A Man Made of Water - Will Burns (2012)

In the afternoon my father
and I went from the hospital
straight to my grandfather’s
house. We took off our coats,
and sat down and I made coffee.
My grandfather muted
the television and asked how
his wife was.
She is the same, Dad.
* * *
We sat together for the first
time that I could remember –
just us, the three men.
* * *
On the morning that he died,
it began to rain from almost
the exact moment that my father
called to tell me. And although
this would have been
too sentimental for Grandpa’s
tastes, I was glad for a man,
who more than any of us,
was made of the water.

Will Burns, retirado daqui.

Lamb - Wise Enough

CCTV Central Control - Tom Warner

Eight-hour shifts on rolling nights wouldn’t suit some

– people with kids and a wife – but the money’s okay

and I’m my own boss, in a way, or at least it feels like that

when I pan across girls stamping their feet in the taxi rank,

 

zoom in on men squaring up in the street between bars,

or watch a woman sat against the glass of the Turkish Kebab,

head lolling between her bare knees, all her long hair

covering her face. They never look into the camera.

 

The Eye in the Sky, that’s the game I play in my head,

but this job takes serious discretion: Outside of work,

you must never discuss what you see on your screens.

I switch between twenty; the others work ten at the most.

 

Some stick it out for a year or so, then leave or get asked to go.

Darren I know fell asleep on the job. His phone was flashing

and flashing and flashing on the desk next to mine.

Operatives must demonstrate excellent concentration, Darren.

 

Ashley in Archives was sacked for leaving a door unlocked.

Most of the time nothing much happens, just the silent film,

the roll of drunken friends hanging from each other’s necks.

My colleagues find ways to pass the time. I don’t join in.

 

Never record over a shift. I liked Ashley, but sometimes the film

tells it wrong and I’ve been doing this job long enough to know

what’s a crime and what’s just two people fooling around.

These things would be better with the sound turned up.

 

My dad always said I’d never amount to anything

staring at a screen all night, but here I am, doing just that:

a free man with a one-bed rent on the seventh-floor

of that mirrored-glass tower he hated. I’m my own man

 

and when I get home after a shift, I pull a chair up to the glass

like it’s some massive VDU on which I watch the sun

and all those city workers rising from the ground, 

changed, wiped clean, as though nothing was ever as it was.


Tom Warner. Retirado daqui.

St. Vincent - Bill Murray Sings Bob Dylan

Attic - Rachel Boast

My head bowed under the rafters 
I make a start in the attic's advantage, 
the lowered lamp, a cushion 
deleting the daylight, but I'm given 
to climbing out onto the flat roof 
leaving my papers, my books, 
the closed doors and closed windows, 
for those dark sayings 
that have no hinges to swing 
towards what they mean, and so 
are more like song, more necessary. 
I'd rise like this, day after day, 
above the strain of hard angles, servant's quarters, 
clarifying the openness of your face, 
love, and this generous sky.

Sidereal. Picador, 2011. 

Perfume Genius - Take me Home

Why Walking Helps Us Think - by Ferris Jabr (The New Yorker, September 2014)

In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”

Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”

Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.

What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them.

The way we move our bodies further changes the nature of our thoughts, and vice versa. Psychologists who specialize in exercise music have quantified what many of us already know: listening to songs with high tempos motivates us to run faster, and the swifter we move, the quicker we prefer our music. Likewise, when drivers hear loud, fast music, they unconsciously step a bit harder on the gas pedal. Walking at our own pace creates an unadulterated feedback loop between the rhythm of our bodies and our mental state that we cannot experience as easily when we’re jogging at the gym, steering a car, biking, or during any other kind of locomotion. When we stroll, the pace of our feet naturally vacillates with our moods and the cadence of our inner speech; at the same time, we can actively change the pace of our thoughts by deliberately walking more briskly or by slowing down.

