Matt Colquhoun's Blog, page 25
June 27, 2022
No Transformation
Despite the intensity and exhaustion of the previous day, I slept for only an hour or two. On my return home, I was greeted by two books by Anais Nin: House of Incest, a prose poem that explores the thalassic copulation of mother and child in utero and postpartum; and volume one of her near-mythological […]
June 26, 2022
Lost and Safe
“You’re just a canny lad who finds life really hard, aren’t you?” was the Geordie assessment of my character on Monday. Hardly the conclusion I expected from an hour with a therapist, but I’ll take it all the same. He’s not wrong, I hope. Still, this internal life of writing where I dwell for the […]
June 25, 2022
Lion
I start reading Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller’s correspondence. The former’s early gushing over Tropic of Cancer is effervescent, and it is striking to read Durrell’s appreciation of the book in the context of the interwar years. He recognises in Miller’s deeply transgressive prose not a moral evil but an affirmation of life beyond trauma. […]
Trauma Self
Lying in bed, watching rubbish on YouTube, my mind drifts and I forget where I am. The room fades to black beyond the light of the screen and I find myself simultaneously lodged between different space-times. Hull, 2014. London, 2017. Newcastle, 2022. Muscle memory, as each time I remember the embodied sensation of being similarly […]
June 24, 2022
Material Love
After days of eating very little, I binged and fell asleep. My dreams were pure chaos. On waking, I had no way to adequately describe what I had experienced. There were people, places, but mostly feelings, impressions, colours, shapes, emotions; wholly disordered, overlapping. “Dream soup” was the only phrase that came to mind as I […]
June 23, 2022
June 22, 2022
Questions
I pick up a small pamphlet from a second-hand bookshop’s online store about Durrell, written by John Unterecker and published in 1964, as part of a series on “modern writers”. It seems there are few book-length critical appraisals of Durrell’s life and work outside academia, with most appearing in literary journals that are hard for […]
June 21, 2022
Dream Flats w/ Kitty & Archie on Slacks Radio
A little kitchen disco recorded sometime last week with Kitty and Archie of Incursions, and which Archie broadcast as part of his regular Dream Flats show on Slacks Radio over the weekend. Below, a little blurb from him: We recorded this in our ad-hoc setup in our kitchen, decks on a surface squeezed between the […]
