stars sliding

Yikes...

2011-02-01T21:52:00.003+01:00

... I haven't posted here since November. My longest gap since this blog started. What happened?

Erm, I got fed up. I felt blogs were over - so last decade! so dated! And maybe they are. But does it matter? I also ran out of things to say. I could argue the same things over and over again, but to what end? To no end - so I thought.

Here's a post. This one here. I'll maybe post more. Have this in the meantime:

A handful of recent PCs

2010-11-28T17:09:00.003+01:00

The more basic one is in honour of my semi-beloved xkcd.com.

From an e-mail I've just written:

2010-11-28T17:06:00.002+01:00

The part where I talk about poetry:

... I'm wondering what your perception of my perception of poetry is... let me write what I think:

a poem is made of words;
a poem is prompted by an idea-for-a-poem;
an idea-for-a-poem is not a poem;
an idea-for-a-poem can be, and often is, greater and more fulfilling than the poem it gives birth to - that's why a poet has to practice and get the words right - because a poem is made of words and nothing else.

And why I think there's a confusion:

we use the word "poetry" to describe perfection and/or beauty;
I suggest that this is a simile ("it is like the best poetry") that has become a reduced metaphor ("it is poetry") which has got confused with the noun it is;
similar things can be said of words/phrases such as "symphony", "genius", "work of art", "God", etc.

If I was a semiotician I'd be able to talk about some kind of sign being confused with some kind of signifier or signified bitzenbob or something, but I'm a dimwit when it comes to theory. So I won't even bother

Lots of my ideas about poetry come from a half and one lines in Shakespeare: "...the moon's an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun." i.e. the poem acts like the moon, a mirror stealing light from the sun of an idea-for-a-poem. I write lots of moon poems and most of them are about stolen light.

And I believed all of this before WS Graham's Collected Poems came into my hands and I read this by him:

"The most difficult thing for me to remember is that a poem is made of words and not of the expanding heart, the overflowing soul, or the sensitive observer. A poem is made of words. It is words in a certain order, good or bad by the significance of its addition to life and not to be judged by any other value put upon it by imagining how or why or by what kind of man it was made."

Final thought: the essence of what an idea-for-a-poem is is worth investigating.

That's kinda why I think what I think.

Cover Versions

2010-11-05T00:09:00.003+01:00

I like cover versions... and don't believe first-performed-best-performed. One of the following is much better than the original, thinks I.

Sigh... here comes a rant.

2010-11-04T23:46:00.004+01:00

Coleridge in a lecture given in 1811/12:

Verse-makers are not poets; the poet is the one who carries the simplicity of childhood into the powers of manhood; who, with a soul unsubdued by habit, unshackled by custom, contemplates all things with the freshness and the wonder of a child; and, connecting with it the inquisitive powers of riper years adds, as far far as he can find knowledge, admiration; and, where knowledge no longer permits admiration, gladly sinks back again into the childlike feeling of devout wonder.

The poet is not only the man made to solve the riddle of the universe, but he is also the man who feels where it is not solved.

This is not a description of a poet - this is Coleridge's description of a poet he thinks is good. Poetry is an indicator of form, not quality. Poet is a person who makes poems. Poem is a collection of, first-and-foremost, words.

This Romantic idea of Poet = Sage = Mystic = God... still with us and we're not we over it yet. This is why lots of people choose to be poets. For the perceived superiority. Sometimes the arrogance of some poets make me shake my head and go aargh!. In the words of the west of Scotland: ye think yir somthin, but ye know whit? yir nothin. Poets are not better people than you or me - some of them just write good poems.

Now I want them to get back to that job of just writing poems - good and bad and mediocre.

Some PCs - click for bigness

2010-11-04T23:41:00.001+01:00

Pleased to meet you...

2010-11-04T23:31:00.002+01:00

... won't you guess my name?

So, yesterday I took a half day and went to the GOMA at around 2ish. I sat in the cafe in the basement where the library is. I read my collection of Chatwin's journalism and odds'n'ends. And then in comes someone trailing a purple suitcase on wheels who smiled at me and me at them.

Who was it?

It was JoAnne! (aka'd as Titus The Dog) It's always strange to meet some online person and find out they're exactly like you imagined - but in this case, so much more so. I spent around two very happy hours in her company and laughed packets.

And she almost convinced me to read Moby Dick. (I should maybe have mentioned the fantastic pop-up version of it you get. She may know about this already.)

Collisions from both sides...

2010-11-01T20:20:00.002+01:00

Last week I did the 15 Favourite Authors thingummy at Facebook (at Marion's request). My 15 were:

1. Hergé
2. Jorge Luis Borges
3. Bruce Chatwin
4. Ivor Gurney
5. Alice Oswald (and her husband, Peter)
6. Christopher Isherwood
7. George Mackay Brown
8. David Crystal
9. Italo Calvino
10. Georges Perec
11. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
12. Pablo Neruda
13. Douglas Hofstadter (for one book)
14. Graham Greene
15. Ryszard Kapuscinski

I felt a bit bad about their only being one woman there... but then, why should I? If I prefer these writers in the same way as some women might prefer 14 women and 1 man, am I to be thought a lesser human being?

And I'm surprised that Graham Greene made it in there. I think it might be better to turf him out and get Emily Dickinson in in his place.

***

Number 3 on the list - he came quickly. It's Bruce Chatwin. And when I popped into WH Smith the day after to get the TLS who was staring at me from the cover? Yip, Bruce. This photo of him:

He's on the cover of the TLS because a collection of his letters was published a few months back. The book is reviewed , over three pages, by William Dalrymple. He recalls how, aged 21, he met Chatwin and was entranced.

"I have been thinking of that first meeting a lot in the past few weeks while reading both Chatwin's letters, and the sometimes markedly hostile reviews the book has generated. For Chatwin's star has faded dramatically since I first met him."

Later:

"... the pendulum of fashion has swung against Chatwin, and it is now decidedly unhip to admire his work. In a recent piece in the Spectator, for example, Philip Hensher dismissed him as "an absurd pseud... a reporter who had the wit to go to some very interesting places... unsystematic and frequently cranky... that very familiar figure, the young man on the make."

