All This Useless Beauty

Towards Lough Dan; Lough Tay.

Valleymount, West Wicklow

Valleymount's unusual church is the result of emigrant stone workers absorbing local influences in New Mexico in the early nineteenth century before returning home to West Wicklow. It also features stained glass windows by Harry Clarke. The inscription on one of these, 'Rex Regum', would I think make an excellent name for a Catholic detective who specialised in theology-themed crimes, such as despoiled holy water fonts or typos in editions of Thomas Aquinas.

In Wicklow

Lough Bray Lower; Lough Nahanagan from Wicklow Gap; Derrymuck (behind Dwyer-McAllister cottage); Glenmacnass; Croghanmoira from Sally Gap.

On Arran

Machrie Standing Stones; Lochranza Castle.

William Hanbidge, Discountenancer of Vice

The extract I quoted from Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter lately put me in mind of an equally rough and ready folk autobiography, that of William Hanbidge, a native of Tinnahinch in the Glen of Imaal, Co. Wicklow, who lived from 1813 to 1909. He belonged to a society for the ‘discountenancing’ of vice, which always conjured images, for me, of a nonagenarian Quaker dropping into his local pub to gurn threateningly at the local drunk. Anyway, here is Hanbidge’s account of the descent into sin of the village of Stratford (Stratford, Co. Wicklow that is). Blogger isn’t too hot on mid-sentence gaps, quite a few of which occur in the original text, and which I’ve had to remove here. Please supply mentally, mindful of the high regard in which the early twentieth-century Projectivist community of West Wicklow held Hanbidge’s writing (his use of the full stop is also somewhat fitful):

Straford was a prosperous little place but it was also a most abominable wicked place

The scenes to be seen of a Saturday night and on Sundays were awful.

Drunkneness, prostitution, cursing and fighting.

There were always a wordy warfare carried on between the country and town lads for the country lads when they saw the weavers would shout A dish of kailcannon and an iron spoon would make any calico weaver jump over his loom with other scurrilous epithets which the others resented very much.

All used to meet at a low public house about half a mile from the town on Saturday evenings and Sundays the sights which followed I cannot describe.

After a time the downfall of the town began.

Mr Orr found out that he could buy the calico ready wo much cheaper than it cost him to have it woven so he dismissed all his weavers who were scattered over many parts of England and Scotland

The slated houses which they lived in soon fell into ruin.

Mr Orr still continued the bleaching and printing business for a short time till his correspondent in South America failed by which he lost thousands of pounds and he turned bankrupt and could not continue the business

All the remaining employers had to seek work in England or Scotland and others such as shoemarks &c.

Thus fell Stratford no more markets.

{Quotation ends}

Those in the mood for more will be pleased to know that W.J. McCormack edited Hanbidge's memoirs for UCD Press a few years back (scroll down a bit). The above picture, which I found here, is not of Stratford but nearby Valleymount. The combination of Wicklow place-names and water reminds me of a bridge I encountered there once called Pennycomequick Bridge. Or am I making that up? I can't be sure.

Flat Earth Society News

New from Tom Paulin: The Secret Life of Poems, an ‘encounter with some of the most celebrated poems in the language’. Starting with Anon, Wyatt and Herbert we gradually approach the choppy waters of the contemporary, and after Hughes and Larkin find the following names: John Montague, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Craig Raine and Jamie McKendrick. While it’s true that Craig Raine is not demonstrably Northern Irish, though at least Oxonian, his poem has the great advantage of being called ‘Flying to Belfast’: ‘he is flying from a culture which can separate poetry from politics to a different society that doesn’t make that separation.’ McKendrick, also not-Northern-Irish-but-at-least-Oxonian does not so much as mention Northern Ireland. He is however the same Jamie McKendrick who ‘was the first reviewer to point out the complexities of Paul Muldoon’s rhyme schemes in The Annals of Chile’, in a ‘seminal review’.

Eppur non si muove.

