A Portrait of the Artist as Pervy Old Man

There's something about book-buying that just seems inherently healthy to me, and, as such, any internal concept of demand and supply goes completely out of the window. My wallet is deaf even to basic economic concepts, so I hoard with manic delight what is now becoming a small but growing knoll of dog-eared paperbacks in my bedside 'to read' pile. I'm a bit more cautious with other media, perhaps in the sense that I wouldn't happily and with a clear conscience order two pizzas every day, then stock up on eight tubs of ice cream for the forseeable future. Since reading is very much the broccoli of the mind (to stretch a bad analogy even further), you can never, really, have too much of the stuff. Thankfully though, books don't make me involuntarily retch. Not the case with broccoli.

Anyway. Recently I stumbled across a paperback stall in Cambridge and got inordinately excited at a '60s edition of Penguin Modern Poets with Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, and William Carlos Willliams in it. There were a few other editions, but they all contained long-forgotten, pithy, '50s poetasters so I stuck with this one and a new-ish edition of L'etranger. I couldn't read the French, mind you, but it always does well to try and sound vaguely intelligent.

I was particularly taken by Rexroth and his not-quite-Beat perch in literary history. He always commands the sharper image, and reigns in sharply rendered splices of nature along with vague perambulations through glowing, quick-cut images of the human condition. I hate saying the human condition, but its vagueness will serve for now I guess. What struck me in one poem in particular, though, was the candid zoom-out; the portrait of the artist as a pervy old man, as it were. Which is, in fairness, a crude joke of what it really is, which is the bold outing of the shame of his desire, still defiant, set near-mockingly against his tatty, wearied and ageing self. But he celebrates it in a sense, and that's why I love it. Here it is:


The Advantages of Learning


I am a man with no ambitions
And few friends, wholly incapable
Of making a living, growing no
Younger, fugitive from some just doom.
Lonely, ill-clothed, what does it matter?
At midnight I make myself a jug
Of hot white wine and cardamon seeds.
In a torn grey robe and old beret,
I sit in the cold writing poems,
Drawing nudes in the crooked margins,
Copulating with sixteen year old
Nymphmaniacs of my imagination.


It reminds me also of a poem by Howard Nemerov who, in his old age and declined virlity, sees in pornography only the endlessly renewed, Sisyphean theatre of the absurd. In his world this is set against our staid,everyday lives which are numb to the direct and interconnecting reality of the act itself, and favour instead the vicarious libido-diversion of porn.


Reading Pornography in Old Age


Unbridled licentiousness with no holds barred,
Immediate and mutual lust, satisfiable
In the heat, upon demand, aroused again
And satisfied again, lechery unlimited.

Till space runs out at the bottom of the page
And another pair of lovers, forever young,
Prepotent, endlessly receptive, renews
The daylong, nightlong, interminable grind.

How decent it is, and how unlike our lives
Where "fuck you" is a term of vengeful scorn
And the murmur of "sorry, partner" is often heard
As ever in mixed doubles and bridge.

Though I suspect the stuff is written by
Elderly homosexuals manacled to their
Machines, it's mildly touching all the same,
A reminiscence of the life that was in Eden

Before the Fall, when we were beautiful
And shameless, and untouched by memory:
Before we were driven out to the laboring world
Of the money and the garbage and the kids

In which we read this nonsense and are moved
As all that was always lost for good, in which
We think about sex obsessively, except
During the act, when our minds tend to wander.

'I choose not to run!'

I can't help but feel my continually laissez-faire attitude to my own writing is just like Jerry's approach to running in the Seinfeld episode 'The Race':



Well, that or I'm just plain lazy. Smart bets on that one, I'd say.

Thing I Miss About the North - No, 1

The leisurely, trundling flicker of the price on the petrol pump.

Uprooted.

Something of a shite platitude, but it's odd, it really is. Experiencing at 24 what most giddily tumble into at 18 is bizarre at best. And no, I don't mean sex, I mean.... *shudder* living on your own. In a sense, though, I'm glad that I flung myself so wholeheartedly into the sheer premise of it, hurling myself 150 miles south to an area I don't know to live with people I don't know, and then work another 20 miles from that. Sheesh, and I can't even cook pasta that well.

Although I'd a taste of it from travelling the USA post-graduation with my mates, living independently is an odd tang that just tastes perpetually baffling. The nature of your freedom is different: it's defined by an absence, rather than a liberating force; albeit the absence of any discernible figure to regulate your life and cook you nice things. Now, my new mother is Tesco, and I suckle hatefully on her plastic teats.

Uprooting

Well the times, they are a’changin’. After months of infuriated cage-rattling as a graduate with an overinflated sense of entitlement (see here) ,and then a couple more as a redundantee with confused and burning eyes from stepping out of the Plato’s cave of acutely overqualified employment, I finally got me a job. And I’m moving to Cambridge.

We perceive elements of ourselves, I’ve always thought, in continual relation to the lack or abundance of similar elements. Therefore, in Hull, I always sort of perceived myself as other in relation to the schlepping flocks of dumbly patriotic shitheels. Like Bill Hicks, my tie to my hometown was weak and vague: 'Well, my parents fucked there...' etc etc. Now I’m moving south however, I’ve never felt so violently and strongly Yorkshire, if not Hull. I even have a mug that says so.

It’ll be interesting to see how I adapt to these new circumstances, how it might affect or stifle creativity; hell, I might be spending all my damn time cooking and washing now. Yeesh. I have an attic room, and the flush of light from the two windows is something I’ll look forward to. Either way, it’s good to, in a sense, be able to finally get out there and just make that damned first step already. Short of the satisfaction of actually having a job even slightly related to my degree, it’ll be great to, you know, do life. There’s something satisfying about plunging into these situations with no idea of how I’ll adapt or function (within reason, that is), it brings to mind this TED talk on synthetic happiness by Dan Gilbert:



Of course, watching that in the first place makes me hopelessly white, I know. Now back to packing hokey miscellany and looking forward to missing Yorkshire...

