So now that the complete mindfuck that was the assessments period is over and my brain is resolidifying inside my skull I feel like I should get back into blogging.

Problems with this include the fact that unless you're utterly fascinated by the precise difference between a dactyl and an iamb I really have little to say.

So, what to do? Here's a poem from the archive:

Lia

You. My friend. My madcap keeper

I am a little in love.

Not like that- not with you.

But with your toxic, bright-black

zest for life

You. Snap crackle.

Sour apple vodka shot

making anything possible at 1 am.

Little goddess; blowjob queen

Morrigan with a golden heart

Thanks for making me laugh, cry, smile

Thanks for your babydoll eyes rimmed in kohl.

For bitching with me by the Seine,

For buying scarves in old Lijiang

For being the type of girl

who screams “Free Tibet” from the Great Wall

In true Grumpy Young Man style, the following things are currently topping the league table of Stuff that Pisses Me Off:

1. People who tag my location on Facebook. Um, no. I'm really glad you had a great time with me at some club the one night of the year that I stayed out until 5 am, but plastering it over my wall is one big reason why I tend to spend huge amounts of time cooped up in my room. Especially as I now use Facebook for work.
2. Magazines that take ages to get back to you. I realise slight hypocrisy here, but it's my blog innit?
3. Seagulls. The war is ongoing.
4. Phone Battery. Is just too short to take seriously. At the end of the day there's not a phone that's better than those old Nokia 3210s with the grey-blue covers and the most awesome version of Snake. Fact.
5. Summer music. Eugh. Eugh! I know it's coming, and the dread is building in the pit of my stomach. I swear if I ever meet Harry Styles (and/or any of his overgelled compatriots) I will smother him in honey and throw him into an anthill.
6. Writer's Block. Nuff said.

I realise that I'm not exactly the poster child for conventional relationships, what with my odd-dynamics, open-snog-policies and prediliction for going out with high functioning sociopaths. And as an ex I'm curiously devoid of malice or jealousy. In fact I'm totally happy to coach former amours in their subsequent romantic endeavours. I am the ex who keeps on giving.

That said.

IT IS TOTALLY CREEPY FOR YOU TO USE MY POETRY TO 'WOO' SOMEONE ELSE. STOPPIT RIGHT NAO! EW!

EWW. EWW
EWWWWWWWWW!

I'm usually really, really sceptical of anything which tries to put human nature in boxes. That said: this, this A MILLION TIMES THIS.

In case you are wondering (you're clearly not) I am a typical INFP. Like scary typical. But that also means I share a personality type with Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Kurt Cobain, J.K Rowling, Andy Warhol and Neil Gaiman. Either that or the Internet is trying to flatter me.

Eh, I'll take it.

Am revising The Book. Which still doesn't have a title, oy vey.

The sun is here. It's pretty fucking beautiful, but it keeps melting the bottle-candles I keep in my window.

See?

So sadmaking.

I made lavender and cardamom vodka. It is delicious with Doctor Pepper.

So we're told the publishing world is in crisis, and that Kindles, ebooks, free downloads et al will inevitably lead to The End of The Arts Industry.

Good!

Because there's an addendum to that sentence. It's the End of The Arts Industry As We Know It. I'm a writer, so publishing is my sector. It's an industry that's existed longer than universal literacy. In other words, it's an industry that made it's own market and naturally the decks were stacked in the publisher's favour. Yes, the masses could walk with their wallets, but prices were set, audiences were predictable and one only has to look at the late Ms Cartland to see how people could make a mint writing popular books which were in no way great literature. Compare this to the life of writers like Kerouac, and does something not seem to be amiss?

And then came the Internet. Here's where shit gets all Amanda Palmer. Suddenly, increasingly, poetry is free, books are free, publishers can no longer control the flow of art. There's going to be some shit writing out there, because people like shit. There's also going to be some diamonds.

But what this does mean is that the power is with us as consumers. The publishing industry existed for a reason, and with it's decline there's a greater responsibility on art consumers than ever before. Here's my philosophy as an artist for the digital age.