But at the end, Dalrymple gives a positive review of the book - and of Chatwin himself.

"Within the last few years, Wilfrid Thesiger, Norman Lewis, Nicolas Bouvier, Ryszard Kapuscinski and Eric Newby have all followed Bruce on their last journey ... Yet of all of these Bruce Chatwin is, for me at least, the greatest talent, and by far the greatest loss."

Quite right. I'm not going to apologise for loving his five little books. Nor for ignoring, hidden deep in the admiration, the fact that I wouldn't have liked him in Real Life.

He just wrote good.

For Nitoo...

2010-11-01T20:04:00.003+01:00

... I know she'll like this passage from The Diary of Lady Murasaki (trans. Richard Bowring):

Returning to my room, I looked in at Lady Saisho's door, only to find her asleep. She lay with her head pillowed on a writing box, her face all but hidden by a series of robes - dark red lined with green, purple lined with dark red - over which she had thrown a deep crimson gown of unusually glossy silk. The shape of her forehead was enchanting and so delicate. She looked just like one of those princesses you find depicted in illustrations, I pulled back the sleeve that covered her face,

"You remind me of a fairy-tale princess!" I said.

She looked up with a start.

"You are dreadful!" she said, propping herself up. "Waking people up like that without a thought!"

I remember being struck by the attractive way her face suddenly flushed. So it is that someone normally very beautiful can look even more beautiful than ever on occasions.

As I start typing...

2010-10-06T23:59:00.004+01:00

It's 1 minute to National Poetry Day. Woo. Hoo. It would be nice if people who didn't read poetry often would do so because they actually wanted to, not because they felt they "ought to". And therefore wouldn't really need a day to remind them that it exists - there is, after all, no National Prose Day that I'm aware of.

Is anyone looking forward to this? I mean - I've *always* wanted to watch Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson as middle class literary types going for lunch. That may not have been sarcastic enough.

Here are some Poets Cornereds:

More PC

2010-10-03T23:00:00.002+01:00

One of them is an oldie... I think I might update and "beautify" some more of my first 120-odd. Any requests?

Musical Poems Recently Loved

2010-10-01T20:28:00.004+01:00

Woman in a Mustard Field by Alice Oswald

From love to light my element
was altered when I fled
out of your house to meet the space
that blows around my head

The sun was rude and sensible,
the rivers ran for hours
and whoops I found a mustard field
exploding into flowers;

And I slowly came to sense again
the thousand forms that move
all summer through a living world
that grows without your love.

(That last non-rhyme makes that last non-rhyme jump out at you, no?)

After you speak by Edward Thomas

After you speak
And what you meant
Is plain,
My eyes
Meet yours that mean -
With your cheeks and hair -
Something more wise,
More dark,
And far different,
Even so the lark
Loves dust
And nestles in it
The minute
Before he must
Soar in lone flight
So far,
Like a black star
He seems -
A mote
Of singing dust
Afloat
Above,
That dreams
And sheds no light.
I know your lust
Is love.

(The beaten up lines make those almost-too-hasty rhymes bounce around the head. You have to work to say this one - two readings, at least one of which must be spoken or mouthed, should be sufficient to say it. Oh, and this was written in 1916.)

Sleepe, angry beauty by Thomas Campion

Sleepe , angry beauty, sleep, and feare not me,
For who a sleeping Lyon dares provoke?
It shall suffice me here to sit and see
Those lips shut up that never kindly spoke.
What sight can more content a lovers minde
Then beauty seeming harmlesse, if not kinde?

My words have charm'd her, for secure shee sleepes,
Though guilty much of wrong done to my love;
And in her slumber, see! shee close-ey'd weepes!
Dreames often more then waking passions move.
Pleade, sleepe, my cause, and make her soft like thee,
That shee in peace may wake and pitty mee.

(This one was actually a sung-song - a lute song - from his Third Book of Ayres, 1617ish.)

***

And because I wrote "sung song", try this - it kinda fits:

Song sung blue
Everybody knows one
Song sung blue
Every garden grows one

Me and you are subject to
the blues now and then
But when you take the blues and make a song
You sing them out again

Song sung blue
Weeping like a willow
Song sung blue
Sleeping on my pillow

Funny thing, but you can sing
it with a cry in your voice
And before you know, start to feeling good
You simply got no choice

Song sung blue
Everybody knows one
Song sung blue
Every garden grows one

Poets Cornered - no. 11 & 12

2010-09-26T22:56:00.002+01:00

The first one... hmmm... ok, I'll give you this (it's not online):

Orpheus - WH Auden

What does this song hope for? And his moved hands
A little way from the birds, the shy, the delightful?
To be bewildered and happy,
Or most of all the knowledge of life?

But the beautiful are content with the sharp notes of the air;
The warmth is enough. O if winter really
Oppose, if the weak snowflake,
What will the wish, what will the dance do?

3 x Noisy-Pixies + 1 x Quiet-Pixies

2010-09-25T11:37:00.005+01:00

I never knew The Pixies made a video for Alec Eiffel - one of the only one songs I know about M'shure Ee-fell.

And here's Planet of Sound on the telly:

Surprisingly sweary at around 0:50, but it is educational - he says so:

I remember in Cuba letting a local guy borrow my mp3 player (the one with the little elephant attached to it that Heather had bought for me in Amsterdam). He listened and listened and eventually said: "When am I going to hear good music?" He had been given some CDs by a previous tourist. He wanted more U2 and the Stereophonics and the Chilli Peppers. I gave him Glen Campbell, My Bloody Valentine and, amongst others, this:

Armenian Miniatures

2010-09-25T11:11:00.003+01:00

I was in the Panoptican on High Street last week; I got a little bundle of postcards for £3 - they show, it says, Armenian Miniatures of the 13th and 14th Centuries from the Matendaran Collection, Yerevan.

I like the colours and general oddness of them. Here's one I've scanned - I may scan more.

Russian Fairy Tales and Long-Time-Ago Japan

2010-09-25T09:04:00.005+01:00

Yesterday I got a bumper book of Russian folk tales. It's a collection made by Aleksandr Afanasyev in the 1850s/1860s. I'm very curious about the weird folk that he got these stories from... Take the opening of Bukhtan Bukhtanovich:

"In a certain kingdom in a certain land there lived one Bukhtan Bukhtanovich, who had a stove built on pillars in the middle of a field. He lay on the stove in cockroach milk up to his elbows."

There may, of course, be an error in translation there but really, cockroach milk? But as an opening, it seems very Samuel Beckett to me.

Here's another story in total:

The Bladder, the Straw and the Shoes

A bladder, a blade of straw, and a shoe went to chop wood in the forest. They came to a river and did not know how to cross it. The shoe said to the bladder: "Bladder, let us swim across it on you." The bladder said: "No, shoe, let the straw blade instead stretch itself over from shore to shore, and we will walk over it." The blade of straw stretched itself across the water; the shoe walked on it and the straw broke. The shoe fell into the water, and the bladder laughed and laughed until it burst.

Why a bladder, a shoe and a blade of straw? Maybe there are some homophones or rhymes going on in the original Russian. Or maybe they represent a drunk man, a man with one shoe and a thin man? Or maybe it's simply as literal as it appears.

Whatever, the book is good. And of all the folk tale / fairy tale collections I have, this is the weirdest.

(Incidentally, some species of cockroach do produce "milk", I've just checked.)

***

I also got a copy of Lady Murasaki's diary - she lived around the turn of the first millennium in Japan. She wrote The Tale of Genji and was a contemporary (and fellow employee of the Empress Shoshi) of Sei Shonagon - they didn't like one another.

It's full of beautiful little passages (translated by Richard Bowring) and completely browsable. Here's the opening paragraph:

As Autumn advances, the Tsuchimikado mansion looks unutterably beautiful. Every branch on every tree by the lake and each tuft of grass on the banks of the stream takes on its own particular colour, which is intensified by the evening light. The voices in ceaseless recitation of sutras are all the more impressive as they continue throughout the night; in the slowly cooling breeze it is difficult to distinguish them from the endless murmur of the stream.

Later (maybe years later - the passages are undated and I haven't read the introduction yet):

On Autumn evenings, which positively encourage nostalgia, when I go out and sit on the veranda and gaze, I seem to be always conjuring up visions of the past - "and did they praise the beauty of this moon of yore"? Knowing full well that I am inviting the kind of misfortune one should avoid, I become uneasy and move inside a little, while still, of course, continuing to recall the past.

Sigh... I could read things like this all the time and be floppy-hand-on-forehead Romantic. And when reading that, I also imagine a certain Green Room I spent time in in Delhi.

The past is always with us;
this is our misfortune.
The future never is;
worse luck.

***

What does Murasaki say about Sei Shonagon?

Sei Shonagon ... was dreadfully conceited. She thought herself so clever and littered her writings with Chinese characters; but if you examined them closely, they left a lot to be desired. Those who think of themselves as being superior to everyone else in this way will inevitably suffer and come to a bad end, and people who have become so precious that they go out of their way to try and be sensitive in the most unpromising situations, trying to capture every moment of interest, however slight, are bound to look ridiculous and superficial. How can the future turn out well for them?

Ouch... Bloggers and tweeters beware ridicule and superficiality.

Poets Cornered #9 & #10

2010-09-23T19:21:00.001+01:00

Five Things

2010-09-23T18:59:00.002+01:00

one.
I walked past a rook yesterday morning. It wasn't scared - it stayed solid on the pavement, it's head turning to watch me as I moved along. From as close as I was, I could see that its feathers were giving off an oil-slick purpliness.

two.
I walked out of the GOMA library (and coffee stop) with Magpie yesterday. On one of the racks there was a magazine with Tom Waits on the cover. She, surprisingly, likes Tom Waits. As we climbed the steps and made our way out to Royal Exchange Square I tried to describe the most surreal situation I've ever been in. I've tried to write poems about it, I've told dozens of people - but everyone says: "yeah, and...?" It involves Tom Waits and a spice shop in Morocco.

three.
I saw Bus Stop Girl for the first time in months today. Not only has she stopped going to the bus stop I go to, she's changed the town where she gets off the train. Yikes... I must truly be an awful person. :(

four.
I'm taking a week off work in October - my first thought was to go to Orkney. But then I thought: why not Northumbria? But then, but then... where?! I want somewhere I've never been before... I'm even almost-tempted by a city.

five.
I've been listening to The 1900s a lot over the past few days. I like this one, but there's only a live version on youtube. I've been having crazy thoughts of starting up an acoustic instrumental group - no singing. Ever. I'd call it The Harpo Marx (or Marks, take your pick).

Occasionally...

2010-09-19T23:11:00.002+01:00

... I have a yearning for 1960s French music. Here are some:

Juliette Gréco:

And the same by Serge Gainsbourg and Phillipe Clay:

Poets Cornered no. 7 & 8

2010-09-19T23:09:00.002+01:00

Blogthargia

2010-09-19T23:04:00.002+01:00

I've been feeling very blogthargic recently... but I've done some things:

I've returned to the obscenity of Lathynarn (only 6 and a bit parts left to write!);
I've been drawn back to Facebook;
I've been doing silly drawings (see below);
I've been working on more Poets Cornereds (and wondering whether to redraw some of my old ones in the "new" way;
I've been strumming my ukulele a lot.

So, not lazy... just blog-lazy.

If you cry, cry only one tear...

2010-09-18T11:49:00.001+01:00

A tragic nursery rhyme from the 18th Century. Prepare to cry and sob and weep:

Little Betty Pringle she had a pig,
it was not very little and not very big;
When he was alive he lived in clover,
But now he's dead and that's all over.
Johnny Pringle he sat down and cried,
Betty Pringle she lay down and died;
So there was an end of one, two, three,
Johnny Pringle he,
Betty Pringle she,
And Piggy Wiggy.

(Apparently Robert Southey claimed it was the most unbearably sad thing he heard as a two year old and couldn't listen to the end... I, personally, was more interested in chewing table tops.)

Why oh why oh why oh why oh why___

2010-09-16T23:33:00.001+01:00

___ does YouTube insist on recommending things like this to me?!

Does it know nothing about me at all?

I also got this as well... and I kinda like it.

Poets Cornered - no. 6

2010-09-16T23:25:00.002+01:00

(I spent a ridiculously long time drawing that fox... before the colour went on some people said it looked like a cat. Hmph. It's based on the origami fox I make. Some people say it's more like a cat in paper as well. Hmph.)

"... a mouse is used to draw."

2010-09-16T22:57:00.002+01:00

I got Keith Haring's journals the other day, having chanced upon an entry in the Penguin blog about it. (Almost half price at Amazon if anyone's interested.)

I've not read much so far - just dipped in and out.

Here's something from July 8, 1986:

I was ... interested in the tactile experience of drawing, which is very different on a computer. Time-lapse (and/or spacial displacement) occurs when a "mouse" is used to draw. This displacement of image and action creates a new problem to be solved by the "drawer". The drawer then has the added ability to take the image and manipulate its color, size, and placement. The image becomes a workable entity restricted only by the limitations of the computer program, programmer, and the screen of the monitor itself.

There are endless possibilities to be investigated in this area.

He died 4 years later, long before he got a chance to see things like this.

Poets Cornered - no. 5

2010-09-14T22:53:00.002+01:00

It's number 5 by the new numbering...

And so, the next Poets Cornereds...

2010-09-12T19:22:00.003+01:00

... are all over at Facebook.

But I think I'll continue to upload them here... they'll maybe be too small to read as is, so please click for largeness.

And why four in two days? Well, I'm starting from scratch at FB, so I needed more than one!

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT (no, really...)

2010-09-12T19:10:00.001+01:00

Well, only important if you're interested in developments surrounding Poets Cornered. If you are... read on.

***

Further to yesterday's momentous one-framer, here's something equally momentous: Poets Cornered is moving!

Where to? All the way to Facebook and you can find it by clicking on this lovely link (non-FBers as well - it's open to the world).

It would also be nice if you befriended wee Poughbuoy... aw, shucks - you know you want to.

Many apologies for any perceived and/or unperceived inconvenience/convenience*.

* wherein lies the basis of a tongue twister...

Poets Cornered #127

2010-09-11T11:32:00.006+01:00

As suggested... things have changed in the Poets Cornered department.And they will continue to change - 4 panels was always a bit restrictive.

"Women of India: Protected and Progressive"

2010-09-11T10:46:00.003+01:00

I was given an old Fodor's Guide to India - I'm sure I saw the date 1968 somewhere in it, but on looking again the only one I can find is 1962.

It's not structured like modern guidebooks - like Lonely Planet or Rough Guide - it's less interested in telling you where you can sleep or eat than it is in telling you about the country. This book is not backpacker friendly.

But it's still interesting. Here, from the Foreword:

This is the first definitive guide book of India in over one hundred years. Since 1859, India has rocketed from a backwater colony into the forefront of the world's leading nations, not only by virtue of her sheer size and power, but even more because of her astonishing political maturity and tenacious allegiance to high moral values in her dealings with the rest of the world.

There's a chapter on the place of women in Indian society - written by Taya Zinkin. Here are a few quotes.

Indian women - or rather, Hindu women, the ones I shall consider here - have never been subjugated to their husbands, only downtrodden by their mothers-in-law.
In her new home the wife's only ally is her husband, whom she is not supposed to meet in public, to whom she is not supposed to speak within earshot of the older members of the family, but whom she meets at night in the throes of passion. The husband knows it is his duty to satisfy his wife ... the woman tries to please her husband while satisfying her own needs. Frigidity is rare in India...
To imagine that the wife is downtrodden is mistaken.
What is holding India back is the fact that so many of the women are still not educated because of the old prejudice against sending girls to school and because of the influence of Islamic culture on much of Northern India, where to this day women are more than shy. Mr Nehru once told me that if he could have his way he would arrange for women alone to be educated throughout the sub-continent; in that way he could make the whole country literate for the mothers would teach their sons and the sisters their brothers and shame them into emulation.
As more women earn an independent income, so the pressure on them to marry, or indeed to stay married to an unsuitable partner, goes down.
Far from being shy and retiring, Indian women are made of steel ... Take for example the case of most unmarried working women; they have had to put up with an epic fight to preserve their freedom, for in India, socially, there is no room for spinsters. Yet there is an increasing number of unmarried women who earn both their own livelihood and the respect of men. This, in a world where only prostitutes used to remain single, represents a major achievement. Indian society has grown to make room for them, whether it is a Director of All India Radio or a Governor of a State, or the welfare officer in a factory, or a poultry farmer; all, in their quiet way, have helped to emancipate women by refusing to get married merely for marriage's sake.

Compare this from the 2009 Lonely Planet for India:

For the urban, middle-class woman, life is materially comfortable, but pressures still exist. Broadly speaking, she is far more likely to receive a tertiary education, but once married is still usually expected to 'fit in' with her in-laws and be a homemaker above all else. Like her village counterpart, if she fails to live up to expectations - even if it's just not being able to produce a grandson - the consequences can sometimes be dire...

The future's bright, the future's less straight-lined

2010-09-10T23:08:00.003+01:00

Some of you may have noticed a lack of Poughbouy. My last Poets Cornered was posted on the 26th June.

Since then I've been doing other sorts of visual things - first there was my poet-face t-shirts/posters/postcards, now there's my imaginary film posters. What I've actually been doing is learning how to draw in a different way. I like this new way of drawing. Prompted by Nit this morning, I've been at work on an update to our favourite poetry comic strip character.

Here is Old Poughbuoy confused and confuzzled by New Poughbuoy who is likewise:

He'll be back soon - other things will change as well.

Meme-a-licious

2010-09-10T22:30:00.002+01:00

I know, I know, I know... I've said it before: I hate the word "meme". It was, it appears, invented by Richard Dawkins - that angry wee man.

But Titou le Chien passed the following on. Please go here to read what she has to say.

***

1. Why did you start blogging?

Because Nitoo suggested it... My first post (on my first blog) was back on the 27th May 2005 - post title: "Should I do this or not?" I wrote:

Mmm... what am I to do? If I choose to start a blog I need something to blog about... And that raises this question: do I post my poems? I've objected elsewhere to doing that online.

Why should this be different?

I had stopped going to MSN poetry communities - I had increasingly found them to be nasty little places full of spite and bitterness. Personalities were there to attack and be attacked; poetry was of secondary importance. I got tired of it all... and then got tired of writing. It was then I coined my sceptical quatrain:

"Any fool can get published,"
the wise man sat and said.
"But the clever part of writing
is this: to have your work read."

Nit started her blog, then I started mine. It took a long, long time for me to realise what I wanted a blog to be (like Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book, essentially) but I persevered and practised and finally I came to realise that blogs are most definitely not essays online. I continued - and continue - because I like the ramshackle of subjects, videos, pictures and links.

[And I now find myself asking what the future of blogging is... I mentioned this to Nit a few weeks ago: blogs seem *so* last decade. What do personal blogs add to the world? Are they all destined to fizzle out in the next few years?]

2. If you could travel anywhere in the world with no restriction of costs, where would it be and why?

It's a big world, baby.

Like Titou, an area of Africa. But for me it would be West Africa: Mali, Niger, Ghana, etc., etc. That big expanse that Mungo Park took himself to. Here's a map of where he went.

But that's not everywhere I'd go, of course - there's East Africa, Ethiopia. There's South America - the Altiplano, the Andes. There's back to India - I saw virtually none of it.

I want to see flat expanses and I want to see mountains.

3. Did you have a teacher in school that had a great influence on your life? If so, what?

Mrs Anderton - my English teacher when I was in 3rd and 4th year at school. I wrote to her in late 2008 to tell her how much her teaching of poetry meant to me. Part of her reply:

"I hope that I have touched a chord with many young people: that is what has kept me doing this job for so many years and I am truly grateful for some affirmation of that. You have made my day!!"

And also Mr Armstrong my maths teacher all through High School - his attempt to demonstrate the beauty of mathematics to a class of cynical 16-year-olds may have failed on the rest, but it worked on me.

4. If you could spend the day with a famous person, who would it be, and what would you do?

Now there's a question... I've never been one to idol worship. But I'd like to go the pub with Wayne Coyne of The Flaming Lips, Bjork and the resurrected spirit of Harpo Marx. We'd play I Spy and then go for a curry.

5. Toilet paper – over or under?

I'm presuming that this in reference to how it is put on the holder? If so, the loose part of the roll hangs against the wall. It looks neater.

6. Name one thing in your life that you would do over if possible.

There are so, so many things... I have lots of regrets - on occasion, I think my life 'til now has been one big mistake. One event in particular jumps to mind. But I don't want to talk about it.

7. Tell about your pets – if any.

I have none. Haven't had one since I was a student - a dog that was put down for biting (and hospitalising my mother - she nearly had her arm amputated). He was called Jackie.

8. Do you live in a small town or a large town.

I stay in a village of between 2 and 3 thousand people. Some suggest that it's a small town - but we have a Spar, a bank that opens two days a week, a butchers, a bakers, one church and one chapel. We're a village.

Another two of these...

2010-09-07T22:48:00.004+01:00

With thanks to The Watercats for suggesting these posters aren't tedious after all. :)

Oh, the pains of unknowing!

2010-09-07T22:41:00.002+01:00

My last two imaginary film covers for a bit...

2010-09-05T23:47:00.002+01:00

This could get boring very quickly. :os

Scott Pilgrim

2010-09-05T23:38:00.003+01:00

I went to see Scott Pilgrim vs The World with Margaret yesterday. I think we were the oldest people in the audience.

It's directed by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Spaced) and I very much enjoyed it - it's silly and noisy and smart and so packed with imagination that I was dumbstruck at several parts. However I also recognise that many people will hate it. I want to read the comic books it's based on now as well.

Here's an old (11 year old) song from the soundtrack:

And the title - If We Can Land A Man On The Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart - is a perfectly good and logical argument, no?

What do mathematicians know about the English language?!

2010-09-05T23:33:00.002+01:00

Here's that numbers guy Tom Lehrer telling us how to change adjectives into adverbs.

And now all about silent Es...

(These were done for an American kids programme called The Electric Company.)

Beautiful and floaty

2010-09-04T09:36:00.001+01:00

All those poems in a row...

2010-09-04T09:14:00.003+01:00

... I meant to write about my writing marathon during the week. I didn't. Why? Because it probably doesn't matter that much to me... I wrote what I did, then I stopped. Last year I said I wouldn't run the marathon again. I also said that it was a fairly easy thing to do. One of them was a lie.

But I'll write something.

***

This year, for the sake of ease and consistency, I chose to write with a theme - the theme was "India" in all its dirty, peacocking glory.

And what a variety I wrote... This year was very much a game, you see. How much can I do with one theme? And with a theme that is essentially only three weeks of my life.

I wrote sonnets and nursery rhymes; alliterative verse and blues; sound poems and nonsense; mysterious poems and stupid ones; hindi poems and ex-colonial ones.

One person is generally missing from them all... me. The exception to that is day 17

Poem written in Amritsar beneath one reckless fan and one ruthless gecko when I was quite, quite quiet and quite, quite alone

I've got a heart
on proof - and see:
it beats like so;

and whatever even
then and though
it beats it breaks

has broken, is broke
and may not again
might not, p'raps not

beat a rattle
to households again -
but no, it's true...

my heart lives on proof
and does its thing
through and through.

But that's the only place the Real Me appears. Harpo Marx careering through Amritsar is possibly a cipher for me, as is the person who wrote a letter to Captain Haddock; I might be that Leh Palace Ghost with its watering eye. And am I that person on the More Plains who almost gets pickpocketed by the boy I had just offered a mango and a sandwich to? Maybe, maybe.. But it doesn't matter if I am or not. These are poems. They are not the same as reality.

***

Nitoo also completed her 31 poems and wrote about the act of writing them at Facebook. I want to steal something she sad in response to a comment about her use of "ornate" language and "literary wordplay".

She said:

I do it for several reasons.

a) The sheer aural quality of poetry is something I feel strongly about.

b) I react almost physically to the pure play of sounds.

c) I think many poets ignore this very important element in their writing, thereby deadening and blunting their poetic edge.

d) It is my way of engaging not only with verbal acoustics and acrobatics, but also with language (and its purity and meaning/lessness).

e) Unlike some Indian poets, English is not my first language and I bring from my own language a history of soundscapes slightly different from the styles present in English.

(f) Lastly, one of my (frivolous, perhaps) reasons for this “baroque” wordplay is the definite sense that I can do with it (English) what I want. Language can become simply sounds; beautiful, affecting, yet strangely indifferent.

Point (b) is one I feel so much and I wish most people did as well. In the same way that the hairs go up on the back of my neck at certain passages of music it happens with beautiful passages of words.

Point (c) - a poet who isn't interested in what their poem sounds like and who only care about what it says... well, I'll be ruthless, they're of little interest to me.

(Note to self: I need to write something about the physicality of music, both when making it and when hearing it.)

I'd add a couple of things (that come from what she said):

1) Poetic language is not the same as the language we speak every day - it can't be, otherwise everything would be poetry and then "being poetry" would mean nothing. As such, we have to look for what poetic languages there are out there.

2) WS Graham asked what language is using us for - I'd say that a poet should be in charge of their language. It's a very complicated musical instrument that poets need to practice with. And once practiced, you can play the harp like Harpo. Each string is a poetic phrase, each finger a way of speaking it:

August 31st / Titles

2010-08-31T23:28:00.002+01:00

For the past month I've been doing what Nit has called "POETRIFYING FOR A MONTH". Every day in August we've each written a poem - her's are here, mine are there.

I'll write more about the exercise tomorrow as it's late and I had dinner with Mel and wrote the final poem after she'd left and I drank some hot chocolate. (We were at Mono on King Street... nice music shop in there, and - rather disconcertingly - Trans Europe Express playing as we ate.)

But I'll leave you with the titles of my 31 poems... For a poem, a title can essentially be regarded as the first line - so much so, of course, that in lots of cases the first line is the title.

Another kind of title for a poem is one that can be regarded as meta-information - it tells you something beyond what the poem will choose to tell you. I tend to prefer these types of titles.

I usually spend a fair amount of time thinking of titles.

Phyang Festival, 9th July 2010
Ladakhi Stones
The ex-colonialist examines a pile of Ladakhi stones
Looking for a copy of “Indian Hill Birds” (OUP, 1949) by Sálim Ali
The ice rink in Leh
Skimming stones
Antediluvian Leh
An Anglo Saxon Song: “White Button from Indraprastha College for Women”
The ex-colonialist to his long-lost native lover
A letter to Captain Haddock
Himalayan Lathynarn
Road Worker Blues
“Ode to the Delhi Metro”
My first poem in Hindi
The ex-colonialist picks up an Indian child’s Abecedary
Shonagh demonstrates the centre of Wheel of Dharma to me...
Poem written in Amritsar beneath one reckless fan and one ruthless gecko when I was quite, quite quiet and quite, quite alone
Harpo Marx: Lost in Amritsar
Leh Palace Ghost
Dogs of Leh
Plateau
Salesman, Manali
Prayer for rock balancing, heard in Likir Gompa
Photographs near Pang
The Indus Valley Explodes for Kiran
Brother Peacock watches a Scotsman and prepares to stone the sky
I am a boy in Alchi
Foothill Crow:
There is always realisation
Review: Mōra /Mōranī (2010)
Leaving Ladakh

Posters

2010-08-31T23:23:00.004+01:00

Following on from my post about Saul Bass the other day, I thought I'd attempt my own 1950/60s style film posters in that stylish style.

The first one has several similarities to one of the Bass originals.

The films are, of course, made up. But I'd imagine everyone knows the stories they tell.

Don't think once, twice, thrice, ...

2010-08-28T11:04:00.002+01:00

... fourice? "Fourtimes" sounds so awkward. Hmmph... the English language fails us again! Anyway, here we have covers of Dylan's Don't Think Twice, It's All Right...

Elvis:

Helen Cornelius:

Nick Drake:

Johnny Cash:

Sophie Madeleine:

And the only place I can find the original on youtube - end of Season One of Mad Men. 50 seconds of it.

Saul Bass

2010-08-28T09:20:00.005+01:00

I've been looking at lots of film posters by Saul Bass...

I love the simplicity of the designs - the audacity even. Remember that there'd be lots of cutting out and gluing and inking and stencilling for these posters which would make them time-consuming to construct.

This is something that could be done in minutes today... Given that, with all the wonders of technology, would a modern film studio be happy with something as basic as these?

(My favourite thing is the refusal in lots of his work to go straight, the refusal to have right angles or to line things up. He operates two foot to the left...)

Bitzenbobs (being six 14-liners)

2010-08-26T22:06:00.003+01:00

From the John Kinsella book I got on Sunday:

the insulation of the new york sonnet by John Kinsella
(for Noel Sheridan)

I don't know if there's such a thing
as the new york sonnet, and I can't find
out until I get my copy of Denby back
from a guy who shot through to Carnarvon
at short notice. It's not likely that
tracking stations, bananas, racism, and
the Gascoyne River are going to yield
a response, but Denby, to whom you handed
a cup of tears some years ago in a film
that was rumoured to be a sonnet in itself,
holds the answer, not so much in the dance
of language, but in his collecting insulators
from the tops of power pylons and giving them
as tokens of gratitude to his closest friends.

***

From a book I got signed in Delhi:

When I went over to the other side by Nitoo Das

I think it was you
I saw crouching behind
that leaky amaltas tree.

You were doubled
over with want
and never saw me

dribble my love onto your face.

You just swayed
and flailed, ignored my nipple-
clamps, my elk-cracker kisses

and smelt the bristly
yellow of hawks

aching
in the dark.

***

From my recently acquired book of nonsense verse:

Sonnet Found in a Deserted Mad-House by Anon

Oh that my soul a marrow-bone might seize!
For the old egg of my desire is broken,
Spilled is the pearly white and spilled the yolk, and
As the mild melancholy contents grease
My path the shorn lamb baas like bumblebees.
Time's trashy purse is a taken token
Or like a thrilling recitation, spoken
By mournfu; mouths filled full of mirth and cheese.

And yet, why should I clasp the earthen urn?
Or find the frittered fig that felt the fast?
Or choose to chase the cheese around the urn?
Or swallow any pill from out the past?
Ah, no Love, not while your hot kisses burn
Like a potato riding on the blast.

***

From Adrian Mitchell's Heart on the Left - Poems 1953-1984:

The Institution by Adrian Mitchell

The crazy talkers in my head
Steal lights and moments when they can;
Beat at the windows to be fed
Or listen to the sounds of rain.
They stroll, they shout at passing Man,
And in extremes they form a a plan
To drown at night, or catch a train.

Simple as glass, they wander through
The colours of my twenty years
Singing and whispering the true
And false of all my private cares;
Inflated songs that shrink to fears.
My chest is thick, so no one hears
The lovely mute who kicks and tears...

***

From Edwin Morgan's Sonnets from Scotland:

On Jupiter by Edwin Morgan

Scotland was found on Jupiter. That's true.
We lost all track of time, but there it was.
No one told us its origins, its cause.
A simulacrum, a dissolving view?
It seemed as solid as a terrier
shaking itself dry from a brisk black swim
in the reservoir of Jupiter's grim
crimson trustless eye. No soul-ferrier
guarded the swampy waves. Any gods there,
if they had made the ting in play, were gone,
and if the land had launched its life out
among the echoes of inhuman air,
its launchers were asleep, or had withdrawn,
throwing their stick into a sea of doubt.

***

From Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe:

Telescopes by Rebecca Elson

Those few brave pilgrims
Standing white robed
At the edge
Of earth and sky
On their mountain
In the thin, dry air,
For all their altitude
No nearer, really, the stars.

But hopeful
And so patient,
High above the traffic
Of the lowlands, tracking
The minutiae if the Universe
Attentive to a different light.

Something noisy to waken up the neighbours...

2010-08-25T23:32:00.002+01:00

It's in two parts because it's so long. I got judged for this last week. In the office, Gordon and I were discussing long songs. I said I'd come up with a list of songs I like that are over 10 minutes long. No, wait... I said. There should be 11 - because it's more than 10.

I made that list, took it in, he took it home to his children. Oh, they apparently said. He likes Mogwai.

I lost all credibility in their eyes.

PS for those interested... Here are my 11 songs with timings.

Fela Kuti - Gentleman - 14:41
Yo La Tengo - Night Falls on Hoboken - 17:40
Franco & OK Jazz - Mario - 14:20
Dexy's Midnight Runners - This is What She's Like - 12:22
Isaac Hayes - Walk on By - 12:03
Television - Marquee Moon - 10:39
Sigur Ros - Viðrar vel til loftárása - 10:11
Stereolab - Jenny Ondioline - 18:08
Spiritualized - Cop Shoot Cop - 17:11
Tom Waits - Sins of My Father - 10:35
Mogwai - Mogwai Fear Satan - 16:19

Ridiculous

2010-08-23T22:40:00.001+01:00

I stole a view of this from Nit's on facebook...

This is the most ludicrous piece of cinema I've seen in a long time. And it's great. :)

Some very old poems for Rachel

2010-08-23T21:48:00.003+01:00

I recently got Pure Pagan: seven centuries of Greek poems and fragments. Translated by Burton Raffel. They're all from BC.

Here are a few:

Lover's Dialogue by Anon

He: Hello, pretty one.
She: Hello.
He: Who walks ahead of you?
She: None of your business.
He: But I have business in mind.
She: My mistress.
He: Is there any hope?
She: For what?
He: One night.
She: How much can you pay her?
He: Gold.
She: There's hope.
He: Here's what I have.
She: That's all? Forget it. She charges more for hope.

Grouse by Callimachus

I hate poems that go on and on and on.
I hate roads where everyone walks.
I loathe wandering lovers,
nor will I drink from just any well.
I detest everything common.
Oh, you're handsome, Lysus, you're very handsome.
But even as Echo says it again, I hear:
"He belongs to someone else."

Old Age by Menecrates

We all pray for it
Before it comes,
Then blame it
When it arrives.
Old age is a debt
We like to be owed,
Not one we like to collect.

A Girl's Speech by Philodemus

You moan, miserable. You gawk,
You're jealous, you kiss me, you paw me.
How loverlike. And then I say: "I'm here!"
And you flop like a fish instead of a lover.

Try Singing by Alkman

For feasts
For feasting
For eating with men
Try singing as you eat.

Girl with a frog hooded jacket + Book buy

2010-08-23T20:21:00.004+01:00

Yesterday, I wentclimbed halfway up Ben Ledi with Rhoda. Why halfway? Because the clouds were low, we could see no summit, the path was disappearing into the mist and rain. It's not a big hill, the path's ok and not steep. No problem making it to the top.

But there's no joy in getting to a summit and not seeing anything, I said.

Eventually she said: Ok, Ok, let's get a sticky bun in Callander.

On the way down we met a group of 3 women and one girl aged about 8 coming up. She had a rock.

I'm looking for somewhere to hide my rock, she said very confidently. She wanted to keep it and take it home, but was advised not to carry it up the hill. She thought someone might steal it.

The person presumed to be her mother smiled a hello at us.

The best place, I said, to hide something is in the open - in full view. Then people won't think it's valuable.

She thought about this with head to one side, then nodded.

You could keep it on this big rock here, I said, pointing at a large boulder by the path. She put it right in the middle.

Thank you very much for your help! she shouted at us from 4 foot away.

We all said goodbye and they went up to the clouds and we went down to the wet carpark.

***

In a tatty "antiques" shop in Callendar I got a Bloodaxe book for £1: John Kinsella, Poems 1980-1994.

Never knowingly read anything by him. This isn't the picture on the back, but it's similar. He smiles a lot, it seems.

And I've leafed through, but not read much.

