tottenham

1.

tottenham hale retail park. black guy on a bicycle outside the pound shop playing music out of handle bar speakers. fountayne road, with the redbrown brick victorian warehouses and imperial works, car workshops and stacks of wood. markfield park, down onto the river lea, past the concrete skate park and the beam engine museum, open every second sunday, elaborate victorain machinery painted like steam fairground rides. the sky is that english grey, just looking at it makes you feel cold and the barges seem flattened against the landscape like a stage set. heading south down towards hackney marshes and there’s riverside council estates, a central courtyard full of kids riding in circles on bmx bikes with hoods up against the drizzle. pistachio café with kid’s section – sign reads ‘these toys are not for playing with’ like some kind of challenge and the bulletin board advertises personal training from an aerial circus performer called daniel. We get down the river as far as stamford hill, a private estate and a man on the phone in a parked  a van advertising 'your local hiemliche greengrocer’. exploration is still possible even in the city where I was born.

2.

markfield park on a sunny day. kids walking along the broken walls of the original sewage plant that closed in 1865, dumping all the effulent into the river lea and killing 4000 people in tottenham and the east end. a little path leads up into the wild hedges that border the train track, someone has carved out a space, the edge of a sleeping bag. dark green, red and gold. orthodox teenage girls pushing buggies, one in the front and one in the back, speaking yiddish. The original sewage plant was staffed with east end jewish workers, a white racist put up a poster outside: no englishmen need apply. tottenham conservation society leaflets in the café, conserving what? a history built on human waste. children playing in the ruins of the sewage plant, low walls that now seem beautiful, like a long lost medieval church with sloping banks – what’s beneath them? like the soft mounds of plague pits but filled with what? a cargo train rocks past, rusted brown with open containers. smoke from the river boats floating above the lea, a dark narrowboat passes with dogs on deck at each end, her name is nosferatu. 

Poem for a suspended student

'rusticated' by Cambridge University Court for 2 1/2 years for disrupting a talk by David Willetts. He read a poem aloud with many other protestors.



You have violated freedom of speech in this university
by speaking
out of turn.

You should have been listening.
And
possibly asked some questions
(but not too many).

What you have to understand is
that we could have destroyed him
with our well-thought-out questions.
We could have forced a u-turn
of government policy
with our pre-planned questions
we could have shaken Whitehall
with our stinging questions
echoing down the corridors of power!

But you just had to go and ruin it
with your ‘speech’
that wasn’t even a ‘speech’
just some kind of
‘poem’
spoken out of turn.

Speaking out of line
will not be tolerated.
That’s not how we do things here!
Holding freedom of speech
close to our hearts.

It’s almost as though you have some kind of vendetta
against our thoroughly-considered questions.
Almost as though you think
they wouldn’t have been enough
that we couldn’t force a u-turn
by putting up our hands
and waiting to be called on.

that we all might have gone home afterwards
feeling smug
and left it at that.

Have we taught you nothing at all?

We hope you take the next two and half years
to think carefully about what you’ve done.
We expect you to take into account
our thoughts on your
‘poem’
and how it violated freedom of speech
and ruined it
for everyone sitting quietly.

We hope
in the future
you will raise your hand and
wait to be called on
like the rest of us.



......................................................................................................

Read more about this:

Guardian

Cambridge Defend Education

How to support this student:

If you are a Cambridge student, you can sign this petition.

If you are in Cambridge you can go to this protest.

If you are anyone else, you can sign this petition.

the map is not the territory

I should have guessed:
the map is not the territory -
what can't be known must be felt,
must be lived in vivid shades.

but what of this darkness?
it must be faced blind and
raw as a red baby, it must
be touched by skinned hands
and mortal years.

do all of us go by the same road?
for all our armour, do we sleep
with equal innocence, and fight
for our small corners
with the same animal surety?

pain travels under so many names:
a universal unknowable - it
cannot be borne, cannot be
translated, carried each to each,
across all those human borders.

preda tory years

I found a notebook from my second year of university. I went through all the notes I'd made and scrawled over in angry pencil marks.Here are some lines I found.

.......................
Stand back. 
I don’t want your 
blood on my hands
.………….
I don't sleep for fear
I will wake too soon
............ 
I shall fight a war for independence &
my weapons shall be words
.................
Cards down. Lights out. 
All in.
Darlin'.
............
On the coldest night of my life
we woke up to find
England, dressed in white
...............
In times to come we will laugh about all this.
No defeat is so final that we cannot rebuild.
You said you feel like a post-war city, 
grey, all weakness burned away.

