Long Discarded text & image

Shuffles Nervously

2011-04-25T22:54:00.000+01:00

Eli Regan
Shuffles Nervously

"People dine, just dine, but at that moment their happiness is being made or their life is being smashed."

Chekhov

This is the essence of what I wanted to capture in my vignettes in 'Shuffles Nervously'. The feeling that with some rough sketches in seemingly mundane settings you can suggest whether a character is breaking or celebrating.

The images can be read as the places in between where the characters exist- a lone bench, abandoned warehouses, shadows, a path, a road, an allotment. Both the vignettes and the pictures exist as a series of observational, alluding sketches rather than definitive portrayals of the places and people.

The voices used for each vignette make the stories come alive. They lift them from being my own true if subjective experiences and become fictional and communal happenings.

Aphex Twin - Flim

2011-04-25T22:50:00.000+01:00

cards for sale

2011-03-29T00:09:00.000+01:00

for more info on these cards, email ereganphoto@gmail.com
packs of easter cards of 4 for £3
any card £1.50, any 2 cards £2.

Untitled - Pete Regan

2011-02-13T22:46:00.000Z

Atmospheric art film by Pete Regan, my brother. Melancholy in non-places. Beauty in the bleak:

I scrubs - E Regan (poetry pamphlet)

2011-02-10T10:31:00.000Z

Hi all,

My pamphlet came out in May 2010. It was also the month I discovered I was pregnant, thus making me forgetful of all things poetry, and focused on baby.

If you're interested in purchasing it, here's the link:

http://www.erbacce-press.com/#/eli-regan/4540399102

and click either 'add to cart' or click on the cover image and order it.

Some lovely things writers said about it:

'Regan has studied photography, so she understands the urge to capture a moment that is charged with latent meaning, that balances on the tightrope of too much information and too little. She is, like a good photographer, alive to the minor malfunctions of the world, the anomalies that shape our lives much more than we realise. Her subjects are often trapped within a metaphorical frame, their lives trammelled by duty, convention, inertia. And yet still they dream, still they escape.

Not content to inhabit photographs, Regan also inhabits a photographer, becoming Diane Arbus in the throes of three photographic encounters. This brazen embodiment reveals the photographer’s duality: the urge to remain true to a situation, yet knowing it must be manipulated in the pursuit of that ‘truth’. Similarly, Regan gives herself licence to invent in the pursuit of her own truths.

Beyond the frozen moment, Regan is also a storyteller. Her poems offer oblique, fragmentary insights that can be rolled out into whole lives. But like all poets, and many photographers, she sifts her way through life in search, not of answers, but of laden questions. She leaves our heads full of pictures that have a life of their own' - Greg Leach, author of 'Twice Told Tales'

'Eli Regan writes highly original, filmic poems that explore the perspectives of outsiders. With great empathy she often constructs worlds through the voices of her protagonists; whether it is a Madrid prostitute, or a girl living in the slums of New York at the end of the nineteenth century. Regan gives voices to those denied a voice, and in doing so creates an alternative world that is genuinely subversive and compelling' - Amy McCauley, work has appeared in 'Rialto', 'Obsessed with Pipework', etc

'Regan's poems are equally concerned with eye and voice. Her interest in documentary photography gives her a striking way
into other people's lives, other people's stories.' - Michael Symmons Roberts, author of 'Corpus', broadcaster - Radio 4.

The Dawning by Megan Taylor

2010-05-11T14:31:00.000+01:00

One of the immediately striking things about The Dawning (by Megan Taylor) is its present tense narrative, naturally enforcing the frenetic pace of the story and leading the reader into the unknown along with the narrators.

Set in a wintry backdrop of the Peaks, on New Year’s Eve, it tells the story of the Haywood family, who, one by one are inwardly crumbling with the pressure of family and their own lives. With great insight, Taylor weaves the multiple perspectives of each member, meticulously, and so creates a fuller picture of the level of disconnection found within this particular family, and with each reader will identify and empathise:

Stella, the mother with young baby Mia, suffering from post-natal depression. Philip, the father – at the cusp of a mid-life crisis, looking for pleasure elsewhere with tragi-comic results. Nicola – the teenage daughter, shy, unsure, lacking-in-confidence desperately trying to fit in and emulate her more glamorous friend, Christine. And 11-year-old Zac, in some ways the most sensible of the lot, acutely aware of his family falling to pieces and in his own child-like, protective way fighting against this.