Yet, But, So, We, Our

Perhaps in homage to the seventeenth-century divines who reserved their most stinging remarks for their footnotes, Geoffrey Hill used a note to see off Philip Larkin in Style and Faith; and now in a note to an essay on Sidney Keyes in Tim Kendall’s Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry I see he’s at it again. ‘The speaking voice’, he writes, ‘has its own systems of betrayal, as is demonstrated by many poets from “Movement” to Mersey Sound.’ Footnote: ‘See e.g. Robert Conquest (ed.), New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956), passim, uses of “yet”, “but”, “so”, “we”, “our”. See also The Mersey Sound, Penguin Modern Poets, 10 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983; 1^st pub. 1967), passim.’

Hey, Asshole!

This is a discarded poem. Consider it buried hereunder.

Daytrip

Pay two visits on the same day: your first and last. ‘We’ve come on holiday by mistake.’

The view from a mile up. Then lying prostrate in the back garden. Find the correct perspective. Change it.

Don’t tell them anything. Them meaning you. Don’t tell yourself anything. Starting now.

The little rasher of overexcited loquacity in your mouth, trailing its delicate fronds of drivel. Give it the back of your hand.

Find the thing, prod it, sniff it, turn it over. It would appear to be dead.

Cheques payable to ‘Friends of the M62’.

Allow four working days for us to do what we want with your money. You’d only waste it anyway.

Champagne all round at the motorway service café, we’re walking home.

The hearses speeding again.

The world’s first telephone sex baby.

The caller has chosen to scribble your number on a shithouse wall.

In this reconstruction the role of the missing girl has been taken by the missing girl herself.

Ditches on the estate have been drained and filled with tears and lemonade.

A CCTV camera has been arrested and charged.

Kicking the ladder away before climbing up it you have effortlessly reached the top.

Don’t let’s just agree, let’s agree to the point of violence. But our vast and endless differences – no, we can’t be bothered.

Let the caption read ‘Alderman Chubb receiving the applause of the chamber for her remarks on the relationship of base to superstructure.’

I told you I’d help you find your odd socks. I lied, I lied, I lied.

Speak a swear word, the clouds form into it.

You put on a record, I dance a little, I dance a little and sing.

The man in the street when the hero runs past, bodychecked by him and shouting ‘Hey, asshole!’, every film has one – oh my God, that was me!

This gruesome weapon, requiring only a short piece of string, half a diced carrot and an old envelope –

A bumble bee flies into your mouth, beds down, stays there.

Be sick of it. Keep being sick, sick, sick. Or, if you must, rejoice.

Night thoughts of the morning train in a room in the Royal Hotel: ideas above your station.

A big yellow skip outside the front door: your transport awaits.

Your whole body covered in tattoos, have the image of the skin underneath tattooed back over them and start the performance all over again.

James Watson is 16 Per Cent Black

DNA Scientist Who Thinks Black People Are Stupid Learns He Has 16 Per Cent Black DNA, Apologises For Previous Stupidity and Racism, Blames It on His 16 Per Cent Black DNA.

I would have used this as the post title but it didn't fit.

Read the news story here.

Keepsake

Found this short 'un in my poetry folder, having completely forgotten I'd written it. So here it is for what it's worth. Remarkably little, I suspect.

Keepsake

Name me a part of me I can tie
a knot in to remember us by.

Ned Kelly

Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter, picaresque auto-apologia with a larrikin contempt for the mere comma, agent of bourgeoisification that it is:

Dear Sir,

I wish to acquaint you with some of the occurrences of the present past and future, In or about the spring of 1870 the ground was very soft a hawker named Mr Gould got his waggon bogged between Greta and my mother’s house on the eleven mile creek, the ground was that rotten it could bog a duck in places…

{Quotation ends}

Shortly before his Euroa bank heist in 1879, Kelly occupied a farm property in Jerilderie and dictated 8000 words to his comrade in arms Joe Byrne. He had russled some 200 horses in his time, but when this was put to him at his trial he indignantly countered, ‘Who proves that?’ ‘Non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare’, as Ovid might say. In the midst of the bank raid, Kelly tried to locate the editor of the Jerilderie Gazette, who he thought could be persuaded (perhaps with some of the drinks ‘on the house’ he provided for his hostages during the raid) to publish his tract, but Gill had absconded and the text remained buried until 1930.

