6.

Wow. I suck at keeping updated. 

SUISS is over. What an upsetting day! It's unbelievable how closely connected people can become after such a short time. It was like saying goodbye to my second family! But it wasn't all sadness. Each student (as well as the directors and student hosts) had to put on some sort of performance for the farewell party. There was live music (some amazing musicians in the group!!), readings, dances, and one musical performance! This is what i slightly participated in. A 10 minute high school musical parody intertwined with a Romeo and Juliet sub-story all taking place in a day in the life of a SUISS student. sounds complicated? It's just post-modern. 

So the morning after the farewell, I saw my lovely friend Nisha off on her train and made my way to the Bus station... back to Glasgow. The room i stayed in for those 2 nights would have eaten me up, i'm sure of it, had i stayed longer than two nights. Dark blue walls, one very small window with curtains so thick I couldn't even open them. No lift, so carrying my insanely heavy luggage (traveling during book festival... must be done carefully) up 4 flights of stairs and then down another flight, through a maze of windowless neon lighted hallways was quite the work out. No offense Glasgow, but next to a 3-week stay in Edinburgh... you suck dirty sweaty smelly nuts. First night spent chatting to Ashley on the telephone while cradling a bottle of red wine. Day 2 went into the centre and met up with Silvia. Visited the Glasgow Museum of Modern Art; The theme being GLBT freedom and expression. Very cool! Then went on a search for haggis since she refused to leave Scotland without trying it! I, on the other hand, would rather lick the sidewalk in Glasgow than try haggis..... maybe not though, really. But the search was a success and i went back to my hole and let my wine cradle me to sleep. 

I am currently free loading on my friend / ex-writing tutor's couch. Beautiful flat!  He works at the Scottish Poetry Library so i get to join in viewing all the readings and events around the city! amazing!! He is also a manager of sorts of this wonderful non-profit cafe/venue/bar called The Forest. All the employees are volunteers and it's a place full of art and art-minded people who want to share their work, whatever form it might take. It's in a gorgeous old two story church, so there's always a couple things happening at once. Probably be volunteering there for a bit before I leave.  Also got to know one of the actors from Porn: The Musical (hilarious play.. definitely the best one i've seen in the fringe) so I've been lucky enough to get a free performer's pass into a lot of shows... It is possible to have fun with no money!! 

As for my writing, I have been bad. I still need to go through and edit a lot of it before I can post it up here, but hopefully that can be done soon. 

All for now

5.

Today's seminar involved an activity using  lines from 5 different famous poems. We were to create our own poem using only those words. Fun!

4.

Write a poem

it's never just black or

white

it can never be anything

less

now it can only be

nothing

but it can never be just that

i want to hate you

the same way

you don't want to love me

3.

Write for 10 minutes with little thought or editing using a given first sentence. I write it in light blue ink on white paper.

Blue. The sky, the ocean or just blue. Just a single shade of blue blankness. Will this have anything to do with blue? Well, it's all blue isn't it? It can't not. a torn page filled with small scribbles and symbols that are the first word. I would rather have red. Deep dark red. 12% usually, warm in my cup, flow down my throat, warm my face and mind. Silver is my aura... how cold is that? much more frigid than blue. Il fait froid, tres froid.

I think too many unfinished thoughts, 

my mind has my hand imprisoned.

I guess it's not really prosey

2.

Friday night lasted until the sun came up. I know why the "jig" comes naturally to me after participating in a Ceilidh. haha there is definitely Scottish in my blood. So fucking fun! I really didn't want it to end. Do you know the helicopter dance?? 

So then myself and about 7 others took a cab to the Grass Market and continued the drinking . dancing combination... Let's see... First to Biddy Mulligan's, then to Sneaky Pete's (a dirty bar that projects black and white porn on a huge screen while playing lame rock-dance music.. i really didn't get it), then next door to Opium ( a no comment kinda place) and then to C (?? i think that's what it was called) which was really fun. The first time i've ever heard Frank Sinatra played at a club..  immediately after Jammin'. Nice! Everyone stopped dancing.. sorry Frankie.  A walk home at 5am and a sleep until noon. Quite the alright night. 

Saturday wandered the graveyard with Tom and Sylvia and got some interestingly creepy photographs. Hopefully soon to be posted. Saw a guy swallow a sword on the Royal Mile and wandered to the Mound. I love being aimless in this city!

Today my legs were extremely sore. Nisha (my lovely neighbour) and I took it easy and went to a nearby Indian restaurant where they put cilantro in EVERYTHING! (barf) The vintage shops here are a lot easier to scrounge through and find something actually nice. It is now 10 pm and I have spent the last hour and a half trying to come up with ideas for a novel (hardest thing ever) and doing work for a prose exercise. writing anything and everything that comes to mind with a given first sentence... The one i chose being "Blue." It's harder than you think! But I wish all school was like this. It's freeing.

1.1

just got back from a poetry reading by John Burnside.

AMOR VINCIT OMNIA (LOVE CONQUERS ALL)

What we need now

is fog;

fog, and the pincushion baize

of pine trees

like the trees in Chinese paintings.

What we need now is distance and local tradition;

the breve of italic; the minim of untold love;

a new vocabulary

of now-or-never:

names for the things we have lost,

         so we know what to mourn.

1.

so i made it to Edinburgh! The Pollock Halls campus is looking much like Laurier's... more yellow construction vehicles and piles of rubbish than beautiful architecture. The buildings around this area of campus aren't too historically charged... were probably built in the 70s. But the city is not far and totally makes up for the constant rumbling and reverse beeping that flows through my window all day... not that i even spend much time in my room at all! I do have a pretty magnificent view of Arthur's Seat from my room. I need to get on that... i mean literally 

The course is hectic. Only two days into the course, the lectures have been  general, comparisons of modernism/post-modernism and very open-ended. I always wondered where to go from "post-modernism" in writing and literature or whether it was even possible to get past it. The first lecturer, Professor Andrew Gibson of The University of London, proposes that we've been stuck in a cycle of modernism since the Romantic Period and that post-modernism is just another extension of this cycle. It was sad but reassuring that someone of a pretty high standing also recognizes the literary hole that we, according to him, should just keep digging as writers. Who knows... maybe there is another side we haven't reached yet.

Today the CW class attended a Masterclass led by a Scottish playwright, Douglas Maxwell. So funny and good preparation for rejection... He passed around a 2-inch stack of his rejection letters from the past 8 or so years. only a small portion of what he called a factory full of letters that make him so sick he can't bear to look at them. Understandably so. We looked at photographs and had to make up a scene based on the photograph... not my cup of tea but it ended up being hilarious for the most part. 

Hooray for a boring first entry!