This multiple perspective has echoes of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, where we get to know each character a lot more intimately, than if it was a simple, straightforward narrative. It also alerts us to the unreliability of the narrators. On the one hand, by Stella’s account, we see Nicola as a beautiful, young teenager. Nicola disagrees, in a heart-wrenching but typically teenage body-dysmorphic way. In her descriptions of herself she is ‘dowdy’, ‘more like a fishwife’ and with ‘clothes […] safe and uninspired’.

Taylor’s unravelling story is so compelling, because we are left, on cliff-hangers constantly catching up with the characters own moral dilemmas in the backdrop of a claustrophobic home, a sophisticated party, a teenage-get together in the woods. We don’t know and we want to know. The Dawning has cinematic overtones – not only in its suspense, but the sheer quality of the pictures it creates:

‘Yapping and growling, the animals’ dark, glistening bodies had tumbled over and into one another as they reeled and snapped against her legs. For a moment, they had seemed more like giant rats than dogs, like nightmare creatures – or pieces of the night itself…’

I read The Dawning in one sitting. It wouldn’t surprise me if you did too.

The Dawning by Megan Taylor is published by Weathervane Press. Megan’s blog is at http://megantaylorblogstories.blogspot.com

Patterns of Mourning by Melissa Lee-Houghton

2010-05-03T17:38:00.000+01:00

Patterns of Mourning by Melissa Lee-Houghton is the unsent van Gogh letter, the unedited Plath poem, the more lucid Barrett song. It goes further than all these because it does not seek to be considered a ‘work of art’, but rather ‘outsider art’ by the author’s own admission. And yet, it often is art – raw and yet unequivocally truthful:

…you fill me
With cosmic elation and pacify me
Far more intelligibly than diazepam

These lines resonate with the same truth James Baldwin best lines do (or any great truth teller) – ‘Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself.’ (Giovanni’s Room).

Lee-Houghton’s uncensored diary ‘composed on the underside of letters, the backs of my hands and arms and all over my clothes, on train tickets, in public computer terminals, on walls, in hotels, hostels, hospital wards…’ refuses to be type-cast. Although written during a ‘Mixed Affective Episode’ (doctors do like diagnostics/classifications) a particularly turbulent part of her manic depression, it is not easily pigeonholed. Patterns is the by-product of sleeplessness, rage, a sexual appetite heightened, a sexual appetite obliterated, Schopenhauer, Foucault, Greek myth, free writing, subversion and tenacity.

It addresses a love-affair that is destructive and yet all-consuming, and yet it doesn’t (it skirts it, it accuses it, it changes the subject). Although at times contradictory, even erratic, Patterns is not formless. A transparent and beautiful foreword follows 13 long, sometimes sprawling poems (with operatic titles such as Oratorios and Serenade and Arson) and The Finale, divided into four parts, the last one - Severn I-X – written by the absent lover.

On a train journey, Lee-Houghton captures paranoia articulately, humorously:

‘I am sharing a table with hunger –
Three other strangers who heard me cry
Through the howl of the departure
To a chancer, from the aisle-

Are indulging (or pretending)
To indulge
In light reading’

These beautiful lines are heart-breaking and achingly funny. Other times, Patterns frenetically switches from the lucidity of lines like ‘At first I am amoeba, my sex is irrelevant’ to the undecipherable, yet charming disconnection:

I was back on track with the skeptic. You yelped,
‘Don’t do it.’ It was even him I granted

My full-scale proportions of empathy
You were never greedy-what was your diaphragm
Playing at-
What a hiccup! My missing darling,’

I don’t pretend to know the height of suffering, the particular highs and lows Lee-Houghton has been through. But I know mine. I have the same diagnosis. Her great courage in giving us access to these thoughts - this exploration of her mind’s recesses, its twists, turns, its non-conformism, its fierce intelligence, its chaos, its order, its disorder – is assertively dazing. It also attests to the fact that human experience (including illness) is staggeringly different for whoever encounters it. It challenges many a misconception of mental illness – whether created by a hysteric media or mass misunderstanding – in that it is erudite, witty, desperately mournful and always confronting, but not confrontational.

