I'm sure there are no regular visitors to this most irregular of sites, but should anyone be mildly curious about the yawning gaps between entries (and indeed between stated intentions and actual achievement), here's the answer: I lost the notebook.
To be precise, although I still have a hundred photos, fifty recordings, pages of journal entries, numerous sketches, and about five sheets of paper noting conversational topics embarked on during our stay in Moscow, I lost the small moleskine in which I was actually making my notes on the staions as we visited them.
In the meantime, therefore, I've been going on about that on the Lost Notebook site (link to your right), and haven't been able to face updating this blog. But now, as the project moves on, it's time to chat amiably with that particular demon, and come to some arrangement.
The latest news is both Andy and Paul have produced drafts; I'm struggling towards a few sketchy versions of my own, and we're meeting up to discuss the book and its future next week. In a banya. Or rather, in Newcastle's magnificent Turkish Baths.
There's a nice coincidence in this respect in that a parallel project, the 'Balkan Exchange' interaction between NE poets including Andy and myself, and a number of Bulgarian writers, has now acquired a banya-related aspect. Always interesting when such things, like bubbles in the bathtub, spontaneously arise.
Another coincidence that has arisen recently is this photo diary by Linda Nylind, who was evidently in Moscow at around the same time as us, taking snaps of almost the same things: cosmonauts, parades and myetro stations.
Immediate plans for discussing on the deckchairs of the City Pool include: organising the order of the book, discussions with publisher(s), and a reading of material produced so far.
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
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