Old Trawlermen

At Filey Brigg

Here melted the ice-age assassin’s
weapon leaving only
its glacier’s dross to point
the promontory’s finger of gritstone.

Here sea and shore grew impacted
like a sideways-on tooth,
the very rocks capricious, erratic.

I have lost all perspective.
Only the green sea’s heave could turn
these crosshatched cliffs to a plumb-line.
There is no telling how far down
the screaming gannets will dive.

The Roman signal station on the point
has seen the hordes coming.
Its fires are out. There is no
time for escape. Its rodent bones
are owl pellets, barbarian mice
gnawing at the ablative absolute.

Razorbills and guillemots in their dozens
have fallen dead out of the sky,
propped eyeless in rockpools.
I trace the clotheshorse folds
of their wings, hung out to dry.

Their breasts and wings are untouched.
Only their cause of death takes flight,
and the sewage outflow’s sunken capstan
gushing through scarves of loo-roll
steers our ship of fools
safely onto the rocks.

A group fans out on a shelf.
They are scattering ashes.
Sheen for sheen the brightness
missing from a dead auk’s eye
but all around me catches the waves’
green surge, is thrown upwards
with them, breaks on nothing

at all and scatters like ashes.

{Ends}

Little auk found here.

Bill Evans

In the continuing absence of my brain, which appears to have gone on a backpacking holiday in Patagonia, I thought I might embed this Bill Evans track, which I think is one of the most deliciously melancholy pieces of piano jazz I know. The overdubbing is a mystery to me, though, and is nowhere to be found on the album version I have. What is it doing here, anyone know?

Letting Go

what does a ghost
giving up
give up

Writing at the Speed of Thought

Odd the courtesy
by which the sentence
agrees to move down
the page at the same
speed as your eyes
moving over it.

Brain Gym, Snot Gym

Heaving, puling and retching my way through a miserable cold, I am forced to take my comforts where I can. By revisiting the comedy Disneyland of ‘Brain Gym’, for instance, which passed me by when it made an appearance on Newsnight a while back, and which comes with a ‘Fish in a Barrel, Shoot Now’ label attached for anyone who took even Inter Cert science. Brain Gym is a programme currently in use in hundreds of state schools in Britain (and elsewhere) under which pupils are trained to enhance the flow of oxygen to their brains by rubbing on their chests, stimulating activity in the carotid artery, which one scientist in the clips embedded here compares to rubbing on the wallpaper to make your central heating work better.

When the [total fraud] educationalist behind Brain Gym finally gets to maunder and ramble his way through a chat with Jeremy Paxman (second embedded clip) we are treated to exchanges like the following (1.25 in):

‘It’s my opinion that we are electrical, that we do have circuits, connections, and when we bring our energy to the midline, to the central point, we are breaking out of the reflex to… to… go from one side to the other and bring things back to the centre, where we can relax.’

‘You say it is your opinion that we are electrical. Are you medically qualified?’

‘No I’m not medically qualified, I’m an educator, but I study and read.’

And this (3.40 in):

‘You believe processed foods don’t contain water?’

‘I had a context for that statement… Fifteen years ago that was the best information I had.’

{Ends}

I would describe my own theory, Face Gym, which involves rubbing a dead fish up and down the face of teachers in state-funded schools who want to teach this stuff, but I see it’s time for some Snot Gym and must be going. More anon.

On Not Translating

We swam a river from opposite banks,
met halfway and kept going.
There was no awkwardness.
We did not have words.