Available here: http://chipmunkapublishing.co.uk/shop/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=1388

Long Discarded

2010-02-19T15:25:00.000Z

This image is from a short story I wrote and illustrated (with photos) a while ago. I'm hoping to make it into a few books and sell them at some point.

Fog, Extending

2010-02-19T15:20:00.000Z

Fog, Extending

I. Victoria Park, WA4

Empty pavement
finds you walking on it.
The shape of an unlit
streetlight guides you,

brown railings separate
you from the weir.
Turning, two lone
green benches greet you,

above, the trees stark
against Hokusai sky.
Unseen waters
tumble, and

G
I
N
G
E
!

cries a railing.

Dog walkers enter and
fade into the trees,
characters in an
absurdist play.

Sign, yellow spells:

DANGER!
Risk of Falling
Risk of Drowning.

You feel at home
in nothing places.

II. Birmingham New St

I held on to you like the empty bottles
and wrappers you wish to discard
on a long train journey
with many changes.

III. Montserrat, Spain

Things emerge.

Autumnal branches.
Montserrat’s high arches,
Its Daliesque peaks.

The bells shatter the
bone-creaking ground.

An old man stands
a few feet from
the guided tour.

Dignified,
this bulgy Bill Murray,
wears his shorts
his yellow polo
his hat
a Disney princess bag

despite the cold
the rain.

IV. Victoria Park, WA4

I sit on a bench.

Traffic and voices
dissolve into the distance.

One tree towers with
drooping branches.

The day hides its scattered clouds.

Chopped tree trunks protrude from the short grass;
guests that won’t leave a finished party.

A cyclist flies circling the rose bushes.

I could be anywhere. This comforts me.
I could be anywhere. This saddens me.

_--
E Regan

Writing Sessions

2010-02-16T14:41:00.000Z

Hey!

Nice one for joining me, Kate & Claire! Maybe you can make me look less sad by posting comments when I post a poem or story! ; )

Look fwd to interacting here. x

Is life absurd?

2009-12-06T21:40:00.000Z

I was asked this question at 18. I answered ‘NOOOOOooooooooooo’ with all my might. I answered it in the form of a 1st year Philosophy essay to be handed in and marked. I remember the mark. 67. I think the PhD student marking it was just pleased to see something other than a screaming ‘YEEEEEeeeeeeees’ in the pile. My ‘NOOOOOOOOOoooooooo’ might have been entirely inarticulate, but as a ‘No’ it stood out.

I remember the only guy I liked in the ‘Yes’ pile was Camus. Because Camus, even though a firm believer in the banality and absurdity of life, was an advocator of raging against this meaninglessness with fury. Even though I was still in the ‘No’ pile, I liked his rebellion. It was very teenage-like and passionate, and Lord knows I respected intensity back then.

I quoted not just philosophers, but musicians, artists… and the whole theme of absurdity being reaffirmed in popular culture although still fumed in disagreement. ‘We sit here stranded though we’re all doing our best to deny it’- I quoted Dylan.

Now, life seems reasonably absurd. Arbitrary. Ridiculous. Silly. Laughable. Although maybe this is not as terrifying a prospect as I once thought, and to think that was what made me cling so fiercely to my unusual ‘No’.

I haven’t been in work/study since February 2009. I’ve had 7 interviews in the past few months (none since July) and in every one I wanted to get up and do a bit of a jig, and say ‘Why the farce? I’ll do whatever you want… I’ll sing, I’ll go get you a coffee, I’ll shear your pet goat… just don’t let me go through the farce of this bloody interview!’… because you’re asked questions that seem to require some sort of prodigious power to answer them… and then you happen to talk to someone who got the post or who works at the same place in a similar role, and their answers they gave are blindingly obvious and not very dissimilar to the ones you gave.

Life does seem pretty vacant without some sort of definite structure. I’m not asking for any God-like totality or crystal-clear profundity, just some sort of vague job that will be as absurd as the next but with some sort of activity to make it allusively appropriate to my somewhat creative persona.

Although my answer now belongs begrudgingly to the ‘Yes’ bloc, I’m sort of glad I was once adolescently entrenched in the ‘No’ camp. Camp Nou.