1. You can steal my art. I'm not a poet for the money. If someone likes what I'm producing my first impulse is to gratitude and honour. So take it. Borrow it. Respond to it. Pay me by emailing me and saying what it meant to you, or by showing my your dog eared copy of my book, or by explaining to me in EVERY MINUTE DETAIL exactly what I have done to make your life in some small way slightly richer. That's as much as I could ever want.
2. I can always get a real job. And if my art doesn't support me, I will have to. Consequently there will be less creative work in the future. The person who has the power to make that choice is the reader who loves my work an has the money to pay for it. You either do or you don't, I'll keep trying regardless. I would ask you to give me money if you can. But if you don't there's not a damn thing I can do about it. The arts industry is becoming all carrot and no stick, and that's just the way I like it.
3. Gratitude is Radical. To be a creative person is to take up people's precious time for things they may not enjoy. And with my work? It's often to say things which are disruptive. This is an audacious ask. Humility is important when doing it, and gratitude for those who entertain my notions of profundity.

NSFW- Your not so daily dose of musical goodness

Pure unadulterated glouriousness. Dreamshow: Animals. NSFW, (unless you work somewhere awesome (are they hiring?)).

Yo, I'm contactable: tkblogs@live.co.uk

Didn't take long did it.

THE BOOK being finished, I'm shoving it in a cupboard, the better to go back and edit without being too attached. In the meanwhile... I'm planning a projecty thing. It's foetal, and it's just for fun. Totally not srs riting bizness.

But, please get in touch if you

• Are a man OR
• Love a man OR
• Hate a man

Or if any of the statements above have been true for you in the past.  Also IF YOU HAVE A VIDEO CAMERA/ MAKE SHORT FILMS/MAKE THEATRY STUFF, then drop me an email. I will either skype you, or if you're vaguely South of England based, buy you coffee, and we will talk.

Ta.

TK

Zombie Jesus Day 2013

Things learned in 2013 so far:

1. Hard work is hard.
2. Running away from problems is bad, but fun. Sometimes.
3. I am not built to be someone's boyfriend.
4. A love of classical music and a love of lyrical poetry inevitably leads one down a rabbit hole of industrial post-punk glorious gothiness.
5. Inspiration is a bitch. But I love her, and I ain't treating her right. Inspiration is the girl you don't tell your parents you're dating because they know she's no good for you.
6. Bitches be crazy.
7. Winter is not coming. It has FUCKING MOVED IN AND KEEPS EATING MY NUTELLA!

Here's a little PJ for your weekend.


Happy Easter everyone.

The Finish Line

1000 words and The Book is finished. That's 2 A4 pages.
It's taken me, what... two years? It's not that long. More a novella than a novel really. But it's good I think. I don't know, I'm so close to it. It might be shit. It might be shit. That is a distinct possibility. I think I'd be heartbroken.

I don't love these characters. I don't think I do. No, that's not true. I do, but it's more complicated than that.

Argh. I will be happy to leave them behind I think. It's been like spending too much time with your most intense friends. The relationship it's loosely based on needs to recede into my past now, I'm ready to be over it.

This feels odd. I never finish things. And I tell myself that it won't be over, that there's still redrafting and tweaking and changing. But I still don't know the end. I haven't been able to look. Now I do. I've written one, but I might have to scrap it. I don't know if it's the truth. It feels right but too easy. I suppose I'll know.

Linkage

Also, the even better album which you should totally buy.

AFP's TED talk.

Blogs poems here

Guilty Pleasures Version 2.0

Ah, I was a young addict once. Sadly Blogger in its infinite wisdom has seen fit to eat the post in which I told you all about my first furtive activities. In lieu, let me present to you the journey three years on, wherein I have graduated from softer, gateway secrets to full blown socially unacceptable obsessions.

