Friends, literature, getting out of my depth, art, cinema, philosophy, looking out of the window, comedy, swimming, yoga, cats, rabbits, exquisite food, travelling (including travelling around my room), mindless consumerism ...
I'd like to meet:
I'd Like to Meet:
God, to get an idea as to what all this is about! And Borges, Walt Whitman, David Lynch or people who'd like to meet Borges, Walt Whitman, David Lynch.
This is the Borges's tree we did at the House of Fairy Tales, Port Eliot Lit Fest, July 07
Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys
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I received a message yesterday from Sandragone, while I was having a pint of Stella Artois. He said
he was really interested in Borges. When I got up this morning, I looked in the mirror and I had become this weird morph of Borges and me. Unsettling as I find it, I must say there are worse things in life.
THE SIDE-EFFECTS OF READING, 14th December 07
Image from my story 'A retinal tattoo of light':
A millisecond divides life from death. Or is it an attosecond? Or a femtosecond? The beheaded lose consciousness in two seconds, if the blade cuts through the neck in one go. The brain has enough oxygen stored for metabolism to persist for seven seconds after the head is cut off: the eyes flicker, the mouth might still move. On the 16th November 1880 , Edhard Gustav Reif was decapitated in Heidelberg. His wife had died and he had killed his two sons, perhaps an act of desperation. If the future didn’t exist for him, it didn’t exist for his children either. (...)
in The Shutter of Death by Derek Ogbourne
This is my husband
Music:
Film soundtracks, Bernard Herrmann, Bjork, Ella Fitzgerald, Ennio Morricone, Ry Cooder, the verve, Mano Negra,Patti Smith, Suzanne Vega, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Eric Satie, The Doors, The Shadows, Hot Chilly Peppers, Sonic Youth, etc, etc.
Movies:
Wings of Desire, Lola Run Lola, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Taxi Driver, Wizard of Oz, Brazil, Dogville, Dancing in the Dark, Withnail and I, Vertigo, A Matter of Life and Death, Un Chien Andalou, Blue Velvet, Solaris, Night on Earth, What Have I Done to Deserve This, The Life of Brian, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ...
Television:
Sophie Calle, Derek Ogbourne and Cindy Sherman. Also, Green Wing, South Park, The Simpsons, Have I Got News for You, Jon Snow: Channel 4 News, documentaries, those by Jonathan Meades ...
Books:
Every book is an encounter. Like all encounters, timing, predisposition and a certain openness are prerequisites for the encounter to succeed. Different writers have left a trace or made an impact at different times in my life. These are, I would say, the main traces or impacts, so far:Borges, J.G Ballard, Marguerite Duras, Angela Carter, Kathy Acker, Deborah Levy, Beckett, Paul Auster, Walt Whitman, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortazar, Fernando Pessoa, Peter Handke, Octavio Paz, Jean Baudrillard, Iain Sinclair ... And then, there are so many other worlds I have enjoyed.
And then there is Dante (Inferno and Purgatory are the first surreal masterpieces, amazing images and metaphors), Swift (I love Tale of a Tub and Gulliver's Travels), Cervantes (Don Quixote is an old friend), William Burroughs (for a reality check), Sylvia Plath, Roland Barthes, Stanislav Lem, Plotinus, Kafka, Juan Goytisolo, George Orwell, Mary Gaistkill, Yasunari Kawabata, Milan Kundera, Rafa Reig, Will Self and sometimes, Don Delillo, Cees Nooteboom, Michel Houellebecq ...
And then, I'd like to read, when I have the time:
James Flint, Tom McCarthy, Paul Ewen, Hari Kunzru and more of Toby Litt.
Heroes:
No heroes, no heroines ... Maybe Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Derek Ogbourne and Pippi Langstrumpf, my childhood heroine.
