Larkin Toad 37: Floral, Pearson Park

On the Trail of the Larkin Toads: No. 32, The Newington Toad, Hawthorn Avenue

Greek Street

Approved Coal Merchant

Thinking About David Jones

Like the figure of his Aphrodite, David Jones intended his art to have both a sacrificial and ecstatic function, a synthesis for which only wartime, it seemed, could provide the necessary conditions of intellectual emergency. The name for the highest form of art in Jones's lexicon was ‘sacrament’. In his essay ‘Art and Democracy’ Jones wrote that if only the beaver would add one superfluous twig to his dam it would become ‘a font’, and ‘the creature would enter the “sign world”’. The form of this ‘sign world’ is the artistic sacrament or anathemata, ‘the things set up’ to affirm and exalt ‘the gods’.

Wild Flowers, Near Lund

Caravanserai

The Sahara has shifted
an inch and a continent.

The dune you are standing on,
Ibrahim Ag Alhabib,

is also thousands of miles
from your feet: my windscreen

this morning is coated
in fine desert sand.

Never was shifty heart truer,
or truer to it its far-scattered sons

who touch across oceans of sand.
Among themselves

the Touareg are the Imazighen,
‘the free people’. In Arabic

‘Touareg’ means ‘forsaken by God’.
The sandmen of my youth

are forsaken by the Fassaroe pit,
the last gravel mixed

and the compacted fill
rolled flat. I see again

the brace of wheels
on the weighbridge, the great

engines ticking over,
at bay, and dust

that is no longer sand
in the drivers’ eyes.

I feel its drift, voiceless
and huge, within me,

and know I too
am transported, grain

by grain, and unsigned for,
the docket still in my father’s hand.

Over that brutalized earth
I see the tippers void

the rising clouds of their sandstorms,
a caravanserai

of transients negotiate
sand trails decades since

sand was there:
their mounts departed,

not a Thermos between them,
they and their shallow pits

soon exhausted, tiny-seeming
under the stars.
 

Found Shark, Staithes

Report of the Hull Borough Asylum for the Year 1885

Courtesy of a most intriguing publication I picked up today, the Report of the Hull Borough Asylum for the Year 1885, a list of grounds for summary detention for feeble-mindedness in the late nineteenth century. Good to see an over-enthusiastic bout of self-abuse could land a man in the madhouse back then, in theory at least, even if the 1885 figures show a deplorable shortfall of lunatic masturbators banged to rights. If only these humanitarian sages had been around to help me through my teens. It’s not too late now, even, I suspect. A letter to the Hull Daily Mail may be in order.

Far Ings Grebe

Hessle Road

You can give a man a better new camera but say what you like, the world will always need bad photographs. The Wassand Arms here used to boast a dancing parrot, but no more. There is a parrot in The Ship in Sewerby, but does anyone know of any remaining resident parrots in Hull pubs? I wanted to get pictures too of The Stricky Arms and Rayner’s, redoubtable old watering holes of ill repute, but there were people standing in the door and I didn’t like to disturb them. The pub with the beautiful old Anchor Brewery sign (Anchor Brewery of steam beer fame, presumably?) is The Dairycotes Inn. The Criterion was of coursed named after the literary journal. Geoffrey Hill’s early/late Eliot pitch/tone debate is a very popular theme there, I discover. In fact they speak of little else. Click for big.

Previously Unknown Georges De la Tour Discovered in Hull

Stephen Burt

And now another big long review, of Stephen Burt’s Forms of Youth, here.

The Letters of Louis MacNeice

Monstrously long review of The Letters of Louis MacNeice, by me, here. Now there was a man who loved cats.

Small Mammalian Lifeform Noted, Daily Ordeal of Feline Auto-Anilingus Enters Eleventh Year

A Swift Half

Bought a new camera today. Old camera is no more, which makes it all the more of a pity I never uploaded all those photos on it of the night parrot and Tasmanian tiger I saw down under, not to mention of me cavorting around in the nude. Hereunder a few random shots I took on the way home from work, including my mates Ricky (star of cult indy flick Drift; at bar) and Mike. Otherwise the same, same old locales. But why change a winning, I mean whining, formula.

