{ let the one who brings the candle also bring the wax. }

[delga]

mollycares asked me my five favourite cities; my five favourite collections of words; my five least favourite animals; five things I've always wanted to say; my five favourite colours. I skipped the penultimate one because I pretty much just say the things I want to say unless I suspect I am being especially churlish and am likely to change my mind. I think before I speak, nine times out of ten, and I don't know that there are positive things I want to say that I haven't said.

--

London

New York City

Mumbai

Jerusalem

Copenhagen

--

01. Sylvia Plath's Ariel. I loved it from the very first time I read Daddy, and I know it from odd angles, having cut it up to re-write the myth of Persephone and Hades for an experimental lit class in uni. There is a whole section about bee-keeping! Joyful, light, industrious. A completely different Plath.

Poppies In October by Sylvia Plath

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly ----

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

02. Tracy Chapman's entire discography. I love all the music, but her lyrics are wonderful, too. She sings love songs, devotional songs, political ones, songs about greed, betrayal, materialism, everything.

Sing for You off her most recent album is light and sweet - sweet and high at the break of dawn / a simple tune that you can hum along to / I remember there was a time when I used to sing for you - but Our Bright Future is a condemnation: To my father what of your sons? / All of your children, even the ones / sent out to martyr, to face the gun / precious bodies opposed to bombs.

Telling Stories has the fantastic opening verse: There is fiction in the space between the lines on your face and memories / write it down but it doesn't mean that you're not just telling stories. I have always loved the stark simplicity of Devotion, and the contrariness of Never Yours which switches sides when you're not paying attention.

A recent favourite is Taken from Where You Live (below) but what all of her songs have in common is that they match thoughtful, simple lyricism with thoughtful, simple music in interesting and unexpected ways. She is masterful.

Should I try to take you in and hope for the perfect docile pet?
Hope that you'll not defile or wreck my home sweet home, sweet home, sweet home

Here there's only faith, no doubt; you can be taken anywhere
Here is where you choose the place with pleasure and pain in equal share
A refuge for truth and deceit where all who come are taken in, taken in

03. I take perverse pleasure in enunciating words suffixed by '-ious'. Vicious, malicious, pernicious, auspicious, suspicious, surreptitious, superstitious, envious, impervious, supercilious, bilious ...and so on. It's the sibilants, I think? Very satisfying.

04. The preface to Samuel Johnson's dictionary which I first read when young and, though I didn't really understand it at the time, knew it was weighty and important.

This recommendation of steadiness and uniformity does not proceed from an opinion, that particular combinations of letters have much influence on human happiness; or that truth may not be successfully taught by modes of spelling fanciful and erroneous: I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. Language is only the instrument of science, and words are but the signs of ideas: I wish, however, that the instrument might be less apt to decay, and that signs might be permanent, like the things which they denote.

05. Hélène Cixous' Le Rire de la Meduse which changed my life, and I do not say that lightly. If your life was anything like mine then you grew up thinking equal, equal, equal and not really understanding what that meant until you were older. And I always thought myself a feminist, but this text-- it's not that it changed that perspective, it just sort of contextualised it. I don't even agree with it on the whole; I just know that this was the one that made me think about feminist writing in a completely different light. I was less sceptical to second wave writing (which previously made me uncomfortable) and I was ready to read more - more widely, more openly, more thoroughly. I remember sitting in the seminar listening to the class talk about how the text seemed to contradict itself, and it all felt so easy to me; it made sense. I have never had trouble with it, I think, because it illuminated many things for me.

I am a terrible lit student. I cannot remember reams and reams of lines; I cannot recite texts. I have difficulty remembering things exactly. But I have never, ever forgotten woman must write herself. Aside from that, it's also beautifully written.

I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies -- for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Women must put herself into the text -- as into the world and into history -- by her own movement.

[...]

Listen to a woman speak at a public gathering (if she hasn't painfully lost her wind). She doesn't 'speak', she throws her trembling body forward; she lets go of herself, she flies; all of her passes into her voice, and it's with her body that she vitally supports the 'logic' of her speech. Her flesh speaks true. She lays herself bare. In fact, she physically materialises what she's thinking; she signifies it with her body. In a certain way she inscribes what she's saying, because she doesn't deny her drives the intractable and impassioned part they have in speaking. Her speech, even when 'theoretical' or political, is never simple or linear or 'objectified', generalized: she draws her story into history.

--

01. Hyenas. Like, shut up, hyenas!

02. Cats. I hate domestic felines. The neighbour's cat fills me with rage.

03. Hamsters, and other such pets. I don't find them cute. Sorry?

04. Geese! Geese are fucking bullies. Don't hiss at me.

05. Crows are truly a suspicious breed, guys. For serious.

--

01. Red. All kinds of red. Bright and cheerful, dark and deep and solemn. Polka red. Blood red. Poppy red. I love red.

02. There is this blue colour that is really popular right now that I adore. It's quite dark - indigo, I guess? Inky, indigo blue.

03. Purple. Dark, dark, inky purple. Are you sensing a theme yet?

04. Burnt sienna. It's this rusty colour, like dulled copper.

05. Plum that errs towards dusky pink. It's my summer colour.