We have been burning the lights here walkingtalkingwriting now for over six years. Blogging is pure energy isn’t it? Streams of electrons, blinking on off signals, the same way a string of Christmas lights works. On. Off. Over the years there have been a few gaps, when some of the bulbs in the string of lights burnt out, but over the last two years the on/off signals have been blinking away pretty regularly; a weekly flow of between 300 and 500 words, sometimes more, and at the rate of progress we have been going over the years, there must be over 100,000 words on this blog archive,
Bystanders strolling by, or readers as they are conventionally but perhaps erroneously called, have sometimes asked us about the light. "So what do you have to show?" they ask. "Getting people to stare at the lights, it is surely some kind of absurd wisecrack surely.Or a form of shock treatment. What do you have to show?"
"You tell me," I am tempted to answer, spots in front of all our eyes. Questions about the light, but rarely about the ground. After all the light illuminates a small patch. What do you have to show? It is time to begin telling.
- So in a few days time the lights are going to go out here on Typepad: a CRITICAL power failure!
- Groping around on hands and knees in the dark on a new Wordpress location: TOPICAL!
We will fumble for the plug socket, flick the switch: and how RADICAL is that!
Be on the look out!
WORDSTALL is coming, a small market stall, probably to be found outside an old peeling paint news-stand ‘ZEITUNG’ or ‘CIGARETTEN’ pavilion, filled with a range of enticing pamphlets and brochures for modern living…
1.) …Until the generators run out. Of course that is a rack we will also be filling now we are both well into our 60’s, magazine pieces on OLD MEN TRAVELLING. (‘So do you mean the story is finished? Said Don Quixote. ‘As finished as my mother’, said Sancho.)
2.) … Or we find ourselves HITTING THE POTHOLES, a category for when the ground disappears from under our feet. (‘For oil is not made, it is got. And oil thinks large. Oil thinks wide’, said the narrator - Pathe 1951, Oil for the Twentieth Century)
3.) … Or ECHO EFFECTS set in, which commonly occurs at crossing points, between one world and another. (‘The echo; the giving back of the human voice as nature-sound, is essentially a lament’. said Leverkuhn (from Dr Faustus by Thomas Mann)).
4.) … Or TONITE AT THE COLISEUM, when we sneak out for a show. Typically only old theatre stubs and stained programmes to show for it, but ‘Oh, the smell of the grease paint, and the roar of the crowd!’
5.) … Or – Yes! Yes! - we win yet more tickets for the CATASTROPHE GAMES and get another go looking at Scapolo (the bachelor). It is so addictive! For instance, even ‘Saint Walter’ (Uncle Benjamin) could not resist getting together with Berthold Brecht to plan the publication of a new magazine: Krisis und Kultur. It was of course never published.
We never said it was going to be easy: that the story 'Ticking Boxes', just posted today, belongs in OLD MEN TRAVELLING should be simple enough to decide. However, there is always a moment of doubt, a pause when my collector's hand hesitates, floating over the various racks on the market stall, but it is not a 'glorious pause' ("Truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending." Angela Carter. Wild Children) and my hand moves on leaving well alone. A sub-section of Narrative Poems may present itself within the major category of OLD MEN TRAVELLING later, where the story may go (price 10s/6d), but it is equally possible the piece will be put back in one of the boxes which are kept underneath (in the 'Archive' as it is commonly called) unsold.
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