https://rustyniall.com/Recent content on Niall's NotesHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usFri, 26 Jan 2024 10:15:03 +0000https://rustyniall.com/posts/shoulder/Fri, 26 Jan 2024 10:15:03 +0000https://rustyniall.com/posts/shoulder/I haven’t done this kind of thing in quite a while. These days, I’m normally the guy who steps aside in any given condition to let someone pass and offers a smile even when the other party doesn’t say thank you. It’s fine. There was a point when I would sing a few bars of You’re Welcome from Moana but I’ve grown out of that, unless I really want to make one of my children cringe-giggle.https://rustyniall.com/posts/24indie/Mon, 01 Jan 2024 13:32:55 +0000https://rustyniall.com/posts/24indie/In 2024 I would love to see more writers, poets, artists, performers, musicians, thinkers and creative anomalies embracing and advocating for the indieweb and other independent platforms rather than looking to the same cultural and corporate monoliths (digital platforms, broadcasters, organisations, prizes etc) for exposure and authentication. The truth will always be that we will be compromised by the recognised platforms unless we build the platforms ourselves. Just because we may be “creators” (scare quotes because it’s not a term I like using) doesn’t earn us the right to default to passive consumer mode when we chose our platforms.https://rustyniall.com/posts/london_art/Sun, 09 Jul 2023 10:23:40 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/london_art/I have a lot of mixed feels about London’s arts scene and its relation to the obscene wealth it happens in the shadow of. A lot of the most significant art from London comes from migrant and w/c communities with deep familial links within the city. They have done so for decades with very little of the city’s wealth trickling down to them. A lot of this art is invisible until a Kae Tempest, George the Poet or Stormzy breaks through and makes it more visible.https://rustyniall.com/posts/mcdevitt/Wed, 03 May 2023 20:22:14 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/mcdevitt/On the whole, it’s been good being out of the loop with regard to social media and the poetry scene. That said, the occasional catch up foray onto facebook can sometimes reveal that someone you knew and admired had passed away and that you had also missed the funeral and all those attendant chances to celebrate their life with others. This is how I learned of the death of one of my poetic namesakes, Niall McDevitt.https://rustyniall.com/posts/my_annual_monstrosity/Tue, 02 May 2023 19:29:40 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/my_annual_monstrosity/Getting to the end of the academic year and my thoughts are circling the idea of a thing that I will make in the liminal time between the last bit of marking and when the kids finish school and are home for the summer. It would be lovely to be a constant fount of creativity all the time but life gets in the way when you’re a knackered, middle aged parent.https://rustyniall.com/posts/more_substack_gripes/Tue, 18 Apr 2023 11:49:32 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/more_substack_gripes/A few gripes about substack as posted on my mastodon I stopped posting regularly on Substack at the end of last year for a few reasons, fatigue was one of them, but there was something about the constant announcements of new features that seemed flakey and nebulous. All of it seemed to be in direct response to the bird site and the rhetoric had that airy venture capitalist quality about it.https://rustyniall.com/posts/fragments_180423/Tue, 18 Apr 2023 11:09:52 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/fragments_180423/the train stops at the town of my birth so the driver can check if something went under it love is not an economy – know where love comes from – there is no balance line by line i learn how not to be a writer the massive policeman at the door has kind eyes when i open it the local toffs ring 999 about anything two young lads on the train seats opposite one keeps complaining about the sun in his eyes but doesn’t change seathttps://rustyniall.com/posts/skimming-poems/Wed, 12 Apr 2023 21:34:56 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/skimming-poems/Comment I ended up not posting on a thread on another platform about poetry and whether poems should be skimmable: Is there any other way to read a Frank O’Hara poem, for instance, than skimming it? I often think multiple skims of his work render more meaning than the pinned down aspect of a close read. The pace and energy of the poem is as much a part of understanding it, much like Slow, Slow, Fresh Fount by Johnson intentionally slows the reader down.https://rustyniall.com/posts/11-04-23_2/Tue, 11 Apr 2023 18:23:48 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/11-04-23_2/Just got a notification from Netflix inviting me to relive my favourite moments from shows I watched. I clicked on the notification and was presented with a list of shows, most of which had been cancelled by Netflix.https://rustyniall.com/posts/substack-notes/Tue, 11 Apr 2023 18:11:34 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/substack-notes/The