my writing

Category: Culture

  • Leaving Shaftesbury for Greece, 1999 : Pages from ‘Odysseos’ Island’,

    p1. There is a moment. After my preparations, the note-taking, the buying and borrowing, the itinerary-writing, the spreading out and piling up of things to take – so that the flat was no longer a place to live but a resource at the service of going away, my first trip to Greece alone since 1971…

  • Leaving Naxos, 1970. Pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    p379I plunged inside the vibrating drum of music, the thudding rhythmic bass shaking the floor, screaming guitar notes bending the walls, the drum kit smashing the air into glittering fragments. Sensory overload in which my bones, emptied by leaping, now filled with pulsing, coloured mercury, my body, hollowed out by activity and strung with resonant…

  • Entering Greece for the first time, 1970 : pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    p 38On the overnight train down the length of Italy we take down the luggage and Simon and I use the netting racks as hammocks, leaving more sleeping space for the others. I look down at Jacks sleeping, sprawled and open-mouthed, then I’m rocked to sleep. I wake to a red dawn, the air already…

  • Introduction. &, Meeting Penny : Pages from ‘Dionysos’ Island’.

    INTRODUCTION The details of Richard’s disappearance filtered through to me slowly. Or perhaps I filtered them slowly. I had lost touch, ceased to keep in touch with him several years before, having run out of patience with his lack of focus, his failure to get on. When getting on, one needs the company of those…

  • Bob Dylan and Herman Melville: “Blind Willie McTell” and ‘The Confidence-Man’.

    Note: I originally wrote this piece, on the links between a Bob Dylan song and a Herman Melville novel, a dozen years ago, before his Nobel Prize for Literature, when he was still a ‘song and dance man’. It was written in a compressed form for a specialist Bob Dylan magazine. Here I’ll open it…

  • Buddy Holly’s Apartment Tapes

    Buddy Holly died in a plane crash on 3 Feb, 1959. January 1959, late at night in a Greenwich village apartment, his pregnant wife asleep, Buddy Holly is recording. He’s been recording obsessively since he was 14, and for the last couple of years camped in the studio in Clovis, New Mexico, learning how to…

  • Inside the Tower : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    Aug 21I’ve worked steadily. I finished the panels and glazing in the tower roof and it stands empty. No purpose has revealed itself. Why did I build it?I go in and stand and look around and wonder what it’s for. An orgone accumulator? A meditation chamber? A folly? At present, simply an empty space. ‘What…

  • La Balme in 1976 : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    p.54. I go to the door and stand in the sunlight and look out over the garden, the valley, the hills, clear and bright on this midsummer morning and now more alive in my eyes than it has ever been, because of the songs that are already weaving their way through me. What happened yesterday…

  • Return to La Balme: ‘Cycling the Green Meridian’, Day 20

    Day 20: Albi to Coupiac, 56 miles. Return to the hills. Our village revealed. The carved stone buried. Encounter in the café. The wild boy reconsidered. Our house. The one-armed man. The Virgin’s veil. The threshing-machine. Camping by the lake. Pot au feu with the young couple. I wake early. Today I will be at…

  • Albi in 1976: pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    Chapter 1: Albi I watch the cream and red train disappear slowly around the long bend. The last I see of Jane is her hand sticking out of the window, her fingers spread out like the ribs of a broken fan. I stare along the empty line until the noise of the train dies away…