Ruby Street

stop explaining forget backstory and act how much fuel do you need to play free with the moment

Watching some Hitchcock tonight - as one must from time-to-time. This one was Shadow of a Doubt , from 1942, said to be Hitchcock's favourite movie. Interesting for many things, including the fact that a lot of it was shot on location, unusual for the time (the locale being a place called Santa Rosa, apparently real). Annette was, as she always is, entranced by it's true black and white nature. As she says, also truthfully, "they don't make pictures like this anymore". The lighting was always the important thing in these pictures, especially so-called 'noir'. I would bet that these days if you ever get the odd new black and white movie, it's probably desaturated colour rather than true B&W. As any photographer would know, the blacks must be black and the whites white. It's hard these days to get hold of good black and white still film (though Ilford came back again), so I suspect true black and white movie film may not even exist, or not in any...

There’s a little bit of grandeur in the garden under clouds It springs from rain buds and the contrast in flanks of washing held in straggling lines of wear Petals plump and pink skin-like, as light envelopes and hallows dust At edges of glass webs there’s form in waiting as this sun casts its own light shadow into an emergent zona rosa Hurts the head I’ve travelled in too hard, and faster than it’s built for oh, le don de rêves that passes through its own poem an unlit cigarette also dreamt in the hand Placed on a table that’s moved in the night from wakefulness, Ashkenazy tells it in symmetrical strokes, this thought, that thought even without smoke, that pathfinder, its lyric turnabout airy, forgetful, of fall it’s come from

One of my resolutions this year is to spend less time sitting in front of the computer. It is partly a health (ie body mechanics) issue - I have an ongoing lower back problem - and partly because I really ought to be doing other things, like walking, for instance, or having a life. So, less blogging but not no blogging. Interesting, my osteo calls my lower back region 'boggy'. I replied it wasn't just a bog but a veritable quagmire, ie 'quaggy', which I thought sounded better than 'boggy'. But I don't want boggy to be abetted by bloggy. I'm also walking around more at work and other places. It's a holiday today, for some reason, so I may post something else later.

The production of doubt.

What lies before already exists. The future does not exist. The past is ahead and alongside. Each stone on the road you tread resists your claims to it.

A book is composed of many problems in the making. I wonder, then, if or should I have a recognised style. What is my sign?

We don't. We walk. We don't. The skin, lichens. Dust in the mouth.

Each day fills full heaves a word past blot with much to tell on each strange street not without love nothing will tell on our groove until we can be still. Forget how to time night’s wee tomb or what is home must be warm. We can’t say one but picture stone. That talk about morn each day’s small pain too late to return to mistimed noon. Strange how we burn skin to rosy bloom the holes in the sun turn age to crime. If only we’d seen the leaf’s green hem without heat’s harm in a car’s long dream. No cloud obscures the drape of flowers.

Martin Edmond's comment below on the ordinariness of the Janet Frame Eden Street house encourages me to post a pic of the current exterior. Still pretty ordinary (nothing wrong with that) and the garden was lovely the day we visited. Photo: Jill Jones

Listening to Jimmy Smith. A best of CD thingie. 'Got my Mojo Working' was one of the first records I ever bought. Sure, The Beatles were the very first (hey, I was a kid) but it was pretty early on in my vinyl collecting career. It's still downstairs somewhere.

'pottering without guilt' (a line once attached to a Patrick Cook cartoon)

sixteen days without television - and so ... screen has no angles no size no mountains trees and no smell to speak of apart from something ... sixteen days without - instead poems aloud and air aloud with water ferneries

It's not a huge big deal but I am having trouble with the referral service TrueFresco. I had that nice little list of visitors on the site but it disappeared late last year and no amount of effort in getting it back seems to have an effect. It was free and now I think they want me to pay, but their site won't recognise me (because I'm already registered as me) so I couldn't even do that if I wanted (which I don't). La La. I can't be bothered wrangling with them anymore so can anyone suggest a better service, ie. one that works? Is it just me? Prolly. Many thanks in advance.

While touring around the South Island of New Zealand just before Christmas, we arrived at the coastal town of Oamaru and stayed the night. New Zealand novelist and poet, Janet Frame, lived for many years in Oamaru as a child and teenager, and a Trust has now purchased one of the houses the Frame family lived in - at 56 Eden Street. It is open for public viewing, which is precisely what we, as ‘public’, did. The house is not being restored as such but rather, being ‘reframed’ (apparently Janet Frame’s words). So it has the look and feel of how it must have been during the 1930s and 40s. I was given the privilege of sitting at Frame’s old desk, looking out of the back window, and a typewriter (remember those?) on which I composed an on-the-spot response to the place and our visit. I won’t publish that here but it was a sobering experience using such a device again after all these many years. I rather liked it, the effort of it. Here are a couple of shots, one of the bedroom the Frame gir...

Well, it's 2006 and I am now back from journeying, safe and a little dusty from the mountain tracks. I will rethink Ruby Street, as I've always done, just in the doing. When it's not worth doing is when I'll stop. I am still in the midst of a lot of thinking. Thanks to responses from Martin Edmond and Matt Hetherington about my wee crossroads. I will restore the comments facility pretty soon and let what happens happens.