Barry Graham's Blog, page 97

Bad, Or Good, Or This?

Robert Bresson wrote: “Laugh at a bad reputation. Fear a good one that you could not sustain.”

I used to want a bad reputation… or a good one. The difference didn’t seem to matter. The first fictional character I ever identified with was Frankenstein’s Monster. Growing up, or trying to, in Maryhill, Glasgow, doing good or doing evil seemed equally valid to me, but being ignored, invisible, cast out, hungry, did not.

Now, ideas of bad or good seem less interesting t...

Note to self re: the novel I'm finishing writing

Keep words to a minimum, story to a maximum. If the page is blank, there is no story; keep the page as close to being blank as possible, with only enough words to provide the story.

One of Many Reasons to Love Portland

Walking on a busy Portland street in the mid-evening, I pass a same-gender couple standing on the sidewalk, kissing. No one seems to notice this behavior that would certainly bring stares, probably jeers, and possibly violence in most other cities. Perhaps if I live here long enough I will stop noticing it too, but now it gives me a rush of happiness.

Remembering Glasgow's Garbage Mountains and Hordes of Rats

In The Book of Man I wrote:

The middens were infested with rats. They’d appeared in force during the months when the Cleansing Department went on strike and rubbish filled the back courts in stinking piles. When the strike was over and the rubbish was gone, the rats were still with us. They got so big that the tabloids began printing stories about “super-rats.” For once they weren’t exaggerating. They were true, the stories about huge hungry rats attacking babies in their cots, and fight...

Poem: Against Hypothermia (first published in Northwords magazine, Scotland, 1995)

I.

Worst winter in quite a while:

the guy who delivered our calor gas

was frantic, rushed off his feet.

“Never been so busy. And the other

boy I work with’s went and got

himself arrested - driving without

a licence.” We sympathised while

he put the gas in our heater and

then he ran down the stairs to his

van, too busy to be cold.

II.

The living room warmed

by the oven, door open, grumbling

of gas; we’ll sleep in here

tonight, on the couch that

folds down, duvets brought through

from the bedroom where we could...

laphamsquarterly:December 15In the rue Blanche there is a...

laphamsquarterly:

December 15
In the rue Blanche there is a butcher who sells dogs, cats, and rats. He has many customers, but it is amusing to see them sneak into the shop after carefully looking round to make sure that none of their acquaintances are near. A prejudice has arisen against rats, because the doctors say that their flesh is full of trichinae. For my part I have a guilty feeling when I eat dog, the friend of man. I had a slice of a spaniel the other day; it was by no means bad, som...

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGINGKitty was a stray cat who showed up at The...

FRIDAY CAT BLOGGING

Kitty was a stray cat who showed up at The Sitting Frog Zen Center in Phoenix, AZ, a couple years ago. When we started putting out food and water for her, she made her home there, and when we decided to move to Portland, OR, we knew it would be cruel (to her and to us) to leave her behind. So, a year ago, she became an indoor cat, a life she took to right away.

The cat sticking her head in at the top of the picture is Maggie, age 16, who still seems to think she’s a kitten,...

Poem: The View (first published in Northwords magazine, Scotland, 1995)

“It’s so beautiful here,” I told

the man I was staying with on that

island in the North of Scotland.

“What’s beautiful about it?” he

asked, pouring me another dram.

“Everything,” I said. “Just look at

the view!”

“What view?” he said. “There’s no

view. There’s only mountains and

heather and trees and water.”

When I went back to the city I

looked at it for the first time.

Douglas Rushkoff: Present Shock, the Boing Boing interview

Douglas Rushkoff: Present Shock, the Boing Boing interview:

Present Shock is what happens when the future Toffler described finally arrives. It’s the initial human reaction to living in a world where everything is happening now…

In one sense it’s the first response to a digital media environment - or, more specifically, the digital temporal environment. While analog time (itself just one kind of representation) had a continuous, almost narrative quality as the second hand swept through one min...

In a bookstore in Montreal, Canada.

In a bookstore in Montreal, Canada.