Peter Kirby

'Walk towards Infinity' ( 2013 )

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'The Exact Middle' ( 2013 )

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'All The Things' ( 2013 )

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'Women are Weather, Men are Land' ( 2013 )

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Abridged Sentences for Sol LeWitt
—Peter Kirby

1. The rate at which the brain dies in heat
2. Flying fish are the shooting stars of the sea
3. She read so fast she sweated. He wrote so slow the ink solidified before it left the nib
4. Luck is meteorological – storms bring fortune
5. Introduce a legal requirement for adults to cry “OUT” when they have excreted
6. Rain fucks the sea with its infinite dying sperm
7. The shyest shallowest rainbow water-skis the horizon
8. Swimming in the sea breeds world peace
9. A building made entirely of ladders
10. Writing awakens, reading sleepens
11. Land and cloud symmetry – climatological courtship
12. Shade massages your thermostat
13. Write a story without verbs
14. The removal of concentration in the world and its illiterate effects
15. Vertical wind weather report, gale force from below or above
16. Rainbows in new shapes
17. Eyes are tidal – this is why sleep is so tough to hold back
18. Every new born is given a new word by law
19. Ideas are fairies – they don’t exist until they are clinically proven
20. Mexican wave of yawns, fucks, deaths, births and suicides
21. Guilt and its irrepressibility
22. To write in a boat that just drifts, no sail, no rudder, no destination, a man on a raft
23. The sea is the epicentre of optimism, while all land loves a whinge
24. Wet paper is how a tree grieves, the last threads of strength
25. Bless these pages every day with a lick
26. A city of hermits
27. Mute carpenter carves mahogany monkeys, while mutant ant signs rubber plant leaves with its teeth
28. The sea is 77 billion highly organised eddies
29. Every notebook needs a dollar jammed in it to barter your way out of a mugging
30. Fall into the sea, alone, anude, adrunk
31. Swim 100 strokes crawl and the same back on your back staring at the glory of the almost full moon
32. Dare the sentence that has no end, a gap of a middle and a forgotten start
33. Lower body temperature electrifies brain cells that have suffered a fortnight’s stroke
34. Orphaned doll scandal unearthed by social services
35. Write at the speed you read – for every novel you read, write one
36. Instigate a debit/credit current account for writing & reading, but arrange an overdraft first
37. When you are stuck, stare at your left thumb
38. The less you care about your dress, your hair, your breath, the better you write
39. Raw de-waxes the words that hope to be blown the furthest
40. Farthest and furthest, there’s not much between them
41. Wake up feet first
42. Dress in curtains
43. Wall of dummies, floor of gripper strip, ceiling of water
44. The last hot day for 6 months guarantee
45. Take a fly on a lead for a walk/fly
46. Everyone’s flatulence smells the same on a plane
47. She was an ethnographic failure-maker
48. Write about what you have a surplus of – indecision
49. Make words by walking, by sleeping, by breathing
50. Focus, for fuck sake, focus
51. Idjit – unlearn to read
52. Make the reader take responsibility for the meaning of this work
53. Autobiographies are always fiction
54. Write a novel in a gallery and publish it on the closing night private view
55. Writing Doorways versus Painting Rooms
56. The improbability of death – lose 4 family members individually in one year
57. Creative Landfill – 3 times a week they come to collect and buy thoughts to fertilise uninspired towns or worn out soil for crops
58. Football & art are equally spoilt children
59. Moonlit raindrop shadows are unimaginably beautiful – a rash of aesthetic perfection
60. Writing is fishing – cast enough sentences and one will gaff something for the keep net, to be stuffed, filleted or eaten whole, only the catch can say
61. Only ever write with a triangular pencil
62. A novel written standing up
63. Stop walking, wait until someone comes alongside, then start again on their shoulder
64. Use parking meters to rest on while writing a novel dedicated to Kerouac
65. All the things you said you’d never do but did V all the things you said you’d do but never did V all the things you said you’d never do and never did V all the things you said you’d do and did
66. Being a late developer is a patient instinct
67. Knuckles bleed from writing – hair has worn away on right hand baby finger
68. As you read the book the words evaporate and disappear – you wipe its memory
69. More concerned about the stubby lead running out in the pencil than you are about the quality of the content
70. Robert M Pirsig’s IQ at 10 was 178
71. The positivity of NO – refuse 100 things in a day
    -- Refuse a bag
    -- Refuse a seat
    -- Refuse a receipt
    -- Refuse a free paper
    -- Refuse a plaster
    -- Refuse antibiotics
    -- Refuse a job
    -- Refuse to hold in a fart in public
    -- Refuse a present
    -- Refuse a big desk
    -- Refuse a compliment
    -- Refuse a fight
    -- Refuse an invitation to go first
    
