replaying Blue Velvet. His thoughts are interrupted by an idea for a play, by
his child rolling on the floor and complaining of boredom, by the
likelihood that his wife is reading the letters he’s left intentionally on top
of the filing cabinet. They are photocopies of his original letters to
publishers, writers, artists, academic colleagues... even movie stars.There
are also other documents—drafts of essays, notes, private thoughts and
so on. He wonders if the sin of reading them is greater than the sin of
constructing such a temptation. He thinks of the letters to ‘.. .’ he’s
inserted at regular intervals. He knows they’ll annoy her. His wife, the
novelist, is working on her Ghoul manuscript. The student in flat five is
preparing to leave, he is reading Descartes, in English translation, and
intermittently returning to a draft of his first book—a science fiction
novel with the working title Lens. He’s quite handsome, one might let
oneself think, in a stray moment.Though he watches your every step. It’s
best to pretend to keep your eyes averted. It’s best that way.The ‘girls’ are
getting dressed. One of them is thinking how much she hates sex.They’ve
both just snorted a line of speed.The bitter taste is just entering the back
of their throats and they both, occasionally, snort like pigs. The steroid-
hungry guy in flat six is frustrated and starting a journal on the advice of
his therapist, his girlfriend is writing up her case study notes; the woman
whose child has been removed by the Department is frantically trying to
prepare a vase of flowers for possible visitors/intruders over the weekend
while her boyfriend, the addict, is reading Slide Show— a cult drug novella;
the Indonesian couple are arguing.From Genre (Kinsella 1997, pp. 9–11)It is also common in much contemporary poetry to move quickly from
one moment or scenario to another, often implicitly disrupting a
strong sense of time and place and creating time–space compression.
Such time and space shifts have been apparent in a number of exam-
ples in this book, such as in the prose poetry of Lyn Hejinian and
Ania Walwicz, and are also to be found on a larger scale in the work
of experimental novelists such as Sabrina Achilles (1995). They are
apparent, too, in the word association on travel by Michele Sweeney
in Chapter 1, Example 1.8.
For Exercise 7 create a text which pivots on time–space compression.
Move between different centuries and continents: the transitions between
the locales and time zones can be very swift and abrupt, or slower and
smoother. Whatever type of text you produce, try to capture a sense of how
disparate times and places are geographically and historically interrelated.
Mapping worlds, moving cities 271