Dust Jacket.

Nobody loves a book just because of its dust jacket. Still, it's an incentive to pick up a book, leaf idly through it, scan the blurb, and then either trundle off to the counter with it, or shelve it if it turns out to sound naff or is by J.D Salinger.

Which isn't to say that cover art should be neglected despite the book it shields. David Pelham - designer of the cover of A Clockwork Orange - is vaunted as the godhead of dust jacket artists, and probably rightly so. Paul Rand has more sway over modern writing than some publishing dons, and authors clamour to get his off-hand signature scrawled on the inside cover. Elaine Ramos's covers are a slanty netherworld of colour blocks and monotone fissures; she rakes in a fortune each year designing book covers and, not co-incidentally,architectural designs for art galleries, including The Tate Modern.

Sometimes the writer or photographer who complements the book becomes iconic, sometimes not. Sometimes the author creates their own mock-up; sometimes not. Sometimes the dust jacket is connected explicitly with the book; sometimes, merely obliquely. As a general - very general - concept, the cover echoes the feel of the contents, binds theme and form, and refines literary technique into a image.

All of this doesn't mean you actually have to like the book itself though. Everyone knows a Famous Five cover (By that I mean an original, slightly foxed tatty version in a second-hand bookshop), but I'd rather blind myself with carbolic acid and fire ants than read a single word of the racist old bint's writing. I felt that way when I was five, I see no reason to change now.

Regardless, I like dust jackets very much. Even if nobody else does. Which may be the case. With that in mind, here are some good ones - some scanned in, some pinched off the internet. Permission has not been sought; as such, lawsuits from the illustrator or author are expected.I would say in my defence, however, that this is technically a form of advertising, and as a corollary to this, any publishers, authors, or cover artists who wish to send me a cheque, please message me when convenient and we can discuss figures. Thanks.

Seamus Heaney; Toolbox.

I've had, for about as long as I can remember (And I can pin-point when, come to think of it; I'd just tottered in out of the rain on a fog-bound October day, where I'd been lurking in my den (A mossy alcove behind the log-pile my Dad built, clumping about in his work boots with a liberated - and lethally sharp - hatchet, clomping about like the wild man of the woods in size twelves) and was soaked through, covered in bark shreds, mulch, churned mud, lichen-dew, livid weals of crayola etc, when I found a green cloth-bound book, which turned out to be a Seamus Heaney anthology. I went to my secondary den place (behind a heavy velvet curtain; crushed, red, mothy), something of an obsession with Seamus Heaney's poetry. The first time I read this strange, bog poetry, which felt oddly as if the outside had been transmogrified into words (all the caked mud and leaf rot and squashed wood-worm on my boots and mackintosh, condensed, raw and cold and damp, into words), it was uncomfortably visceral. You could feel the hoar frost misting on your skin and flaking off in shards of rime; feel the spring and hear the hiss of air bubbles trapped in the springy lichen. Being behind a curtain with a glass of overproof Ribena and a monstorous, blue-furred spider of a hot water bottle didn't help much; it was still like being on the red moors and wracked dunes with a salt atlantic wind grazing your cheeks.

Anyway, it left me with a slightly uncomfortable shiver, hooked in and around my spinal cord; I kept getting petrified bog-men and slanted silver rain and deathly famines in my dreams. I carried on reading naturalist writing for the rest of my life; Roger Deakin, Ted Hughes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, E.M Forster, Thomas Hardy, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Adam Nicholson, Robert MacFarlane, and so on (I will write this up at some point, promise). Regardless, if the unthinkable has happened and you're not aware of Seamus Heaney, here's some of my personal favourites, bar the whole work of District & Circle, which I couldn't find illictly on-line and quaked a bit at the thought of typing up from scratch.

Seamus Heaney is, as far as I've discovered at any rate, the most sensitive, even-handed, elegant, languid, calm, and above all - this is what makes it work, I think - the least showy/understated poet I know of; adjectives are a killer sometimes. However, here they are, in no order that I'm aware of.

Lovers On Aran

The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass,
Came dazzling around, into the rocks,
Came glinting, sifting from the Americas

To posess Aran. Or did Aran rush
to throw wide arms of rock around a tide
That yielded with an ebb, with a soft crash?

Did sea define the land or land the sea?
Each drew new meaning from the waves' collision.
Sea broke on land to full identity.

Strange Fruit

Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.

Death Of A Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

The Docker

There, in the corner, staring at his drink.
The cap juts like a gantry's crossbeam,
Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw.
Speech is clamped in the lips' vice.

That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-
Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again;
The only Roman collar he tolerates
Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.

