cris cheek

so, a terrible pun for a subject heading. Although it could have been plaice and chips - caught in the net, or some other equally silly phrase. Just so as you all don't get the feeling that i'm above a bit of a laugh or too serious for corny jokes. Reeling from an ongoing and often corruscating discussion on 'place, locality, nomadism' on brit-po (the e-list for british poets) which lets you know that this is somewhere that i spend a sizeable amount of time at. Apologies to all here (some of whom i know, some i almost know and some i am pleased to meet) for my late arrival btw. I have been here and listening all along but just when i wanted to send out this message i found myself caught working away from 'home' with the terminal from which this was to be launched a long way off. I'm increasingly fascinated by the architextures here - the windows, the browsers, the navigational equipment, the search engines, the links, the gateways, the thickening almost smog of electronic data particles in the air that we breathe I live by the sea and enjoy walking that brew of water on light, always changeable an chargeable. Wide skies, fogs, footsteps in the sand, thoughts, drifting voices. Cooking smells moving through the house, childrens' laughter, cars on the road outside, books to hand all become locations and as locations far from static (although i get that sometimes off an old jumper) but energising points of arrivals and departures. Even if that energy is a regrouping or recharging after a day of doing not a lot but pottering from one displacement activity to another displacement activity, sort of getting something done or beginning or moving on but avoiding what i feel i ought to do. If it all gets too much i go out and weed the garden. This town, or at leat the ward i live in is being substantially rebuilt and under the rubric of heritage and conservation huge factories (the coop) and leisure palaces (the grand bingo) are being hauled down. Just yesterday the main arterial road was blocked by a wall being dismantled onto the street. I'm sitting now in the top room of a 4 storey house about 100 yards from an almost mile long sandy beach. That makes it sound so romantic. In fact this is a rundown town whose principal industry, fishing, is fading as quotas and fish stocks dwindle. Its newer tec, rig building, is growing but there's high unemployment. I'm just about to walk downtown, past the trasnlocal multiplex cinema and over the harbour bridge (which opens up vertically like one to be clung to in a Hollywood movie), past the old train station into the Benjamin Britten (he hated the homophobia of this brithplace) Centre to pick up a film of photos i took in Devon last week. I write. It's part of the fabric of my everyday. I make writing from what stirs me up. Often over the past few years that's been collected as notes onto dictaphones as I walk or drive or train around the country and watch tv and play playstation games and skip the net and talk with friends and allies. The writing is part conversation with myself and part conversations with many others. Sometimes it gets published, only because someone asks me for something. Sometimes it's been 'read' at a public event. Sometimes it makes forays into internet spaces. Sometimes it's on a CD or on the radio or webcast. Local and translocal everywhere. People on streets outside pubs and clubs, sat on park benches, in shops all talking on the mobiles, which with the hands-free sets brings even stranger ellipses between public and private. People everywhere appear to be rehearsing their lines out loud. Closure operates extraordinarily i such circumstances. These are some of my senses of pla(y)ce. But I'm also thinking of things that others say like language is the most important home i can think of and that we are all tourists and I wonder why that doesn't feel quite true to me. Although I can't grasp how to 'map' this sense of translocality and locality interactive that i live with day by day. looking forward to these emergent conversations more and more love and love cris

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