Identity Politics

Seven-page piece in the new Poetry Ireland Review by Rita Kelly, ‘Eavan Boland: A Voice of Courage in Our Time’. It seems to be a riposte to a review by Maria Johnston that appeared PIR a few issues back. At issue, among other things, is Boland’s addiction to dictating the terms, in her prose, on which her poetry is read. Kelly quotes a 1997 essay from American Poet beginning, in classic Boland style: ‘I was in a flat in Dublin for a few years…’, going on to describe the blinding revelation that she wrote a few poems there. That would be, let me see, In Dublin. In the 1960s. Before she moved to the suburbs. The centrality of the male poet. Had yet to be. Questioned. It’s a familiar tale, and I don’t know why Kelly is repeating it. There really is nothing more to say about it. A letter from Matthew Arnold to his mother is quoted, with mutton chops reassuring the old lady that like Alf Tennyson and Bob Browning he too will have his time in the sun. ‘It is difficult to imagine an Ireland, especially then, rather than even now, when Boland could write such a letter to her mother or to anyone else.’ Maybe we should interpret Boland’s one-note critical prose as a self-addressed letter in this vein. This is a debate about self-esteem rather than poetry. Boost your self-esteem all you want if you think it’s going to improve your poetry, but I can only review your art, not your self-image. Maria Johnston had quoted a stray remark by Dan Chiasson on an anthology of German poetry Boland had edited (though she speaks no German), calling EB someone ‘who had suffered her share of atrocious events in her own country’. This is a ridiculous statement, but it’s hard to blame Chiasson overly. This is what happens when art is offered as a testimonial to good character. Eavan Boland’s poetry has spent decades sheltering under a good cause (feminism) in defence of the much more important right of Irish art to remain forever defined by and in hock to identity politics, first and last, and enough, I say, please let us and the world at large, which includes Ireland, get over this now, and never, ever have these pointless debates again!

Arsenal/Liverpool Six-Day Trilogy of Doom, Condensed

They are in the moaner’s room. It is they who live there now.

They have just been quite stuffed in spite of all.

They can’t go out, they’ve gone out.

Proverb

He who swallows a pineapple trusts his anus.

Oppen at 100

The planet’s
Time.

Blood from a stone, life
From a stone dead dam. Mother
Nature! because we find the others
Deserted like ourselves and therefore brothers. Yet

So we lived
And chose to live.

These were our times.

{Ends}

George Oppen is a hundred later this month, and I salute him.

The Biggest Douches in the Universe

Britain’s Fraudulent Mediums Act is being repealed, to be replaced by new Consumer Protection Regulations. Mediums (media?) have complained that, rather than targeting fraudulent (genuinely fraudulent?) members of their profession, these regulations will leave them open to frivolous law-suits from [every member of the human race still in possession of a brainstem] skeptics and anyone else who feels misled, coerced or taken advantage of. ‘We have to fight it’, one medium is quoted as looking up from her crystal ball/premium rate call line royalties statement long enough to say, ‘If not, we will go [forward] back [no really, she means ‘forward’] to the Dark Ages, where we will be [who said progress was dead] persecuted and prosecuted.’

As well as being scum-sucking emotional rapists and the biggest douches in the universe, mediums are also, one and all, frauds.

‘It is taking [a scum-sucking money-making fraud] a religion, a way of life, and making it a commercial transaction’, someone else is quoted as beating off messages from your long-dead grandmother long enough to say. ‘There are bad mediums out there, and we would like to [muscle in on their premium rate call lines and general emotional racketeering] regulate them. But this is very unfair on [total frauds still working the rubber chicken circuit in the North of England] genuine spiritualists.’

When I saw (world’s greatest living Wicklowman) Dara O Briain recently he did a routine on mediums, in which he described the cold reading antics of some total fraud he was forced to appear with on a Belfast chat show. Asked to explain one of the all-too explicable failures of her technique (given that she is a total fraud) the psychic in question said that sometimes she receives so many messages all at once that it’s hard to tell the right ones from the wrong. She was such a great psychic, in other words, that she was shit at being a psychic.

Psychics are total frauds whose government approved licenses should be handed out by very large hungry bears in very small unlit, locked rooms.

To the M62

Grant me the slipstream of the lost,
the godspeed of all who have driven
east for Ireland and west for sunrise.
You will know your fellow travellers by
the backs of their heads and recognise
that face to face means only goodbye.
The hawk winging over the forecourt
flecks with a single drop of red
your diesel stain and its rainbow bleeds.
Watch in the truckstop’s turning circle
the cabs’ huge brows nod resignation
and slip right off, a brainpan of wires
earthed to a pair of tatty mudflaps.
A layby is a bed in air
hungry for your transient cargo
of sleep. I turn in eight feet up
and will not wake while the traffic lasts.
Find me beyond the service station
where the radio late shift drifts
to static. Take the space I have kept you;
arrive with me before dawn nowhere
but here, that is nowhere, but ours, alone.