'a real human being and a real hero'

one amongst us is missing.

one amongst us has left his clothes on the shore.

one amongst us is absent in our laughter,

one less shadow like a slow disaster

one less voice leaves us briefly silent;

deaf after the explosion

numb after the exposure

five senses and a loss

of one shade in the spectrum.

one amongst us has left his boots at the door,

and taken naked barefoot to that wild.

the first poem i've written since moving back to london.

I feel life starting like waves crashing on the shore in recurring dreams

east end streets crowded in the evenings with the energy of elsewhere

ramadan passing outside barber shops and boys who are all talk on the corner

offer me drugs on saturday night after work. now I finally understand the weekend,

I suppose this is adulthood. well, didn’t it just slip in through the back door?

not far between cambridge and cambridge heath but don’t the nights smell different,

with the rain falling on cable street the day after blackshirts in wifebeaters

tried their luck a second time. the words don’t come easily to me like they did -

that’s a kind of innocence, I traded it for that easy confidence you buy with

weekly essays and white stones. circling back to the place I was born I find it foreign,

circling back to the old words I find they’re coming unbidden like sickness or passion

they pass just as fast. walking the ditches and fields of the city like ley lines that might lead

to some essential truth, brushing cold shoulders with the suits that seem unburdened

by the history lying grave deep beneath us, I remember we promised to live on for

those we left in the earth, to feel life crashing like the waves, retreating only to return.

Winter's Bone

It's been a while. Here's a review I wrote earlier in the year for Varsity. I find it more exciting to review films that I love. And I really loved Winter's Bone. I gave it 5 stars.




Ree Dolly is teaching her little brother to skin a squirrel. Pulling out the guts and innards, he looks up at his sister and asks, ‘Do we eat these?’ She pauses. ‘Not yet.’ It is a rare moment of dark humour in the otherwise heart-breaking Winter’s Bone.

Set deep in the backcountry of rural Missouri, this exquisite film is a devastating portrait of a forgotten America plagued by poverty and running on a black market of crystal meth.

Ree’s father Jessop is a meth ‘cook’, recently arrested and now missing. Jessop has put up the family’s house and surrounding wood-land as collateral for his bail and Ree must find him before it is seized and her mentally-ill mother and two young siblings are thrown out to ‘live like dogs in the field’. She embarks on a journey that takes her deeper into the harsh landscape of the Ozark mountains and its cattle markets, hill-billy bars, burnt-out meth labs and bare frozen forests. Her determination and fortitude against mafia-like silence and startling violence eventually lead her to the darkest depths of her community in the film’s genuinely shocking climax.

Ree Dolly is played with extraordinary skill by twenty-year-old Jennifer Lawrence, who has even been tipped for an Oscar for her performance. Ree’s raw strength and resolute spirit makes her perhaps one of the most arresting female characters in recent American film.

Winter’s Bone has already received widespread critical acclaim, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. I can only add my voice to the chorus of praise. This is an unforgettably haunting film and, despite all its bleakness, contains moments of incredible beauty. The final shots of Ree with her younger brother and sister echo Dorothea Lange’s famous portrait of a migrant woman and her children in the Dust Bowl.

Winter’s Bone is finally a story of survival and dignity in the face of poverty and struggle. Like Lange’s photographs, it belongs to a poignant tradition of alternative histories of the United States and is a testament to the indomitable strength of the human spirit.

................

Leave No Trace - Short Story

In case you've been living in a cupboard under the stairs for the last few years you've probably realised that vampires are pretty popular. Now, I liked vampires before they were cool. I was into vampires when Buffy was on BBC 2 at 6.45pm after school. I had a poster of Spike on my wall. I was a teenage goth. Aside from a few worthy exceptions (like this and this) vampires these days seem sterile. They are all good looks and no substance. We seem to have forgotten the very sinister fact that vampires are actually dead bodies walking among us with the potential to maim and kill. I think we need to put some of the threat back into these creatures. With that in my mind I wrote this short story. It's called, 'Leave No Trace'.