1. Interior Design Blogs. Hooked On Houses is currently topping the must read list, however I'm searching desperately for a blog I once stumbled across which features the adventures of a couple renovating a New York brownstone apartment with superglued crown mouldings. (Sidebar: perhaps I've been watching too many Carry On films recently, but is it just me or does 'thrifting' sound kinda naughty?)
2. Cheese. I shudder to contemplate the exact percentage of my food budget which is spent on cheese, but I love it. I love smooth, mild cheeses with interesting textures. Mozzarella is good. No, not good. It's luscious. Halloumi is a special delight, salty and chewy and moreish. Wendsleydale is a particular favourite from the British Isles, especially when studded with nuggets of apricot or blueberry for a contrast, or when served with quince or figs, and in case the cheese purists are about to burn me at the stake I will seldom say no to a creamy, well flavoured brie or a strong Camembert.
3. Two Fat Ladies. I'm not sure what exactly it is about Clarissa Dickson-Wright and Jennifer Patterson's eighties (?) cookery show that hooks me like a heroin addict. I don't regard my fervent addiction to the culinary works of Sophie Dahl to be an embarassment because she's engaging and charming and I fancy the pants off of her. In fact I would quite happily move in with her and be her live-in assistant in all matters sensual- food related or no. But Two Fat Ladies? Makes. No. Sense. I've tried to work it out. Is it their irreverence and heavy handed use of saturated fats? ("None of this nonsense about yogurt instead of cream," Jen says. Or said. She died, let's not look into it too closely). Their ludicrous posh accents? The casual disdain for vegetarians? The vaguely Sapphic undertones? I may never know.
4. Great British Menu. In a similar vein to the above, I do totally understand how ridiculous this show is. I really do. I caught myself squealing the other day over an underset parfait. No excuse here, I just enjoy melodrama.
5. M.I.A. Which totally does NOT fit in with the rest of my music. In fairness it's a pretty eclectic mix, but I think my music taste can be broken down into either great pianists or great vocalists or great lyricists.
6. The Indigo Girls. I don't know exactly how socially acceptable this is as a musical taste in wider society. A significant proportion of my friends are in the, ahem, niche closely associated with this band so that probably constitutes a skewed sample. 
7. Gingham. I try to curb this particular impulse. My room is decorated (because you're dying to know) in navy blue and dark red, mostly in Indian-esque prints. That sounds really awful actually but trust me it works, I'll post pics. However gingham is kinda invading my life. So far I have accumulated two pillowcases, a miniature teapot, a keyring and several pairs of underwear.
8. Candles. Sometimes I like my space to be pretty alright? Shouldn't you be doing something productive instead of judging me? Yeah, that's what I thought.
9. ETA: Trawling the Real Estate Section of Sotheby's. A guy can dream, amirite?

I really do love slang. Honest. I love swear words and bywords and all the euphemisms that your parents used when you were little, all the rebellious little syllables you hesitated to utter, then uttered too much in an attempt to seem cool to your friends. And ladies I know, I know that you don't exactly have a plethora of delightful words to use when discussing your wrinkly bits. 'Cunt' is brutal, 'vagina' is clinical and 'pussy' conjures up images of Postman Pat. For most people none of these things constitute a turn on (if brutality or medical roleplay do it for you then skip ahead. If Postman Pat is your kink of choice then on behalf of humanity I suggest you check yourself into some kind of facility) and when writing sexy poetry/fiction you're left with limited choice. As someone who recently inspired his creative writing class to spend fifteen minutes discussing the pros and cons of the word 'panties', and in fact provoked a debate which is now referred to as Pantygate, I get it, totally. Our lexicon on matters sexual is woefully limited in terms of genuinely titillating verbiage.

That said, please let it be known that 'Vajayjay' is quite possibly the most obscenely saccharine term ever used to describe human genitalia and should be stricken from your vocabulary. Like, yesterday. Especially when mentioned in the same sentence as the words 'turgid member'.

Shudder.

P.S. It is perhaps a sad indictment of the aforementioned issue that Blogger's autocorrect understands Vajayjay but refuses to believe that 'titillating' is a real word.

Epiphany

I wrote about the girl who was giving me trouble. I've cracked it. I knew who she was but not where she was going. It isn't a love story at all. It's about growing up.

The female character in my book can be described in the following sentence:

She is someone who's stuck being Bellatrix Lestrange while she figures out how to become Hermione Granger. Now I just have to get her there.

TK Writes

(I'm sure there's a certain circular motion of the finger that stimulates one's writing gland but I can't for the life of me figure it out. Will simply have to spend more time playing with myself.)

Secrets: 

These are the secrets I have yet to tell:

She bought me flowers last weekend. A bunch of orchids, white and spotted with red, like beads of blood on creamy fabric.

Orchids are my favourite flower. She thinks they look like the genitalia of a weird space alien but she’d buy them for me anyway.

This will be the first time I’ve spent more than ten pounds on flowers for her.

Sometimes when we had sex I’d start crying because I was stressed, or angry, or because I felt she wasn’t enjoying herself. She’d hold me, and kiss my face, and tell me that whatever it was, it was okay. She’d lace her fingers into mine and whisper that she loved me.