Singularity

Since redundancy I've somewhat disavowed multi-tasking. Not in a nihilistic way of course, rendering my existence down into a prolonged loaf-fest or anything like that, no. I've realised that, especially when the majority of your life is crystallised through the dizzying and fractured lens of a computer or laptop, the sheer multitude of things to do or finish makes the entire prospect shudder to a halt more often than not. Each project or task wobbles precariously on top of another, and even in the midst of one, you can feel the encroaching pressure of the other 5000 things you should be doing pressing slowly on your mind.

So I've decided to adhere to a new philosophy: singularity of purpose. Or, in short, actually finishing things. Not just leaving a trail of stunted beginnings behind me like half-eaten apple cores.

Therefore, I'm aiming to be a lot more like THIS guy:

and less like THIS guy:

Spain Torture Diary

On my recent (and final) wee sojourn to Granada to see Alex in Granada, it was good to see that Spain had kindly upped the ante in terms of ruining my life entirely. Ably assisted, of course, by the city of Malaga and its associated travel systems.

Having missed my bus to Granada due to our luggage being delivered by what I can only assume was a seminally stoned sloth with narcolepsy, I was informed that the next bus (1 am) was also full. ‘Uh... pardona? But it does actually say on the machine there're two sea... no? Full? Oh, ok. Fuck you then.

So obviously I took my only recourse, which was to furiously storm out with a ticket for 7 am (this was at approx. 10 pm), and get the bus back to the airport to sleep in the Camp X-Ray chic of the departure area’s cold, white floor. Thankfully though, I still had my pen and paper:

'I can't really say that I expected to spend my first night in Spain huddled in a plastic seat in the departure lounge, but neither can I say that I’m hugely surprised either.

When large swathes of life have been padded out with relative convenience –relatives easily contactable, a bed that remains in one place, a means to easily travel reasonable distances, for example – there’s a certain nauseating shock or jolt that any unexpected or sudden removal of said presumed conveniences gives you.

I remember back in 2004 when I were but a mere slip of a lad at 17, spending my first proper time away from my parents at Leeds Festival. My initial reaction was of shock, nay terror, at the overwhelming sense of diminution at being but one tiny speck among tens of thousands of others – all, yes, individual just like you. Living in a perma-greased sunburnt state while subsisting on either cheap instant food or mediocre sausage sandwiches tainted by traditional festival hyperinflation, it was like living in some kind of refugee camp powered entirely by crap beer and suncream. Also, the bands were fairly good, I guess.

But the real point was the coming home. Suffering counter-culture shock from a few days in a tent a few hours’ drive away may sound stupid, but my previously pale, retiring self had metamorphosed. I was Rambo, Ray Mears and Rocky all in one, Once home, there would be absolutely no earthly convenience that could possibly stop me. Well, for a few hours at least.

On returning from Download fest this year, I crossed the threshold without any of the requisite glimpse of the ubermensch outdoorsman I’d known previously. I just slumped a little, yawned, and got back to life. I’m still wondering why exactly this is. Is it merely my jaded adult ego hopelessly desensitised to any kind of transcendent optimism myth? Or have I just been to too many festivals?

Much the same happened in my travels across America: our numerous mishaps only served to further fuel our camaraderie and sense of bold frontiersmanship. After nearly being stranded overnight at a dusty gas station in Austin, Texas en route to Nashville, we managed to somehow barter passage on the packed full bus by sitting in the aisle. It was fantastic. We were practically cowboys. We’d had an adventure.

Fast forward to now, and I’m grimly sat in a plastic chair–row with stadium lighting scorching my retinas, glaring furiously at my watch for 7am to roll around. It is now 1am. I set off for the airport exactly twelve hours ago. The strange thing is how, as I’ve said, I used to pirouette in shock and awe at adversity (not literally, of course) but now I merely harrumph and bear it with good old stoic determination and seething, undirected rage. I think, over a long period of time, one becomes so acclimatised and willingly saddled by pessimism that setbacks are merely expectations finally realised. The silver-lining, perhaps, is that I now so effortlessly seem to shoulder things and integrate them into myself that I can shrug off agonising tortures such as this with little more than a shrug of the shoulders and a cheeky blog post.’

An Elegy For Oprimus Prime

Megan Who? Shia LeWhat? Go to hell. All salute a real American hero:




An Elegy For Optimus Prime


Lurching space-hulk, esteemed tomb of Cybertron,
Receive the dulled shell of one who blazed through
Darkest hours. Who, with iron flex and pistoned whir, flew
Amidst unspoken phantasms of glory, soon gone
In a flicker of weakness – mercy – which, we all knew,
Was his only failing: that he was too good, would abandon none.

May he be borne aloft on steel pinions, his legend searing
The circuits of those bereft, cursing that fate should
Prise away the one clasped so close by all: he who could
Turn tides in magisterial vengeance; with honour clearing
The scene of iniquity and, with hissing doom ever nearing,
Silence armies with plangent truth, bearing the hope of all good.

Spiralling out to alien Earth; buried by the slump of history
To awaken to us, and them, bringing the sword to bear again
Against ancient evil. I, and others, of course, wistfully
Cherish the old clang of titan legs into rapt memories when
You first walked among men. Haloed in sheer mystery,
Young gazes tapered off halfway up, wreathed in clouds as you went.

Megatron! Vile deceiver, he who escapes only by the grace
Of the good he so loathes. Optimus, do you still long
For freedom? Take it, let the still-fresh vision of your dying face
Spur others to lesser victories. Speak out with ageless song
Through aeons to those who fight in your name, who race
Breathlessly to guard the hope you forged, until all are one.