The endless complaint of the badly used, the harried, despised Fenian:

[Captain Brooke] knows as much about commanding Police as Captain Standish does about mustering mosquitoes and boiling them down for their fat on the back blocks of the Lachlan for he has a head like a turnip a stiff neck as big as his shoulders narrow hipped and pointed towards the feet like a vine stake…

{Quotation ends}

Kelly killed three policemen, but claimed that ‘a man killing his enemies was not a murderer’. At the siege of Glenrowan he came out fighting in his home-made armour. His last words before execution, myth would have it, were ‘Such is life.’ His mother Ellen lived a further 43 years, until 1923.

I marvel at Sidney Nolan’s Kelly paintings, some of which he donated to the Hugh Lane gallery in Dublin.

‘I am a widows son outlawed and my orders must be obeyed.’

The Blue Movie Theory of Seismology

Cioran's Entretiens, their frequent harkings back to his paradisal childhood in Sibiu, otherwise Hermannstadt, otherwise Nagyszeben.

Many years later he hears on the radio that it has been destroyed in an earthquake. He walks the streets in despair and sees a church but cannot bring himself to go inside and pray. Instead he sees a porn cinema and decides to go and watch a blue movie. It was a terrible film, he says (whether terrible because a blue movie or a really bad blue movie I don't know), and sits there thinking, Well if human civilisation amounts to this then earthquakes probably aren't such a bad idea.

In another interview he is asked if he enjoys writing. Enjoy it? I hate it. I hardly ever do it. I'm the idlest man in Paris. The only person more idle than me is a prostitute without a client.

I paraphrase, since idler that I am too I forgot to mark the pages.

Encyclopaedia Mahoniana

Whiling away the wait for the megabucks Derek Mahon limited edition Somewhere the Wave (due any day now) with a chapter a day of Hugh Haughton’s Encyclopaedia Mahoniana.

Derek Mahon, then. The Irish say Mahon, the British say ‘Mann’ and Americans say Mahone, as in the Irish for ‘my arse’. Unfortunate, that. Even his name has to come in a variorum edition. I’ve written very little about him, over the years, and feel like I'm making a nuisance of myself even just formulating these thoughts. This particular god does not need interruptions from me. Many years ago now a friend of mine who spotted Mahon in the street around Dublin found himself following DM around, at a suitable distance, perhaps in the hope of a discarded spondee or surplus anapaest falling out of his pocket, but couldn't bring himself to say hello. I sympathize entirely.

When I finally met him myself and asked him to sign a copy of Night Crossing (still a much cheaper purchase than books two or three, Lives and The Snow Party – look them all up on abebooks and see for yourself) he somewhat theatrically averted his gaze as he signed his name. This would have been in the post-Yaddo Letter period when rumours of a proper comeback volume had the gold-dust quality of Thomas Pynchon sightings. And that book would be The Hudson Letter.

For some reason the thoughts on Mahon that bubble to the top of my brain seem to form themselves into questions as much as statements or opinions. Such as:

Why, for all Mahon's fascination with Ezra Pound, his Poundian (or is it Poundian?) weddedness to poetry in translation, does his Pound stop with Mauberley – as very publically signalled by the Mauberley redux of ‘A Kensington Notebook’? What would a Mahon Cantos look like? Don’t say The Yellow Book.

Introducing his translations from Jaccottet he briefly mentions Michaux and the cult of the ‘illisible’ in French poetry from mid-century or so onwards, and not approvingly either. Is this Mahon’s version of Larkin’s intro to All What Jazz, perhaps, and the beginnings of an answer to my first question?

If an early Mahon poem falls over and out of the Collected, or gets revised out of existence, is it still making a noise somewhere? Does he instruct his current publisher to veto republication of poems this publisher never published in the first place, or like babies in Limbo, might there be an occasional dispensation?

