Reading list no.3

A few more things I've been reading:

Visions of the city - David Pinder

Rodinsky's room - Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair

Rethinking the meaning of place - Lineu Costello

Maps - Ed. Ross Bradshaw

Cultural geography in practice - A. Blunt et al

The counter-monument: Memory against itself in Germany today - J.E Young (Critical Inquiry 18(2) pp 267-96)

Writing writing writing

I've joined a writing for group for practice-based researchers who want to explore new and creative ways to write in academia.  This is a stream of consciousness piece about my research that I wrote in one of today's writing exercises.

It is a bit mysterious if I look at it with too much intensity it seems to disappear, if I look at the whole of it. If I look at smaller parts then it has different characteristics - part of it is musty and crumbling, sepia toned, silent and very shy.  It doesn't want to play but can be tempted out with a sustained expression of interest and then slowly it uncurls a bit at a time, but never very much I could stay with it for ever and it would never completely uncurl.  In some ways it is reacting to the experience of being unloved.  The roof leaks and it is exiled in Gorton.  There is nothing beautiful about its environment and like a child, it should be nurtured.  No nurturing there except one guardian, on his own, in the silence, day after day.  And when someone comes to visit. It Is An Event.  It's smell is decay, slowly creeping and it knows that there is an end.


Another part of the research is foggy.  I think I know what is there but I can't actually see it, and if I could see it it might be very different from what I expect.  There is a slight danger to it, like driving in fog or a snowstorm.  Snowstorms are busier and some of it will be busy. Fog is languorous and lonely and very quiet. And I don't know what will loom out of the fog, it might be a fairground and it might be a cemetery.  I can't prepare because I don't know. I don't know and I want to be open to whatever comes and not describe a graveyard as a fairground.


The biggest monster is waiting for me and I am afraid of it. It can crush me and yet it can also carry me away to places I would never go on my own it can be my muse and it can capture peoples attention in a way that I cannot do alone. It can make a show or disappear.


The straight lines are holding me together and I love them.  But they trap me they seduce me with their simplicity and I revere them too much and cannot let them be smudged, cannot spoilt their perfectness.  They trap me and I want to learn to escape from them.  I can't change them and I can't ignore them.


The page is too big and the ideas are too small and my mind is smaller than either.