Entomofuntimes

So the other night there was a gargantuan daddy long-legs lurking opposite me in bed, skittering occasionally in that freaky, unpredictable way that they're generally wont to do.

'What's up?' asks my girlfriend.

I point, with quaking finger and rictus of horror towards the flapping, twitching agent of evil framed against the white wall opposite.

'Oh it's only a daddy long-legs', she laughs.

'Only a daddy long-legs??' say I, 'Don't they freak you out, all spindly and bobbing about before they land and feast on your flesh?'

'Well... no', says the reasonable female opinion.

'But you're terrified of spiders, you curl up in a quivering ball at the sight of one.'

'Well yes,' she says, 'But spiders seem like they're on a mission, like they're going to climb into my brain while I'm sleeping.'

See, I like spiders. I genuinely do. Maybe I've just been brainwashed by the airbrushed mug of Toby Maguire clad in gleaming spandex, but they've always seemed like the intrepid little vigilantes of the insect world. Who else would stand up to the buzzing clouds of sandwich-bothering pestilence if not our arachnid friends?

Yes, I've seen Arachnophobia, but I refuse to be swayed. See, it's their very sense of purpose that warms me to our eight-legged comrades so much. When I see one passing by, his intent doesn't trouble me, no. If anything it soothes me that all is right in the world, and I respectfully doff my cap to it as one might a passing policeman. When I see a spider crawling from one place to another I see not malicious intent, but a neighbour popping out for a paper. They may well have eight legs, but by god, at least they favour good, honest locomotion. None of this buzzing, flapping and wheeling randomly around the room stuff, missing all the open windows and keeping you awake. And frankly, this means that at any given time spiders will always be at a fair distance from my face, so everybody wins.

Other than being the frenzied, evil heralds of Beelzebub, flies also freak me out and annoy me for a different reason. As with the daddy long-legs, they seem to have absolutely no raison d'etre other than to throw themselves wildly against bright colours and vomit on your food in a chaotic orgy of pointless, random buzzing. They're the very epitome of entropy, of the second law of thermodynamics. Not only do they eat rotting food or excreta (and, fair play, I'll excuse the daddy long-legs on that part, they actually eat nectar), they live brief, 24-hour lives only to frantically breed and die. At least the spider creates. At least there's some artistry in what he does.

It reminds me a little of the first chapter of Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday wherein Gabriel Syme - the undercover police poet - confronts the wild, anarchist poet Lucian Gregory in Saffron Park:

“It is things going right,” he cried, “That is poetical! Our digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry. Yes, the most poetical thing, more poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars—the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick.”

And flies really make me sick.

Lowell Has His Say

I feel a bit of a cheat quoting verbatim from somebody with scant introduction, but Lowell manages to so effortlessly and eloquently encapsulate what I've been cack-handedly fumbling over for years:

'Almost the whole problem of writing poetry is to bring it back to what you really feel, and that takes an awful lot of manoeuvring. You may feel the doorknob more strongly than some big personal event, and the doorknob will open into something that you can use as your own. A lot of poetry seems to me very good in the tradition but just doesn't move me very much because it doesn't have personal vibrance to it. I probably exaggerate the value of it, but it's precious to me. Some little image, some detail you've noticed-you're writing about a little country shop, just describing it, and your poem ends up with an existentialist account of your experience. But it's the shop that started it off. You didn't know why it meant a lot to you. Often images and often the sense of the beginning and end of a poem are all you have - some journey to be gone through between those things; and you know that, but you don't know the details. And that's marvellous; then you feel the poem will come out. It's a terrible struggle, because what you really feel hasn't got the form, it's not what you can put down in a poem. And the poem you're equipped to write concerns nothing that you care very much about or have much to say on. Then the great moment comes when there's enough resolution of your technical equipment, your way of constructing things, and that you can make a poem out of, to hit something you really want to say. You may not know you have it to say.'

Firing Squads Kick Ass

I have to say, I've yet to comprehend the mass hand-wringing, tutting and desultory nose-gazing against the state of Utah. Not for executing Ronnie Lee Gardner, no, but for doing so by firing squad.

What baffles me is that the shock and horror is not actually over the fact that the USA still perpetrates capital punishment - albeit almost entirely by one or two yee-haw States such as Texas - but that they've merely sort of revived a slightly dormant form of execution because a guy asked for it. And why the hell not? FIRING SQUADS KICK ASS. Despite the fact that he actually stated that 'I lived by the gun, I murdered with a gun, so I will die by the gun', we still see that 'demonstrations were held on the steps of the Utah State Capitol building'. What the hell did they want instead? Have him watch Michel Gondry films in a chair without appropriate lumbar support until he possibly develops Deep Vein Thrombosis? Have him waterboarded with warm Evian? Be force-fed asparagus that... that ISN'T organically sourced?? You sick, sick bastards.

Now, I daren't even poke at the myriad ethical minefield that is the death penalty, but suffice it to say that I oppose it in principle.

However.

If I ever find myself with a hankering for unspeakable crime amounting to an almost certain Death Row penalty, I sure as hell am choosing Utah as my romping-ground. I mean, at least Gardner got a choice. And with that limited choice he decided to die like a real man: eat a steak, watch Lord of the Rings, and then be blasted to shit by four massive rifles. How the hell can you dispute that choice against the others? Well, apart from, you know, not having to be killed 30 years after you shot a bloke in the stomach this one time, but, hey, this is America after all. Honestly though, if I had to choose between having my life slowly trickle away as I wilt like a sad little flower from a crappy injection, or have my still-beating heart explode out of my chest via the business end of four high-powered rifles, well... sign me up for the latter any day. Talk about dying like a man, christ, I want to go out the way I came in: screaming, naked and covered in bloody entrails. Even better, push me out of a plane, that'd be equally badass. Or make me fight two lions with only a paper plate and a can opener for defence. I mean, if the end's inevitable, I'd at least want it to be interesting. I don't smoke either, but I feel that smoking a cigar as you're blown skywards is also more or less a crucial necessity for the quintessential manly death.

