i'm sitting here writing a poem
(or at least pretending to) while
a photographer shoots me with
a wide-angle lens. of course it's
fake - this isn't even my office,
rather the media lab at yeonhui
in north-west seoul, a thousand
miles from home(s), months
ago, a million species of weird-
ness, like a bastardised poet-model
(po-mo) whoring myself out
for that fabled publicity shot.
the camera flashes, blips, whirrs,
a semblance of a shutter, a studied
pose, the stack of books as props,
the obligatory globe. looking
at the camera now, as i write,
is harder than it looks. somehow
it still feels fake ... especially
in close-up. can the viewer see
what i'm writing here and does
anybody really care? these are
the 'travails' of the modern writer
distilled into one single stream
of consciousness, etched in pencil.
the shoot is done, it's time to go
but fuck it - they'll just have to
wait until my final line is written:
#fml
Tag: writing (page 3 of 3)
In the ideal world, all writers would have a Catholic childhood, or belong to some other religion which does the equivalent for you. Because Catholicism tells you at a very early age the world is not what you see; that beyond everything you see, and the appearance – or the accidents as they’re known – there is another reality, and it is a far more important reality. So it’s like running in the imagination. I think that this was the whole point for me – that from my earliest years I believed the world to have an overt face and a hidden face, and behind every cause another cause, and behind every explanation another explanation, which is perhaps of quite a different order. And if you cease to believe in Catholic doctrine it doesn’t mean that you lose that; you still regard the world as ineffable and mysterious and as something which perhaps in the end can’t quite be added up. It could be summed up as saying “all is not as it seems”, and of course that’s the first thing Catholicism tells you. And then it just runs through everything you write and everything you touch, really. Plus, it’s good to have something to rebel against.
As any avid reader knows, the journey of the mind is the greatest voyage of all. Regardless of where you are or the state of your finances, literary experimental travel gives you a ticket to ride—even though your physical destination may be no further than your nearest bookshelf or library.
Literary experimental travel gives you the opportunity to explore unknown (and familiar) regions. It is also the only Experimental Travel game in The Lonely Planet Guide To Experimental Travel, by Rachael Antony and Joel Henry (Lonely Planet 2005), that allows you to travel through time.
Whether your interest is in revolutionary Russia, 14th-century China or prehistoric France, you can travel there with the help of a book—and a little imagination.
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