Wedding blog

2009-11-30T23:25:00.000Z

Check out my new blog at

http://ereganphoto.blogspot.com

Candid Wedding Photography in Warrington & surrounding areas:

Cheshire, Merseyside, Halton, Lymm, etc

A3 Posters For Sale

2009-11-29T18:09:00.000Z

Got some photographs to sell in the form of posters, this time!

1 for £8

2 for £15

These are just 2 of many designs. Send me a message at ereganphoto@gmail.com if you'd like to order one, or ask me to show you more samples of my work so you can choose an image yourself!

Xmas Cards For Sale

2009-11-10T19:51:00.000Z

available from me at ereganphoto@gmail.com
packs of 6 for £4

2 packs of 6 for £7

non-start

2008-12-20T22:20:00.000Z

Not written here for a while.

Great start.

I have been writing (this is said with a big pinch of defensiveness) although I confess I’ve probably spent more time watching Jeremy Kyle re-runs than writing. (I wish I was Larry David. Then and only then, would the words ‘you don’t know me’ theatrically repeated from the settee resound with humour, and not bastard boredom).

I’ve been writing poetry about photography.

Tried to write a review about ‘Hunger’ and the unending, piss puddles from the cells lining the Maze’s corridor while reflecting the institutional lights. I can’t quite seem to gather all my disparate thoughts about the film into a good enough sequence.

I’ve tried writing a piece ‘9 ways to plunge further into credit crunch blues’, although maybe it should be renamed ‘once a pauper, always a pauper’ because it’s not like I’m losing my house or job. I don’t own a house or have a job.

I wanted to write a review of the Manchester Carols. I wrote a few bits and pieces on scraps of paper on the train home, but discarded it. I seem to discard a lot of pieces of paper this day. Probably should put them in that blue bin. Never been good at recycling.

I need to write an essay for uni about Berryman and Williams. I don’t know enough about poetic personae. I’m excited to learn about it. So much so, I was reading on the train home semi-relevant essays about Williams and Berryman. This guy next to me, slightly pissed, kept looking at me reading. He finally says 5 minutes before he gets off : ‘is that any good, or do you have to read it?’ Before I’ve spoken he decides ‘It’s boring, innit.’ I say ‘actually, no. I sort of like it. Bit of a geek’. He rants platitudes about life being about getting from ‘A to B’ and ‘you have to know what you want to do’ and just when I’m beginning to nod off, he supplies me with this corker ‘tv’s the killer though. You shouldn’t watch tv’. How does he know? So, maybe he was infinitely more perceptive than his white chavvy ku klux klan type hoodie and his approaching middle age goatee led me to believe. He knows I’m watching too much tv. I can compare myself to Mildred in Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ with her 3 interactive walls of tv, if it makes me feel better. Or LD. But I know it’s not like that.

Laura Marling- Rambling Man

2008-10-09T16:11:00.000+01:00

Watch & tremble:

Cork: night pictures

2008-09-25T10:39:00.000+01:00

'At least, it has rhythm'

2008-09-24T11:07:00.000+01:00

He wants to cancel everyone out.

Office parodies jollily told,
Beckett-like fishing vignettes
rhythmically crafted,
shower curtains with a touch
of the nostalgic.

He falters, on stage,
like he practiced at home
making references to his
awkward height
and ‘these poems are shite’,

‘Don’t read them, then!’
A brave girl echoes
each silent thought across
the room.

Out he comes with it,
(smearing spit on skinny jeans)
a smuttier version
of ‘Last Tango in Paris’
set round the corner, perhaps.

Anal sex this, groping her that
joyless sex this, joyless sex that.