I laugh mockingly at the other contenders. Electrocution? Jiggle about in a chair for a bit with a sponge on your head. Hanging? Dangle boringly from a wooden climbing frame like an incontinent Christmas fairy. Stoning? Be the human equivalent of a badly-done pebble drive. Lame. All of them.

Moreover, if it could somehow be staged to exactly replicate Protest the Hero's 'Blindfolds Aside' video, I'd be all the more happy. Just so you know. Check it out.

Finally, in the inevitable situation in which I've been bitten by a zombie in a war-torn post-apocalyptic wasteland and have but 15 hours to live before I devolve into a subhuman brain-eating machine, I fully intend to pick a method from Maddox's list and go with that.

An Interesting Day

Yesterday was an interesting day workwise. We usually get an interesting variety, be it the man who wanted to know if he could electronically tag his children on holiday, or the person who wanted to know whether testicular examinations were actually routine when he was at school, or whether the schoolmaster was merely sneaking a sly jingle of the coinpurse.

A lady with PCOS (Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome) called with a medication query. It was really just a routine thing - relating to her prescription meds for her condition and her newly-announced pregnancy - but you could honestly hear the joy in her voice that they'd managed to conceive and overcome the huge odds stacked against them with her condition. It was nice to hear.

Also had a surprisingly lucid mid-80 year old woman in which we took a while to establish the real meat of her problem, which was... *drum roll* that her son hadn't rung her in a while. Yeah. Now, I'm not entirely unused to the odd confused oldie call (I've been asked to sort out their council tax and to fix the volume of their telephone to name but two), and their charming eccentricities can usually be put straight with a bit of helpful redirection. I was about to say that, basically, there was nothing we could do to get her son to go and visit her more often. But I noticed a tone of panic in her voice and recalled a recent elderly negligence call one of our nurses took (the lady had no electricity and so was freezing without any means of cooking for two days) so I erred on the side of caution. I took background info on how often her relatives visit her, how she gets around, gets food etc, and passed it to a nurse in breathless anticipation. But, of course, I'd spelt the name wrong. Very rare for me I must admit, but as a result I missed out on the note on her real record stating that the lady has Alzheimer's and can't remember anything in the short term beyond the last ten minutes or so. And, sure as day, there was in the note a mention that she often complains of her family abandoning her and taking her money. Thing is, they visit her every day. She just can't remember.

Often we also deal with toxic ingestions. Kids'll eat all kinds of crap (often literally) on a whim and get mum in a hysteric frenzy over their sampling of either her liquid foundation or a highlighter pen. 99% of the time this is the case, and occasionally we also get adults who've accidentally OD'd on prescription meds, but this one was a new 'un for sure. It was about a 34 year old male... and he'd swallowed an earthworm. 'He thought it'd be a laugh like' says dear sister. 'Oh and,er, he's also an alcoholic' she mentions. Figures I guess.

There's also a category in which I'd place a very small amount of people I speak to. It's the 'grizzled, wise veteran' category. These are the old people who've more or less seen it all. They don't piss about, and I have all the more respect with them for it. They're acutely aware of their own mortality and often poke healthy fun at it while having a robust grip on the real priorities in life. The man I spoke to was, in fact, an ex-manic depressive (which showed itself, I guess, in his sunny demeanour) who'd carved entire blocks of his life out in self-destructive stagnation. Whole swathes of his youth wiped out by his illness and by drugs, oscillating between homes and relationships, happiness and sadness. He got back on board later on, it seems. Found God, found a psychiatrist, found himself. Has a firm grip of what matters and on the importance of helping others. As he mentioned, 'I don't like to go out burping, looking at tits and shouting at footballs like the rest of 'em, so I have a bit more money left. And I give it to the kids. I help 'em out.' He acts as surrogate mentor and grandparent to a number of disadvantaged youths in the area. One of which, a 17 year old girl on the run from an abusive home life, sparked a phone call to the gentleman in question from her estranged father. The caller made sure to ascertain that this was, in fact the person who she'd been going to see recently. They then threatened to break his legs and to watch out; that they'd get him for what he'd done. Although he hadn't actually done anything. He was actuely self-aware, and more than perceptive of the social implications of what he was doing. He knew that having a beard, living alone and speaking to young people would equate to only one thing in everyone else's mind. He himself laughed at the very notion of his having congress with a girl of her age. He couldn't even if he wanted to, he said. Cheery and articulate as he was however, he was shaken, and his anxiety was worsening when he was on his own. No doubt there's more to the story, but he was a genuine pleasure to talk to. He'd made it out somehow and was, in his own way, paying something back to the world. Being a good Christian I guess.

So I saw Clash of the Titans and it was

clunky, boring shite. As if an able-bodied and bum-faced Sam Worthington wasn’t enough to make you instantly flaccid as he plays a confused loaf of bread in sandals, the clumsy plot and limp-dick anticlimax are balls-shrivellingly awful. Add to that the overpriced eye-rape of a poorly-done 3D botch job and there you have it.

Hermaphrodite Healthcare

As we often do, last night I received a call from dear old nana calling on behalf of her cherished loin-fruit, who in turn is calling on behalf of the darling cherubim of a grandson. I forget the name, but as these calls are often near-identical, I would place good money that he is either a Cain/Kane, Kaden/Zaden, a Tyler or a Taylor. I also once had a Christofa. No lie. Of course, the reason for the gran intermediary is, as is always the case, that mum is cruelly sundered from our welcoming arms by a pay as you go mobile, our local call-rate and the amount left of this month's giro. So it goes.