How, when Mahon is on record as preferring the amiable enough minor poet and talisman-to-the-Irish-post-avant (no sniggering there) Thomas MacGreevy to all the poets of the Movement – not just some, all – can his reception among very-much-pro- and very-much-anti-critics in the never-ending Irish modernist debate have worked out the way it did? What are they missing? (For an example of anti-Mahon pro-modernist response, take a look at Donal Moriarty’s disparaging of Mahon’s translations from Nerval in favour of Brian Coffey’s dried biscuit and soda water versions, in his UCD Press study of that estimable old duffer.)

What was going on in The Yellow Book? Really, what was going on to make critics think that Oscar Wilde and 90s decadence was a useful template for denouncing the ‘fake in contemporary culture’ (that’s from an essay by Gerald Dawe, collected in his recent volume The Proper Word)? Denounce the ‘fake’ (fax machines, I remember, come in for his particular ire) by staging a love-in with Oscar Wilde?!

Connoisseurs of Irish Studies racial consciousness will have long cherished Declan Kiberd’s declaration in the Field Day Anthology that Mahon and Michael Longley ‘represent a strand of Ulster that identifies itself as British and asserts its rights to the English lyric.’ Perhaps his sour poem about going back to the Wee Six for his mother’s funeral in The Yellow Book helped move him another step up the ladder towards eventual assumption into the paradise of born-again Irishness (and Collected Poems does end with a poem called ‘St Patrick’s Day’ after all). Forty or so years ago Mahon remarked on how the time was coming, if it wasn’t already here, when discussions of whether so-and-so was an ‘Irish’ writer could clear a room in seconds. That’s one prediction that didn’t come off then.

Which of the following does Derek Mahon have most in common with: Richard Wilbur, Seamus Heaney, Paul Durcan, Thomas Kinsella, Geoffrey Hill? Award each one marks out of ten on a likeness scale. Your answers should tell you a lot about which Mahon it is you’re reading, of the many available Mahons of the mind. (My answer to this one, at least is: 6, 2, 3, 1, 3).

And that’s enough Mahon questions for now.

One More Thing

As a footnote to the recent tales of Raymond Carver and his aggressively interventionist editor Gordon Lish, Marcel Berlin notes in his column today that the celebrated ending of ‘One More Thing’ turns out to have been written not by Carver but Lish. A man has been ordered to leave by his wife:

He said, ‘I just want to say one more thing.’

But then he could not think what it could possibly be.

{Quotation ends}

On a slightly related note, in a transcript of a Geoffrey Hill reading I was sent recently (Geoff samizdat!), GH talks about a word Gillian Rose changed in the margin of one of his books (in her copy of the book, I mean). He now prefers her word to his and plans to incorporate the change in the ‘deathbed edition’ of his poems he is preparing.

Is there was one line, any line, you could aggressively edit and alter in any work of literature what would it be?

Espagnolisme

No promised heaven, crucified Christ,
could move me to your love, any more
than my brief default from sure hell-fire
moved me to the fear of you I missed.

You alone, Lord, move who sees
you nailed so, to your cross, and so despised:
move who looks upon your flesh so bruised,
the wounds and the contempt in which it dies.

Your love alone that moves, and moves enough
to win, though heaven never was, my love,
and though hell too be lies, my despair,

for leaving yours as full as my heart’s bare;
and whose cheated death – love turned to theft –
no death of mine repays, or earthy gift.

I found this translation in an old magazine, having long since forgotten I'd ever written it. I think I found the original Spanish in the Penguin Book of Spanish Verse, where, again I think, it is credited to Ignatius Loyola. In case of any possible misunderstanding, I should add that I possess no religious faith whatever, none! There is no God. But there are some interesting poems about him in Spanish.

Gagging For It

From a Teach Yourself Arabic I bought the other day: ‘We have a muscle in our throat which is never used except in vomiting. Think about that and pretend you are about to be sick. You will find that what is normally called in English gagging is actually a restriction in the deep part of the throat. If you gag, and then immediately relax the muscles in order to release the airstream from the lungs, you will have produced a perfect : (called :ayn in Arabic.)’

