COVID-19 diary 30/3/20


DAY TO DAY

I see tiny cities made of gold and stellar formations of uncanny provenance, all wrecked in the flood, even at its muddy rim.


[pic: Elaine Edwards]

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poundland

Image
  When I mentioned that Rapallo would be one of the destinations of Elaine's and my rail trip to Italy, more than one of my poet friends mentioned Ezra Pound. "Poundland!" remarked one. Rapallo, on the Ligurian coast, was of course the abode of the American poet from 1925 until 1945, when he was repatriated to the US and arraigned for treason because of his collaboration with the Italian Fascist government during the Second World War. He returned to Rapallo following his lengthy incarceration in a mental institution in Washington DC, and again lived there until his death in 1972. In the years before the war, Pound in Rapallo was the centre of a distinguished group of writers, composers and artists who came and went, including his wife the painter Dorothy Shakespear, WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Georges Antheil, Richard Aldington, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting and many others. He started composing The Cantos there. He gave regular talks to visitors. The Italian poet Eugenio Montale...
Read more

SECRET ORBIT - the first chapter (of 33)

Image
   Day 1 You wake in what seems to be an abandoned factory. The pipework and ductwork is of an extraordinary beauty. There is no way out. This is the Holding Pen, whence no-one in reality, despite the stated protocols and procedures and mission statements established by the Management, ever escapes. But hang on a minute. You must have escaped, it’s vivid in your memory; except it isn’t, that’s an illusion, because of course there is no longer any discernible electro-chemical activity in that skull of yours, because, frankly, you have the condition known as brain death. That is to say, your brain stem is no longer in meaningful connection with your spinal cord. That trumps everything. So to say “you wake” or that “you remember you awoke” is fanciful. But there you are. The good news is that this is no abandoned factory after all; actually, it looks uncommonly like your own bed in your own bedroom in your own flat. Congratulations. You made it. What do you think of that? Sorry, ...
Read more

How Secret Orbit came to be written

Image
  [CONTAINS SPOILERS!] The novel that came to be called Secret Orbit had a long gestation which would be too tedious to detail. For years I’d had a perhaps not very original perhaps pretentious notion of writing my own Divine (secular) Comedy: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. All three parts were to be set in different versions of London. Secret Orbit was once the title of another associated project, but eventually came to be allocated (initially as a working title) to the part of the trilogy that represented Hell. Of course, Hell is always the most fun to write. The title stuck, and the novel got written. Like the other half-written novels in the sequence, it is structured in 33 chapters, mirroring the cantos of Dante’s original (there are actually coded references to the mirrored canto in each chapter, though I’ve forgotten what some of them are). The framing device is a description of the stages of decomposition of the unnamed protagonist’s body as he lies in his London...
Read more