Breakfast Will Not Be Served After Lunch

This is toothy television nun and consecrated virgin Sister Wendy. Consecrated virgin is to virgin what extra virgin is to virgin olive oil, I'm presuming. She rises between one or two in the morning. I mention that because, as a reader of George Szirtes's blog, I notice how his hour of rising keeps getting earlier and earlier. These days it's 3am.

If someone gets up at the same time I go to bed, who is up early and who is up late? I worry about these things though not, be it said, to the point of losing any sleep. I rarely go to bed before two in the morning and rarely rise before eleven the next day.

The idea of confusingly overlapping timezones reminds me of a sign in an Irish B&B: 'Breakfast will not be served after lunch.'

And so the year ends as bone-idly as it began.

Cartesian Centaur

A Cartesian centaur, I presume. From the Watt manuscript at the Harry Ransom Centre.

Komodo Dragon Virgin Birth

Flora the Chester zoo Komodo dragon has delivered herself of a virgin birth.

For God so loved the world, that having already used up his one son he sent an outsized Indonesian novelty living fossil.

Craze for Explicitation

Beckett fact no. 73.

Ten mistakes in Beckett.

1) ‘Not count! One of the few satisfactions in life!’ Dan Rooney expostulates indignantly in All That Fall. He wouldn’t have derived much satisfaction from the eighteen by fifty metre cylinder in the John Calder printing of The Lost Ones whose surface area is a paltry 80,000 square centimetres. Revising the height downwards from eighteen to sixteen, Beckett managed to bring the dimensions back in line with the correct twelve million square centimetres of the original Evergreen Review printing.
2) Still on the theme of innumeracy, ‘The figures given here are incorrect. The consequent calculations are therefore doubly erroneous’, we read in a footnote to Watt of the Lynch clan and its sadly unrealized millennial ambitions.
3) ‘Atlas, son of Jupiter’ Pozzo exclaims in the original text of Godot, where we now read ‘Atlas, son of Japetos’, someone having pointed out the mistake to Beckett.
4) Also in Godot, Vladimir errs in his memory of inconsistency in the gospel accounts of Christ and the thieves. ‘Only one speaks of a thief being saved […] Of the other three three two don’t mention any thieves at all and the third says that both of them abused him’, he says. Except that while Luke has one good thief and Matthew two bad ones, there are two silent thieves in Mark, and two men (not described as thieves) in John.
5) Christopher Ricks notices this one in Beckett’s Dying Words: that the ‘Grave’s disease’ mentioned twice in Murphy is in fact ‘Graves’ disease’. How hideous is the misplaced apostrophe.
6) The seven scarves quoted in the opening of Murphy, when only six are enumerated, not to mention the fact that tying one behind one's back is a physical impossibility: that's all just to make sure you're paying attention.
7) Is this a mistake? The narrator of Enough is identified by Martin Esslin and Vivian Mercier as a woman, between his references to penis-licking and breasts, but in the original French text Assez Beckett wrote ‘Si je m’étais retourné je ne l’aurais pas vu’, indicating that it’s a man. If this did strike him as a mistake, he corrected it by ungendering the sentence to ‘En me retournant je ne l’aurais pas vu.’
8) A Deborah Warner production of Footfalls was halted by the Beckett estate in 1994 for the athletic off-piste antics it handed to the normally foot-dragging May. However, where the original text specifies seven steps before she turns around, Beckett later fixed on nine. In Collected Shorter Plays he forgot to bring V’s step-counting in the text into line with the diagram of the nine steps, but all attempts by the Beckett estate to have Beckett's own productions of the play retrospectively banned for tampering with the script have come to nothing.
9) Very late in life Beckett contributed to a project called The Great Book of Ireland, which involved him copying the four lines of 'Da Tagte Es' onto vellum for the delectation of Charles Haughey and other political flunkeys back at home, but in his weariness/confusion/temporary (soon to be permanent) failure of the will to live, Beckett got the lines in the wrong order. Mistake though this was, it was as nothing to the trumpeting that followed of the quatrain as 'Beckett's Last Word', when it was obviously no such thing.
10) There's lots of back-and-forth 'he said'/'he said' dialogue in Mercier and Camier, so it's hardly a surprise that Beckett loses trrack of who's saying what, as he does on page 74 of the Calder edition. Camier has ventured out to test the rain:

Well? said Mercier.
Don't rush me, said Camier.
He advanced to the corner of the street, in order to reduce the risk of error. Finally he regained the porch and delivered his considered opinion.
In our shoes I wouldn't, he said.
And may one inquire why not? said Camier.

