Bird and Ocean dot com

A new genre of literature ?

I'm hoping (working at, struggling to make, hammering like a madman in a desert cave, forge-fire singeing my eyebrows, hammer-strikes clang! clang! echoing across the dry stone valley outside - by god! this has to work, it just has to!) I'm hoping this website is a new and never-before-seen-nor-imagined genre of literature.

The genre combines elements of literary magazine, British television sitcom production, autobiography, traditional author's website, and performance piece, among others.

Less stridently: I'm a writer and birdandocean.com is my studio. Here you can read, listen, look at essays, stories, notes on writing, culture, life. I’ve collected out-of-the-way indie music and soundscapes, art, photographs, curios, objects to ponder … and I’ve written pieces short and long, fiction and non-fiction, light and serious.

Imagine you've been walking across the desert of Baja California. The heat is hot. The ground is dry. The air is full of sounds - mostly the sound of someone clanging iron against iron somewhere in those stony hills.

At last you reach the ocean just where a village or small town clings to the rocks above a beach. The sea stretches out like a rippling silver-blue mirror. At the horizon it blends into an azure sky. The soft roar and salt of waves crashing upon a long white-sand beach refresh your desire for adventure.

So you stroll down through the village, your mouth dry, legs aching. You pass by this shop, which advertises cool drinks and armchairs alongside its collection of curios and books.

Sand from the beach trails into the shop. The floor's made of wooden planks which echo your footsteps as you explore more deeply. A cat, too lazy to raise its head from its paws, half-opens its eyes to watch as you find yourself amongst a clutter of objects. Some are clearly whimsical - perhaps the shopkeeper's a bit crazy. At least a little self-indulgent. No harm done, though, for many of the objects are thoughtfully collected, shaped, and placed. Some even strike a deeper chord --

Work

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About

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I don't know

To smash the glass face of everyday life. To re-experience “the portentous power of the negative”.

A curio, a scrap of paper torn out from a book by Hegel and covered with someone’s handwritten notes, time-worn, scribbled in pencil. The old text reads:

“The circle, which is self-enclosed and at rest … arouses no sense of wonderment. But … an accident [happens, which sets you loose from your] containing circumference – [you] gain freedom! This is the portentous power of the negative.”

What’s it mean? I don’t know. But I can feel … what?

The negative – potential – wild possibilities of touch, taste, sound, life, mind! Yet it's not mind or even imagination that first feels life, first feels the negative. It's experience. Mind, imagination – born of fear and striving in joy – mind's the filigree of experience, foam on waves. Experience and joy, like a bird that skims the sea watching with sharp eyes and sharper jaws, hungry for the negative as for fish beneath the waves. Oh give me this! give me this so I can thrive! The negative is food, is a seabird's cry, the negative is clarity, the reason for wings, it's air to breathe and space to fly.





Support the work

I'm a writer and this is my website. I've been working on this - on writing, on some way to make sense of experience and turn it into words worth reading - for many years, a handful of decades.

Very early during the effort I realized that making money from writing distracted me too much from my goals as a writer, so I did other work for money while studying and practicing how to write - how to hammer the chaos out of this pig-iron language - and write and write and write.

Now I'm going full-time artist, which means making money from the art. To do that I need to give something that readers might value. This website's what I have to offer.

So why not

have a look around,

learn about the project,

and if you enjoy what you find, consider supporting the work.