this doesn't mean i'm coming back to blogging

though part of me thinks I rather ought. No, I've just been on a huge e.e.cummings binge lately - what is it about the lower case that makes everything feel rushed out and desperate and sincere? - which was the kind of thing I'd have talked about here if I hadn't gotten out of the habit. Summer's the exact right time to pick old hobbies up again, though, isn't it? too much free time.

ANYWAY, in the midst of my big cummings rediscovery (and while I'm meant be reading All The Evelyn Waugh Novels Ever, so way to get distracted, self), he got quoted on the current highlight of my televisual week, BBC2's 'The Hour', which is beautifully shot, full of lovely performances and seems to get better every week, after a slightly unconvincing opening episode. The three leads are all fantastic but Julian Rhind-Tutt is sort of stealing the show a bit by being a perfect creeper - and to think that he was one of the great, charming loves of my mid-teens! That's the magic of acting. Apparently I'm supposed to find all the characters very annoying but I somehow don't? It's odd, and terribly subjective, but I do occasionally have the HUGEST love of characters who are slightly pompous/pretentious/dickish/unloveable/whatever, and sometimes absolutely no patience with them at all. Perhaps it's just because I really do think Ben Whishaw is one of the best actors of his generation, but I find Freddie more endearing with each episode - it's the father relationship and the small house and the fact that he's just a snapping working-class terrier underneath all that seeming self-confidence, I don't know, I like that kind of thing. And yet, on the flipside, I have vague memories of being totally unable to finish Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Line of Beauty' because all the characters were SO unsympathetic and insufferable, so it's not like I just bloody love bastards.

As a side-note, I just had a massive brain short-out and forgot both the title and author of that book (I haven't been sleeping well lately, give me a break), but managed to successfully locate it by googling, "novel 80s thatcher booker gay". Which gives you both an insight into my brain - couldn't remember the title or author, but DID recall that it won the Booker, what - and a very condensed insight into the plot, if you haven't read it. Also might suggest that I'm just dreadfully unsympathetic to Fictional Tories, as opposed to Fictional Bastards more generally, but then who knows.

None of this is what I came here to say. Here's the e.e. cummings that got quoted on 'The Hour', because why not:

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

admit that the waters around you have grown.

Well, I hope everybody had a good Valentine's weekend? Slash chinese new year, slash any other holiday I've forgotten, etc. Mine was generally lots of fun, but distinctly odd.

For the first part of it, I went to stay with my best friend, who lives in London, and we had a lovely couple of days of milling about in the capital, which we filled mainly with drinking, comedy and excellent Japanese food. Joy! The always-excellent Karaoke Circus was a particular highlight; I'm never normally a fan of karaoke, but I love every inch of this charming and rambunctious bi-monthly evening, and cannot recommend it enough. Love Will Tear Us Apart (as performed by Robin Ince, with some Smiths lyrics thrown in for good measure partway through, because, as Judge Dan pointed out, Joy Division clearly aren't depressing enough alone) and Two Princes (from Thom Tuck, one third of the Penny Dreadfuls) were perhaps my favourites of the night. Absolutely class.

Got back up to Liverpool in time to be thoroughly puzzled by the state of our kitchen, which took up a lot of my time/energy yesterday. Two of the ten people in our flat are international students from China, and one of them had a gigantic party for new years, which is all very well and good, and we ate dinner at the pub round the corner so we wouldn't have to get in their way trying to cook (the kitchen's our only communal space), which is a whole other story in itself, probably. Still: less cool the next day when nobody cleared anything up, including the vomit on the other corrior's bathroom floor. HMM. A party's a party, but my god, this was something else! There was food everywhere, there were stains over all the worksurfaces, cigarette butts and seeds all over the floor, which itself had been stained black somehow (??), a fish head in a bowl on the windowsill and some very odd smells coming from the bin. So me & two flatmates spent an interesting half-hour or so mopping/sponging/spraying etc, because otherwise we wouldn't have been able to eat in there. An unusual way to spend the afternoon of Valentine's Day, but we're all single anyway so none of us particularly minded, and in the evening I made a jolly good bean & vegetable stew to celebrate.

Valentine's Day's causes a lot of discomfort to a lot of single people, but I'm quite lucky in having several close friends up here who are also, as I said, also single, and we plumped for a terribly wholesome night, not of getting drunk & weepy, but rather of popcorn and Casablanca. It was lovely. Valentine's Day is, if nothing else, a perfect excuse to watch good films with good people.

So that's my incredibly shallow thoughts on the day of love, and now on to this week's piece of writing! I realised today that I have literally never posted anything up here by a female writer - and frankly, what the hell is that about? It just won't do. So have a poem I'm rather in love with by an excellent American writer.

Intensive Care
by Heather McHugh

As if intensity were a virtue we say
good and. Good and drunk. Good and dead.
What plural means is as everything
that multiplying greatens, as if two
were more like ninetynine than one,
or one were more like zero than
like anything. As if
you loved me, you will leave me.

You (are the man who) made
roadmaps to the ovaries
upon his dinner napkin.
I(‘m the woman who) always forgot
where she was— in a state,
in a sentence. Absently stirring
my alphabet soup, I remember
childhood’s clean white calendar
and blueprint of the heart.

As if friends were to be saved
we are friends. We talk to ourselves,
go home at the same time.
As if beds were to be made
not born in, as if love
were just heredity
we know the worst, we fear
the unknown. Today we were bad
and together; tonight
we’ll be good and alone.

The last stanza, and the closing lines in particular, give me chills everytime.