Unless Camier has taken to talking to himself, I'm assuming that last 'Camier' should be his partner in pseudcoupledom, Mercier.

And finally, not a mistake in Beckett, but revealing none the less. Looking for references to mistakes in Beckett I noticed a reference to this ‘craze for explication’ (from Catastrophe) in a 1994 Contemporary Fiction article by Therese Fischer-Seidel. Except that it’s a craze for ‘explicitation’, not ‘explication’. You never can be too careful!

On the Menu

In Christopher Reid’s new book, Mr Mouth (Ondt & Gracehoper), the protagonist finds, on the menu of a greasy spoon café, something called ‘spaghetti bongolese’.

Am debating whether that tops my previous favourite restaurant trouvaille, 'aubergine stuffed by a nut.'

Anti-Tithonus

Rodin's Aurora and Tithonus







We are, Peter Riley writes in The Day's Final Balance – Uncollected Writings 1965-2006 (just out from Shearsman), 'eternal but we die.'

Penguin Skittles

My brother saw these penguins on Gable Island, Tierra del Fuego.

PS Penguins do not crane their necks backwards and fall over when they see planes passing by. Or at least it says they don't here. They do, however, fall over when recruited for a game of penguin skittles, which I presume, privileged witnesses that we are, is what's going on above.

Gut of a Bloated Swine

I was reading a student essay the other day about poetry on the internet and came across the following sample, from a poetry site called Aha! (supply Alan Partridge joke here). It's about childbirth, apparently:

Partitioning your legs in fever,
Like the gut of a bloated swine,
But your chops has [sic] breathing machinery in it,
Not a cherry red apple,
And you are not basted in apple sauce,
But the sweat of your pores.

Artist and Audience

A poem, for Peter Riley, is ‘an object between poet and reader which is both a means of communication and a barrier to communication’, ‘neither opaque nor transparent’, a ‘body of light’ reflecting ‘the need to say and be revealed crossed with the need to remain silent and secret’. Glenn Gould suggested that the audience is to the artist as one is to zero, and in an appreciation of little-read 40s poet Nicholas Moore Riley goes further: ‘If poetry in this place is to have any half-decent future, it will have to be withdrawn completely from public view.’

Tim Robinson

A riddle from Tim Robinson's Connemara: Listening to the Wind, a book I've been reading slowly, lingeringly:

Téann sé isteach ar ghuaillí daoine agus tagann sé amach ina shnáithín síoda – ‘It comes in on people’s shoulders and it goes out as a thread of silk.’

Answer in the comments stream.

Wretched Stuff

Eric Griffiths chews on Sean O'Brien's brains and spits them out.

On the subject of there being no hills between Pisa and the sea, Stephen Dedalus looks at Bray Head from the tower in Sandycove in the first chapter of Ulysses, except he can't possibly do so; Killiney Head is in the way. He must taken taken a terrible brain-chewing over that from the books desk of the Freeman's Journal or the Wicklow People back in 1922.

Cynophagy

Is that the word? For dog-eating?

Reading Among the Christians sent me back to Empson's Christian-baiting essay on 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner', where I picked up this tidbit:

Take the philanthropist Nansen; all teams such as his had a schedule for eating the husky dogs who pulled the sledges, so that each time a sledge became empty, as the men and dogs ate the food on the sledges, there were no husky dogs to pull this useless sledge. I bet all those dogs loved Nansen like crazy.