Leave No Trace

He is on the floor spitting blood like a dog that has been kicked in the mouth. They are all like this at first. It lasts a long time. With the right attention, the right training, the process might be quicker. But as far as he is concerned he is alone. My presence in this room is of no consequence. I am one of the many lengthening shadows of this summer evening.

I wonder how old he was. It is hard for me to tell anymore, there is so little difference between the young ones.

He is dying.

It takes much longer than you might imagine.

Usually it is different. On any other day his body would have been dry and in pieces by this time.

That is what they always get so wrong in all those books, all those moving pictures. How strange an idea it is that we would ever leave a body behind, when the blood is only the first step. The blood is a rush, a clamouring in the ears, like a plunge into dark water from a great height. It is almost terrible, almost sickening, almost unbearable. But it dries up fast and then the real work starts. The flesh and the organs and finally the bone marrow. The real energy. The substances we need to continue.

A true kill is a rare thing. A single body can last us a long time.

Imagine the panic if it was not so. If the gutters were filled with corpses come each morning. Even the thought is ludicrous. Perhaps such ideas are easier to accept than the truth. The truth is not so romantic. Not the pale master half-bent over a languishing bed but the pure animal fact. Like the hunter of any other species we consume in entirety, leaving nothing to waste.

That is not to say that we are uncivilised, that we go without any ritual at all. Ours is also an existence bound by law.

By the one rule obeyed above all. Leave No Trace.

Gender Agenda

A little post to mark my birthday. I recently had some poems published in Gender Agenda , a fantastic feminist magazine and blog. I wanted to write something positive about female sexuality, and even promiscuity. I came up with this.

sitting in a room opposite a man I slept with but

our bodies are not what they were.

we have new nails, new hair, new skin.

our bodies existing only in the present

have no memory of the act,

they do not retain, but flow

never the same twice again

sure only of moments in their moment:

nothing of us recalls the other.

we are free.

James Ellroy

Anyone who knows me well will know how much I love crime fiction. So imagine how excited I was when earlier in the year I interviewed James Ellroy, author of L.A Confidential and The Black Dahlia. Between you and me he didn't come across as the nicest man and insisted on telling me all about his faith in the Pax America and Israel and the United States defending the world against the 'barbarians'. For more information on how that is not a good thing check this out . I think he was just trying to get a rise out of a young blonde girl. Anyway, here's the interview, first published in Varsity.



The first thing James Ellroy asks me is, "Have you read my book? Do you hate me yet?"

It’s hard to say.

Known for his bestsellers L.A Confidential and The Black Dahlia, Ellroy has been called "the demon dog of America crime fiction". His latest autobiographical work, The Hilliker Curse, takes as its starting point the events leading up to his mother’s murder in 1958. Ellroy issued the curse of the title when he wished his mother dead during an argument three months before she was killed. Her murderer was never found and he has been haunted by guilt ever since.

As a young man Ellroy turned to drugs, drink and petty crime, breaking into women’s houses in his native Los Angeles and stealing their underwear. It was not until he was in his thirties, sober and working as a golf-caddy that he wrote his first novel Brown’s Requiem. His work often returns to 1950s and 60s Los Angeles at the height of noir. He tells me his male protagonists are "men who want things and who become so utterly exhausted with their own essential maleness that they are only teachable by women. And I’ve been that way my entire life."

The Hilliker Curse is a departure from fiction and a companion piece to Ellroy’s 1995 memoir My Dark Places, which details his inconclusive attempt, with the help of a detective, to solve his mother’s murder. It was written following the dissolution of his marriage and a nervous breakdown.

Realising that he and his mother "comprised a love story rather than a crime story," he saw at last that the "‘primary journey’ of his life had been women."

Ellroy has been a life-long, self-proclaimed obsessive pursuer of women. He claims that the new book attempts to grant each of the major women in his life a "separate and distinct selfhood, whilst acknowledging that this drive has rendered all of them a blur," adding, "There are faces that I can recall of women glimpsed in train stations fifty years ago who I think of on a daily basis."

Is The Hilliker Curse really about women at all? It reads more like an exploration of Ellroy’s own psyche. He admits that this might be the case, telling me, "It’s about the notion in the abstract of formative trauma as progenitor of sexuality and romantic ardour. I am formed in trauma."

Don’t read The Hilliker Curse looking for a love story: more than a romance, it is a dark and disturbing chronicle of one man’s fixation.