Well, I guess I’m starting to feel somewhat better now, beginning to rise from the fug of the end of term blues. Into town yesterday morning to post a bundle of recent eBay sales, and stopped off in Waterstones to browse some books. I’m determined to start reading books with words again instead of just picture books… Anyway, I was delighted to find a new Pelecanos hard back, and even more delighted when I got 3 quid off the price. Result. I’m looking forward to getting into it, although there are a couple others in the pile before it, notably David Peace’s GB 84 which has been on the shelf since Easter, and that David Nichols Go-Betweens biography. But I have five weeks, so what am I worrying about, right?

Then dropped into Bostons for a decaff and a read, but bumped into Josh instead, so we had a good chat about school, which was good, kind of finally getting some things out of my head. Realised I had barely spoken to him for the last year, which is nuts, but then we neither of us are much ones for dropping by the staffroom, so heh…

Uh, I also finally bought frames for the three posters I got from Top Shelf some months ago: two Craig Thompson posters and one with three kind of gorilla / spaceman type things, um, its hard to describe, but it’s really cool anyway. Now I need to figure out where to hang them. I suspect the stairway to the Geek Lair might be the most popular option, but we shall see.

All of which helped raise me from the fug a little, but what really did the trick was getting myself sat down in the afternoon and writing… I have had this big pile of books I wanted to write about for ages but kept putting it off and putting it off, so it was getting to be like this big cloud hanging over me. So in the end I just took a deep breath and started in on them. And you know what? The cloud wasn’t half as dark and big as I thought it was. But it’s strange because it made me think about the whole situation, about having these books (not review freebies, but the result of much spending on my behalf) and not feeling quite right about my relationship to them until I had written about them. It’s like things aren’t real if I haven’t disseminated my thoughts about them in some way. And having done that, now I can move on and do something else. Of course it also made me think about what I was looking at, and that’s always a positive aspect of feeling that need to write about what you consume, even if it’s not in any great depth and if no-one particularly either cares or agrees.

So now I need to write about some comics, and of course there’s a pile of CDs to get to grips with, but at least now I feel a bit more upbeat, a bit more ready to face the day.

Comments

[David O MacGowan]

Madama Yevonde and Laurie Simmons sound absolutely fanTAStic in your article (which was well worth the wait).

The only photography book within my budget when i was shopping today was some huge thing called Exhibit A.... stunning cover (a model lies next to a pool of paint/blood) but flicking thru the interior it was a drab collection of would-be 'mysterious and distant' 60s-style catalogue models posing about next to symmetrical architecture.... :(

Simmons particularly reminds me of something a Live Journal friend has been doing - going back to her childhood dream of owning a doll's house and repopulating it according to her childish whimsy. The idea of a domestic interior being in fact some magical fantasy world is a curious dichotomy....always makes me thinks of Lewis carrol....

Simmons also reminds me of Todd Haynes' 'Star: The karen carpenter Story', albeit more tangentially.....i only ever saw clips from this but the idea of using dolls to tell a serious story is a real sock in the eye for those who look down on children's stuff as being kitsch at best....when we know, of course, it can cope with ideas far better than traditionally adult media can.

It's also fun fun fun!!....hope you include some of the recent run of Batgirl in your comics review....!!!...but WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE NEW ROBIN??!?!?!