Automatic writing

I was lazily flicking through my autumn/winter 2010 copy of .Cent magazine last night and stumbled across this extract from Richard Milward, incidentally the guest editor for the issue. It's taken from the writer's second book Ten Storey Love Song and demonstrates something called 'automatic writing'. A continual flow of seemingly arbitrary words, it's completely natural rather than painstakingly put together to resemble a stream of consciousness piece like, say, Virginia Woolf did.
Anyway, I love it and am now off to order Milward's first two books immediately.

'One psychedelic afternoon in September Bobby the Artist accidentally swallows ten tabs of acid while sitting on the toilet. He starts mumbling to himself, gurgling, the shapes of sinks becoming white elephants with beady winking eyes, and the clownfishes on the bath curtain darting about chattering to each other. For a minute he thinks he's Salvador Dali, growing a curly moustache in the mirror. Hola! Salvador laughs - he can't even tell if his eyes are open or shut or not. Freaking out, Salvador put his head in his hands, serving another gust of Chanel into his sleeve. Watch out Sal, here comes the automatic writing! Holistic chicken made tea don't you hedgerow all oil trousers ink sprayed salmon on its chest possibly a frog leopard print snout man looking grumpy boulevard legs eleven prostitute hamsters won fifty pounds at a masquerade after leaving four cups of juicy lemon spiked a nut on the dame of Duke York post-natal dream dismay and a forehead keeps singing on the phone to conker forest of evil and wormy stretch ouch bastard gondolier tra la la Cornetto Tonga hand grenade hooray hippo snarling under grasp only showing no remorse for the budgie that sung sweetly so sweetly but died after having injection to the neck holy water tomato onion banana ketchup see-saw then Ellen Ellen Ellen. "Bobby, what are you doing?" Ellen asks, stepping into the bathroom and it's really her, not a mirage...'

AMAZING.

Book off

I had the oddest thought today, and it simply came from the act of carrying a couple of books around. That's right: books, in my arms, being carried. It gets no more complicated than that. This seemingly redundant process of movement (WITH BOOKS!) reminded me of my BA days. Oh, I was an English student, put on this earth for one reason, and one reason only... to learn in the ways of the Literai! The crumpled pages of a beaten-up second-hand volume of Gaskell's North & South, the hard-bound spine of a text by some wonderfully arbitary author ruminating on the structures of power in a Pinter play, the piles of books discussing Wilde, and Faulkner, and Joyce, and Eliot... This excess that I lumbered around was an armour that swelled up in my chest and the layered pleats of the pages were my protection, voicing the sentiment that 'I was learning!' I was learning, and even as I moved the pressure points of my fingertips were drinking all that inky knowledge up, where it would lie dormant in my mind as tiny fractured splinters of wisdom until I needed to call on them to support an exclamation of swaggering and moving importance...

Then I realised I was walking, carrying some books.