Their Office, no.4

"Darling, it's a similar number. It's 27 instead of 71."

Attack of the Giant 50s Thatcher Babe

I'm posting this up again cos it fell off the front page and it's just so.. bright and, er... colourful. I don't think my reputation at Faber has ever recovered from insisting that the pin-up's hair had to be more Thatcherite... but it was for thematic reasons! Not because... oh God, no. How could they think that..???

In other news, happened across a quite amazing archive of poets reading their poetry at Pennsounds - the University of Pennsylvania's online resource for, uh, poets reading their poetry. Obviously something of a US bias but if you're interested in hearing Mayakovsky, Apollinaire, WC Williams, Robert Creeley, Tom Raworth etc etc, you 're in luck. Oh, it also contains a quite hysterically awful version of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience". Sung. By Allen Ginsberg. Lovely man, I'm sure, but could he hold a tune..?

Cold Lampin'

Not really got owt to say for myself so here is a picture of my stylish light source in the glamorous writing bunker I call Sick Building Syndrome. Stuck on the wall behind is the gigantic chart on which I scrawled ideas etc for my re-writes on my (old) new book. And now that's done and delivered I've taken the paper down. I miss it. It made it look like I was working...

Chris Ware Is In The Building

Chris Ware's new book, "Building Stories," has been being serialised in the IoS for a few months now but, for some odd reason, I keep forgetting to read it. But it turns out you can find the whole thing so far online here. There's something rather beautiful about looking at all the pages laid out as thumbnails and seeing how he changes the colour scheme and the way the boxes fit together month to month. Being as it's Chris Ware it looks amazing and centres on loneliness and a mountain of small sorrows. Going back to an earlier post, surely influenced by Monsieur Georges..?

Foot Notes

Michael Foot was on t'radio this morning, reminding me of what a wonderful individual he is (though I was a little stunned by how much faith he seems to place in Goldon Brown). Ah, the glorious days of the early eighties when Thatch whipped Labour's arse, but at least we knew we were right (definitively and absolutely)... Anyway, Today are streaming the full interview online, but unfortunately you have to find it on the site as they don't seem to believe in offering direct links. Fools.

Their Office, no.3

"I used to be like, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah,' but now I'm like, 'Yeah.'" Pause."'You did fight in a war. For freedom... and rights... and all that kinda stuff.'"

Darkness Returns

I've abandoned my ill-advised flirtation with a red, gold and green website at least until Jah contacts me personally. The moral of this story is - customisation is for buffoons.