72. Breath louder and louder through your nose until someone notices
73. The less you saddle yourself with the more defined your work
74. It’s so hot a man is moulding a supine horse into the tarmac of the road
75. The very act of thinking about something brings about its happening
76. Never write at a desk
    -- Never write in a desk
    -- Never write under a desk
    -- Never write against a desk
    -- Never write to a desk
    
77. A man from Mali who sires a child every year from 15 to 77
78. New concentrated sleep – 8 hours worth condensed into 1 hour leaves you fresh to drive heavy machinery 23 hours a day
79. Use an entire pencil, a carpenter’s pencil
80. Write in the dark, judging the lines and legibility by the minimal movement of the pencil, the baby finger as a spirit level and the knuckles as a return key
81. Sit left leg over right and the pencil becomes a divining rod that seeks out the last drops of water in the page
82. What a wonderful splurge life can be if you get up early enough
83. Nine standby lights are on, tiny embers of cold electricity waiting to go to bed once each machine goes green with use
84. The line that says nothing
85. The line that seconds the say-nothing-line’s mute stance
86. The noisy line of substance that is angered by the Buddhistic bollocks of fannying around in the present tense
87. The page that feels the book lacks direction, purpose, story, talent, commerciality, engagement, hope, magic, maturity, voice, characters, plot, pictures, legibility, depth, quality, value, risk, form, control, narrative, humour, dialogue, prose, rhyme, re-readability, play and something to change your life
88. The page that defends the book in published court and says it teems with mood, instinct, desperation, freedom, experimentation, conviction, failure, ideas, non-ideas, naivety, verve, confusion, cramp, perception, unruliness, belligerence,
    will, lucidity, nature, hunger, questions, light and boilerplate that guarantees this book will affirm your life
89. Rent-a-eulogy
90. Sit on kitchen floor next to dishwasher and translate the circular noise into conversation
91. Being published is not the best option for this work
92. Sit in a child’s tepee and pretend to be a longpig casserole left in arid heat for 3 months to hang-cook like biltong
93. Write on your back with the pressure of gravity forcing the book down onto the pencil
94. Write on an empty stomach and fast until the work is done
95. Write modern prayers to be read aloud by 75,000 people in sync and in love
96. Read to wake someone out of a coma – in loving memory of Nora Brown
97. That lovely feeling of the mind warmed up and purring like a cat
98. Cry through nose, ears, mouth, skin, hair, nails, etc
99. CTE, the belligerence of ETC to say “I’m sick of being last, now call me by my full name – ARETECTE”
100. When you’re stuck, stretch, it unknots ennui
101. Human compost heap – snot, phlegm, scabs, wee, pooh, hair, fingernails, semen, blood, saliva, blister skin, eyelashes...
102. O!H! M!Y! G!O!D! The masclamation mark
103. It’s this rock’s birthday, it’s 4,600,000,000 years old today
104. The trees crouch at night
105. Camp on Christmas Eve, waking up in a forest to real living Christmas trees
106. The thought supermarket opens tomorrow
107. Solitude assistant
108. Ideas and thoughts are by-products of the mind and must be treated as such
109. An ebullient and serious dance is almost impossible
110. She slowly siphoned 70% of the 50p pieces out of circulation and built a massive mosque out of them in a carpet warehouse in Norwood
111. Notes taken while cleaning your teeth electrically include the dexterity of your left elbow to hold the left hand page flat
112. Memoirs of a miscarriage: I am failure
113. That periodic lump in your left throat isn’t really there
114. Menage-a-une
115. Chase the rain until you have drunk a pint of drops
116. She always brought the subject back to inanimate objects
117. Most people catch colds, she threw them, often nine at a time
118. A glass wigwam with floppy glass doors
119. Make a lampshade out of buttons
120. He knocked with his elbow, so scarred were his knuckles from scrubbing
121. Some words want to be written, others fight to be typed, a few yell to be said, a few pray to be heard and fewer still beg to be mute
122. The words that harvest every feeling ever felt emptied into one big stew and left to simmer at 99.5 degrees for as long as we all shall live
123. Draw around the saliva that just left your lip and fell down in the shape of ‘Madagascar swallowing a small goat’
124. Make every note secondary to what you are doing – dictation of the subconscious
125. Write the exact middle sentence of 1000 books
126. Write from a posture of discomfort to angulate the content
127. She had a Tesco Value heart
128. He kissed her on the end of every hair of her head
129. 917 moments = 1 slowment (this is imperial emotion)
130. Clad lampposts in the singular seeds of a fir cone
131. 2 dollar bills are left in a book, they mate to procreate a $100 bill
132. Peppermint tea belches are re-swallowable
133. Every time we cross our arms we shave a second off our lives
134. The yawncatcher, stores yawns in vats to help terminally ill people die easier
