List #3

(For James, and belated happy birthday)

Opening the cabin blinds and there’s the frost on slate; that light, that sky

if you’ve never considered the multiple uses of a photo booth perhaps you’re not inventive enough

PIMP in Anatomy of a Fall

Suddenly, magnolia

Crowstep gables

John Le Carre, and how does he do that?

Girl dinners in hotel rooms

just because you’ve got a beard it doesn’t make you an artist

TV pitches on your notes app

has to be the roasted garlic dip though

pollarded trees

sometimes you worry everything you do takes you further away from everyone you love

rainy Edinburgh evenings

suddenly a memory of crying at El Anatsui

Sally Rooney is everything and nothing

the row of phone boxes outside the high court

marmite > marmalade

how big the sky is from a tenement

Clara Mann all week

sometimes you’re fine and then you remember Carol howling at the end of Where the Wild Things Are

it is confusing to think of green as the colour of death

suddenly a memory of a May dawn 20 years ago

wishing your eyes were a camera and you could blink and click

just do it

after a while, you have to get up from the floor

and the soundtrack

I aspire to be music

do people at the centre of an explosion see it?

wanting to read Ducks, Newburyport for the first time again

it would help if more writers paid more attention to syllables

Laszlo Krasznahorkai

aries > anything else

and James Gandolfini is dead

(I started making these lists for myself on my phone, but lately I’ve become preoccupied by potential of the list as a literary form. I think it’s under utilised. I think I will explore it a bit more, more regularly.)