{Ends}

Photo found here.

Wtf?!

This at my place of work yesterday. Well, wouldn’t you have photographed it too? What were they thinking – just imagine the acoustics in there!

Brad Mehldau

Yet another album from Brad Mehldau, Live, and a double too. A bone-shaking version of Coltrane’s ‘Countdown’, with what sound like Charles Ivesian super-chords detonating every other beat in the left hand and a shudder and judder like waiting (it’s coming, it’s coming) for an elephant to sneeze.

If he and I hung out I would say to him, as I waved this eleventh or twelfth album of his that I’ve bought in his face, Brad Mehldau, you were born one week after me (23 August 1970) and have spent your whole life over-compensating.

Distant Planet

In a New Yorker piece about Frank O’Hara, Dan Chiasson calls Michigan (where O’Hara spent a year) ‘a distant planet settled for the manufacture of master’s degrees.’

Bert Ahern

This is Bert Ahern. Unlike the outgoing (how outgoing, I wonder? does he do karaoke?) Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, Bert is not resigning, despite forty years’ service in the history department at the University of Minnesota. He may not ever have been a minister of finance or prime minister in his time, but I’m willing to bet he at least had a goddamn bank account, unlike that other you-expect-me-to-believe-that slieveen.

Bert Ahern. Deserving of the thanks of Irish people everywhere for his contributions to historiography and the University of Minnesota history department.

Lead

It was a golden age
of lead. Prospectors
striking lucky

in the distant mines
would try
to look pleased.

Leadsmiths resigned
themselves to the mild
curiosity

of ages to come
at their leaden displays,
until at last

the lead in the pots
and pipes leaked
into our brains

and we became
settled and heavy;
a background

against which
our showier children,
turning to copper

and bronze,
could not but
brilliantly shine,

an unwitting homage
we took as our due,
soberly

receding into
the long
leaden night.

Avocet

Dip dip dip, fussy-insistent,
an avocet’s beak. Enough
is never enough: why can’t you
savour your food?

This man in the hide has been here
ten hours among avocets,
oystercatchers and redshanks:
he knows why.

Thumbnail-sized black frogs
sprinting, which is to say inching
along the path don’t know
but still come

tumbling into the rushes
where the rabbits come too.
Safe at last! Which is to say
ready to die

at an avocet’s beak, the frogs
that is, who understand
nothing. Hawks come
for the rabbits,

and they too understand nothing,
the rabbits, dying, devoured.
The hawks on the telegraph pole
understand

when a train of thought has gone on
long enough. Dinner is served,
the white rumps by the ditch
announce

and the vegetarian hawk
can go without. More
than that they can take or leave.
Understand?

You they’re not bothered with.
Strictly speaking your sandwich
isn’t part of the food chain.
In fact you’re not here.

Beak goes down, tail up,
beak tip up too. Superb.
Solder this basin of twilight,
freeze-frame

each lucky-dip splash.
Except ten hours is enough.
The wellingtoned twitchers have flown.
(I know a good pub.)

But it’s never enough. First
there’s a marsh to be drained. Splash.
Dip dip dip. Slurp.
I’ll drink to that.

Counsel of Despair

The Sentinelese people of the Andaman Islands are one of the world’s few remaining uncontacted tribes. Essentially nothing is known of their culture. Their fate became a news story during the 2004 tsunami: nearby Andaman Islanders had moved inland prior to the flooding, despite a lack of any advance warnings, and in their unknowable way it seems the Sentinelese too were able to take evasive action. They made the news again in 2006 when two fishermen strayed into their waters and were killed by the tribespeople. No attempt has been made to recover their bodies.

When the anthropologist Bruce Parry visited a remote Brazilian tribe, the Matis, for his television series Tribe, he had to sail past the territory of another such uncontacted tribe, the Korubo, known to their neighbours as the ‘headbashers’. Long may they remain uncontacted, he hoped. Rather than endure the Matis’ disastrous history of contact with people like him, presumably.

