What The Matter Is

Hate spending hours on an invoice then finding I never put it on my TO DO list in the first place. My sole joy in tedious tasks is crossing them off afterwards in good wet blue ink. Often I put things on a list retrospectively just so I can cross them off. TO DO lists are the meaning of life.

Ideally TO DO lists wouldn’t be the meaning of life. I can always tell when I’m too busy because I find lists not paragraphs in my notebook. Sometimes the lists have actual tick-boxes. Consequently when I’m at my busiest there are no blog entries. It’s a shame because life’s very bloggable when I’m rushing from one thing to another, even if it’s incoherent.

Last week was

Monday: Finish video for Manchester reading. Send it off. Buy stuff for Tate event. Sit on floor amongst stuff wondering what on earth I’m doing.

Tuesday: Morning meeting. Meeting goes on til 3pm. Panic. Late afternoon: sit on floor amongst stuff. Get inkling of what on earth I’m doing for Tate. Practise reading for Manchester and check timings. Decide how to ad lib the ad lib bit.

Wednesday: Train to Manchester. Draft outline for Edinburgh show on the way. Get to Manchester. Get lost. Have unexpected peppermint tea from a coffee percolator. Sound incoherent in interview about me and poetry. Drink 1 inch of beer before reading. Do reading. Ad lib bit goes nicely. Drink remaining inches of beer warm.

Thursday: Train back. Finish outline for Edinburgh. Start emailing a man about book proposal. Meet unexpected brilliant person on train. Start talking; turns out she knows book proposal man. Small world. Send Edinburgh text from home.

Friday: Morning meeting about a new project. Find out the new project person’s also doing a Tate Britain workshop tomorrow. Smaller world. Evening: Urban Physic Garden for poetry reading. Do reading. Man plays guitar and sings variously with and without American accent. Meet person there who’ll also be at the Tate thing tomorrow. World smaller still.

Saturday: Up too early for Tate briefing. Get there too early. Do Tate thing. Get too much sun on face. Go home and pack for move.

Sunday: Pack stuff into car to move house. Drive to new house. Move stuff in. Boil water for tea in saucepan. Eat biscuits, drive back to old house.

.

I can manage weeks like this as long as I have correspondingly quiet weeks afterwards to mop up all the spilt ideas and invoices. It would be a good discipline to attend to the ideas first then the admin, but ideas have a way of needing open-ended space, whereas you can fit an invoice in between cups of tea. And you don’t get to cross off an idea in blue wet ink once you’ve had it.

The running order for next week’s event is sorted, now it just needs practice. Post-it notes fixed it.

I’ve timed everything in order with excessive precision and it comes to 16 minutes and 30 seconds. I have twenty. I think that’ll be about right since I always read more slowly with an audience. Nothing worse than thinking you’re overrunning and trying to read bits at double speed or judiciously omit bits as you go along.

Now. It’s a sunny day and we’re moving house in a couple of weeks, further from all the green. I’m going outside.

What’s all this. I’m trying to piece together a 20 minute set for a reading this month in Manchester. I enjoy this process but it always happens in a state of distraction, like having multiple tabs open in my brain.

I’ve begun as I often do: with a couple of pieces that hang together in a way that interests me, and an idea of what’s good about their relationship. Now I’m trying to develop that relationship by adding other existing texts and artworks, and by incorporating new ideas and new texts to edge the whole lot towards a self-contained performance.

So far I’ve got plasticine and a few texts.

I’ve got these balls of plasticine from a couple of years ago. I’d made some kind of plasticine scenario on a dinner plate – don’t ask why – and when I got bored with it and it was getting sticky and dusty I separated out all the colours again and rolled them into usable balls of red, and yellow, and blue, and so on.

Their primary domestic simplicity is good. Because of the list-like names I’ve given them, they’re imprinted with the meanings they accumulated on the dinner plate in the first place. And the things they once represented – the sky, the beaks, the dress, the apples – suddenly only count in terms of their colours. If you look at all the balls and their names you can get a sense of what might have been going on, but mostly you just get gaps. I like the gaps.

The texts are various. Some of them are quotes I’ve heard or read recently, and want delivering in their original voices, or at least my well-meaning impersonations of the voices. Others are short self-contained stories and scenarios written for their own sake, often in sets. I’d like to hold up each of these texts like plasticine accumulations of the things they’ve been and the gaps in between – a bit sticky and imprinted with the corners and contours of the things around them.

The event’s on the 20th, so there’s still time to get the gaps in the right places. Here are details:

THE OTHER ROOM 26

Wednesday 20th July 2011, 7.00 pm.

Chris Goode, Jonny Liron and Tamarin Norwood at The Old Abbey Inn, 61 Pencroft Way, Manchester, M15 6AY, on Manchester Science Park.