Octopus Wins World Cup

Match of the Day pundits have now spent entire month in Africa without working out how to get into the stadium right behind their bloody studio, for Christ’s sake.

Match of the Day pundit and most boring man alive confirms world-historical colossus Nelson Mandela has ‘certain presence’.

And back to 1974, 78 we go (with Carles Puyol’s haircut).

Mark Lawreson’s incessant ‘It’s tight, very tight this’ shtick in fact a reference to anti-hernia corset.

Nelson Mandela spends first half surfing warm tide of nostalgia for incident-packed, time-well-spent years on Robben (no, not Arjen Robben) Island.

Spain play Barcelona v. Madrid five-a-side at half-time.

Queen Sofia and army of conquistadors seize Matabeleland.

Furious Dutch denounce Papish sophistry, pressgang hapless locals, set sail for and seize Canary Islands.

Man with nice hair on bench is ‘story waiting to happen’, football-related kind of story, I’m assuming here, rather than Donald Barthelme kind of story.

Dirk Kuyt, Pepe Reina and Ryan Babel?! complete pre-season training for arduous task ahead of finishing seventh in Premier League.

Torres’ last-minute hamstring injury condemns reaffirms his undying commitment to another year on Merseyside.

Xabi Alonso picks out winner’s medal with pinpoint accuracy from 50 yards.

Jubliant Spanish players thank, eat Paul the psychic octopus.

Migrant Workers

If there are dozens there are a hundred,
frost on their boots but some bare-chested.
Not one green shoot will be wasted:
migrant workers, drifters, kindred

come from towns out east to stoop
to the earth this harsh-grained Lincoln dawn,
then stretch by the road, their day’s shift done,
stopping when this man says they stop.

This one has a master’s degree,
this one a girl in Brno and
a girl in Grimsby. His best friend
will kill a third in some skulduggery.

Some will not know, how you say,
names for what they pick in English,
for pleasure, tedium or anguish,
for banks of poppy, wild rose, daisy.

Next summer finds them here or gone
as the market or their whims dictate.
The children they have yet to meet
call here/there home in this/that tongue.

Erosion

Level with a passing ship
and buried by sky, the flood plain shows
the tide a quivering top lip
of shallow soil between my house

and the soft clay banks I hardly trust.
Drip-fed back to gull and wader,
the fields will go and not be missed,
dry for now but underwater.

Though barn and spire may stand against
the heavens’ downward-plunging level,
here we are captive though unfenced.
Deliver us, Lord, not from evil

but, worse again, the solving blank
of a place where only postmen come,
and save for us when all has sunk
a tremor in the churchyard loam:

no resurrection of the flesh,
but our thin coffins shaken from
their moorings by the tidal wash,
plunging us past all roots and home.

(Sunk Island)

Writing, Being a Writer

When T.S. Eliot met the young Stephen Spender, who told him he wanted to be a writer, Eliot ticked him off, saying he could understand somebody wanting to write poetry but not the desire to ‘be’ a poet. I am reminded of the New Yorker cartoon of two women talking, one of them telling the other ‘My husband’s like Tolstoy. Except he doesn’t write.’ I too have never understood people who say they want to ‘be’ writers. Writing is an activity, not a state of being, like simply being a princess or an Indian holy man. I’m reminded of all this by seeing Sean O’Brien (not someone all of whose opinions I am likely to share...) announce in the current issue of Poetry Review that:

The preoccupation with ‘being a poet’ is part of the contemporary fetish with ‘creativity’, whereby an attitude and an identity as part of a scene are assumed to be the real thing, rather than the thing itself.

{Ends}

When in old age Georges Simenon stopped writing novels, he changed his passport to read sans profession. Write or don’t write, but don’t go around wanting to ‘be’ a writer. Or if you do, keep it to yourself, world. And so endeth the lesson for the day.