Genie Of The Lamp

Traveled up to Armagh to give a reading with five other Salmon poets fro the John Hewitt Society. I met some interesting people, including the organiser, Anne Marie Fyfe and the poet Maurice Harmon (whose reading the following morning I couldn't stay to attend unfortunately).

I did manage to catch the Kevin McAleer show. Psychosis as comedy: hsi whole act was in the one character, a guy who thinks he's the holy ghost and that everyone is spying on him for the government (postmen, waiters, born again Christians...): 'When I opened the door there were these two men in suits. They said "We want to talk to you about Jesus." I said: "Oh no! What's he done now?!" Brilliant.

McAleer would have had fun with my own little neuroses. For example, the hotel room was L-shaped, much to my discomfort; I am one of the weird ones, preferring small, neat, square rooms to ones that make me feel like a pea in an oversized pod (or a lone genie in a bottle). I also passed the time by taking photos, such as the self-portrait.

Read a sci-fi book to try to get to sleep, Greg Bear's The City at The End of Time. S'okay. A bit too full of 'quirky' characters from the future-present (and others from billions of years in the future, with Monty Pythonesque fantasy-names). Perhaps that's what bores me a little, the mixing of two genres best kept apart; in such an unrelenting dreamscape absolutely anything can happen, which drains the tension from the narrative. Anyway, it isn't a patch on his early book, Blood Music.