Because we don’t have to devote much conscious effort to the act of walking, our attention is free to wander—to overlay the world before us with a parade of images from the mind’s theatre. This is precisely the kind of mental state that studies have linked to innovative ideas and strokes of insight. Earlier this year, Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz of Stanford published what is likely the first set of studies that directly measure the way walking changes creativity in the moment. They got the idea for the studies while on a walk. “My doctoral advisor had the habit of going for walks with his students to brainstorm,” Oppezzo says of Schwartz. “One day we got kind of meta.”

In a series of four experiments, Oppezzo and Schwartz asked a hundred and seventy-six college students to complete different tests of creative thinking while either sitting, walking on a treadmill, or sauntering through Stanford’s campus. In one test, for example, volunteers had to come up with atypical uses for everyday objects, such as a button or a tire. On average, the students thought of between four and six more novel uses for the objects while they were walking than when they were seated. Another experiment required volunteers to contemplate a metaphor, such as “a budding cocoon,” and generate a unique but equivalent metaphor, such as “an egg hatching.” Ninety-five per cent of students who went for a walk were able to do so, compared to only fifty per cent of those who never stood up. But walking actually worsened people’s performance on a different type of test, in which students had to find the one word that united a set of three, like “cheese” for “cottage, cream, and cake.” Oppezzo speculates that, by setting the mind adrift on a frothing sea of thought, walking is counterproductive to such laser-focussed thinking: “If you’re looking for a single correct answer to a question, you probably don’t want all of these different ideas bubbling up.”

Where we walk matters as well. In a study led by Marc Berman of the University of South Carolina, students who ambled through an arboretum improved their performance on a memory test more than students who walked along city streets. A small but growing collection of studies suggests that spending time in green spaces—gardens, parks, forests—can rejuvenate the mental resources that man-made environments deplete. Psychologists have learned that attention is a limited resource that continually drains throughout the day. A crowded intersection—rife with pedestrians, cars, and billboards—bats our attention around. In contrast, walking past a pond in a park allows our mind to drift casually from one sensory experience to another, from wrinkling water to rustling reeds.

Still, urban and pastoral walks likely offer unique advantages for the mind. A walk through a city provides more immediate stimulation—a greater variety of sensations for the mind to play with. But, if we are already at the brink of overstimulation, we can turn to nature instead. Woolf relished the creative energy of London’s streets, describing it in her diary as “being on the highest crest of the biggest wave, right in the centre & swim of things.” But she also depended on her walks through England’s South Downs to “have space to spread my mind out in.” And, in her youth, she often travelled to Cornwall for the summer, where she loved to “spend my afternoons in solitary trampling” through the countryside.

Perhaps the most profound relationship between walking, thinking, and writing reveals itself at the end of a stroll, back at the desk. There, it becomes apparent that writing and walking are extremely similar feats, equal parts physical and mental. When we choose a path through a city or forest, our brain must survey the surrounding environment, construct a mental map of the world, settle on a way forward, and translate that plan into a series of footsteps. Likewise, writing forces the brain to review its own landscape, plot a course through that mental terrain, and transcribe the resulting trail of thoughts by guiding the hands. Walking organizes the world around us; writing organizes our thoughts. Ultimately, maps like the one that Nabokov drew are recursive: they are maps of maps.

Retirado daqui.

Hot Chip - Over and Over

Tramp in Flames - Paul Farley

Tramp in Flames

Some similes act like heat shields for re-entry
to reality: a tramp in flames on the floor.
We can say Flame on! to invoke the Human Torch
from the Fantastic Four. We can switch to art
and imagine Dali at this latitude
doing CCTV surrealism.
We could compare him to a protest monk
sat up the way he is. We could force the lock
of memory: at the crematorium
my uncle said the burning bodies rose
like Draculas from their boxes.

         But his layers
burn brightly, and the salts locked in his hems
give off the colours of a Roman candle,
and the smell is like a foot-and-mouth pyre
in the middle of the city he was born in,
and the bin bags melt and fuse him to the pavement
and a pool forms like the way he wet himself
sat on the school floor forty years before,
and then the hand goes up. The hand goes up.

Tramp in Flames. Picador. 2006

Zola Jesus - Dangerous Days

Night is - José Duarte (a google poem)