135. If you ever commit suicide, tell me first how you did it
136. Throwing money at a relationship never works, and if it does, get out quick
137. She left the hen night early for her own funeral
138. Be a detective of betweens, the things that happen or don’t happen between the more obvious memorable things
139. He never dabbed the pen on his tongue but he did dry the pencil, thermometer like, under his arm. The lead deposit grew until a forest of carbon had amassed to fuel a moped for a mile
140. World’s calmest man contest
141. Old year’s resolution – fuck the past tense
142. Every person has the same amount of ups and downs. Luck is fair and split evenly. Tragic lives on the public outside are counterbalanced by inner private luck and optimism. This is the law of democratic emotion
143. C-section scar reunion
144. Adapt a pamphlet, a business card, a napkin, a letter, a tombstone, a manual, a parking ticket, a game, a joke into a feature film
145. The language spoken by all 6 -18 month old babies, irrespective of race, wealth, environment or development is pre-speak,
     or free-speak, or ‘Bwoll’
146. The homeless osteopath who does back realignment then sleeps on his fold-up bed
147. The story will tell itself in time
148. Her hair has 4x the breaking strain of a regular human being, like cotton to catgut
149. Pain is worn. The use of clothing to describe it helps to treat it
150. Reading re-directs writing. Reading revives writing. Reading reaffirms writing
151. Write against the wall/door of a prison and feel marginally jumpy
152. The near, mid and far readers hold their printed matter at distances ranging from 8 inches to 3 feet
153. His giving up coffee is Iran giving up weapons
154. Gather one year’s cut hair from a salon and plait it together to make a hammock that crosses a reasonable river
155. Never know what’s coming is the screenplay
156. A movie in memory of someone not yet born
157. Write about a difficult age, make everyone that difficult age to stop it being difficult
158. Mass synchronised fate – 17,000 people get hit by cars on a day in 2014
159. Secondary sleep, sweat, grief, sex, hearing, growth, thought, love. Initial or primary actions and feelings are involuntary whereas secondary actions and feelings are unwilled, unplanned, spontaneous, unstoppable occurrences
160. Her anger and frustration at the hardness of the ice-cream snapped to laughter once you pointed it out
161. Public phone boxes are land mines
162. Chefs trousers made with 100% mono-sodium-glutamate
163. Feel the simmering fury of business coming on in a tiger balm rub
164. V.A.L. Value Added Love. Love is taxed and assessed by HM Customs & Excise. Send in your VAL return by February 14th
165. The spine of this publication is secreting the sweat of 1000 commuter’s arses
166. Dye your blood. Get a new shade of red, or streak it white. Curly blood with hyper-circulation from Maybelline New York
167. A body of works, a body of words, a body of walks
168. Create a character out of granite
169. Everyone is saying ‘fucking’, yet no one is having sex
170. Prison for acts of goodwill, in a dystopic society
171. Age 4 is the most beautiful we ever are
172. Be a critic of art, books and films that don’t exist
173. Inland Cliffs, meet Tidal Lakes
174. The more time you create to speak, the less is said. Gaps tell stories Pauses. Silences Absences Emptiness Betweens
175. He took off as pheasants fly, the arse leaving the ground half a second behind the rest of the body
176. The French melamine tabletop bore 700 scars of domestic love and hate
177. She sat in a café, kept warm by her own wind
178. Odds & sods of cutlery & crockery make instant coffee taste home-made and stale cake taste moist
179. Fires don’t go out, they hibernate
180. Why are wolves always the villains? Why not a wolf picked on by a caterpillar? Or an alligator victimised by a moth
181. Wear a headband and you shall write like Zadie Smith, grow a beard and you shall write like Hemmingway, brandish a gun
     and you shall write like Hunter S Thompson
182. You cry dust – sawdust – this is how much you despised him
183. She was unable to say the same thing twice
184. Threadbare Catarrh – nice name for a band
185. A film where we get great actors dressed as birds. Helen Mirren is a red-breasted Merganser. Emily Watson is a little egret. Vincent Cassells is a razorbill. John Cusack is a cormorant. A road movie in the air
186. Rearrange keys on a keyboard before writing the story
187. Geographical schizophrenia
188. By our hands/brains/mistakes we live (delete two as necessary)
189. Write beneath a swinging light, as the great moth authors do
190. Today, the words are limpets and will not be gathered
191. Wanting someone to come and sit next to you when there’s a carriage of empty seats
192. What really makes the world go round...smiles, rights and mint imperials
193. 2 people sit at a table, a third joins, then a fourth, and a fifth, sixth, up to a 26th even though it is a table for two
194. Invent the equivalent of spectacles for noses (smell), ears (hearing), tongues (taste) and fingers (touch)
195. Under this tiny table there is vast legroom
196. Luck Conductors – like lightning conductors, they stop you getting struck by bad luck. Copper cables stapled vertically to trees