So, nana tells me in the vaguest of terms of the child's general illness: his fever, a bit of a headache, all in the last day or so (sadly, in our society of instantaneous wish-fulfillment and bloated sense of entitlement, we refuse to admit that anything so hideous as a high temperature might afflict our children for so much as a night without the doctor racing out to cure it for us as Britain's Got Talent drones in the background), that he's 'not right well', and 'like an oven'. Since her daughter and grandchild are, however, on yonder side of Bradford I decide just to ring her myself and get the hopefully more accurate down-low. So I take mum's phone number, her name, and, as per protocol, tell her to alert mum to the call before I get in touch with her.

I try the mobile number and... it's a dud. I try again - no dice. Thus I call dear old Nana back to clarify the number, but, of course, it's engaged. I try again five minutes later... still engaged. Obviously someone must've mentioned this week's Coronation Street in passing. So, as an adjunct to merely sitting there cupping my balls in contemplation, I search our previous records for any record pertaining to the child (of whom I have only a name, a vague location and an age but no specific DOB) and find a record that might, might just be the one. So I opens it up, and it's the wrong one. I can tell straight away - wrong side of the city, wrong age. But, something catches my eye in the previous call reason. And here I stand and tentatively clear my throat in anticipation as I read it:

'swollen penis, painful pussy 2 days'.

Now, I will admit that my colleagues' spelling is about on par with an adolescent gibbon at the best of times. But the surety of it, the lack of any kind of punctuation between 'painful' and 'pussy', well... it just makes me proud that we're here for those moments when even hermaphrodites lose their good judgement and don't use a condom with themselves.

This was possibly the most needlessly complex penis gag I've ever told.

Tim Westwood

'Hence it is, that the children of bishops carry about with them an austere and repulsive air, indicative of claims not generally acknowledged, a sort of noli me tangere manner, nervously apprehensive of too familiar approach, and shrinking with the sensitiveness of a gouty man.' Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821).

FC-KR Derby

As something of an expatriate Hull KR fan (having emigrated from family territory in East Hull to, well, more of the Westward fringes) I'm obviously seething from the recent loss to the monochromatic bastards. Tight one mind you, and we're still leading in terms of total derbys won, but it's always a sore blow. As I was just going downstairs to fetch a cup of tea though, it occurred to me how absurd the fanatic, die-hard loyalty that surrounds clubs can be. While the hardened Rovers fans scream for the will of the Robin-God himself to be unleashed on t'other bastards, the righteous fury is actually coolly delivered by what looks more like a touring Australasian bodybuilding group.

Although it's something I have little to no interest in, football is much the same, if not worse. Quite simply, why cheer for your city out there when nobody on the pitch is actually from the bloody place? Yet the bloody-minded fanaticism of most suggests that most fans haven't factored-in that their team is essentially just a superfluous badge for a succession of preening dicks in hairbands. Since I rarely take note of football, every time I look it seems a uniquely Heraclitean experience: as he tells us that you can never step into the same river twice, I can never seem to look at the same bloody club twice either. Actually, Roberto Bolano prefaces his Nazi Literature of the Americas with a cute refutation of this by Augusto Monterroso: 'If the flow is slow enough and you have a good bicycle, or a horse, it is possible to bathe twice (or even three times, should your personal hygiene so require) in the same river.' So, I'm pretty much guessing that this is how Talksport phoners-in still manage to stay bothered then.

James Wright

Once I got over Wright's constant insistence on a very pure manner of practically Horatian craftsmanship - not to mention his predilection for over-obvious rhyming couplets that make you cringe at the sheer clanging sound - I found a succinct poet of humbleness and sublimity. Ostensibly a nature poet, he's one with fierce ties to the industrial working class, and a sense of the constant ghost of his birthtown of Martin's Ferry, Ohio that flavours his work the same way Detroit does for Philip Levine. Anyway, I'm not bloody wikipedia, I'm just saying that it's exciting to find someone new that honestly impresses me. I feel guilty, though, that I've not been able to feel as excited about any British poets for a long time, something that the recent watery mulch of the National Poetry award-winners has only served to prolong I'm sad to say.

Here's a bit of Wright's I admire from 'The Frontier':


A girl stands in a doorway.
Her arms are bare to the elbows,
Her face gray, she stares coldly
At the daybreak.
When the howl goes up, her eyes
Flare white, like a mares.


I gulped the whole stanza in one go and, as the collected inflections, meanings and associations settled, I was amazed to feel that little shiver you feel when something truly stands out for you. I don't want to analyse it for exactly that reason.

Wright's classical dedication to the sheer craft of form gave me something of a second thought. Though I always considered form essentially an archaic, sing-song affectation thrown in for sheer technical diversity in creative-writing classes, I've come to realise the difference that it can really make in the inception of a poem. Obviously no vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job, as our boy TS never tires of telling us, but in composition the prosodic rhymes are essentially just replaced with semantic ones. With a free rein, it's all too easy to fall into a similar path of associations at times, and, as Thom Gunn remarked, even the act of laboriously reading out every possible permutation of a rhyme can be immensely liberating and force a change in direction or approach that the pacey ramble of free verse could never happen upon.

Wright decided never to write again, that he'd said everything he could possibly say. Then, after the emotional and spiritual vacillations of breakdown and an epiphany, he returned with This Branch Will Not Break and Shall We Gather at the River, loosening his formalist tendencies of old. But again, I am not Wikipedia. Here's a bit from the final poem, 'To the Muse', from Shall We Gather at the River where, as far as I see, there's a tender emergence of the lost loved one and a bitter candour similar to that found at the end of Bunting's 'Briggflatts'. Although the baldness of his sentiment initially rankled to one such as me - raised with the sickly veneer of postmodern, smartarse irony daubed hideously over everything - it still managed to ring clear with me somehow. I can't help but feel that in itself that's an achievement:


You come up after dark, you poise alone
With me on the shore.
I lead you back into this world.

