STONE SONGS & MANIFESTOS
a Beltaine round up
Beltaine Blessings, my friends. It’s a bit of a gloomy day in Orkney today, but I have a candle burning in place of the sun.
In this Missive:
- Wonder at the neolithic sound-chamber of the Dwarvie Stane on Hoy
- Reading Copy Machine Manifestos (with mine and Laura’s zine in it!)
- Listening to Xan Tyler’s new album Holding Up Half the Sky
- Musing on Nativity and Nativeness—who or what ‘belongs’?
- Planning late summer & autumn writing events & Copy Machine Manifestos hits Vancouver
Wonder
I have just returned from the island of Hoy, where I used up my spoons to walk through the moors. The ground was running with black peat brew—peaty water. I walked to the Dwarvie Stane—a hollowed out ‘tomb’ of stone. The giant slab of stone fell from the cliffs above during the Neolithic or before. The cliffs are called the Dwarvie Hammars, and stories of this place attribute it to Dwarves’ handiwork. You can crawl inside this tiny stone room. It’s carved in two sections, each big enough to curl up in—if you are small—with a stone ‘pillow’ in the tiny box bed scored with graffiti there from the 18th and 19th centuries. I sang while in the tomb as the acoustic properties of the space are profoundly beautiful. If you sing the right notes, the stone sings back.
I’ll write up my field notes from this journey at the May New Moon. This will be a post for paid subscribers.
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Reading
I’m reading the Catalogue from the Copy Machine Manifestos Show at the Brooklyn Musuem. It features a few of the zines I produced in the 90s with artist Laura Splan. I’ve been making zines since the 80s when I was a dreamy, punk-goth, baby poet. I was unable to attend the museum show, so perusing the catalogue is a vicarious visit. Reading it has made me nostalgic for the intimacy of those days, when do-it-yourself was more than just another hustle, mainstreamed with ‘influencer’ culture on social media. This massive tome documents a period art practice that was immediate and risky—pre-algorithm, before in-your-face-shares. Yet most were deeply personal and all the more intimate without the mediating tech in use today.
Listening
I’m listening to Xan Tyler’s Holding Up Half the Sky which is out this week!
Sometimes you hear something and it’s exactly what you need at that moment. Xan Tyler’s “Miniature Oceans” is that song— “change is raining down” indeed. This single is out now, and Xan’s next album, “Holding Up Half the Sky” is due out this week. Xan’s voice is a balm. Beauty and gravity form a pact in these delicate, complex songs. A mix of nostalgia, showmanship and hope, they pay homage to Nacy & Lee, Natalie Merchant and the 60s pop renaissance of the Brill Building song writers. For me, the ominous “The Devil’s Hand” is a standout track on this album— it's deeply resonant with my book about the Scottish Witch Hunts, Ashes and Stones.
Glasgow Friends—go to her album launch this Saturday, May 4th at the Panopticon!
Musing
Recently I saw an infographic on social media about how to tell a ‘native’ bluebell from a ‘non-native’ or Spanish bluebell. Understanding native plants and animals is key to conservation strategies, but the language seemed misleading. Who or what is ‘native’ when it comes to plants and does this apply to people? What do we believe about our own nativities? One myth that has thankfully come to light is the ‘indigenous English’ myth of the Anglo-Saxons.
I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘native’ myths in Britain—an island nation of migrants— as I dip in an out of Peter Fryer’s definitive tome Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain which begins with the sentence “There were Africans in Britain before the English came here.” And then elaborates with a completely illuminating throw-down, a truth bomb spanning millennia.
Planning
Copy Machine Manifestos at the Vancouver Art Gallery
This epic show mentioned earlier has travelled from the Brooklyn Museum to Vancouver!
I’m possibly planning an online workshop for the autumn. The workshop would be about writing fictional witches, and how we do this ethically. Perhaps there will be another online writing hour in the late summer for paid subscribers if there is interest. I’m taking the temperature here.