Will Self

I was at a Will Self reading in a pub once, and decided I’d had enough of his aardvark-trying-to-hoover-the-fluff-out-of-its-bum voice. But the crush was too tight and, trapped at the wrong end of the room as I was, I was trapped. My only hope was a bookstall: I bought a Will Self and stood there reading it. Will Self’s voice behind me was very distracting though. My thought process was going something like this, in other words: shut up Will Self, I’m trying to read Will Self. Is there a word for a situation as ridiculous as that? If not, there should be.

Like a Dog

Went along to a Geoffrey Hill poetry reading the other day. I noticed he pronounced Simone Weil’s surname ‘vie’ (to rhyme with ‘by’). I remember having it on the authority of someone who had met her brother that it was ‘way’ (with due allowance for French vowels). Wikipedia says ‘vay’. Is it Weil that Gillian Rose (subject of a recent Hill poem) cites at the end of Love’s Work: ‘l’amour se révèle en se retirant’? (The line is disastrously mangled in my edition as ‘en se retirer’.)

Anyway, love, Weil on love. Love shows itself in withdrawing. Love is powerless: ‘Prendre puissance sur, c’est souiller, posséder, c’est souiller (…) L’amour n’exerce ni ne subit la force; c’est là l’unique pureté.’

Love is abdication. God renounces being, shows his love for the world by withdrawing from it, and in return we must love him through renunciation and ‘decreation.’

‘Dieu a créé par amour, pour l’amour. Dieu n’a pas créé autre chose que l’amour même, et les moyens de l’amour.’

Love is an empty plenitude. I love you and walk away. I love you and never say so. I love you and we have never met.

Marina Tsvetaeva, who was hardly a model of connubial fidelity, wrote to her husband shortly before their disastrous return to Stalin’s Russia: ‘If you are alive I will follow you like a dog.’

The last words of Kafka’s Trial, ‘like a dog’.

Coarse Behaviour

A tourist has just arrived in Russia and is sitting in a pub window enjoying a beer. He notices a man outside standing on a street corner. When a woman passes by the man approaches her, whispers something, and gets a slap on the face. Another woman passes and the same thing happens. This goes on for quite a while, until the tourist can’t contain himself anymore. He goes outside and asks what it is the man is whispering to the women. ‘I ask them for them for a fuck’, the Russian replies. ‘You get slapped a lot’, the tourist observes. ‘Yes, but I get fucked a lot too.’

Thanks to PMcG for this.

Croatia, Non-Englishnesss Of

A correspondent to the Guardian's football unlimited page writes: 'Michael Owen has kick-started preparations for 2010 World Cup qualification in earnest by insisting none of the Croatian team would get into the England side. Is that because they are not English?'

Island Fever

An enterprising soul has just completed his quest to visit (and sleep on) every one of Scotland’s 162 substantial offshore islands. You can read about his exploits here, but an All You Can Eat session on wikipedia, armed only with a list of the islands’ names, yielded some of the following information.

Natives of Scotland’s most famous abandoned island, St Kilda, disdained fishing, because of the heavy seas, preferring to live on a diet of gannet and fulmar.

Informed that Bonny Prince Charlie had fled to St Kilda after the battle of Culloden, crown forces travelled there to see for themselves, and found the natives ignorant not only of the prince’s existence but also of King George.

In four centuries of recorded St Kildan history, no islander is known to have fought in a war or committed a serious crime.

Mingulay, in the Bishop’s Isles, would seem a good candidate for a Paul Muldoon rhyme for ‘Mengele’, should he ever find himself in need of such a thing.

The population of North Rona, an even more remote outpost than St Kilda, was wiped out by black rats in 1685. The rats themselves were subsequently wiped out by their inability to hunt along the island’s shores, so large were its tidal swells. Extremely inconveniently for an island community, you might think, North Rona possesses no natural beach whatever.

Soay, another constituent island of St Kilda, is formed of a ‘breccia of gabbro and dolerites’.

St Brenhilda, sister of St Ronan, retreated to the uninhabited island of Sula Sgeir, and was found dead in a bothy there with a shag’s nest in her ribcage.

