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.’