Panda Sex Tricks

Jonathan Watts describes some panda sex tricks in The Guardian:

Another challenge was the risk of in-breeding. To widen the genetic stock, researchers had to come up with a way to find a mate for even the least popular females. How did they do that? "We tricked them," Zhang says with a smile. The "trick" is to put a fertile and attractive female into a breeding pen, where she leaves scratchmarks and droppings capable of exciting a male. But at the last moment the females are swapped. The zookeepers introduce a new, less popular, mate who has been scented with the urine of the more attractive animals. She is introduced into the mating pen rear end first, so the male cannot see the face of his partner until after they have finished copulating. "When the males find out, they get very angry and start fighting the female," Zhang says. "We have had to use firecrackers and a water hose to separate them."

Flaubertian

Julian Barnes introducing a French edition of Le Sottisier, Flaubert's projected second volume of Bouvard et Pécuchet:

Le dimanche 28 Novembre 1852, à cinq heures du soir, Flaubert s’assit à son bureau pour rédiger sa critique péremptoire du poème de Louise Colet, ‘La Paysanne’. ‘Je vais vous noter tout ce qui ne me paraît pas irréprochable’, commença-t-il. Au bout de six heures (seize pages de correspondence de l’édition Pléiade), après une série de critique blessantes, il conclut: ‘Tout ce que je n’ai pas remarqué me paraît bon ou excellent.’

Novelty Christmas Record

Christian Crusaders and Al Davis (especially Al Davis) reported 'angered' by William Empson's anti-Christianity, 'gigging again', considering rush re-release of 'Gay Weddings Make Jesus Cry' for Christmas market.

Against the Christians

As gleaned from the second volume, Against the Christians, of John Haffenden’s biography of William Empson:

As a girl, Hetta Crouse (later Empson) taught herself to urinate forwards standing up.

The text, all twenty-six stanzas of it, of ‘Praise of the Wife’, Empson’s paean to troilism, the 'love with three corners' ('I loved you in bed with young men, /Your arousers and foils and adorners /Who would yield to me then'.)

He expressed his passing disapproval of his wife giving birth to a child out of wedlock by downgrading his usual epistolary salutation from 'Dearest Hetta' to 'My Dear Hetta'.

His idea of keeping a friendship in good repair was endless cheerful hectoring, disagreement and needle. He once sent T.S. Eliot ‘the most insulting letter which I have ever received.’

Despite the covers of those old purple Hogarth Press editions of Seven Types of Ambiguity etc, Empson’s beard was indeed once attached to the front of his chin, before taking up residence exclusively underneath it.

Speaking at the 1982 Joyce centenary celebrations in Dublin, Empson was incoherent and inaudible, wandered offstage at one point for five minutes, and frequently appeared not to know where he was.

During an ill-starred year at Penn State, Empson 'once, for some minutes, watched my neighbour's door lamp through my telescope, thinking it Venus', reports Paul West.

Outside the pages of Haffenden's book, a friend tells me his wife was once interviewed by Empson in Sheffield from underneath a desk from which he at no point emerged, before, during or after.

Another Empson story I've heard, I can't remember who from, is his interruption of a poetry reading he was giving with the words 'I've set my beard on fire', as indeed he had, with his outstretched cigarette holder. Perhaps this was the bushfire that sent the shrubbery into that retreat below his chin.

World of Filth Song Title

'Your Heart Belongs to Jesus but Your Ass Belongs to Me'

Dirty Laundry

A sign seen by my brother in Argentina.

This is Wrong. This is Just Wrong

Going for a pee in a café earlier this evening, I was confronted with this in the urinal:























A fruit salad. They'd piled a fruit salad in the thing to absorb the smell of my pee. Suppose I was eating a fruit salad. I would get up from my fruit salad at the table, go piss on a fruit salad, then come back to one and resume eating it. And that is just wrong.

Rouen Cathedral

If I was Monet, this would be my Rouen Cathedral. Click to enlarge.

Bionic Man, Suggested Put-Down Of

Heard this on the radio recently, can't remember who from. But as put-downs go it seemed worth preserving: 'I saw Lee Majors the other day. He looked terrible. I told him, You look like a million dollars.'

It's Always Night

The De Selbyesque sentiment behind the epigraph from Thelonious Monk to Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day, is all fine and well, but its internal rhyme is just a bit too distracting for me: 'It's always night, or we wouldn't need light.' De Tocqueville, was it, said mankind was given language to conceal its thoughts from itself; and it's so like the English language to come between us and our best ideas.

