Thirst

Wet snow drips misery from the rooftops.  
I shouldn't have had that last bottle of beer.
Or the dozen before it. Or that shot of tequila – 
I guess that was not such a brilliant idea.
 
But last night, I was thirsty for beer and adventure
and a glint in your eye told me you were too.
So the drinks had no bottom, and the clock had no meaning,
'til the sky started turning a lighter blue.
 
You bought the first round at the bar of the venue,
a scene we've rehearsed on many a day.
Cold beer in the dark, heartbeat soaring with drumbeat,
and on stage someone sings what we never could say.
 
We picked up more drinks on the way to the party.
It was somebody's birthday, with cake and a grill.
Someone brought out tequila. Someone brought out a camera.
In the pictures you smile as only you will.
 
Early this morning I woke up on your sofa 
and snuck out of the house while you were asleep.
Maybe the next time we meet I will tell you
that it's for you that my thirst runs so deep.
Berlin, January 2013
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Only the Committed Drink on Tuesdays

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“Boss,the guy at the bar is making trouble.”

I looked up from the roster. Dario nodded towards the white-haired, red-faced man leaning on the bar with one elbow, clutching his wine glass. The man glanced erratically around the room then unsteadily focused on Manuela behind the bar. She had moved to the far corner by the coffee machine and was stiffly staring ahead. Her hands kept polishing the rim of a wine glass, round and round, and her eyes seemed shiny.

I sighed and got up. He owned a clothes shop in the neighbourhood, a confusion of colourful velvet, beads and mirrors. If it weren’t right on the main tourist thoroughfare, he would have been bust long ago. As it was, it still seemed to support his drinking habit. He seemed worse than usual tonight. Continue reading

How to edit: Rick Moody’s ‘Guide to Revision’

Even in our days of the internet, when almost everything can be found and traced online, there are still some things that are handed on, from person to person. In a creative writing course a few years ago, I received a copy of author Rick Moody‘s ‘Guide to Revision’. It is a very helpful essay, detailing twelve useful steps to improving one’s writing. The document itself seems rather quaint: there are no publication details, but rather a PO Box address for the author, and any source I could find on the internet seems to provide copies of the same, home-typed document. Here it is again, and thank you, Mr Moody: Rick Moody ‘A Guide to Revision’

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The Cooking Species (book review)

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I just finished a book I had been meaning to read for a long time: Richard Wrangham’s Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. For anyone involved in studying food, this catchy title is irresistible. Cooking made us human? That validates our entire field of interest! This is particularly attractive because the preoccupation with food, even at a professional, scholarly level, is often considered at best to be a nice hobby, at worst a vain, superficial interest for a frivolous topic. As if the study of food was limited to the private appreciation of decadent luxuries such as white truffle or expensive wines. As if the study of food was not dealing with an absolute essential, with something that structures our entire lives from social relationships and physical surroundings to our time. Continue reading

A thought by Carl Sagan

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Happy #bookloversday everybody!

Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was a US-American astronomer, astrophysicist and author. One of his many awards and donors was the Pulitzer Prize for his book Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence and Emmys for his television work. If such an accomplished scientist and scholar of human intelligence calls something magic, it’s about as serious a compliment as you can get!

A thought by Allen Ginsberg

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Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the counterculture of the 1960s. His poems often mix impressions from his life as a Jewish, homosexual intellectual in modern mid-century USA with Eastern mysticism and literary references.

In his prose poem “A Supermarket in California”, he places two famous poets, American Walt Whitman and Spanish surrealist Federico García Lorca, alongside himself in the very mundane setting of a contemporary (1950s) supermarket with its neon lights, stacks of cans, frozen foods and shopping families. It is Walt Whitman that he references most in the poem, not just by name, but by the very form, tone and content of the piece. Continue reading

A thought by Gillian Slovo

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I heard Gillian Slovo, the South African-born author, last Saturday at the International Literature Festival Dublin 2017. She was talking, along with fellow writer Danielle McLaughlin, to author and psychotherapist Susie Orbach, on the topic of Why We Write. Orbach was fantastic in gently teasing out subtexts and hidden corners of thoughts – it felt more like being privy to an intimate conversation than listening to a panel discussion where, in the worst cases, the same old clichés are being rehearsed.

The questions of why we write, and how we write, fascinate me. Continue reading

A thought by Truman Capote

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Truman Capote (1924-1984) knew a few things about literature, and about gossip. He did not study literature after secondary school, but he was writing every day since he was eleven years old, eventually publishing short stories, novels, plays and screenplays. He broke ground for a new genre, too – the real-life crime story. His book In Cold Blood (1965), about the murder of a family of four in Kansas, is usually called a nonfiction novel, which Capote researched for six years, travelling to the small farming community where the murders had taken place and later to the prison where the murderers were held before their execution. Continue reading

A thought by A.A. Milne

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Alan Alexander Milne (1882-1956) is mostly remembered today because of a children’s book. He created Winnie-the-Pooh, the loveable bumbling teddy bear and his friends, putting his little son Christopher Robin as a character into the stories. But Milne wrote many more things – plays, poems, novels and newspaper columns. Continue reading

A thought by Oscar Wilde

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Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), the Irish playwright, novelist, essayist and poet, enjoyed the good life. He subscribed to the philosophy of aestheticism, of art for art’s sake and for providing refined sensuous pleasures. Living in London, he moved in fashionable social and cultural circles, and this is the world that is reflected in much of his writing, where characters meet in drawing rooms and at garden parties, and amuse themselves with witty banter and, again and again, food and drink. The humour of their dialogue is proof of Wilde’s great talent for wit – he was exceptionally talented at distilling sharp observations about people and about life into brilliant one-liners. His twitter account would have been legendary.