Current Playlist in no particular order;

1. Don't Deny Your Heart - Hot Chip
2. The Time is Now - Moloko
3. Shadowplay - Joy Division
4. Under the Westway - Blur
5. Drive - Incubus
6. Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains) - Arcade Fire
7. Higher and Higher - The Blackout
8. What the Water Gave Me - Florence and the Machine
9. A&E - Goldfrapp
10. How We Operate - Gomez
11. I Feel Better - Hot Chip
12. She's Lost Control - Joy Division
13. P.E.T.R.O.L - Orbital
14. I'll Haunt You - Seth Lakeman
15. Chocolate - Snow Patrol
16. Graceland - Paul Simon
17. Thank You - Led Zeppelin
18. Life in a Northern Town - Dream Academy
19. Aint no Love in the Heart of the City - Whitesnake
20. It's No Good - Depeche Mode

Current reading

Right now I am reading a novel by Padrika tarrant called "The Knife Drawer."  Tarrant gave a reading from the novel at Cafe Writers in Norwich last year and it made me go out and buy the book. I won't give too much away about it here as I have been asked to write a review of it for Peony Moon, but I will say that it is dark, disturbing, riveting and quite unlike any other novel I have read - I would highly recommend it, you will never view mice or cutlery in quite the same way again.

Holiday Reads

Holidays are a good time for reading and so far this holiday I have read two novels and I am now half way through a third one. The first two were crime novels - Kathy Reichs and Ian Rankin - relatively easy reads. The book that I am reading now is the surprise hit though. It is called "The History of Love" and is by Nicole Krauss. It was a spur of the moment purchase at the local charity shop just a few days before we came away. I was desperate for books that I could take away and leave behind once I had finished. This is a book I might take home again though - it is an original story and beautifully written.  It is a joy when one comes across a treasure like this by chance. The story is too complicated to explain here and I wouldn´t do it justice as there are several plot threads and the story is complex but if you are interested then you can look inside here

A non-literary post about notebooks and writing

On hearing that the new copy of The Rialto would be hitting my doormat any day I now, I decided that maybe it was time I finished reading the last copy. I tend to dip in and out of journals and sometimes they end up sitting in a pile somewhere for a while before I read them properly. In his editorial introduction to Rialto 71 Michael Mackmin describes how he has piles of notebooks dotted around his house. Me too I was shouting (in my head of course!). 
I am a compulsive buyer and hoarder of notebooks - I have little heaps waiting to be used. I am fickle with them too - I don't just use one notebook at a time. I have one A4 on the go, which is where I try and write my morning pages and then I have two or three smaller ones of differing sizes that I take out with me. I go for nice covers these days (I'm sure notebooks were plainer when I was younger) - but I don't like them too pretty or girly or with things stuck on.  My current favourites have some kind of groovy retro owl print on their covers.  If there was ever some kind of disaster I would have enough notebooks to keep me going for ages; and there is no way they would get used as toilet paper either: take the novels first!  It strikes me as odd that they never have a character obsessively writing in a notebook in post-apocalyptic dramas like Survivors. I would be scribbling away in the corner every chance I got.  
I have always written - I wrote as a child, I obsessively wrote (bad) poetry through my teens, in my twenties I wrote a collection of short stories and more (bad) poetry. I have written on hillsides in Devon, in pubs and cafes, in other people's houses, in cars and on trains, in communes, in bed, in Scotland, Cornwall, Wales, Italy, France and Greece.  For me it hasn't been about the audience - although now I finally am getting one that's nice too - I would write whether I had one or not, hence all the notebooks, I am a writer through and through.http://www.therialto.co.uk/pages/

the ego and creativity

I have been thinking a lot about art and creativity. Eckhart Tolle talks a lot about the human ego and how the ego makes us behave in negative ways but I have found myself wondering what would happen to our creativity if we lost the ego. Isn't it the ego that drives us to be creative - to produce, art, theatre, music etc? Obviously some of the arts are more ego-led than others and similarly some artists make their egos the sole focus of their work (Tacey Emin is an example that springs to mind and Antony Gormley). But would we still have the drive to create if we were ego-less, existing only in the present moment?

What I'm Listening to Right Now...

So I haven't blogged here for a bit and thought it might be time for a top ten tracks of the moment. My listening style seems to be somewhat erratic at the moment which is not necessarily a bad thing. so here goes - ten track and in no particular preferential order:

1) You Overdid it Doll - The Courteeners
2) Naive - The Kooks
3) Tenderoni - Kele
4) Crossfire - Brandon Flowers
5) Papillon - The Editors
6) Death - White Lies
7) Ghosts - The Lightning Seeds
8) King and Country - Seth Lakeman
9) Another Nail in my Heart - Squeeze
10) Radioactive - The Kings of Leon

Change and Evolve

I was watching Mary Queen of Shops tonight, and what became evident to me at about seven minutes into the programme was, that to survive we need to evolve. This rule especially applies to business - the woman that Mary was trying to help was especially resistant to change and because she wasn't allowing her business to change and evolve with the times her business was going down the pan. But this rule can be applied to most things. Even in poetry and art one needs to change and evolve otherwise the work becomes boring and stagnant.