‘At least, it has rhythm’
I concede to Anna
and when his endless elegy
to anal’s finally over,

enter ‘Death girl’,
(read hopelessly depressing
poems earlier)
mop of
strawberry blonde hair
a-fopping, following
‘Anal sex guy’’s thin black figure

and smiling, congratulating,
weighing each other up.
Anna & I think ‘Anal sex guy’
and ‘Death girl’ make
an apt couple, lovely
is pushing it.

american dreams & nightmares

2008-09-02T07:33:00.000+01:00

A gritty visual fest of a video directed by my brother Pete Regan with a tune by my nearly husband Mark Graham, can be watched here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjdE2fCJGd4

or at www.myspace.com/markgraham23

and www.myspace.com/peteregan86

a while ago; divided

2008-08-25T18:21:00.000+01:00

2008-08-22T00:08:00.000+01:00

So apparently Niloo looks like Julianne Moore; Shoosh like Heather Locklear, my brother Pete like Primo Levi (strange coincidence that's he's reading 'The Truce' by Levi at the mo?), Niloo in her 2nd appearance looks like Gloria Estefan, and Mark (my nearly husband!) like Kenneth Branagh... and my older bro Chris like Joshua Jackson, and moi resembles Kate Winslet...

Odd... ; )

The local loon

2008-08-21T21:06:00.000+01:00

The local toothless loon stares at your chest,

The raffle lady wants to stuff tickets in your mouth
As you decline; penniless.

Nurses' prayer

2008-08-21T16:38:00.001+01:00

Give us this day our endless shifts,
a stand ‘condemned’ outside
the lifts
And a smell that never leaves our nostrils.

'These pictures mean something'

2008-08-17T19:16:00.000+01:00

Josie tears her four up
outside her local post office
with a faded sign up:
‘SAVE OUR P.O.’
‘Too yellow. Too fat.’

Tyler thinks he’s James Dean
in his.
He wants to make
Warholesque rite
of passage posters
out of them.

Fred stares straight
ahead smiling a little
too much.
He’s 70. This is his
first passport; it will
take him to Australia.

Sam and Fran are
nervous.
Her favourite film is Buffalo ’66;
his, Amelie.
They want a look which will
blend both.

The photobooths
respond silently or loudly,
beep, dry, beep, dry; red light
flashing.

‘These pictures (4 down/4 across)
mean something’
writes Tanya
bemoaning the death
of photobooths on
her blog;
normally dealing with
period sex.

numbered swan park again...

2008-08-10T23:19:00.000+01:00

I took an evening walk to the numbered swan park again. Took a few snapshots, nothing too serious. Suddenly I heard a 'psssst'.... quickly started to walk on, was worried it was some wino fisher or something, but it was my mate Jamie... even though they're not the most special photographs... they somewhat remind me of Roger McGough's poem 'what you are', my favourite line being 'you are a derelict canal where the tincans whistle no tunes'... in fact maybe I should include the first 1/2 here:

'What you are' --- Roger McGough

you are the cat's paw

among the silence of midnight goldfish

you are the waveswhich cover my feet l

ike cold eiderdownsyou are the teddybear (as good as new)

found beside a road accident

you are the lost day

in the life of a child murderer

you are the green

whose depths I cannot fathom

you are the clean sword

that slaughtered the first innocent

you are the drop of dew on a petal

before the clouds weep blood

you are the wind caught on barbedwire

and crying out against war

you are the apple for teacher

left in a damp cloakroom

you are the litmus leaves

quivering on the suntan trees

you are the ivy

which muffles my walls

you are the first footprints in the sand

on bankholiday morning

you are the suitcase full of limbs

waiting in a leftluggage office

to be collected like an orphan

you are a derelict canal

where the tincans whistle no tunes

you are the bleakness of winter before the cuckoo

catching its feathers on a thornbush

heralding spring

you are the stillness of Van Gogh

before he painted the yellow vortex of his last sun

........................... (can't seem to edit this blank space out!!! aaargh, why am i shite at html?

Place cards

2008-08-10T11:01:00.000+01:00

Made these place cards today for our wedding... Was looking on the internet last night and they were so expensive.... 60p each... Anyway, I cropped a photo that I took in a 2nd hand bookshop, now closed... I'm pretty happy with the results.

here yesterday

2008-08-09T10:36:00.000+01:00

I went here yesterday; to the park of numbered swans. It didn't look the same. These pictures were taken in 2006.

bottles & wrappers

2008-08-09T10:00:00.000+01:00

That evening; our clothed bodies
drenched in sun

(although your eyes still sung for me)

I held on to you like the empty bottles
& wrappers you wish to discard
on a long train journey
with many changes.

Shuffles Nervously

2008-08-09T08:44:00.000+01:00

1.

