Pea Arts About

Last one of these attached to Linda France's New Writing North climate residency and not sure what we'll get up to yet. My writing lately has been scraping at the edges of my DYCP Treasures project and planning for a guest seminar for my friend Jenn's MA module on language in TV and film taught from a linguistics perspective. Getting back in Metz after a long time away from film semiotics and it's giving me such a lift at a tough time. His final book Impersonal Enunciation was beautifully translated into English my Cormac Deane in 2016 and it's a breath of fresh air.  Linda is asking us to think about place. The places in my mind currently are my mum's room in the intermediate care home she's in while rehabilitating from surgery on a badly broken hip. If that's where I choose then we're staying with it for the session. Ok, let's document it.  Prompt 1: Describe this place. Write freely and loosely, but remember detail. There's a little nature

With my mum in hospital and the uncertainty around her care, and then all the running about that having a close relative in hospital involves, it has been difficult to find headspace for writing at all, and writing for my DYCP project specifically. Rather appropriately, I started vaguely reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence (Abacus, 1997) in which Dyer wants to write a book about D. H. Lawrence but finds himself doing anything but writing a book about D. H. Lawrence. This is my current experience with my Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable project. At least my ACE grant is about developing practice and doesn’t expect a big shiny outcome other than a report on the development of your practice. But I do really want a manuscript to come out of it. So I’m carving snatches of time between hospital runs to write something , even if it’s skirting the edges of what I really want and ought to be writing about. Plus it’s cathartic, getting stuff out

I wasn’t going to try to blog for a bit. The material I had scheduled has dried up and I haven’t prepared any more. I was feeling a bit of pressure with increasing deadlines in my paid work and the ramping up of my Arts Council England project to the writing practice phase when we were hit hard with Covid infections. I’m feeling angry that the deemed-on-our-behalf healthy and working population haven’t been offered an autumn booster when it was inevitable that all the nasty viruses would be rampant as soon as schools and universities were back in action. By the same measure I’m grateful I had 3 jabs in 2021, even if their efficacy has waned as I suspect my infection may have been severe enough to warrant hospitalisation had I had no protection at all. I’m recovering a tiny bit more every day, but progress is slow and I am significantly weakened.   On top of that my mum had an accident and needed emergency surgery on a fractured hip. I’ve been very anxious about such a scenario for some

* Derry Girls season 3* The appearance of a Hollywood star with a particular set of skills (and still no match for Uncle Colm) in the season 3 premier of Derry Girls wasn't a surprise for me as it was with live viewers because it was trending on Twitter when I logged on to do podcast stuff (have I mentioned I make a podcast ?) early the next morning. Yes, in 2022 in the UK, the masses still don't consider that a load of us don't have or watch live broadcast television for a multitude of reasons and get caught up later, as is our wont well into the age of on-demand catch-up services.   Liam Neeson's turn as an RUC officer was quite the boon, and to see him bested by Uncle Colm's (Kevin McAleer) filibustering was nothing short of masterful, and the weans were acted off the screen all round by the older generations in this one. But the A-story's edgy hilarity served to mask the deep darkness of the B-story in which Granda Joe's (Ian McElhinney) taken-in-cat, Se