197. Slowly, you realise your arse isn’t fat enough for this weather
198. The shoes we wear govern our temperament – flip-flops in prisons
199. Chins drop in the cold
200. There are 1000 ways to wear a scarf
201. Maybe, just maybe, the planet can save itself no matter how badly we treat it
202. Where is better than who
203. Fairly soon, girls’ sunglasses will be a face-sized disc with holes to breathe
204. She would only awaken to the sound of pain or joy
205. Lopped trees out-mime man by 17,000%
206. The Depressed Balloon, a film about failure
207. “It’s not what’s going to happen to us that matters, it’s what we do with what’s going to happen to us that matters” for distant Great Uncle Aldous
208. The shorter the pencil lead becomes the deeper the thought it records
209. Bobble hats according to the size of brain they are keeping warm
210. His eye line swept from side to side as rhythmically as windscreen wipers
211. Of your fingerprint, only the outer three rings would now show if you robbed a bank
212. Make some very tiny and very strong ladders
213. Weld a Rolls Royce and a Robin Reliant together – Rolls Reliant by Robin Royce
214. It’s the bench that’s itching not your back
215. Our last hope with earth is cosmetic surgery to the moon to stem the tides
216. For ten minutes in the middle of the night the sun jumped out and said BOO!
217. The slope of his beret was down to his prevailing thoughts
218. The frizz of her hair was down to humidity and inclement dreams
219. Prams and supermarket trolleys are 39 weeks away from being as one
220. It is too cold to fart
221. Writing in glasses, you feel fake and afraid
222. Once a month, he felt a Carver surge, but rarely recorded it on paper
223. When high tide cannot smooth over the frosted footprints in the sand, we can say it’s cold
224. Be the most deadpan writer alive!!!
225. The crease on a nose from a smile could solve world peace
226. Every 72 hours you must be angry
227. Finger nail as screwdriver
228. Postage stamp as bookmark becomes part of the plot
229. Write thoughts down assuming that you will recall why you loved them yet so often stare at them like clothes you bought but never wore
230. A banana eaten fifteen minutes before it went bad
231. Such is her relief to be asleep that the end of each snore there sings a tiny whistle
232. If you turn left leaving home your day is marginally better
233. A half-bunged up nose kept horizontal will unbung in 45 minutes
234. When we are still and things are moving our mind is most active. When we are still and things are still our mind is least active. When we are moving and things are moving our mind is over active
235. You have a phantom brain in your right knee
236. If your dreams are difficult wear a seatbelt to bed, buckle up your lifejacket and crash helmet, then read the highway code
237. Very young people and old people are know how the world works. Everyone in between struggles
238. She didn’t watch the world go by, she made the world go by
239. Despair weighs more than love, so much so, it sinks in stone
240. Success gives you a certain fear in the way fear gives you a certain success
241. Baa baa black sheep stuck in her head and affected the rhythm and intonation of everything she said
242. Polar bear and killer whale are the biological parents of the panda
243. At 2, she knew she’d become an Olympic Archer. The way she speared her peas said as much
244. Go round underlining things/words that aren’t there
245. The man who stood still while the earth spun
246. Sleeping is a good use of time. Breathing is a great use of time. Living is a divine use of time
247. It was a night when all the stars got stuck in a jam on their way home
248. 1000 walkers all leave solitary start points and meet in the centre to eat. Then they return to their start points and shit
249. The Inuit Crematorium was often closed for repairs
250. You can tell a man’s intelligence from the small of his neck
251. Grow vegetables like bagels with holes in the middle
252. Our nostrils are never more than 100 yards from a sweet scent
253. Our breaths are numbered – only so long to live in this slow-motion emergency
254. Paris, Texas is an album to be buried to, but not cremated to
255. Hundreds of awful opening lines – this is a book of failure
256. He/she who draws knows and feels more about writing than those who write
257. How far can a comma be away before it becomes a pencil scuff of isolation
258. High tempo work prevents minor illnesses from getting jobs
259. The more bevelled the pencil lead becomes the more defined the words
260. The comfort derived from uncertainty
261. Her eyesight drowned, she became blind through the tears of crying
262. Puny Hero – the boat’s name
263. She looked so sad in all her money
264. Women are weather, men are land
265. Everything was in a state of half-doneness, stories unpublished, songs & symphonies unfinished, floors part-swept, drinks half-full, ideas half-baked 266.100 steps with hands clasped behind back
     100 steps with hands clasped in front
     100 steps of walking while writing
     100 steps with hands in pockets
     100 steps with hands on head
     100 steps with arms folded
     