When she said that I never believed her. Not even once.

I lied to her all the time. Never about anything big, but sometimes about traffic accidents or incidents at work.

I loved her, but I love myself more.

I’ve never liked taramasalata. I only ever ate it so that I’d seem adventurous to her.

I think she settled for me.

I hated her sometimes.

I love her. Present tense.

The smell of her was like an orchid, or ozone, or orange zest and red wine. If, while she was out, I caught a snatch of it in the flat I’d sometimes stop still for minutes at a time trying to get it back again. It still happens but not for much longer.

I hated the way she loaded the dishwasher. In fact I believe that no woman knows how to do this correctly.

I miss her so much that it often feels like someone has forced a broken Coke bottle into my lungs, so that every time I breathe it’s a fresh laceration, an internal mincing of the organs which give me breath.

I like this feeling. I’d feel guilty without it.

I hate her dad.

I don’t remember exactly what the last thing we said to each other was before she got in the car.

I tried to download all her videos on Facebook last night because I’m scared I’ll forget her voice.

I really, really hate her dad. At the funeral today he glared at me. The sky was the only one not wearing black. I thought of her favourite flower, irises. I thought of cyanide and the lips of suffocation victims.

My underwear was bright red. It’s the pair she hated, but I had nothing else clean.

Her mother came up to talk to me afterwards, looking wan and cried out like the shadow of a woman. Her jaw was clenched. Grief makes people very ugly.

“You’ll still… you’ll still be family,” she lied, “It’s not even a question. You know that don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. It’s her fiction and she’s entitled to it. Her dad glared at me over his wife’s shoulder. I didn’t look at him but I know he was glaring because I could feel it. He didn’t say anything.

Her friends didn’t talk to me either. They didn’t approve of me because I have no money, no ambition. She had enough ambition for both of us. That was our greatest secret.

I taught her to lucid dream, to enjoy TV shows with guns, to have sex without worrying that someone could hear her. She taught me... well. Next to nothing. I was never a good student.

I loved her. I really loved her, and now she’s in the ground. She hated the dress they buried her in but I didn’t say anything because her mother gave it to her. She would have been so pissed with me, but I figured, what’s one more secret? It’s not the big one.

The big one? It’s glaringly obvious to everyone in her life, but that doesn’t mean you can say it aloud.

I don’t think she loved me. I don’t think she could have and I guess I hated her for it. But I loved her.

Don’t tell anyone.

Pep Talk.

I'm back. For reals. I hate winter now, it freezes parts of my personality. My blogging gland goes into hibernation. I've developed this unpleasant artistic temperament; I can't write if my hands are cold.

There's music again. I am obsessed with The Jane Austen Argument. Here's them with AFP:

They kinda break your heart and put it together so it looks like something weird and wonderful in a Victorian freakshow. Here's what's currently my favourite song from their album:

My life resembles an independent film about contemporary Britain more than real life. I would prefer it to resemble a Pierre et Gilles portrait but I really don't wear anything that's not monochrome or the colour of river sludge.

I'm reading:

Volpone, Ben Jonson
Darling, Jackie Kay

also slivers of Margaret Atwood's poetry (who knew?) and Neil Gaiman's short stories.

There's a character I'm struggling to write in my book. I know her well, perhaps too well. The bones of her are my ex, The Bitch. Being her boyfriend became a full time job that should have come with danger pay but just came with danger. It was fantastic. Onto this skeleton I have grafted parts of various fictional girls I've been in love with over the years;

Effie Stonem, (Skins)
Faith Lehane (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Eponine Thernardier (Les Miserables)
Kitty Jones (The Bartimaeus Trilogy).

These are the girls I fall for; dark haired and pale, volatile, manipulative and intelligent. Girls who make you crawl over broken glass for their love and express it by punching you in the face.

 In only tangenitally related news I am single again, and I plan to stay that way for a while.

But this character... I don't know what she's doing. She's running away from me. Pin her down and she clams up. I have made a playlist, heavy on Marina and the Diamonds, with a healthy helping of AFP and Angus and Julia Stone. She will have to be coaxed, this one. Story better be worth it.

Jamming

(I wrote this a few months back and haven't revisited it since. Such huge things have happened in the intervening moments.)