Mosaic imperatives bang home like rivets;
God is a foreman with certain definite views
Who orders life in shifts of work and leisure.
A factory horn will blare the Resurrection.

He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross,
Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
Tonight the wife and children will be quiet
At slammed door and smoker's cough in the hall.

Pasadena diner, 9.42am, Tuesday twelfth, '78.

Hello chaps.

Today's playlist is a mixed bag of:

* Dustbowl folk.
* Early 60's surf and proto-garage.
* Appalachia blues, Virginian bluegrass, Chicago Jazz.
* Californian drinking songs.
* Sunburnt alt-country.
* Spoken word Beat.
* Deep southern gospel.
* Scratchy come-down punk.

So, here it is: http://open.spotify.com/user/trade_winds/playlist/7lLv67hCLBSyN1SFDybPla

Enjoy!

Love,

Nick.

Blotting Paper

I used to have a bizarre recurrent dream where I was in a completely white landscape, a three-dimensional sheet of paper, empty except for a crudely drawn, child's idea of a house – a wooden cube, slatted in unblemished logs that never came from a living tree, yellow-lit, steamy windows, amiably puffing chimney like an old man's pipe, all under a brilliant white sky that was somehow bright without being distinct. There was no division in colour and perspective between the sky and the land. Clumped around the house in a geometrical spinney were four trees; arrow-straight brown trunks, with five cantilevered branches projecting from the crown, then a fuzz of scribbled green lines for the leaves.

The house stood at the bottom of a hill – there were gradients in this landscape, although because of the radiance of the sky, there were no shadows, so you couldn’t see an angle until you started walking up (or down) it. I used to be at the top of this steep hill, this ghost hill, and for some reason or other, I had to run down to the bottom, racing against (I have no idea why) the White Queen in the Narnia books. I always used to get off the mark with a comfortable lead, and my feet became winged and the air parted like a curtain as I sped downhill at an appreciable fraction of lightspeed, but she gained on me step by step as I began to slow, and instead of breaking the barrier and winning, she always drew level with me. Then, glancing left, she stretched and warped and fused, like burning photographs or smeared oil-paintings, and then I did too.

I used to be able to think I could feel my component cells, then atoms stretching like elastic to the invisible horizons – not painful, but excruciatingly uncomfortable and alien. The space between my molecules became an empty ocean, then a gulf filled with wheeling points of light, then a void so vast and incalcuble and touched with faint stars at distances so massive as to be functionally infinite that my mind, even within the dream, shut down entirely.

Well, around about this point, I assume my brain used to mentally hiccup, as happens when you encounter something that is just too big and strange (Thinking about what was there before God, and before that, and before thatargharghargh) and triped over the quantum door-step into confused awakening.

There’s probably some deep Freudian pulse to all this, but I don’t know what it is and I won’t linger on it.

"Later that day in gym class, she ate a mouthful of anthrax, go to sleep".

Here is the first of a string of stuff that I quite like to listen to. Today's humble offering is titled 'Wooze Patrol', and is a mixed bag of 1940's jazz, 1960's doo-wop, C86 indie-pop, Americana folk pre and post dustbowl, mid-60's psychedelia, and orchestral contemporary folk. Make of that what you will.

spotify:user:trade_winds:playlist:4XLtsVj3L3v4962VpUkfLn

Enjoy!

Nick x.

NB - This is a Spotify playlist, so you will need Spotify to play it. Fairly obviously.

Patterns

"I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1902. The event took place some five years ago. Bioy Casares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers - very few readers - to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors hare something monstrous about them." - Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius


Realms

Light lingers long by the door. A crack in the paintwork of the windowframe that I cannot see because it is too small threads a persistant eddy of cool air into my forearm, brushing a crease in the small blonde hairs on my medial muscles and running parellel down the wave-streak of my slightly twisted lateral muscle, as if the wind was surfing on my still skin down its length. There is the faintest of whistlings. The wind from a wasps wing stirs spirals of dust on my hornbeam chest of draws, and then the wasp is gone out of the door into the hall. Patterns in the white emulsion paint of my ceiling flit from fingerprints, to nazca lines, to the expanding concentric circles of a dropped pebble in the changing light, then stop. Flecks of sunlight diffuse off my gold hairs and shear off into the air, though I can't see them because of the fading sun.

