What is it like to be a cormorant whose life it is to catch the fish but not to eat it?
Before the advent of the internet, I typed on a yellowing Atari, a dirt view onto the grey rooftops of Elephant and Castle by my side, a Jameson and my co-conspirators in the shadows. With an eclectic set of writers I reminisced exotic travels, or so I thought, and a new world of love and angst.
I flirted with foreign correspondence, creative writing and Yugo-pop, Yamaha keyboards and industrial rock, Henry Miller and the modern Penguins, or Vince Clarke and the Shepherd’s Bush global rhythms.
Ideas materialized from dreams and wishes, from free spirits and lost souls. They translated onto pages, writing as practice, writing as reality, a tuning-up, an archive of memories, meditation and diary, in a fluid time.
These pages are in their raw form, and include those youthful stumbles. They are the freeform protector from forgetting, or so I trust.
WMC
March 14, 2022
Copyright Mel Christie © 2022. All rights reserved.
All content on this site reflects the author’s present recollections of experiences over time. Some names and characteristics have been changed or mixed together, some events have been compressed, and some have been recreated or totally invented.
Shiki’s cormorant haiku translated by R. H. Blyth, Haiku Volume 3.
For related sites try my forthcoming (?) book Seeking Sanook (See the glossary for more about cormorants and cormorant fishing) or read my mid-Atlantic musings on The Pure Life of Dreams.