It is too easy to dwell on the contradictions of our concern for things that, in our well-meaning way, we nevertheless conspire to destroy. A more constructive solution might be to take steps not to find out about things like the Sentinelese in the first place, or failing that, to wipe them from our memory. The Iberian lynx. A dying Aboriginal Australian language. Choose something endangered every day and purge it from the servitude of our impotent concern. Forget to visit the fragile Alaskan ecosystem. Forget to visit the zoo to ponder the fate of the caged Siberian tiger. Let us ignore the world into a state of wellbeing. Ignorance has brought us to this and only ignorance will set us free.

Some Help With This Roadsign Please

The Blacksmith's Arms

Lough Dan Unreached

Not that the path was lost
but that after long
hesitation the briars
had found and embraced it at last

{Poem ends}

Image found here.

Helpful Hand

Bookseller Eric Korn writes to the TLS:

Sir, – I should be sorry to see my improbable find lost through the intervention of an overzealous normalizing proofreader; the bibliography of film noir sources, which I reviewed, attributed the praise of Raymond Chandler not to our own dear mag, but to “The Time [sic] Literary Supplement”, which has an awesome plausibility in an alternate universe. Samuel Butler had a similar disappointment: his sardonic gag “tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all” (I wonder if I have this right) was corrected by a helpful hand.

Kilnsea

A Taunton Shopper Writes

I have been reading:

John Haynes’ Letter to Patience. I can’t remember an English poet writing better about Africa, Nigeria in this case. Haines is the Englishman in Ulysses, as noted by Haynes, who also signals the roots of his name in the Anglo-Saxon ‘haga’, meaning ‘hedge’ or ‘enclosure’, a factoid that explains the name’s guilty association with the Enclosures movement in the nineteenth century. He handles terza rima a lot more skilfully than Heaney did in Station Island, though Heaney’s was unrhymed, which meant it wasn’t really terza rima anyway:

Autistic were they, Tarzan, Peter Pan,
Mowgli, those hunters through our videos
and comics strips – Tammylan, Caliban,

Green Man, who come back and come back like those
ghost abikus, ‘half savage and half child’
in Kipling’s words that might just be Rousseau’s?

Emile, I thought of, sitting in the Wild
Zone fenced off in Lara’s primary school.

{Quotation ends}

In Tarzan of the Apes, Tarzan teaches himself to read but not speak English from the children’s books his dead father has left in their cabin. He calls the printed letters ‘bugs’, as Haynes tells us in a note. An abiku is a Yoruba evil spirit. Haynes writes in long, loping verse paragraphs that are hard to excerpt. You’ll just have to read the whole thing.

John Riley was born in Leeds in 1937, and these days I find him a lot more palatable than the other Leeds poet of 1937 vintage, Tony Harrison. Peter Sirr has an enjoyable tribute to Riley here, and given the small problem he mentions with the Carcanet Selected Poems (much of the stock was destroyed when the IRA decided to blow Carcanet up) I was very happy to track a copy down myself. It came with a 1997 receipt from Our Price in Taunton pressed between the pages, inscribed with the words ‘Live life as you want Make sure you are happy with Life.’ The Selected omits the Russian translations (you’ll need the Grosseteste Press Collected for them), and slightly more understandably the ‘Geoff’ letters (what the hell were they all about?!), but try ‘in memoriam’ for size:

in almost total deprivation we are all
learned survivors, the soft fruit calls, soft rain
a crystal, carried internally, a facet gleams as if
by chance, at the bark of a tree, glows in the atmosphere

when memory is of the future
then we may speak of fear and sharpening
and of love too more than of the fallen fruit
of the form that is calling and to that lovely form

{Quotation ends}

Steve Burt’s recent LRB piece on Creeley has also been sending me back to Black Mountain Bob. Could some unsuspected Norn Irish roots be showing in the final ‘so we are’ of ‘A Birthday’?

Now slowly
spaces occur, a ground is
disclosed as dirt. The

mountains come of it,
the sky precedes, and where
there had been only

land now sticks and stones
are evident. So we are
here, so we are.

{Quotation ends}

I’ve also been reading plenty of Tim Robinson on Connemara, Claire Keegan’s short stories, and George Oppen’s prose, but what is this, the wire service? That’s enough quotations and updates for now.