Attack on Democracy

Commentators have rushed to condemn former loyalist prisoner Michael Stone's gun and blast bomb attack on the Stormont assembly today. 'If Michael Stone wants to attack the democratic process in Northern Ireland', Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain commented, 'why can't he join a political party like the rest of us' {snip}

Robert Frost

Robert Frost described himself as ‘the author of several books against the world in general.’

Seinfeld Series 7 DVD Bloopers Just In

Spinach

'Monsieur Prudhomme' on spinach in Flaubert's Dictionary of Received Ideas: 'I don't like it and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I would eat it − and I can't stand it.'

Oh Joanna!

Oh Joanna, with all that snow, your funny pixie ears, your having Dave Eggers tell everyone how obsessed he is with you, and your sixteen minute tracks on Ys!

All my bones they are gone, gone, gone
Take my bones, I don't need none
Cold, cold cupboard, lord, nothing to chew on!
Suck all day on a cherry stone

'Life is Futile'/DVD Case Flarf Novella

The episode and episode 'chapter' titles from the Peep Show Series 3 DVD.

Mugging
1. The Victim Flees
2. Big Suze is Here!
3. I'm Getting Threesomes
4. Lump of Monk

Sectioning
1. I've Got a Girlfriend
2. Life is Futile
3. She's Kooky
4. In For Observation

Shrooming
1. German Biscuits
2. Andy's Theme
3. Magic Eye of Execution
4. Endless Pooing

Sistering
1. Jumbo Cashews
2. Internet Research
3. Modern Day Eunuch
4. The Horsey Type

Jurying
1. Cheech and Chong
2. Internet Research
3. Jailhouse Rock
4. You Are a Moron

Quantocking
1. Don't Say Crack
2. Yoghurt Cock
3. Flip Flops & Sombreros
4. I Didn't Kill Him

Asbian

Asbian (n.). A lesbian with an asbo.

Tpyos and Other Non Sequiturs (Non Sequuntur)

Aidan Higgins







I posted to the comments stream here the other day but mistyped something and had to post a ps, because unlike the main blog the comments can’t be revised. This set me thinking about typos, about how the pen is mightier than the wrist. As the following examples remind me.

A poem I had responsibility for printing was due to contain the line ‘I no longer goad the stubborn beasts’ but came out as ‘I no longer goad the stubborn breasts’.

The 1631 King James Bible urged readers (Mark 7:27) to 'Go and sin on more', but personally I prefer the 'Bile Fellowship' that used to tout for business on Dublin's Pearse Street.

In Terence Brown’s book about Yeats something which, I’m going to presume, was ‘worth noting’ comes out instead as ‘worth nothing’.

There is a Les Murray poem called ‘The Genetic Universe’ which is listed in its volume contents page as ‘The Genital Universe’.

Or the ad for a Mediterranean cruise describing ‘sofas and chairs […] filled with prostate passengers seeking relief.’

Not strictly a typo, but I like the newspaper line-break that turned Paul McCartney into a ‘pop leg-end’ (insert joke about his wife here).

Do student howlers count as typos? Maybe not. Still, I like the ‘Ironic’ columns the Greek invented, according to a student of D.J. Enright (in Play Resumed). ‘They also had myths. A myth is a female moth.’ I also liked a description I once heard of the novel Langrishe, Go Down by Alex Higgins. The best one I’ve seen was a description of Webster’s The White Devil: ‘Fleeing the Turkeys, the assassins reappear dressed as Cappuccinos.’

There is a poetry urban myth about a typo in a Sara Berkeley poem whereby the line ‘emerging from my discordance’ lost its r and became ‘emerging from my disco dance’. But go look it up. Disco dance it is, but disco dance it’s meant to be. Good story though.

Still, these are fairly rubbish examples. Someone else do the heavy lifting for me and post some better ones in the comments stream.

Tom Waits' New Album

Orphans is dead-end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear.

Arse

According to the BBC a man on Wearside, without so much as taking the precaution of entering himself for the Turner Prize first, has stuck a firework up his arse and lit it.