Three lady doctors in Wheeling open
Their offices at night.
I don''t have to call them, they are always there.
But they only have to put the knife once
Under your breast.
Then they hang their contraption.
And you bear it.

It's awkward a while. Still, it lets you
Walk about on tiptoe if you don't
Jiggle the needle.
It might stab your heart, you see.
The blade hangs in your lung and the tube
keeps it draining.
That way they only have to stab you
Once. Oh Jenny.

I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy
And disastrous place. I
Didn't, I can't bear it
Either, I don't blame you, sleeping down there
Face down in the unbelievable silk of spring.
Muse of black sand,
Alone.

I don't blame you, I know
The place where you lie.
I admit everything. But look at me.
How can I live without you?
Come up to me, love,
Out of the river, or I will
Come down to you.

Spring (2)

I noticed that a lot of poets I love have a sly spring poem or two hidden up their respective sleeves. They just can't leave it alone. Here're a few:

Ode 1

Weeping oaks grieve, chestnuts raise
mournful candles. Sad is spring
to perpetuate, sad to trace
immortalities never changing.

Weary on the sea
for sight of land
gazing past the coming wave we
see the same wave;

drift on merciless reiteration of years;
descry no death, but spring
is everlasting
resurrection.



Basil Bunting

***

Spring Rain


Now the rain is falling, freshly, in the intervals between sunlight,

a Pacific squall started no one knows where, drawn east as the drifts of
warm air make a channel;

it moves its own way, like water or the mind,

and spills this rain passing over. The Sierras will catch it as last snow
flurries before summer, observed only by the wakened marmots at ten
thousand feet,

and we will come across it again as larkspur and penstemon sprouting
along a creek above Sonora Pass next August,

where the snowmelt will have trickled into Dead Man's Creek and the
creek spilled into the Stanislaus and the Stanislaus into the San Joaquin
and the San Joaquin into the slow salt marshes of the bay.

That's not the end of it: the gray hays of the mountains eat larkspur seeds,
which cannot propagate otherwise.

To simulate the process, you have to soak gathered seeds all night in the
acids of coffee

and then score them gently with a very sharp knife before you plant them
in the garden.

You might use what was left of the coffee we drank in Lisa's kitchen
visiting.

There were orange poppies on the table in a clear glass vase, stained
near the bottom to the color of sunrise,

the unstated theme was the blessedness of gathering and the blessing of
dispersal-

it made you glad for beauty like that, casual and intense, lastng as long
as the poppies last.



Robert Hass

***

Some haikus by Matsuo Basho:


First day of spring-
I keep thinking about
the end of autumn.




The spring we don't see-
on the back of a hand mirror
a plum tree in flower.




A village without bells-
how do they live?
spring dusk.

***

Spring

Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings,
Their children finger the awakened grass,
Calmly a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings,
And, flashing like a dangled looking-glass
Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark,
The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me,
Threading my pursed-up way across the park,
An indigestible sterility.

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;

And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitious,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.


Philip Larkin

***

Haikus by Kobayashi Issa:


In spring rain
a pretty girl
yawning.




Spring rain:
a mouse is lapping
the Sumida River.

***

Spring and All


By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast - a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines -

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches -

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind -

Now the grass, tomorrow the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf.
One by one objects are defined -
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance - Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken



William Carlos Williams

***

Some Haikus by Yosa Buson:


A moored boat;
where
did the spring go?




The end of spring
lingers
in the cherry blossoms.




Wading through it
her feet muddied
the spring current.

Spring.

I only thought of spring the other day. I usually pay less attention to it than the other seasons because, essentially, it's summer-lite. Just as autumn is winter-lite in fact, except that most people lie in order to look profound and exclaim that it's actually their most favourite season of all. Like, totally deep, man. How sublime and aesthetic, the deep ochre palette of mother earth brimming to the fore just as nature beds down on the wane dude. Lies. Granted, though, autumn does have big piles of leaves to kick, just as summer has (theoretically anyhow) lots of warm weather and winter has snow, spring doesn't really have any instant, tangible appeal in that way. For all I know it could be summer now, seeing as, what with the onset of global warming and all, spring is apparently starting earlier than ever now (). Plus, it was quite sunny today.

The reason that I noticed though was that, outside my bedroom window there's a rather tall tree about one house away. Actually it's the garden that backs on to ours, whatever that makes it. Anyway, I noticed that it looks particularly gorgeous on a starry night in winter, its spindly limbs framed against the starlight and so on. Now, having taken out (and subsequently lost) both of my piercings I now feel postively naked. And a total average Joe to boot. As such, I've given greater thought to a tattoo (please bear with me on this non sequitur ramble) and the plan for an upper arm sleeve. I have no intention of getting anything in old english or chinese, or to 'commemorate' anything mind you, I'm more of the school that, if you're going to do something, do it properly. So, I want to have it done well, and relatively artistically. My idea was to get the image of that tree framed against the stars on my upper arm as a sleeve, although first I needed a picture of it. Last time I thought of this was a good 2 summers ago, but then I missed winter. Don't ask me how. I missed it. An entire season. No photo. I remembered this and cursed the heavens in a particularly vigorous and colourful manner. But, upon looking out, I realised that it hadn't actually begun to blossom yet. So in that way I was happy, despite spring apparently starting earlier. I'd kind of intended this post to be a list of some spring poems, but I see now that I've over-rambled somewhat, so I'll bundle it into a separate one methinks.

Chronic Douche moments courtesy of the Paris Review.

Interviewer: You mentioned economic freedom. Does the writer need it?

Faulkner: No. The writer doesn’t need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper... Success is feminine and like a woman; if you cringe before her, she
will override you. So the way to treat her is to show her the back
of your hand. Then maybe she will do the crawling.

***

Interviewer: Despite the great variety of the characters you have created in your novels, it is very noticeable that you have never given a sympathetic or even a full-scale portrait of a working-class character. Is there any reason for this?

