Things on my desk

Drugged and wrecked by flu medication, fighting a deadline, I'm sure you won't begrudge me a little gratuitous descriptive fun, dear reader. And Georges Perec would forgive me too, because he did it first (and best) of course.

First of all, the desk. It's small, but dense; very tough because it's made of teak. It comes apart in a few places to enable easier transport. I put it next to the windows in my room, so that I can look out and see the neighbours' houses opposite - a soulless view. My desk is like a little cocoon filled with all manner of ingenious nooks and crannies. I feel very at home and work very well sitting here.

I have been writing intensely for a few days so I have built up a carapace of personal debris. Useful books are scattered at my feet like silent but faithful cats - Borges' essays, one by John Berger, numerous issues of Off The Edge and a reader from a course I did years ago in university, Traces Left in Cities. Oh, and a dictionary. Countless used tissues are proof of my sickness and bloom everywhere like awful germ-infested flowers. I have just made myself a coffee in a nondescript floral mug. Some typed out poetry that Newt sent me sits just above eye level and comforts me whenever I look up. John Montague: 'I'll tell you a sore truth, little understood/It's harder to leave, than to be left: To stay, to leave, both sting wrong./You will always have me to blame, Can dream we might have sailed on; From absence's rib, a warm fiction.'

I sometimes read that last word as 'friction'.

Off to one side is my eternal nemesis, my constant weakness: cigarettes, a lighter and a used ashtray.

The white cotton blinds are down, filtering the evening sun. It's one of my particularly terrible conceits to imagine them as the sails of a ship.

When I was in Bali I bought a type of hand-woven cloth in a rustic, checkered design. It is my new love and I wrap it around me sometimes when I work. It inspires and protects. Don't you love a basic article like fabric rendered precious and personal through artisan-ship? Here is this piece of cloth, made of threads, pulled from cotton, dyed in vats, time woven into the warp and weft. Flaws reaffirm from where it came. I love to know where things come from.

I'm writing about abandoned buildings. Two interesting ideas I have from Traces Left in Cities:

One, that these spaces are the places where the city has left. They present for us not only a critique, but an alternative. (Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio)

Two, that we are attracted to these spaces because they preserve for us that essential aspect of cities: heterodox multiplicities. (Michel de Certeau)

And with that, I think this is a good point to get back to my work.