Duny,
That’s better, than Dunny I mean. I wouldn’t want to make you feel like a smelly lean-to, surrounded by boxing marsupials and digeridoos. There’s little of the Ned Kelly about you, I can see that. And Duny been all sort of cuddly Celtic/Anglo folklore and all that caper, makes the nomenclature more up to the jobby at hand. N’est ce pas? (TYFTC).
Sallying forth has not been much on the agenda here either, and apparently the next few days will be worse, clammy wise. One doesn’t feel much like hoovering here, and can only admire your enthusiasm for the same, sporadic as it is. I basically wait until ‘Hem Binnen’ gets the urge, then spring into assistance, an enthusiastic Robin to his Batman. The last time I took a damp mop to the dust, and it worked a treat, better than any hoover, at least on the wooden floors surrounding the carpets. Sometimes I secretly creep up on dust-bunnies with me trusty dust-buster, and vanquish the bleeders afore ‘HB’ comes over all Misses Mop, and I have to put on me assistant costume. That Robin mask makes me eyes run, not to mention the tights. Strangely, I don’t think of it getting in the way of writing, all menial jobs being a chance to cogitate, to let things brew (like the mammy’s tea, 24 hours on the hob, strong enough to trot a mouse across). I love me a good cogitation session, so you won’t be hearing me coming over all Clytemnestra or Niobe over that, not at all (at all). Down time and up time are both the same in my book, or me book, even. I used to like how Marcel (D) used to put a sign on his studio door, whilst he was sleeping, saying ‘Artist at Work’. I think of chasing dust-bunnies with me trusty dust-buster, in me tights, as the same thing: ‘Writer at Work’, or if not a writer, then at least someone who is trying cack-handedly to communicate in whichever form and medium is to hand. You be careful between those bookstacks in your bedroom, wouldn’t want you all smothered in an avalanche of your own enthusiasms. But I guess that’s what gets us all in the end anyway.
I enjoyed doing ‘The Origin of the Milky Bar’, it’s very me, very much my background, all that art history, all that academic shite. I enjoy playing with it, I always have. But it’s also a thinking space, for ideas, like those around the Cuckoo, ‘The Wild Geese’, and the Catfish. I like that menagerie, and feel it is an area I want to look at, that recognition of the ‘essential self’, and the ways we choose to hide that, how we disguise it, or rather how I do. I think I might end up writing the first Flickr novel, an amalgamation of a tradition with this clunky form of communication which exists in this Internet backwater. It’s the very ‘Backwater-ness’ of the place that makes it attractive to me. I haven’t courted followers, you can see I only have 308 followers there, and only recently joined a ‘group’ (actually I am in two, but only add to one. I joined the other to find images of Ireland, memory joggers). I almost think of it as a ‘private’ space. I have found it to be a very exhibitionistic intimate space, and I love that contradiction. It’s like leaving a window open, and sometimes I do a ‘Wife of Bath’ and hang my ass out that window (and laugh uproariously). That’s it really, it’s an open window to this room I am sitting in, in my Robin costume, a possible avenue of communication. It’s not that far away from my ‘Anchorite’ obsession, the one I built my 5-hour performance piece around, which in turn had been inspired by Pinter’s ‘A Kind of Alaska’ and Oliver Sak’s ‘Awakenings’. What a tangled web we weave indeed, no wonder my teeth are worn down trying to, at last, unravel it.
Talking of toothzes, good to hear your trials do be coming towards an end. It’s part and parcel of growing older, I guess. I am now on Calcium Blockers, and Statins, both of which are known for dissolving toothzes, so I am expecting them all to go south in due course. If they can get me as far as the crematorium, I will be fine, if not, I’ll be fine too. I believe gumzes are popular in certain circles anyways, circles which, in me former life, I was known to frequent. I understand the profound oneness you feel with those lads from Brandon, spendooly being spendooly, and all that portemonnee stuff in this time of great upheaval and bankrolling stockholders whilst poor creatives starve for the want of a bottle of Bombay, or Moët, I am with you there, me ol’ segousha. Don’t be at the starting of me on the old ‘electric’!
I won’t be at the giving of any advice relative to your dealing with Cuckoos, being one of that variety of foul fowl meself, there would be a touch of an own goal there. I am very pleased to be working that through myself, somewhat with Hem Binnen’s encouragement. At some point in your life, at least in the life of a cuckoo, you/he/she/they have to grab that bull by the horns, so to speak. It becomes a sort of admission and a renunciation. There is some catharsis there, but the royal we will get there.
The disappearance of the universal cuckoo, it does seem to be happening, with my sorely missed bees here. We have had one overworked bee on our balconies all summer. We now know each other well. I salute him with a “Hello, Mr. B”, which he answers with a “Hello, Mr.B”. I have been encouraging him to bring some of his mates around, but he doesn’t appear to have any anymore. What have we done with our cheap flights and pointless travelling? I, meself, am well and truly dun roamin.
An oeuf already, indeed!
Atticus Cuckoo