too much. My last 'contemporary' book was The Corrections - anyway, Frantzen's got the cold vocab, but Pierre grabs those gutstrings good.

So Tuesday morning melts through me.... and it's time for bed.

From out of the blue, a phonecall

Opportunties, continual developments, surprises and disappointments. Life's rich tapestry &c &c. Something new today, and me unprepared and unshaven. Let's have it.

What else can you do but roll with the punches?

It took a bird in the windscreen to make me see

So there is a God, not that I was in any doubt. And before this turns into yet another scintillating weather blog, I want to stress that some of my favourite writing stems from meteorological conditions, A.R. Ammons's The Snow Poems being top case in point. I think it makes a good starting point for whatever follows, gives the work a grounding and a context, helps you connect.

So, current observations: 22 degrees, sunny spells. And Friday for a fucking change.

In hac lacrimarum vale

I need to be thin and lonely and devout.

People, we have done something bad

Well, I asked for it. Is this the real hard rain Dylan and Bickle promised us? Batten the hatches and hand me that hammer.

Word of the day: Humidity

Why won't it just crack? I grow tired of allday stickiness. Give me an allday grey any day I say.

Elevator lady, elevator lady, lady interface me

So today, the question on everybody's lips is...... "What part of a laptop would you least like embedded in your skull?" Popular choices include modems, space bars, and internal fans. Me, I'll take what I'm given.

Sample quote: "It would be horrible to have a modem in your head, like people who pick up radio waves with their teeth..."

No need.

A deep breath....

....and it begins.