266. Every 26th step, a hop. Every 52nd step, a jump. Every 78th step, a whistle
267. Stop creating cancer in your body
268. Start everything you say with YES!
269. She never removed her make-up. Each day she applied a new layer. She wore 7 years of paint which on hot days, would bubble
270. The feeling is déjà vu without time bullying its way in
271. Weighty ideas written down with bookmakers William Hill biro on a napkin V a precious fountain pen and parchment to
     record a shopping list
272. Where we learn to swim governs our personality
273. Futoirs over memoirs
274. His spite was such that he urinated on his neighbour’s post after eating asparagus
275. Why are so many artists called Richard: Serra, Long, Wentworth, Dadd, Brautigan, Prince, Deacon, Wilson, Diebenkorn, Demarco
276. Why are so many authors called Margaret: Atwood, Drabble, Truman, George, Laurence, E Johnson
277. Why are so many writers called John: Updike, Fowles, LeCarre, Irving, Fante, Hawkes, Berger, Pilger
278. A black and white dog and a black and white cat on either side of the road
279. Never hem in a thought until a new one has begun. This is a violation of conceptual rights
280. Wield & yield. Awake & aware. Look’n’mean-a-likes
281. A listening stammer. A feeling stammer. A smelling stammer. A sexual stammer. An honesty stammer. An ambition stammer
282. Out on a pier, that suspension of drowning
283. Shadow cast in the colour of the sun
284. By throwing the lifebelt and its holster off the bridge, he prevented someone’s life from being saved and killed 2 passengers
     on a tourist boat passing beneath the bridge
285. Faroes tan – the colour for the C22nd
286. Identical twins of the opposite sex and star sign
287. She ate her apple like a hard-boiled egg, discarding the first bite of skin
288. Watching two violent people fall in love over the period of 1 minute
289. She spoke rarely in the day until you met then let go at 5 times the speed a man can listen
290. As we age we are prone to winking our left eye in acknowledgement
291. Only when he sat on a wall did he realise the weight of his ankles
292. If there is ever a doubt, you can always tell the true sex of a human being by their laugh
293. Danger: never be under the influence of an idea, however good it may seem
294. Yes, to an uncertain extent, Yes
295. Ask questions honestly or not at all
296. Logic writes itself, stupidity needs a hand
297. Walk towards infinity
298. Knowing when to stop is innate, you’re born with it
299. Their Western and Eastern ethnicities met halfway on a catwalk in Syria
300. She created a field of paradox, she had to move and stay moving. This is why she showered and not bathed. And always
     slept in a hammock between 2 trees weak enough to sway with her breath but strong enough to just keep her bum off the floor
301. Still pencil and moving paper
302. She hid from ideas as they began to depress her with gigantic expectation – she would carry them to the canal and drown
     them in a sack
303. One day, over coffee, on a bench, she worked out the maths. On a bike you get knocked off and die, but the more you cycle
     the better you cycle, but the more time you spend on the road, the greater the possibility of death, so she thought and expected to die all the time. This made her happy
304. ‘Momentum’ is what being good at anything is really about, from sex to knitting to sleep
305. The fall-out of forgotten thinking still idles at 83% in overheat mode. This book is nothing more than a mild coolant
306. Funeral soundtracks given out on death to widows, lovers, pals and pets
307. Laughter through the nose, the squeak-elch, is funnier than a fart
308. If you don’t set out to pay the rent and make money, you will
309. If you don’t set out to pay the rent and make money, you will one day not have to
310. Noses are funnier than eyes, mouths & ears combined
311. Love can’t buy you money
312. The betterment of life is overrated. It is the greatest red herring imaginable
313. She became obsessed with being last...last one away at the lights, last one in the queue, last one to come during sex, last one to cry at a funeral, she’d not get out of the bath until the last drop of water sank down the plug hole, she never left a crumb of food or a droplet of drink, she’d give homeless people her last coin each day, and before she shut her eyes each night she’d pray to George Bernard Shaw’s shroud above her bed and say: “Today George, I am thoroughly used up.”

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