I have watched a gull turn in a halo of sky for the last 1 + 1/2hrs. I don't understand why birds fly, anymore than I understand why the wind thrums my washing line or why my eyes are blue or why the sun didn't go out yesterday, or tomorrow, or a millenium ago. Oh, I understand the scientific, the academic, the realist theory why, but I don't understand the why why. Sometimes I can only find 'because'. I measure myself by what I don't really understand. I'm not very good with things I am supposed to understand. We step gingerly onto a line that is as wide as the most slender strand of hair, and broken and lonely winds push us from all angles without knowing why, but soon we forget about falling from all that staring at the sky. The land below becomes as intangible and intransient as a star, and about as distant. Soon, we don't remember falling at all, then we forget the memory of the memory of falling, and then nothing. Now, for the first time in all our lives, we are walking. And you cannot run until you've learnt to walk.


Walls.

There are four walls.

The unbreakable fourth, the inexorable third, the shifting second, the collapsing first, with the outer seal of the fourth hemmed in by the heavy third, and the siblilant second binding the folding first.

Between each wall is a rift of size.

The first and second walls contain emotion and colour and distance, which warp and elongate and snap from chemical to chemical and reaction to reaction. The reactivity of the first to second is sequential, numinous, lawful and chaotic in equal measure.

The third contains precepts of memory and foci of habit, half-formed phantasms, doldrumic and windless, which are subject to change as often and varied as cats paws in a trackless sea.

The fourth contains composure and resource, lodestones of self and selfhood, one fractured totality.

The distance between each layer is as thin as the wind through the slivered grass. Or as thick as the distance between the mirror and the reflection. The impact of one wall on another wall is so appalling as to be cataclysmic, yet so subtle as to be as discernable as the single reflection of a single sunbeam on a single grain of sand.


I Don’t Remember.

Influence begets influence, thought chases thought, step treads footprint, footprint crushes grass, grass presses mud, mud pushes stone. Stone cracks stone. Each thought, memory, and habit is spherical yet boundless – its circumference hypothetically measurable, its radius functionally infinite.

The space between each sphere is filled with archons of light.

The radiance is blindingly invisible. The colours are like the washes in a mandala. Seraphic synpases flit in torn bursts of pale flame. The wind that shakes the barley also propels the rain, murders the sky, sings the evening, twists the fabric, snaps the fingers, expands the pupil, waters cupidity, drowns courage, heals endurance and corrodes doubt. Memory falls like fog on a field. Shreds of vapour have more in common with remembrance than element. The bars of pink behind a shut eyelid, the diffusion of light through a glass of water, the sebum of smears on that glass. The slow fall of protective mucus like raining atoms on a woken eyeball. I don’t remember any more than I remember why I sleep, or why my heart beats. Or why my mouth swallows air. I don’t remember anymore.


"I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?" - W.G. Sebald, The Rings Of Saturn.


But There Are Other Skies.

I am followed by my own shadows and led by my own lights. On some days, I cast beams onto pavements and I am lit by the glare of silhouettes, although only when I shut my eyes. When I open my eyes again it is seven hours later.

Or eight.

I waltz from reflection to glaze to sheen before sleeping in matt colours. Everything in my dusks and dawns is in secondary colours. There are other colours there that I don’t have names for and I suppose never will.

I wake up in half-light and falter through currents of spontaneity and rivulets of impulse until the day ends and the sun goes down. Then I go to sleep when the light goes from black to black-black to grey-black to grey-blue-black to yellow-grey-blue to copper-azure to bronze-scarlet-sapphire. Then finally blue, blue stretching from golden horizon to golden horizon and from drowsing ground to waking zenith, until I am cupped in the palm of the sky and my breath flickers happily in my chest and the freshening wind rises with the morning.

Then I get up and do it again.


Strange Weather

I am blood-caught in the skies, as far in altitude in my head as my feet are chained to the earth. I lay on my back on cropped laser-green grass and feel my skin groove and spike with the blades and turn pink and mottled under the pressing ground. I watch clouds scud and trip over the sky until my vision spins.

I tilt my head back and watch the arc of the sky fall into the inverted earth until the blood pulses in my brain, and I watch as trees plant their leafy roots in the blue shimmering ground and their towering trunks reach the roof of the green sky. I have a tame Poplar that picks up the slightest breath and shivers silver leaves.

In a strong wind, it looks like it is on fire. Silver flames, edged with emerald.

Huge winds growl around the meadow and buffet the grass like an inland sea, tides of air.

And the barn owl rides the wind-spins like a storm petrel.

The March Of The Toasters

On some days, I fear my toaster.

It sits in the corner of my kitchen, dowdy in shades of beige and silver, and emmanates a chilling smugness when I slot my bread warily into it's broiling depths. I'm not a technophobe, but more of an inadvertant luddite - on the whole, I approach technology with a certain clandestine joy, throwing the instruction manual gaily over my shoulder and bounding in to get happily covered in machine oil, choked with WD40, and peppered with splinters. Sometimes I finish using, making, or tinkering with something and find it hasn't impaled, burnt, or exploded at me. These are good days, and they are rare. For example, I once made a phone explode by looking at it. Sparks and everything. Often are the times when a friend will return from the bar, a parent from the garden, or a teacher from a quiet smoke, to find me cradling a smoking pile of twisted metal and making apologetic noises.