Picture found here. Ah, Smithfield.

Dungfork and Sloppail

I continue to munch on Hill’s Collected Critical Writings. Much that is new on T.S. Eliot. Healthily ironic that a writer so often decried as authoritarian (Hill I mean) should spend so much time patiently and carefully anatomizing Eliot’s tragic decline, and demonstrating Eliot’s trading of a once startling spirit of inquiry for the empty postures of authoritarian fiat in his post-Nobel papal senescence.

More cheeringly, this encomium from Hopkins, who ‘repeatedly stressed the value of humble unlettered faithfulness’:

To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dungfork in his hands, a woman with a sloppail, give him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should. So then, my brethren, live.

{Quotation ends}

Take up your life and walk.

The Light of the World

Beckett fact no. 91.

Ten Spanish and Hispanic Connections in Beckett.

1) Walter Starkie, Beckett’s lecturer in Spanish at Trinity College, Dublin. Sister of Rimbaud translator Enid and author of a memoir, Spanish Raggle Taggle, of his time in Spain. Friend of egregious anti-Semite Charles Bewley and enthusiastic fascist. Laces his translation of Don Quijote with the Hiberno-English ‘Bad cess to you!’ Beckett ‘never rated’ him, Knowlson insists.

2) Calderón de la Barca, Spanish dramatist whose tragicomedy La vida es sueño furnishes Beckett’s Proust with the adage: ‘Pues es delito mayor /Del hombre es haber nacido’ (‘For the greatest crime of man is to have been born’).

3) Francisco de Zurbarán, he of Belacqua’s ‘livid rapture of the Zurbarán Saint-Onan’, represented in the National Gallery in Dublin by a more than usually fluffy and cherub-plagued Immaculate Conception and St Rufina, as reproduced here.

4) I’ve already mentioned, many facts back, the Spanish edition of Beckett’s poems, Obra Poética Completa (Hiperión, 2000), which contains the otherwise uncollected ‘PSS’. The text is trilingual, which means English or French facing the Spanish translation, except in those cases where the original exists in both English and French, leading to pleasing textual constellations such as the shadowing of ‘elles viennent’ by ‘vienen’, and, down the page, of ‘they come’ by (italics this time) ‘vienen’. ‘diferente e iguales’ reads the first; ‘diferentes e idénticas’ answers the second. The first: ‘con cada una la ausencia de amore es igual’. And the second: ‘con cada una la ausencia de amore es la misma.’

4) Salvador Dalí, author of ‘Binding Cradled – Cradled Bound’, as translated by Beckett in This Quarter 5.1, September 1932. Award yourself the rest of the day off if you manage to track this one down.

5) ‘In Patagonia?’, asks the Director in Catastrophe incredulously. This after a reference to ‘the Argentine’ in Embers some years before. A transparent testimony to the growing influence of Jorge Luis Borges on the later Beckett, perhaps after their joint victory in the Prix Formentor of 1961. On another subject entirely, note the reference to Dupuytren’s contracture (from which Beckett suffered acutely) in French Catastrophe, but left unnamed (‘fibrous degeneration’) in English.

6) The great white whale of the Anthology of Mexican Poetry, translated in a spasm of hackwork for UNESCO (the ‘inexhaustible cheese’) in 1950. Someone, somewhere, one day will comb through this book for intertextual echoes of the rest of Beckett’s oeuvre, but… let’s just say I’ll get back to you on that one. It’s always a pleasure to dip into though. There is an abundance of psittacine life in Beckett, and ‘The Parrot’ (after Jose Juan Tablada) adds cheerfully to the ranks:

When the parrot, treading on
my feet, traverses the brick floor,
the black cat, curled up in a ball,
fixes him with amber eye,
glowering diabolic sulphur
at this green and yellow demon,
nightmare of its somnolence.

7) Fernando Arrabal, Spanish dramatist often hitched to the tumbril of the Theatre of the Absurd. Persecuted under Franco, and the subject of a letter of protest by Beckett published in French newspapers.

8) El Greco, via a tribute to the Alba in Dream: ‘Her great eyes went black as sloes, they went as big and black as El Greco painted, with a couple of good wet slaps from his laden brush, in the Burial of the Count of Orgaz the debauched eyes of his son or was it his mistress?’