I must have been seven the year the brambles first grew in our garden. They came on the wind perhaps or more likely borne in the stomach of some small animal. In any case they grew thick and strong, straddling the fence between our garden and the next. A lesser man would have cut them down, but my father saw opportunity. That August we went picking, and I braved the thorns to pluck out the shiny blackberries. Children are little obsessives; no blackberry was fit for picking unless each and every corpuscle was iridescent, beetle black, sweet as anything.

My mother made crumbles with the earliest of these blackberries and in our cunning my father and I gave her only those berries which had smuggled their sour pinkish globules past my eyes. The crumbles were tart; we had to eat them with cream. The choicest morsels however were saved for our jamming.

The temperature of hot jam is 220 Fahrenheit, the volume of jam we made enormous. My mother was allowed, at least, to print the labels but we barred her from the kitchen. The jamming was our miracle, to be treated with a kind of masculine reverence. It was a world into which she could not enter.

 My father and I stewed the blackberries in sugar and water, sieved to remove the seeds and added some store-bought pectin. We followed an old recipe in a Mrs Beeton style book that looked for all the world like the grimoire of a bent hedgewitch. And indeed the seedless jam on the stove looked much like a potion. It frothed a deep purple flecked with white foam, and dragging the spoon through the mixture it glistened. I stood on a stepladder armed with a wooden spoon to stop it burning. It felt, I said, “like stirring liquid velvet,”

There must have been a poem there. A lost opportunity.

There was a kind of alchemy that went on, not just in the saucepan with its magical contents. There was a kind of accord between the two of us. Knowledge passed on, time shared. Memories built. This is how I remember it. I also remember the sun streaming as if someone had tinted the kitchen windows sepia, and though the August light was yellow and warm I must remember that nostalgia cares more for preserving feelings than facts. Perhaps all we were doing was making jam.

In my mind this is how I remember my father. Cap on, peering intently into the gently steaming depths of a jam pan. There are other memories of course, most tied up with taste- the sickly cider ice lollies he’d buy me at the park in the days when they all cost 99p or the peanut cookies only he liked, proudly presented on Fathers’ Day. Did he know what memories he was giving me, to horde in our endless fight against the future? No. He couldn’t have done. Still he gave them too me, and during the years where we ripped each other to shreds with our silences I would take out these memories, like postcards from another life. I looked, I felt, I remembered.

I don’t make jam any more but I still cook. I still listen to the songs he used to play- Tina Turner and Janis Joplin and Otis Reading, the records kept carefully in red leather boxes.  I still remember a time when that house was full of music. I remember. Reluctantly, compulsively, angrily, I remember.

It’s the least I can do.

October has never happened quite this fast before. I was going to keep procrastinating but a lady asked, so;

We the Audience

There is a village in some hot place

It doesn’t matter where

It looks like paradise

It looks like fuck all has happened there

since the beginning of time

Sorry

I meant to say

it looked like paradise

It looked something

like paradise

I looked at it

You probably would have said

you’d seen paradise

But in this village

there’s a family

A mother, a father, too many kids

and they’re poor

But they’re poor in that way

that makes it charming, because

the nut brown natives don’t want

or need IPods

So it’s okay. Being poor.

It’s okay being poor if you’re in paradise.

And it doesn’t matter anyway

because there is no village, no family

they’re just a way

we try to empathise. To say we, the audience

understand

Did you know the Holocaust wasn’t real?

It doesn’t feel real to me

I don’t know

what it’s like to stew in my own faeces

to have leprosy or typhoid

or die screaming naked with corroded skin

and Prussian blue gas slipping in

Slipping in and twisting

Slipping IN IN IN IN IN

and efficient boots outside

and gasping! pleading!

God! No! Please, God! Fuck no!

I don’t see how that can be real.

But it’s still…

sad

It’s still a tragedy

like Hamlet or Macbeth

or something where people die

and we learn lessons like

“Never, ever again” (except in Darfur)

We, the audience, learn these lessons

and we take them (yes, we, the audience)

to better ourselves

We get taught these allegories

in school

And Jews and fags and darkies suffocated

and that’s okay

because they’re only stories

For us.

for readers of serious books

For you, and me

and we, the audience, we do empathise

we find the parallels with our own lives

the human spirit, residing in us all, and

we learn these sacred truths

from God, from life, from the Disney Channel

Sorry

I lied. It looked like paradise

to me too.