Waugh: I don't know them, and I'm not interested in them. No writer before the middle of the nineteenth century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesques or as pastoral decorations. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.


Wow.


Also, interestingly enough:


Interviewer: What do you think of American writers? F.Scott Fitzgerald or William Faulkner, for example?

Waugh: I find Faulkner intolerably bad.

Book Love

I think I’ve surprised myself of late–I’ve become an unwitting book perv. Maybe it’s all this talk of rubbery Kindles and aluminium-brushed iPads that has me longing for the leathery musk of a russety old hardback with faded gold lettering. Ok, well, not exactly. Being the unabashed cheapskate that I am, hardbacks are more a luxury I only periodically or accidentally fall into ownership with. I’m generally much more of a grubby paperback guy, although not necessarily by choice. Though I long for yard upon yard of cyclopean, mahogany bookshelves brimming with identical, burgundy hardbacks as much as the next man, sometime you just want to read the damn book already.

In terms of senses, Id’ve thought touch to merely be limping weakly ahead of hearing in relation to bibliophilia, but it does actually influence how I feel about a great many of my books. A recent-ish paperback printing of Berryman’s Dream Songs that I had delivered came with the unfortunate texture of what can only be described as the product of some unholy union of open-minded iguana and prodigiously fertile sandpaper. God, just brushing the front cover must’ve sloughed off at least 4 weeks’ worth of dead skin cells. As far as I know, it’s the only Pulitzer prize-winning work to also double as a loofah. By comparison, the Paris Review Interviews are a ragtag dichotomy: silky smooth matt cover with stylised, gloss punctuation marks, printed on delicate paper with edges so ragged as to suggest someone lost the scissors down at the printing office. Thing is, it’s not even zigzaggy in the way that newspaper edges are, they’ve just all simply been (admittedly skilfully and relatively straight mind you) ripped by hand.

As for the whole eBook thing, well, of course, this is where I’m supposed to step in and wheedle disconsolately about the unmistakeable rustle of golden brown pages or the delightful whimsy of the chirpy stick figures bumming in the margins and so on. No, I don’t really give too much of a toss about that. I just think that their imposition of the iPod model onto books is rather a clumsy transposition all told. They’re not just things that go in different holes of the head, despite what Toby and Emily in marketing might think. While we might conjure up a heady playlist of singles from various albums for our 2 hour flight, I find it hard to believe that people will be throwing in chapter 7 of a Henry James novel before segueing into some hardcore Jilly Cooper. Admittedly, this may well work for poetry – anthologies on the go and all that – but, let’s be honest, we mostly read in slow rotations, and I can’t ever say that I’ve needed more than 3 unread novels for a holiday, and even that’s relatively indulgent. But even if it were appealing to people to do so, the model is still not the same, and here we come to the fundamental point: although it was admittedly a monumental pain in the arse, with my iPod I just ripped all of my CD library to iTunes and went from there. With ebooks – no such thing. Right back at the start buddy. Get to the back of the line and flex those buying muscles, because if you really want to see the imperious splendour of those yards of bookshelf condensed into that wee little handheld boxy, well, you’d best get your wallet out pal.

Read and Reading.

I'm usually not one for being able to measure the passage of time in any kind of reliable fashion, but with the good ship 2010 not yet too far from the shore, I can actually count, for once, how many books I've read this year.

So far:

Pierre Bayard - How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Gav Thorpe - Malekith
Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
Tibor Fischer - Good to Be God

oh and finally - George Orwell - 1984.

The reason behind this isn't so much that I like to show off about such things but that I was able to breeze through them in such a short time with nary a strained eye or gritted jaw of forced intellectual improvement in sight.

And no, neither did I give in to pressure of the canon to read 100 'classics' before I die - 1984 was actually for some A-level tutoring I'm doing - but I'm ultimately glad that I did pick it up. Outside of the context of it being the nearest and easiest shrieking perch for people making broad and lazy comparisons with whatever 'totalitarian' sanctions their resident democracy is imposing upon them at any given time, I enjoyed it first because of the stylistic punchiness (you can tell Orwell used to be a journalist) and secondly, of course, due to the sublime distillation of the concept of power, the will to power, and politics and that. I'm not intending a review here, and by no means do I wish to breathlessly extol its every nuance, as has no doubt been done in trillions of A-level and undergrad papers to this day.

In a sense, the first book (How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read) entirely dismantles the subject of this blog. This emphasis on quantity of books read over the quality of their reading always whiffed a little off to me I must say, and it's certainly with distinct wariness that I list them here, lest I look like a preening tit laying out the respective physical evidence of his cumulative refinement. The book itself confirms something I've long suspected about reading and readers: that a vast amount of it is self-aggrandising bullshite. People largely delight in listing, book for book, what they have read or loved reading recently in the manner of a hypochondriac meticulously reading their current medication to any who'll listen, as though each is inherently imbued with a set value of culture points, you know: 50 points for James Joyce, bonus 5 for Finnegan's Wake, 60 for Dostoyevsky, bonus 10 for anything in translation, minus 5 for anything adapted into a film post-reading, or without the caveat of 'the book is simply SO much better, they ruined it completely. But even with medication, accurately dosed and completely consumed by the individual, the results are never entirely the same. This we know.