Stanley Kubrick used the notoriously Sabbatarian island of Harris for scenes of the surface of Jupiter in 2001 A Space Odyssey. There is no connection between sabbatarianism and Kubrick's choice of Harris as a Jupiter lookalike.

Gruinard island was selected by the MoD in 1942 for an experiment into the effects of anthrax on sheep, with a view to the possible step-up from sheep to Germans, should that prove necessary. The island remained off-limits to visitors until 1990. Among the experiment's findings was that anthrax does indeed kill sheep.

A special dispensation under the Wild Birds Protection Act allows fishermen from the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis to pursue the ancient ‘guga’ hunt every year, in which up to 2000 juvenile gannets are speared and decapitated in the name of the time-honoured, disgusting diet of native North Ronans.

The three inhabitants of Gairsay, in the Orkneys, get to issue their own stamps.

The present-day remotest inhabited island in the United Kingdom, Foula, was also the last place on which the extinct North Germanic language of Norn was spoken.

The island of Shillay is enjoyed in splendid human-free isolation by a population of wild cats.

Waste Not

The Aids orphan and I
take a small step
to righteousness
when his face
on the charity flyer
goes not in the black bag
but one short walk
to the garden later
into the paper recycle bin.

Emptiness

So much emptiness. Are you out there? Yes, I'm talking to you.

Neologism

A cat that looks like Hitler is a 'kitler'.

Concerned Drinker, Newland Avenue

There's a bar down the street from where I work whose owners have just opened another bar right beside it. I'm worried though. Suppose the second bar puts the first out of business? They might be forced to open a third bar next door to the second to make up for it, thereby risking putting bar no. 2 out of business. I already have visions of a rolling domino-effect of two bars at a time moving up and down the street, from one end to the other. What if the sequence went into a spin cycle, or the two pubs got separated, with some unfortunate newsagent or shoeshop in between? The consequences don't bear thinking about. In fact the only solution is to close both down, unless you have any better ideas. I'll better go and explain just why to the nearest barman, immediately.

Norman Mailer Joke

The aged Norman is about to give a reading, but tells the organiser that he needs to take a pee first. He’s not too sure on his feet anymore, so perhaps the man could take his arm and help him to the gents? Of course he can. He also finds his muscle co-ordination isn’t what it used to be, so perhaps the man could open his pants for him too? Well, if you insist Norman. Oh and, he knows it’s a little embarrassing and all but… could the man take Norman’s dick out for him too? The man seems confused and reluctant. Do you think you can take the weight?, asks Norman.

With thanks to JG.

Cyclepath Psychopath

A man simulating sex with a bicycle behind closed doors has been placed on the sex offenders' register, the BBC reports! The offender, who was reported by cleaners at the hostel where he lives, pleaded a drunken 'misunderstanding'.

In Search of the Tenderer Thorns

Wait for the change in the tide where the Ouse meets the Trent and the Humber is born. Sound your foghorn once and slip down the jetty, where a tethered goat flicks its ears in the breeze and skitters a volley of piss in your general direction. These parishes, their runnelled fields all alluvial warping and tillage, secrete their tidal glue round your feet, and the scabby-legged cockerels in the bend of the road have spied you, Phrygian caps a red shock of sedition. Follow them twice round the mulberry bush and into the churchyard: follow the late poet squire of Yokefleet’s cigarette tip in the distance like a will o’ the wisp across the ‘fructuant marsh’, and stumble into the arms of a barman out beating the bushes on pressgang duty for the Tuesday night darts team. Stand everyone at the Hope & Anchor a drink, and that grass, that mistcircled grass on the dyke, cock an ear for its whisper under the jukebox and the farm dog barking half a mile down the road. Have you come about the interview for church warden, someone will ask. Are you that pigfeed salesman, someone will ask. No pigs around here, or hadn’t you noticed. Plenty of moles though. Match on tonight then? That island out in the estuary, what is its name, the island out where the freighters pass and the avocet dips and wades: it’s a trick of perspective, you’re on the island, you’re in the nature reserve, you’re already drifting out to sea with the estuary mud; there is no island and never was, the goat has progressed to chewing its tail, you slip back on board, sound the foghorn again and disappear into the chaos beyond the last high tide. And a couple of pound coins in the change, love, for the condom machine in the jakes, and a packet of crisps. Where the Ouse meets the Trent and the Humber is born, that swaying grass, that mistcircled grass.