9) A moment of endopsychic clarity courtesy of one of Thomas MacGreevy’s many Spanish-inspired poems, ‘Gloria de Carlos V’, as quoted in ‘Humanistic Quietism’:

But a moment, now, I suppose,
For a moment I may suppose,
Gleaming blue,
Silver blue,
Gold,
Rose,
And the light of the world.

10) I once unwittingly, in polite company, invited a Spanish Beckett reader to translate this quatrain from ‘A Wet Night’, in More Pricks Than Kicks:

No me jodas en el suelo
Como si fuera una perra,
Que con esos cojonazos
Me echas en el cono tierra.

{Quotation ends}

¡Ay caramba! ¡Never again!

Geoff Capes

On retiring from the life of a shot-putter and professional strong man, Geoff Capes went into business, opening a shop called Geoff’s Capes which sold only capes. This confused his fans and admirers, who might reasonably have expected it to sell keep-fit equipment, while the dedicated cape-buying public might not, equally reasonably, have identified capes with former shot-putter and professional strong man Geoff. The shop closed soon afterwards. Geoff Capes now breeds budgerigars and has won many awards for his recessive pieds.

Larkinesque

That’s Roy Keane playing the man and not the ball, and a painful sight it was too. Philip Larkin critics almost always play the man and not the ball, according to John Osborne in his new Larkin, Ideology and Critical Violence. Just about every speaker in every poem, he argues, gets cut down to size as the fat, bald, heterosexual, white bloke that was Philip Larkin, though the word ‘speaker’ here is also wrong, denoting as it does the readings of cosy Larkinites unable to process their man as text rather than voice. ‘Cosy’ extends to pro- and anti-Larkinites, of course. The antis, who quaff deep of the wine of righteous indignation, attack a man of their own paranoid and self-serving creation. Take Tom Paulin: faced with ‘Counting’ (‘Thinking in terms of one /Is easily done – /One room, one bed, one chair, /One person there…’), Paulin declares: ‘One is ace and masculine, two is trouble and female.’ Osborne pounces: ‘As a glance at his own poems will verify, words are not Paulin’s strong suit; but there is a serious cognitive problem here… In order to accuse the poem of sexism, Paulin has first had to sex it; the piece itself, like the majority of Larkin’s poems, is resolutely non-gender-specific, as applicable to women as to men.’

Osborne performs similar acts of sterilisation on all the familiar topoi of Larkin flapdoodles. Larkin the John Bull Englishman? He eviscerates Englishness from the inside out, in exemplary poems of non-attachment and rootlessness. Larkin the male chauvinist? He is the most feminist of poets. Larkin the Tory? Even a piece of sour late harrumphing like ‘Going, Going’ is a subtle dig at Tory brainlessness (the Tory working party that commissioned the poem ended up censoring it). That jaunty little ditty from a letter to Robert Conquest, ‘I want to see them starving, /The so-called working class’, is valiantly rehabilitated (‘look what happens if we substitute a different heading: “The Ballad of the Fascist Bastard”, perhaps, or “Colonel Blimp’s Epitaph”’), so that it becomes a satire on being rude about the working class.

It’s all a spirited and zesty performance. If Osborne is correct, Larkin’s admirers have got him completely wrong and not only does he have nothing to do with the jaded old Movement crowd, he is in fact a secret brother in arms of W.S. Graham, Roy Fisher, Christopher Middleton, Denise Riley, John Riley, J.H. Prynne even… just some of the writers, in other words, who really do turn their backs on the cosy commonplaces of recent British poetry (voice, identity, nation), and lead to slightly different contemporary poets from the ones Osborne mentions (Carol Ann Duffy, Alan Jenkins…). So why does none of these people feature in Osborne’s book, and why, if only for the purposes of receiving a good kicking, does the Movement identification win out yet again? That’s what I’d like to work out. How long do we have to spend on Tom Paulin et al’s inability to construe a simple line by Larkin before we get on to the comparative readings of The Whitsun Weddings and Kitchen Poems or The Cut Pages? I’m not sure if that isn’t one of those questions that brings the priest and the doctor running in their long coats, but I presume the answer is ‘a very long time’. It’s never going to happen, is it, and it’s not John Osborne’s fault. You know what I blame this on the breakdown of?, as Lenny asks in Moe’s tavern. Society, that’s what. Maybe radical Larkin (since that’s what’s at issue here, believe in it or not as you will) is like Daniil Kharms’s bald redheaded man I mentioned a few posts back: ‘We’d better not talk about him anymore.’