Truly, there is no hope for such as me. If the robots ever dominate this green globe of ours, then whatever band of desperate rebels remain will wheel me out into the ravaged landscape to combat hulks of metal and malice, where I will pull out my Phillips and Black & Decker and grin winningly as horribly beweaponed war-droids explode into despairing showers around me. I am, in my way, a sort of technological rapture, where the faithful (Simple things that I can't break - pestle & mortar, my aging ipod, and all Nokia phones) will live on, while the sinners (That bastard toaster, for one thing) will be plunged into the abyssal wheelie-bin.

I realize that most toasters are in the same league of dubious convenience as showers - devices where the merest nanometre to the left or the right means the difference between two degrees off ultimate zero and the surface temperatrue of the sun. I understand this, and realize I am not alone. However, I have proof that my toaster not only hates me but is actively trying to kill me.

I understand that the first setting on any toaster is not hot and the, say, fifth setting is burnt. Now then. Who designed that? Who sat down in their swively designers chair and basked in the halogen glow of their angle-poise lamp, thoughtfully sucking a biro, and thought, "Hmm, I sometimes fancy toast that is uncooked, and is therefore essentially bread, and yet in my mind, remains toast, despite the level of heat being equivalent to a Cornish breeze on a July evening. For this, I will devise Level One Toast. Equally, I sometimes like to eat bread that is so burnt it is essentially carbon, and yet I do not want to eat coal or indeed diamonds, as they are difficult to spread butter on, and in the case of diamonds, both harder to come by and considerably more expensive than Warburtons, so for this quandry, I will concoct Level Five Toast."

Presumambly this same designer thought that the idea of toast gently seared to a rich gold, with nary a hint of pallid nor burnt crumbs perverse and pointless, and left it out altogether.

I wouldn't mind, but Level Two And A Half doesn't give you that, as it logically should. It's this contradiction of logic that permeates all human society and exists solely to befuddle people like me. For example, 0 degrees is freezing and 100 degrees is boiling. That is fine, that is logical. But it doesn't stop me believing in my heart of hearts that 70 degrees should be a nice warm temperature.

Anyway, I don't want to get anal about toast. Who would? But to return to the toaster briefly. It is the most malicious item I have ever owned. It has, so far, mildly electrocuted me - possibly as a test to see exactly how much wattage would be needed to boil my internal organs, for maximum hilarity - burnt me more times than I care to remember, and (and this is the impressive bit) tripped me up. Yes, a toaster has indeed made me fall arse over tit twice. Once, when its lead had somehow managed to loop, like a sleeping boa, over the microwave, before falling to the ground and craftily snaring my foot like a triffid, and once again, when it pinged gloatingly at me when I shuffled downstairs once morning, causing me to slip up and deliver a beautiful header into the corner of the fridge. It is a nasty, vindictive bastard of a toaster. I am convinced that the real reason it hates me is because when it was bought I was eying up a sleek George Foreman grill, so now it has abandonment issues bordering on the psychotic, lapsing into murderous rage if I dare to use the grill.

This, really, is yet another example of mankinds mounting obsession with taking all the effort, hardship, and mental taxation out of life and replacing it with new, shiny, chrome-and-titanium effort, hardship, and mental taxation. My on-line banking is there so I can easily track, organize, and authorize my financial transactions at the click of a mouse, ensuring me fiscal security, a zen state of mind and a glowing complexion. However, it actually enables me to forget with depressing regularity a bewildering array of secret answers, user names, and passwords (Incidentally, the password selection process is indictive of the muted hatred technology has for us - only the other day I changed my hotmail password to have my laptop bark, "Too short! Too long! Must use at least one letter, number, and lower/uppercase!") and lock myself out, or, alternately, let myself in to find out just how poor I am (at the click of a mouse!) and thus sending me on a self-destructive path of financial fear all day that culminates in me resigning myself to my fate and buying wildly expensive because I've given up hope and might as well go out with a bang.

The only exceptions to this technological impasse are my ipod, which is old, scarred, slow, and chunky, like a veteran stray cat, my typewriter, which is one of the worst designed and viciously serrated pieces of equipment its ever been my (mis)fortune to have my fingers torn to ribbons by (Although it is very beautiful and I like the smell of india ink) and itunes, which is my pride and joy and keeps me sedated with Mogwai when I go through the rigamorole of on-line banking again.