Violet at 3 and 11/12ths!!

It’s been so long since I was here. There is no time to write, to do, to make. I do still edit Sein und Werden. But also me and Violet’s dad split up a year ago so that means most of my time goes into just being a mum. Vi is 4 next month; I’ll be 38 the day after. I’ve spent the last couple of months editing some gore-drenched existential fiction for Sein, and organising a 4th birthday party. Weird times. But happy happy wonderful times.

I watched an incredibly moving film last night. Tarnation, by Jonathan Caouette, is a journey through one man’s childhood and teenage years, up to now, 31 years of age. Using footage from a lifetime of home-movies, he leads us through this dark, dank, very strange labyrinth, chronicling his mother’s years of electro-shock therapy, his childhood in foster homes, the later years of getting to know his mother who spent her life in and out of psychiatric hospitals. Life isn’t art, until it’s recorded, edited, montaged into a film like this. Caouette is a genius, and with the help of Gus Van Sant he has made a crucial, infinitely-real, eye-opening film about one man’s incredible life.

 Jonathan and his mother Renee. Despite the years of therapy she remained beautiful.

Finally, some photos from the Cabala anthology reading. The anthology included stories by five authors. All bar Jacqueline Houghton were there at Waterstones in March for a reading.

About the anthology – ‘From gothic fairytale to humorous pop-culture satire, five of the North’s top writers showcase the diversity of British talent that exists outside the country’s capital and put their strange, funny, mythical landscapes firmly on the literary map.

Adam Lowe, the editor, and myself.

L-R: Adam Lowe, Rachel Kendall, A J Kirby, Jodie Daber, Richard Evans

So long since I had a dream worth remembering. My diaries used to be full of them, fodder for my writing, a conduit for my sanity. The last dream I remember remembering was about flies beneath my skin that I squeezed like zits until their black little heads and wiry legs dotted my face like brail. Last night’s dream was less creepy crawly, more bloody sinister. A siren, a megaphone, a voice shouting through the night; something about a murderer on the loose. “Do not leave your homes. Lock the doors. Lock the windows. Lock up your daughters and DO NOT PANIC.” So like a good little girl in a horror slot, I left my house, disappeared into the night where my labyrinthine dream house I stands. It draws me in every time and I crawl through its miniature corridors and down its vertiginous slopes and up its creaking staircases, twisting my body through too-small doorways and pressing myself into deep corners. I was running. Away from the bloody man. The man with blood on his hands. On his executive-smart suit. He appeared and disappeared like my reflection. I blame TV! I’m addicted to the medical and crime programmes, the blood and the bones, the guts and the gore. Bizarre ER with its sometimes horrendous, sometimes stupid, always bizarre A+E cases; Spiral – the French crime drama just shown on the BBC with its battered prostitutes and murderous pimps; Surgery School – fly on the wall docu about trainee surgeons… Documentaries about ‘Extraordinary Lives’ (you may have seen them in the freakshows in the early 20^thcentury), documentaries about disfigurement, documentaries about children’s craniofacial surgery… It’s all there. It’s what I pay my TV license for!

For anyone who may still check this site from time to time – I adore you mein freund.

News: I’m doing a reading on 25th March from the Cabala anthology, published by Doghorn Publishing. At Waterstones, Deansgate, Manchester. 6-8. You’re all invited.

More news: The submissions deadline for Sein und Werden / Magnificent Monsters is 20th March. Get on it! http://www.kissthewitch.co.uk/seinundwerden/next_issue.html

And this just in: I have a fondness for Lady Gaga. I can’t help it. So burn me at the stake if you must. I always loved Madonna. She was my idol as a young teen. And now Gaga is, of course, an idol for the next generation. Still, Gaga takes Madonna to a whole new level. Madge had two means of communication through her art – sex and reinvention. It can only go so far. Lady Gaga uses theatre, which means she’ll never come to a point where she asks – where can I go from here?

Yes, she steals image, music and pose left right and centre. But didn’t Madonna use such inspirations as Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis? I love the new Gaga song – Born This Way. I love that it is an homage to Madonna, taking slices from the Express Yourself, Vogue and Pappa Don’t Preach videos, even down to that last gap-toothed shot. But I also love that she has embellished it with her own creepy humour, her theatrics and her fright night get-up.

I pronounce Lady Gaga to be Madonna’s sinister doppelganger, her weird sister. Or perhaps, more aptly, her demon child.

Xanga has changed since I was last here. Is there no longer a link to what I’m reading/watching/listening to?

It’s been… how long? Time flies like an arrow, does it not? Violet is eighteen months old in a week. Now that’s crazy. What have I done since I was last on here three months ago? I’ve had laser eye surgery, I’ve been working on a chapbook by Marc Lowe, and an e-book by Russell Bittner. I’ve finished La Batarde by Violette Leduc (fantastique) and have just started The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which is kind of contemporary for me, but a friend suggested it and then lent it to me, so I figured I’d give it a go. Also started reading a book by Julia Kristeva, a novelist, translator and therapist. Word play, mind games. Good stuff. I watched L’Illusioniste at Le Cinema! Beautifully animated, hardly a word spoken, all in the gestures. I also watched Mesrine. Vincent Cassell is the epitome of French sexiness.

So, I did these things without having to wear glasses or contact lenses. My vision is better than 20/20. Or 6/6 I should say. In fact, it’s 666. It’s a bit of a strain on my eyes to focus close-up though, and I find I am reading books at arms length. But it can take months for the eyes to settle, for the surgery to take full effect. The surgery itself was… well, everything you’d expect from having a laser trained at your eyeball. It wasn’t nice. It was noisy (a loud crackling sound as I focused on this pinprick of red light, with a clamp on my eye to keep it open and a constant flood of eye drops), uncomfortable, and later on quite painful. But it was worth it and the discomfort was only for a few seconds. I can wear eye make-up again. I can leave the house that little bit later because I don’t have to mess about trying to insert lenses. I don’t have to fight with Violet to keep my glasses on my face, or keep pushing them up because they slide down my nose, or keep putting them down and losing them.

I am at work. And I had better get back to it!

Check out the new short story collection by Mark Howard Jones – Songs from Spider Street. I haven’t read it yet but it looks smooth as silk and knowing Mark’s work, the innards will be too. As fine as spider silk and just as damn sticky.

Go here for more info: http://www.screamingdreams.com/songsfromspiderstreet.html

This is what happens when you stick sharp objects into a bull:

Fuck. I bet that hurt.