Meteors, Meteorites, Meteroids

Joanna Newsom explains:

Told, the meteorite is the source of the light
And the meteor's just what we see
And the meteoroid is a stone that's devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite's just what causes the light
And the meteor's how it's perceived
And the meteoroid's a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee

Private World

This white cat (whose name is 'the white cat') is profoundly deaf. As a connoisseur of Japanese cinema, his appearances through my catflap may or may not be indebted to the scene in Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai in which the apprentice (my cat) is encouraged to whack the samurai (the white cat) over the head with a sword only to be intercepted every time. He lives, or appears to an outsider to live, in an ESSENTIALLY PRIVATE WORLD.

Capuchin monkey given latte in monkey-themed laminated zoo restaurant café menu

Consolations of Religion

Critic and artist: how close should the two get? I've no idea, but try the following for size, from Shane Alcobia Murphy’s fascinating new study, Sympathetic Ink: Intertextual Relations in Northern Irish Poetry:

In the course of preparing this book, I published a couple of articles on McGuckian’s poetry which prompted a flurry of correspondence from her. She was unhappy with the fact that I was looking for, and uncovering, the sources behind her work. Apologising for her initial anger, and in an effort to describe her own method of poetic composition, she wrote a poem entitled ‘Mantilla’ and dedicated it to me. […] McGuckian self-consciously describes the action of writing a poem with the aid of a source text, the immediate purpose of which, in this instance, is purely therapeutic. She stated in the letter: ‘I had to write something in the usual way as soon as I – as I shouldn’t??? – could in case I never would again. But I was very aware in this of doing so, and trying not to be anyone but myself, and also of your dedication to your thankless task of studying me.’ The perceived (and wholly unintentional) criticism in my articles had caused the poet great fear, anxiety and anger, yet she learned, through meditation, to make peace with it. ‘The sadness of anxiety’, says the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Han, ‘can be used as a means of liberation from torment and suffering, like using a thorn to remove a thorn.’

Civil War Ends

Announcing the terms of their truce to a press conference yesterday afternoon Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy demanded the immediate reintegration of counties Fermanagh and Tyrone into the Irish Republic, the removal of all brown smarties from their dressing room snacks, and the ironic handover of Rathnew, Co. Wicklow to Northern Ireland 'because it's such a dump' and furthermore {snip}

Attempt to Discover Life (cont.)

Sometimes when the paper jams in the copier and I follow the flashing lights on the console, open the flaps and find nothing, it decides there was no paper jam after all and just keeps going. Attention seeker! Only after running off my copies do I notice the edge of my shirt sleeve visible against the copied page margin. My red shirt, love that red shirt. Photocopiers, the cartoon is telling us, serve as reminders of the menial side of apparently skilled work, yet humourously so. Ah, Dilbert. Turn your eyes radioactive green staring into the copier's heart. Warning: in the event of green glow spillage this room/your life may be encased in lead. If this happens, attempt futilely to evacuate in an orderly fashion before returning to your work station, singing to yourself all the while. Another half-life will be along any minute now. No, you go first if you've only got one to do. I've got loads; I'll be ages. (Paper jams.) Hypochondriac!

Climate Change

In Steve Bell's 'If...' cartoon in today's Guardian (I'd give a link to it, but there isn't one), Tony Blair looks forward to being remembered as the man who 'suggested we invade Greenland and stop climate change by force.'

Attempt to Discover Life (cont.)

Canada geese over the railway bridge by the cafe, low and close, the slag-laden freight train freeze-framed on its way past: life can be good but we must not say so, never say so, consider this sentence unwritten.

Credo

I believe in extreme views lightly held and light views extremely held, but not in light views lightly held or extreme views extremely held.

Borat

US-based actual Kazakh bigot, misogynist and anti-Semite Aslan Bogdanov is adjusting little by little to how hilarious even he finds it these days that he wishes the ethnics a few doors down would sling their dirty asses back to Uzbekistan.

Old English

What we call Old English was in fact Young English and what we speak today, that's Old English; Flann O'Brien noticed that.

Quatrain

The little fat girl with terrible skin gets sick
in her hand and opening it releases
a butterfly that flops back to earth
and touching it sticks to and drowns in the puke.

