weequizzie

I love Bukowski.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I’m not going
to let anybody see
you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he’s
in there.

there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I’m too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody’s asleep.
I say, I know that you’re there,
so don’t be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he’s singing a little
in there, I haven’t quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it’s nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don’t
weep, do
you?

When 2010 came knocking I made one real resolution – try and read more books, maybe even a book a week. So far, so good. After 'What I Loved' by Siri Hustvedt, Chronic City by Lethem and a few short stories, I started 'The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao' by Junot Díaz.

This book is a gift to everyone who takes the time to read it. I haven’t felt so hammered by story and dialogue in a very long time, and ‘hammered’ is a good thing. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone this good to come along and now all I want to do is implore everyone I meet to read this book. It made me cry on the bus; the last thing to make me almost cry on the bus was the kid in front of me listening to Alexandra Burke do ‘Hallelujah’ through a crappy phone speaker. The horror.

This book makes me want to read more, and even if I’m only biding my time until the next Díaz book, and that can only be a good thing.

I need to renew my subscriptions to Cabinet Magazine and Zoetrope All-Story. I can feel all the good words slipping away from me.

and the New Year is spitting in our faces, calling us fat, correcting our grammar and making us feel worthless, dumb and not fit for 2010. So, time to buy a juicer, fast for days, go to the gym and hope my bike doesn’t get nicked, consider a home enema , eat giant pink multivitamins, stay off the booze, read a book a week, write words, take feet pikkers, reboot, rewire and consider what the fuck is it that I, we, you, me are actually doing as we roll in to another year. Another 365 days, with another bunch of potentially paltry culture to absorb, imbibe and shit out silently. Another year of listening to the tick tock tick tock of other people’s clocks.

But the thing is, I’m actually pretty positive about 2010 because I’m going to spend more time talking to people who are smart, funny and brutally honest – my homies. Here’s to a year of stoop-sitting (without the cherry Lambrini), good gigs, Wednesday night hangouts and words coming out of good people’s mouths, rather than stupid people’s arses.

Here’s to all the juicers…

‘There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.’

I have a zillion online baskets full of stuff hovering in cyberspace waiting for me make a decision. ‘Take me, Emma. Take me and watch the quality of your life improve. Watch your dreams and hopes get into a car, drive really fast (faster than Corey Haim) and realise themselves once you purchase these shoes, this dress, this ring shaped like a rabbit…’. Sad state of affairs. Right now I have baskets at Schudoo, Amazon, Etsy, Modcloth, Kurt Geiger and Culture Label (I mean actually open on my laptop – there are approximately 34,073,001 Emma-related baskets out there in cybershoppingspace).

I think I need the Amazon basket most. These books are things I NEED, or at least I think I need. They’ll make me feel happy for a second or more, and might even make me smarter, or funnier, or something. And something is better than nothing, right? 'The Satorialist', 'One Letter Words: A Dictionary' and 'Naive. Super'.

Shitfuckfudge. Maybe it’s time to ban the basket, but only after I’ve got the ring shaped like a rabbit. I know it’ll make me soooooooo happy.

I need to read these books really soon or my brain will push its way out of my skull and drown itself in the toilet. FACT.

Words are the best. FACTOID.

You should read this Oliver Sacks book – it blows your mind out of your bumhole.

Oh, here’s Cassady and Kerouac just because. I want to stop loving Kerouac but can’t. I might love Hemmingway more and I’m sure I love McCullers more and I probably love ‘Franny and Zooey’ more than all of them but this changes…on every beat.

“Sometimes I think that knowledge – when it’s knowledge for knowledge’s sake, anyway – is the worst of all… Knowledge should lead to wisdom, and if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time! Wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge.”

Nabokov is back from the dead. I cross everything in the hope that this is good but I’m just not sure…and against his wishes? Hmmm.

Check out the dets here

We go way back. I love his short stories and have loved every novel so far. He kills me.

Today I found one of many little quote books I used to keep and still do. I can never keep all the words in one book so there are dozens spread across different drawers, boxes and hidey-holes. I guess it’s an attempt at holding words down and taking them out of the air – out of our heart’s mouth. I like to keep them the way I like to keep images on these blogs. I like what they evoke, or what they made, and make me feel. These words are like other people’s photographs – 100s spilling out of old albums – reminding me of all the good and bad, how I was and how I wanted to be. They’re like the books that line the shelves, or litter them. The films, the old cassette tapes, the pages of memories – shining a blinding light on the totally zenless trajectory of my life and what I loved, or thought I loved, or thought I should love.

The memories little letters carry – it’s freaking amazing.

Here’s a few of those excerpts, or quotes, and some pikkers:

‘Our Father which art in Heaven / Stay there / And we will stay on Earth / Which is sometimes so pretty.’ Jacques Prevert

‘…the word cannot be expressed direct, it may be indicated by a mosaic of juxtaposition…like articles left in a hotel drawer.’ William S. Burroughs

‘This is Plan B. Every day for the rest of your lives, all of your living moments are to be spent making others aware of this need – the need to probe and drill and examine and locate the words that take us beyond ourselves. Scrape. Feel. Dig. Believe. Ask. Ask questions, no, screech questions out loud… Grind questions onto the glass on photocopiers. Scrape challenges onto old auto parts and throw them off of bridges so that future people digging in the mud will question the world, too. Carve eyeballs into tyre treads and onto shoe leathers so that your every trail speaks of thinking and questioning and awareness. Design molecules into question marks. Make bar-codes print out fables, not prices. You can’t even throw away a piece of litter unless it has a question stamped on it – a demand for people to reach a finer place.’ Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma