Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 22

Unlatched Red Being: On Anne Carson and Phoebe Bridgers

Photography is a way of playing with perceptual relationships.Well exactly. But you don’t need a camera to tell you that. The girl at the Phoebe Bridgers concert keeping herself cool with a copy of Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red has remained in my mind as a pertinent ghost image. Still struggling to sleep, perhaps as a […]

Writing After Silence

I can’t be on Twitter today. A young man named Rory hits send on “sorry” after a few days missing, a few days of silence, and the outpouring of sadness and sympathies is overwhelming. She tells me she is worried. She’s caught up on the blog. We met only recently, but she had no idea […]

Midnight Automatic

Marguerite Duras’ Summer Rain is a story of automatic reading. Ernesto, an illiterate adolescent of indeterminate age, finds a book with a hole burnt straight through the middle of it. One of seven children, the sight of the book, so mistreated, makes some of them cry. Their parents love books but are too impoverished to […]

Ouija Words: On Sylvia Plath

The final words, the final lines, of the final poem of Sylvia Plath’s first collection of poetry, Ariel: Words dry and riderless,The indefatigable, hoof-taps.WhichFrom the bottom of the pool, fixed starsGovern life. Language, as Blanchot says, is the basis of being, the ground, which is nonetheless dark and voiceless. Poetry becomes nothing more than a […]

Surfeminism: Notes on an Androgynous Writing

Monday. A new week begins, the first since my discharge. Life begins again with a downpour. The rain lashes at the window all afternoon. In the morning, I begin the process of applying for disability benefits. I hang my washing out in the rain, already wet, getting wetter, waiting for the clouds to dissipate and […]

Rob Doyle on Ghosts of my Life

Since his death in 2017, Mark Fisher has reputationally ascended to the status of dissident national treasure. His work as a leftist cultural critic continues to inspire the young in particular – Fisher murals adorn [Goldsmiths] University in London, where he used to teach – who have adopted him as one of their heroes. His […]

I Cried at Your Show with the Teenagers: On Phoebe Bridgers

At the Phoebe Bridgers concert, young women are dropping one after another in the heat. It quickly becomes normalised. One song is interrupted as security go to someone’s aid; the next time this happens so fluidly the band just keep on playing. There is a constant stream of plastic glasses, filled with water, passed back […]

Coffee in Crisis

Two recent Twitter threads, worth sharing on the blog for wider reach: It’s been a long, long time since I’ve done anything like this, having steadily pulled myself out of precarity in recent years, but unfortunately life can come at you fast, and so I wanted to throw my Ko-Fi profile back out there: https://ko-fi.com/mattcolquhoun […]

Discharged: Notes on Annie Ernaux and the End of a Diary

I am due to be discharged from the care of the crisis team soon. During yesterday’s visit, recording the further stability of my mood after one week on a new regime of medications, the nurse explained that the next visit may be my last — at least at this current level of scrutiny. We would […]

Collioure

Another visit from the crisis team. An innumerable visit but the first my flatmate has been present for. I think being present calms her, brings her inside the circle of care. And she is indeed classed as my “carer”, by proximity alone — a responsibility I do not want her to have, but she lives […]