And on the train I see landscapes I know well transformed from their banality by the screaming sunlight… particularly a concrete sports field populated by puddles reflecting trees, pylons- an array of scorched melting metallic.

Stalling. Stalling.

Two Goldfrapp posters disappear quickly and are therefore indelible in your mind. A runner of your ilk, the kind that does this out of necessity, rather than a love of running. Then at the station you spy a guy that wouldn’t look too out of place in the Lake District with backpack and thinsulate hat, eating a pastie. There are ghosts that turn into people at Oxford Road Station by coming out of the frosted glass stairs.

Stalling. Stalling.

A lad with a hairdo like a girl’s is being kissed by his older girlfriend. People at the station are always gazing upwards with that look of slight consternation on their faces, to view the train times.

‘Has my train left yet? Am I on the right platform?’

Out of nowhere some pigeons attack the boy with the girl’s hairdo, a half ponytail…

‘ Is this an indiscriminate attack?’

Then movement again… The aircon systems at the top of buildings become giant hamburgers.

Stalling. Stalling.

A middle-aged man with neon green laces in his trainers and black dye in his hair shuffles nervously, wondering whether to get on my train. A giant billboard in the distance shouts: ‘INSTRUCTIONS: CHILL AT HOME’.

2.

An old gentleman in his 80’s seems to frequent the laundrette almost as much as the black-maned woman. He has an aristocratic face even though his clothes are gray, old, ill-fitting, much as all of us in the laundrette are in our commie type rags. That’s why we appear there, to absolve ourselves from the dirt, the clothes that sometimes should have been washed a while ago. One day I start talking to him, properly. I learn a few things from him, he comes to get away from home. His wife has Alzheimer’s.

‘She’s been a good mother. A good wife’…

I remark that some men go fishing, much as he comes here. He laughs quietly. His cheeks are a dangerous rosy. I start talking to him rather quickly, almost nervously…

Fifteen minutes ago a skinheaded young male with the necessary neck tattoos, is f-ing and blinding, remarking that this

‘laundrette’s gash!’…

Hmmmm, never heard such strong sentiments levied towards such a simple establishment as a laundrette. He has no washing powder and is getting increasingly irate. Thankfully, no-one reacts and they just calmly inform him that in the shop 3 doors down, they do sell washing powder. ‘Right’ he concedes, which coming from him, sounds like a

‘Thank-you kind sir’.

The tense, violent attitude impresses no-one and by the time he comes back and strips down to his boxers, he is more of a comic figure, an abrasive version of the Diet Coke guy, without the patented prettiness. I shuffle less nervously. Just a cocky young lad wanting attention.

I return to my bittersweet conversation. The black-maned woman sings. She repeatedly sighs always recounting that these washing rituals are for

‘the grand-kids’… ‘You wouldn’t believe how many clothes they go through’.

I can. I know she lives there. Camps out there like a Blyton Faraway Tree character- the washerwoman. The bull with the swagger holds the door open for the rosy-cheeked old man.

‘Thanks, son’.

He goes to his battered white car, smiling, back to his old love who can’t remember him.

3.

We look at her with the indifference of tired commuters. Her stories are more entertaining than her poems. Her voice comes alive, sings, is louder when retelling the instances in which her poems were just semblances.

We, the audience sit scruffily attired in faded fleeces and unclassifiable pieces of clothing while a slight air of pretentiousness pervades the room.

The students cannot stop scribbling the names of every poem and huff desolately if they miss the title of one. They do not hang on her every word, but shuffle nervously, asking their companions for the titles. It’s getting late; I can’t afford to miss my train.

On the narrowly caught train the sole sound I can hear are the remains of a crisp packet’s crumbs being devoured. I look out and see a girl and boy contriving pictures.

The boy holds a camera and signals to the girl to throw the bread NOW. The birds scatter, and click goes the shutter I can’t hear.

wrong words

2008-08-09T08:11:00.000+01:00

you become an idiot,
a malnourished mind
with blindingly stupid answers
always uttering the
wrong words

never the right ones.
your tone is mere drone
with absolutely
nothing to recommend it.

you could surpass einstein
and their ears
would still not hear.
in their eyes no recognition
would appear

because
they’ve decided
that you’re wrong
beyond redemption
and your drone can’t
drown their doubt
towards you- neither now
nor tomorrow.