way in which #Substack has promoted their new #Notes microblogging feature is very similar to how they promote all their other new features, mainly by fawning on all the writers publishing on Substack who gained large followings elsewhere. They just don’t seem too concerned with making something that can help smaller writers to grow their audiences. My blinkered idea of what the internet should be for writers is along the line that if you write well in a way that truly differentiates you from others, then maybe a few thousand people might enjoy what you do.https://rustyniall.com/posts/11-04-23/Tue, 11 Apr 2023 16:22:00 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/11-04-23/I’ve noticed that it’s almost always a bad omen when an Indie game is referred to as “ambitious” before release. It’s like an industry code word for “the small developer team bit off way more than they can chew, have run out of money and have therefore been forced to release in a completely broken and unfinished state in Early Access”.https://rustyniall.com/posts/addiction/Tue, 11 Apr 2023 14:27:19 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/addiction/I recently had a bit of a reckoning about my writing. It wasn’t the first and it won’t the last. This reckoning centred around a trend within my writings of referring to people with addictions with derogatory terms such as “pissheads”, “bagheads”, “crackheads” and other nasty, judgemental epithets. I wish I could say that this is something I left in the past but I drafted a piece yesterday about alcoholism, addiction and the Easter weekend that used those terms for all their distancing and dehumanising effect.https://rustyniall.com/posts/moonage/Sat, 08 Apr 2023 18:54:44 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/moonage/I’ve always been a big fan of Bowie’s music but have been somewhat ambivalent about a lot of the other stuff: the fashion, the personas, all the sketchy stuff he got into in his nose-candy years. So, as amazing as the old V&A show looked a few years back, I wasn’t that gutted to have missed it. My relationship with the great man had always been more of an eardrums thing than an eyeballs thing.https://rustyniall.com/posts/grannysgarden/Thu, 06 Apr 2023 18:05:48 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/grannysgarden/why does this site look like the BBC Micro game Granny’s Garden but without the charming pixel art? I’ve always been attracted to some retro aesthetics with my online stuff and normally can’t resist a good typewriter font. This is probably because I started out as a serious writer with a typewriter and I often get nostalgic about those early days and the creative frenzies that accompanied them. I’ve always been attracted to some retro aesthetics with my online stuff and normally can’t resist a good typewriter font.https://rustyniall.com/about/Thu, 06 Apr 2023 15:41:43 +0100https://rustyniall.com/about/about me I am a poet, editor, event host and university lecturer. I live in London with my wife and kids and like to keep a low profile these days. About this site This site is the unruly sibling of my main website, niallosullivan.co.uk. Whereas my main site functions as a typical website with info about me as well as blog posts and poems, this is more of a place for me to post the kind of ephemera and trifles that might find their way onto my social feeds.https://rustyniall.com/posts/notebook/Sat, 01 Apr 2023 12:22:04 +0100https://rustyniall.com/posts/notebook/Hello, this is the notes section for my website, though it also functions as a kind of website within itself, hence the separate url. This is a home for all the posts that might not make the main section, sometimes because they are social media posts and other times becase they’re first drafts or fragments. They will run the gamut from microblogging to poems and early drafts and anything else of a more ephemeral nature.https://rustyniall.com/posts/rem-re/Thu, 30 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://rustyniall.com/posts/rem-re/30/1/2014 It’s been an interesting couple of days since I posted my Remembering the Death of Performance Poetry blog. On the whole the response on Facebook and Twitter — while far from a solemn parade of nodding heads — has been enthusiastic, thoughtful and similarly reflective. People have chipped in with curious questions about whether there is a difference between Performance Poetry and Spoken Word and others have added their own commentary, stories and opinions on how live literature has transformed, fluctuated and stagnated over the last couple of decades.https://rustyniall.com/posts/remembering/Tue, 14 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000https://rustyniall.com/posts/remembering/DON’T PANIC!!! Apologies in advance for the alarmist title. This post is not about some imminent collapse in the Spoken Word boom, far from it. It is intended as a meditative look back at the cycles that happen within spoken word cultures and how history tends to repeat itself, especially when there’s no history available to learn from. It centres around a certain historical point within the poetry scenes in the UK.