Biro Telekinesis

Idea for children's book: pets with magic powers, but charmingly useless ones e.g. the ability to make biros fall off desks, to rearrange paper clips telekinetically into swear-word shapes etc.

Robin Robertson, Meet Nigel Tufnell

'Pushing up, hard and fibrous
from the ground, it is said to be
grown for the mouth...'

Yes, it's the familiar sound of a Robin Robertson poem ostensibly about food but which is in fact about sex. There was 'Artichoke' in his first book ('The meat of it lies, displayed, /up-ended, al dente, /the stub-root aching in its oil'), and now he's done it again in Swithering, with 'Asparagus': 'the dark tip – slubbed and imbricate, /tight-set and over-lapping round the bud.'

Those Heaneyisms aside, whose voice am I hearing in there too? I'll interleave some lines from the man I mean with those of 'Asparagus' to help spell it out.

'You know very much like, I'm really influenced by Mozart and Bach, and it's sort of in between those, really, it's like a Mach piece really...'

'Steamed till supple /so the stem is still firm...'

'This song is in D minor. The saddest of all keys. People weep instantly when they hear it...'

'In a slather and slide, butter /floods at the bulb-head.'

'What do you call this?' 'Well, this piece is called "Lick My Love Pump."'

Existential Stammer

To judge from his new book, Horse Latitudes, Paul Muldoon continues to suffer from a strange case of what I can only call an existential stammer:

I was baffled, baffled as one who wakes…
(‘Alba’)

Now pitching himself like a forlorn hope
in a pitched battle, Angus howls and howls…
(‘Now Pitching Himself Like a Forlorn Hope’)

Every point was a point of no return
where to make a mark was to overstep the mark…
(‘The Old Country’)

Every track was an inside track
where every horse had the horse sense…
(‘The Old Country’, and it goes on like that, all thirteen sections of it)

We cluster at one end, one end of Dillon Gym…
(‘Bob Dylan at Princeton, November 2000’)

I had one eye, just one,
they prised and popped open.

I had one eye, just one,
they prised and propped open
like a Fomorian’s…
(‘The Outlier’)

What’s the difference between clustering ‘at one end’ of the gym and ‘at one end, one end’? It’s something he’s been doing since around the time of The Annals of Chile. You can hear something of the same thing too in. the. way. he. reads. his. poems. aloud. It lends his work, I’d like to suggest, a very low centre of gravity. Whenever something threatens to push a poem into outright obscurity rather than slightly-baffling-but-obviously-very-cute-once-you’ve-worked-it-out obscurity, he can always slam on the handbrake of the Muldoon existential stammer ™. It’ll all work out in the end, the poem says. Just you wait. And in the interval (‘W-w-wait… something will come’, as Henry James used to say, wagging his finger, during his epic pauses), aren’t these poems good enough to read twice? Except, my point is, once already feels like twice.

Dig that jacket.

Portrait of the Artist as a Checkout Boy

Paying homage to Thelonious Monk in the sleevenotes to House on Hill, Brad Mehldau reproduces the score of Monk's 'Ecstasy' (click to enlarge). As you can see, it looks like someone sitting by a river tossing in the loose change in his pocket.

It reminded me of another Monk track, or version of a Monk track (since there are always so many): 'Misterioso', where, having introduced the melody Monk hands it over to the vibes player, but still chips in now and then with a G-flat here, a C-sharp there. It's the artist as checkout boy, watching the customer do all the hard work punting the groceries along while he sits back and zaps them with his laser gun every few seconds. Or, another comparison, it's like Rubens dropping in on his workshop assistants to check how the latest Madonna is coming along and doing the eyes before heading off for lunch.

Monk's last years were clouded by illness. He retreated into chronic aphasia and a strange addiction to getting up during his set and turning in counterclockwise circles for a long, long time. Personally, I blame the hats.

Oh, and Monk's middle name was Sphere.

Attempt to Discover Life

Crooked, up-and-down, wood-fringed fields seen from a train, under mist at dawn, with ditches and drains running off, and a stray hare galumphing from one end to the other, that will have been happiness, that will have been life, not my life necessarily, but life, of a kind.