What is it to even say that we've 'read' a book anyway? That we've categorically ripped it to our internal hard-drive and stored it in our cerebral bookshelf forevermore? Even with Harold Bloom-like reading speed (he could apparently, in his youth, scoff an entire novel in an hour), how much is honestly retained? The shameful truth, that I know lurks in the dingy basement of my brain behind the dusty bookshelves, is that the vast majority of authors I 'know', or have 'read' soon become mere fluffy blurbs with brief internal memos on character and style; a fuzzy glow that shames us with the knowledge of our hours spent furtively poring over page after damn page for our own intellectual well-being. Stoically we all brave our Milton or Shakespeare as we would our greens at the table: it's not nice, we know, and it's not tasty, but it's GOOD for you, listen to Big Mother. As Bayard writes (and I can't remember this exactly because I'm an imperfect reader), with many texts we're simply better off saving ourselves the bother of reading them, and instead merely becoming au fait with the conventions and stock phrases of book-talk that can generally be transposed onto any given book. Things like comments on the accuracy of the setting, the pace of the dialogue, how much better his older stuff was, or the accepted attitudes towards a work and its place in literary history. As he says, I know that Ulysses was a crucial modernist text, that it's written in a stream of consciousness style and takes part over the course of a day from the point of view of various characters such as Stephen Daedalus, Leopold and Molly Bloom. Also it's written by James Joyce, who's Irish. And there's a sex scene at the end, or something.

But if one were to go through the sheer martyrdom of reading it, who's to say that this isn't all they'd be able to remember after a few months or years anyhow? Of course, it's not as if I have acute reading dementia and can only know what's on the page in front of me (true as it is to a certain extent), but people need to be more honest about how much we con each other and ourselves about what we truly know about our books. It's not that people shouldn't read, but that the literary hair-shirt wearing of so many cultural flagellants is simply a colossal waste of time. Put War and Peace down Carol, look it up on Wikipedia, and have a bloody cup of tea.

Ole!

So I eventually found my way, against all likelihood, back to Spain for a second time. Although destinacion ultima is the Andalucian gemstone that is Granada, I have to travel there by first landing in Malaga. Now, being somewhat light of pocket, these last two times I've decided to suppress my bourgeois affectations for things like light, space and oxygen and opt for Ryanair. Having sampled Greyhound in America, I'm somewhat familiar with the 'fight tooth and nail with every man, woman and child' approach you generally have to take.

This time, after assuring the baggage woman that I hadn't forgetfully left my acid-spurting anthrax firework in my luggage, I eventually made it on and to a window seat without much en-route skull-crushing needed. I did actually think that, being February and all, there might be less people than usual clamouring for the marginally-less-freezing shores of Malaga. Needless to say though, with Ryanair being the last-ditch refuge of all of the UK's desperate, fleeing emigres that it is, it was packed as a bastard.

I then had the pleasure of sharing a flight with the curious combo of an imperious, snowy bearded Count Dooku of Tunbridge Wells and his wife, who just seemed to stare vacantly, intermittently affirming his haughty diatribes with fragmented english, giving me a mouthful of greasy afro every time she answered in the negatory. I'm guessing she was some variant of bargain basement mail-order bride. Once the air hostess had finished her ritual flying dance with the oxygen mask and the lifejacket, it seemed to act as some bizarre aphrodisiac to them both, my nose descending further into my Roth novel in wilful denial of the orgiastic kneading, kissing and chafing of wrinkles going on next to me. Also, he may or may not have asked her to call him daddy.

What also interests me is that the disembodied 'voice of Ryanair' that spills out occasionally to tell us either to love them and that War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery etc is always either chirpily Irish or disrmingly Scottish. Which is all well and good, and admittedly a welcome refrain from the constant, icy tone of RP English forced upon us daily, but I suspect people just like being told things by an accent that hasn't invaded them in recent centuries.

Hi 2010.

I feel it'd be somewhat remiss of me not to mention some crap about Christmas and New Year in here, although for all that compulsion I know that reading someone's festive hyperbole just makes me all the more dead inside. So, in passing, I shall say that New Year topped most in that nobody ever thought to include a drum kit in the whole New Year set up before, and why not I can't imagine, since in reflection it's as traditional as Jools titting Holland and passing out in a gutter soaked in your own piss. Oh the auuuuld lang syne...

Yesterday I finally reneged on my 3D vow and went to see Avatar. This was largely on the basis that it'd apparently been designed with 3D in mind, so it'd give it a better chance to state 3D's case than, say, Alan Titchmarsh's Celebrity Biscuit Auction.

I was a little befuddled at first, unsure whether to criticise in advance either the gimmicky 3D, Cameron's desire to weld big explosions and vague spiritualism onto the reclaimed plot of Fern Gully, or the blatant goodie and baddie moral extremes.
I have to admit though, I was impressed - not by the 3D, which gave me headaches and made me go cross-eyed until apparently my depth-perception just fucked off home - but the facial tics and idiosyncrasies of the CGI-rendered, but motion-captured Na'vi characters. Apparently, rather than being seen as special effects, it's more something that's superseding makeup and all that crap, saving studios approximately 5.6 million tons in latex. The rubber industry mourns a loss.
Also, it struck me that the crux of 3D's glittering takeover rests not upons some wondrous, digital HD world of perfectly-rounded, lifelike dewdrops, but on one simple concept: throwing shit in people's faces, REALLY FUCKING FAST. People flocking rapturously to the nearest multiplex to pretend that they're going to be hit by something. Kinda like hysterical quasi-masochism. Or something.

I suppose I could complain about the lazy naming (the rare mineral 'unobtainium' anyone?) but, I have to admit, the child in me couldn't honestly look far beyond the sheer 'ooh' and 'ahh' factor of the CGI, or at least it couldn't detach itself objectively from it long enough to properly critique the script. But is this a bad thing? Well, probably. But neither was it a straight-up, dumbo tits and guns flick. It was, at times, delightfully weird, especially with the Na'avi's propensity for plugging their hair into the local flora and fauna for a bit of a telepathic chat, or the Alice in Wonderland-esqure crack-addled fantasies of nature. Obviously coming from the creator of the abortion known as Titanic it's not subtlety itself, but thankfully, neither is it a drawn-out drama with the word 'harrowing' in the blurb and hordes of vacuous, pale women in it making pouty, existential faces.