Life Beyond the Study Door, My Commitment Thereto

John Banville on Seamus Heaney in today’s Guardian: ‘Heaney’s commitment to life beyond the study door is unusual for a poet, and all the more admirable for that.’

Beyond my study door lies all manner of life. Cats, usually, their fleas, on a good day, perhaps a stray mouse hitching a lift in Sam the ginger cat’s mouth. I tend to intervene to free the mice, but when I intervene with the fleas it’s usually to exterminate them, so I can’t work out quite how ‘committed’ I am to all this life one way or the other.

Mise en Abysmal

Something I was watching on television recently is sponsored by a website called ‘comparethemarket.com’, I see. It helps you find the lowest car insurance, the cheapest flights, that kind of thing. But who helps you find the best deal on websites that compare the market on car insurance, cheap flights etc? That would be ‘comparethecomparethemarket.com’, I presume.

Similarly I have, I confess, a signed photograph of Steven Gerrard in my kitchen. How do I know it’s authentic? Because it came with a certificate of authenticity. And how do I know that was authentic? Because it too came with a certificate of authenticity of course, what do you take me for? I could do this all day but will mercifully stop now.

In other news I notice it’s St Patrick’s Day, which means about as much to me as the brayings of a hippo in Cameroon with a thrombosed pile up its arse it’s just sat down on rather clumsily.

Bananas

It needn’t be grapes, not always: his wife and children bring the man in the next bed bananas, yellow and green. The Touretter, who knows how to bark when he wants, calmly wipes the bubbles from the edge of his mouth and begins the ceremony: peels and bundles it down the hatch. He looks like he’s never felt more grateful for anything in his life. ‘Fuck you’, he tells them with tears in his eyes, ‘fuck you all.’

Tofu

Philip Larkin and the residuary beneficiaries of literary Anglicanism, T.S. Eliot’s decline from ‘pitch’ to ‘tone’, ‘Sean O’Shem’… what would be next on Geoffrey Hill’s kill list, I wondered, as his Collected Critical Writings came flopping through the letter box. Tofu, was the answer. Tofu.

The onslaught comes at the end of a chapter on the OED. Hill laments the slighting of one of Hopkins’ coinages, ‘unchancelling’, when bloody old tofu can show up on a Chinese takeaway menu and muscle its way in, in a suitably crumbly and nutritious way:

Tofu, picked up by the 1933 Supplement, with citations going back to 1880, received further samplings (1981, Guardian: ‘In the United States… tofu has become an “in” food’). Is the name of an easily analysable substance that has appeared on a million menus more than a word, peculiarly resistant to analysis, which has lodged itself in a few thousands of minds?

{Quotation ends}

If only the gentleman pictured above could have spelled his name To Fu instead of Tu Fu. Jacques Chirac is an expert on the work of Tu Fu, did you know? Not many people know that.

1920s Russian Modernism

Partly in reaction to how terrible my mobile phone photography is, and partly too in reaction to the depressingly subatomic nature of the debate currently raging around the Poets of the Century or whatever they’re called being serialized in the papers this week (Bishop versus Sassoon anyone?!), I thought I might pay belated homage to the marvellous Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde exhibition still on at the British Library. When asked if he was a postmodernist, Roy Fisher once answered that he was in fact a ‘1920s Russian modernist’, and these images too, coming on top of my reading of Kharms, remind me how much I too look on 1920s Russian modernism as a glorious lost poetic utopia. I find it depressing how many poets (Irish poets for instance) who latch onto twentieth-century Russian poetry trot out their Mandelstam and Akhmatova (great poets though they are) but never mention Khlebnikov, Khodasevich, Blok… For shame. A plague of Daniil Kharms’ projectile snot on one and all of us until we mend our ways. But first, some pretty pictures.