Shortlist Fever

There’s been a lot of talk about the shortlist for the (blank) Prize, with some people praising the brave decision to omit (blank) and others deploring the rank idiocy of putting (blank) on it, not to mention the presence of (blank). In today’s climate of ground-breaking work by (blank), (blank), and (blank), increasingly rewarded by nominations for the (blank), (blank), and (blank) prizes, and favourable reviews in the pages of (blank), (blank), and (blank) magazines, the time has come to acknowledge the shifting landscape of poetry today and the imminent coronation, on this blog and elsewhere, of (blank), (blank), and (blank) as among the leading voices of our time. And not forgetting dear old (blank): where would we be without him/her/it!

Remembrance Day

British soldier blown up in Iraq stifles screams long enough to observe own death with minute's silence.

The Trial of Colonel Sweeto

Another month of reading The Trial of Colonel Sweeto non-stop like we’ve been doing and we’ll be bankrupt.

Weeaboo, did someone say Colonel Sweeto? (Continues to read The Trial of Colonel Sweeto non-stop).

And so on.

Apologies for the titchiness of the dinosaurs above. Ditto for that one below.

For anyone new to this and in the mood for a quick Perry Bible Fellowship mental zigzag test: panel one shows generic white blob guy falling through the air, panel two shows generic white blob guy waking up in bed, with those comic ectoplasm panic marks around his head, and panel three shows what? Answer in the comments.

Rambles

‘Warning: these premises are monitored by CCTV.’ Such was the note on the door of a gents’ toilet I passed in town yesterday. What gave it a warm personal touch, I thought, was the addition of a clip-art toilet under the typeface, with the lid up too (this was the gents’ after all). Heroin-dealing, cottaging scum? Get out of our toilets now. But first, a clip-art toilet I found on that novelty CD-Rom I used to make my daughter’s birthday party invitations.

A bit down the street there is a knocking shop, adjoined on one side by an outdoors shop called Wet ‘n’ Wild. Dialogue exercise: conversation between Wet ‘n’ Wild shop assistant and punter who refuses to accept shopkeeper’s explanation that the establishment he is looking for is in fact next door. Galoshes eh? And what might I be wanting with them, nudge nudge? Waterproof compass eh? And what might I be wanting with that, wink wink?

Now is the winter of our discount tents.

The reason I know about the knocking shop is because, why else, it’s opposite a branch of Blockbuster’s I use. Looking at 28 Days Later in it yesterday I was reminded of the fact that, as far as I remember, the z word is avoided in that film. It’s for the same reason the word ‘mafia’ is never used in The Godfather. The ‘infected’ community find the word ‘zombie’ offensive. Never use it in their presence. Something else about 28 Days Later I seem to remember is how the ‘infected’don’t diet on their victims’ brains. They just want them to come and play. Is it possible to have a vegetarian zombie? I very much hope so.

I was reminded of zombies mid-week when a stroll round the grounds of an East Yorkshire country house quickly led me into an apparently deserted static home retirement village. It was a terrifying experience. I kept expecting to find Daily Mail dispensers on the street corners with ‘In Case of Emergency Break Glass’ instructions on them. If I was a retired East Yorkshire zombie living there I’d eat my own brain, vegetarianism or no vegetarianism.

Still on brain-eating, I see from this week’s TLS that Faber have published a book about John Coltrane, which, Coltrane freak that I am, I’d better go buy. The brain-eating has to do with his last years, when he became quite pudgy, from a constant diet of the most disgusting food imaginable, especially brains. But then he had a kind of oral fixation, often bringing his sax to bed with him and playing it until he fell asleep. Apologising to Miles Davis once after a concert for having gone on a teensy bit too long with his solo, he explained he ‘just couldn’t stop.’ ‘You could always try taking the fucking thing out of your mouth’, Miles replied.

Poetry Readings

Someone once died at a Geoffrey Hill poetry reading. I presume the cause of death would have been given as ‘misadventure’. Did GH interrupt proceedings or not? That I don’t know.

I remember an American poet once savouring his poems so much he decided to read some of them twice.

Michael Hartnett, who was a short man, once mistook an overhead projector’s lamp for a microphone and spent a reading hunched over trying to speak into it, or so I’ve been told. On hearing some giggles he straightened up and asked indignantly what the audience thought was so funny.

Jessica Smith, I have read on Silliman, distributes copies of the ‘next poem she is going to read’ before standing mutely, reading it. Some of the time. Not all of the time.

I have seen poets with their inter-poem patter written out neatly on prompt cards.

I saw a poet in York the other month receive a text message during his reading, stop to have a look, then start the poem again.

A story about Irish poet Desmond Egan’s reading style also involves Michael Hartnett. It’s been told better elsewhere, but involves Hartnett interrupting a theatrical-sounding poetry chorus staged by Egan, Hugh Kenner and Hugh Kenner’s wife, which had gone on much longer than anyone else’s reading on the same night. Very fairly, Hartnett thought enough was enough: ‘How long is this nonsense going on? Your twenty minutes are up!’

The poetry heckle. There is a story about John Montague asking his audience for requests, only for someone to shout ‘Death of a Naturalist’, but I’m sure that’s apocryphal.

There was the introducer who described a very well-known writer as a ‘fairly well-known poet’.

The Black Mountaineers' readings would go on for hours. I’ve read descriptions of Creeley and Olson readings that would only come to an end when the janitors turned off the lights and began locking up the building.

A writer once told me of asking someone who was being polite after her reading, ‘And do you write yourself?’ only to receive the answer that this was the person she had just read with.

Poetry readings. Who’d go to one, I ask myself. Who’d give one, for God’s sake. Emily Dickinson never gave a poetry reading.

Excavations

North I went and west and north again: to the Wolds, East Yorks’ airbubble alternative to the Moors and the Dales above and beyond.

Altitude in these parts cannot escape the taint of irresponsibility, every molehill tumbling straight back down again in runnels and cuttings of access roads, the dips in the road where the horizontal loses its footing.

Here worked J.R. Mortimer, disturber of dust and fossicker in graves, to produce his Forty Years Researches in British and Saxon Burial Mounds of East Yorkshire. Here too, or therein, worked Peter Riley, on his Excavations, his excavations of excavations, or burials within burials, text upon text:

the body in its final commerce: love and despair for a completed memory or spoken heart /enclosed in a small inner dome of grey/drab-coloured [river-bed] clay, brought from some distance and folded in, So my journey ended moulded in the substance of arrival I depart and a fire over the dome and a final tumulus of local topsoil benign memorial where the heart is brought to witness the exchange: death for life, absence for pain, double-sealed, signed and delivered— under all that press released to articulate its long silence, long descended • tensed wing / spread fan / drumming over the hill.

{Quotation ends}

The hillsides flecked with Aberdeen Anguses, perhaps a seasonal choice, to offset the dripping and dreepings of the hedgerows and ditches. Also a race horse, as the warning on the gate announces, a flighty mare. Mares in heat swishing their vulvas in a state of excitement are said to be ‘winking’. An English ditch, do not forget, inverts the Irish usage. Watt falls in a ditch, the better to hear the mixed chorus, but soon rises. Repeated stirrings in the undergrowth, at ground level, the busy footlings of vole or field mouse. A pocket-sized raptor strokes the air overhead, caressing the trigger and whoosh of its plunge. A woman in a small shop is bewildered by the addition of 99 and 50 pence: could it be two pounds? While the simple old man stood awaiting his ice cream, his ice cream he sat and ate in the car, his carer nowhere in sight. ‘Life Before TV’, announced the children’s tapestry in the village church, a distant prospect indeed. Then over the hill and away. Delete the photos in trying to upload them and filch one off flickr instead. A landscape of the lost. But its pebbles and cowpats are stuck in my sole, meshed and compacted. And one more time the ‘tensed wing / spread fan / drumming over the hill.’