Man in a Shed

2010-08-21T20:37:00.002+01:00

YouTube recommendation for today.

This was the first Nick Drake song I ever learned to play on the guitar... I prefer this version to the final album version.

P.S. For those who may not believe it (some don't) this was recorded live with just Nick accompanying himself on guitar i.e. there is only one guitar playing. Some folk insist there are two - likewise with this song. Only one guitar, honest!

Poems by Groucho, John and Edwin

2010-08-21T19:39:00.006+01:00

From Stefan Kanfer's biography of Groucho Marx:

"Although Groucho was uncredited in the program, he contributed one long recitative into [the stage version of Animal Crackers]. A few minutes were needed for a scene change, and he wrote a nonsense poem; it was delivered deadpan with one foot on the stage and the other planted on a kitchen chair:

Did you ever sit and ponder as you walk along the strand
That life's a bitter battle at the best
And if you only knew it and would lend a helping hand
Then every man can meet the final test.
The world is but a stage, my friend, and life is but a game;
And how you play is all that matters in the end.
For whether man is right or wrong,
A woman gets the blame;
And your mother is your dog's best friend.
Then up came mighty Casey and strode up to the bat,
And Sheridan was fifty miles away,
For it takes a heap of loving to make a home like that,
On the road where the flying fishes play.

At this point he would remove his foot and drag the chair slowly off the the stage as he concluded, "So be a real-life Pagliacc' and laugh, clown, laugh." Groucho found that the literate audiences would break up at his entr'acte. The less sophisticated would applaud them respectfully, as if they were in the presence of a laureate. 'To them,' he wrote, 'my recitation was a great piece of philosophy.'"

***

What are we to say to that? Groucho - vaguely pretentious, from a poor background, self-educated - noted that the literate laughed and the non-literate applauded.

What does this say about nonsense and poetry?

***

I was maybe - maybe - harsh about John Ashbery in my post last week about nonsense. By coincidence, he has a new poem in the TLS this week. Here it is:

Pass It On by John Ashbery

Unless there is a doctor or something up here,
I'd pass on it. If there is ever a time line
you should forget about horse-drawn streetcars
so as to concentrate on the argyle pavement. Seriously,
a few years ago, back in the ... Then he came, sweetly,
his almost-definition of tired tricks of the trade
wearing the appropriate smiles of merchandise long on display.

Of the last few different... Just don't ask him how it's done.
Anyone who has been exposing himself in the public gardens
will have noted the loud freshness of the attention there.
Because it just happens, or is there a secret reason
why animals go to sleep when they do? Who notices which things
observe what is happening to them, and, further along,
who sponsors the mismatched organic conundrums and sorts out
where they came from? The dustpan, that's who.

Her lemon paisley hobble-skirted cutout became airborne
some minutes after the fatal collision. As an apology
for mud pies it's a classic, and not a moment too soon.

Here we might have something different to Groucho's reaction - the literate applaud respectfully, while the less sophisticated would laugh uncontrollably. Maybe, maybe... who knows, who knows... but I do know that having been living with Groucho this week (as I read the biography) I can hear him speaking the full poem - it's like an unfunny montage of Groucho clips. Try reading it but using his voice. It's entertaining. :)

Then ask yourself if the poem is a "nonsense poem"...

***

After my post last week, Nit commented that perhaps all surreal (small 's') poems are Nonsense (big 'N') poems. I think they are.

***

With Edwin Morgan dying I've been leafing through his Collected Poems 1949-1987 - that Carcanet brick that runs to 608 pages.

Here's something called Hrimfaxi from a sequence called The Horseman's Word. (Hrimfaxi, in Norse mythology, is the horse that belongs to the Night.)

Hrimfaxi by Edwin Morgan

champ and jingle, silver, crystal
hungry, starry, gallop and pound
sweat and startle, gristle, thunder
pawing, polar, whinny and strain
hoof and moonlight, scattered, axebright
stamping, flaring, neighing and cold
back and belly, bludgeon, brandish
darkness, lightning, windpack and hunt
bit and harness, hurry, hover
rider, phantom, shadow and dew
lip and slaver, rhimedrop, running
frostlike, tingling, quiver and shine
globe and grassblade, viking, inkling
quickly, nightly, bridled and black

Of course, this one isn't a nonsense poem - it's purely descriptive of a mythological viking horse that belongs to the night and whose name translates as Frost Mane.

What does the audience make of this one? Laughter or applause? Which? Go on, tell me...

***

Nonsense, nonsense... it's not a bad word. It is, in fact, a good word. It's the audience we should take issue with.

Edwin Morgan

2010-08-19T20:09:00.003+01:00

Edwin Morgan died today.

Seamus Heaney has said this:

“A solitary spirit who breathed solidarity, an experimenalist who did not disdain ‘accessibility’, his subject was the big one Patrick Kavanagh identified as ‘the parish and the universe’. What I liked greatly about him was the way he combined a low key personal presence with a high level of poetic endeavour.”

***

I met him once, and only to shake a hand. He seemed very old then and that was 16 years ago.

I knew his poems before that, as we had studied him at school - so my first meeting with a "real life poet" was one where I knew he was a poet. That maybe makes a difference.

I got his collection Cathures when I was on Islay a few years ago - a small bookshop in Bowmore. On a small island like that - with its sense of enormity in sky - you get the feeling of the parish and the universe.

This is from it:

Sunset by Edwin Morgan

Dear light of evening, breaking through
To where I stand in dark review
Of things to come, and things undone
That should be done, if I have won
Any remission for good intent,
Stay with me while your gold is sent,
Your orange and your red, those miles
In millions, giving fire to tiles
And spires and windows, and to me
A burning coat of hope. I see
The harmless flames, walk into them
The last light hardens to a gem.

Songs recently loved

2010-08-15T11:20:00.005+01:00

Last week, Alice made a Spotify playlist of Canadian bands (link at her bit). I liked this one especially:

I've gone back to The Magnetic Fields Distortion album... watch this and wonder why it's called that.

And why not the "real" California Girls? With it's amazingly perfect, perfectly fantastic, fantastically YES! first 22 seconds. And the harmonies do funny things to the hairs on my neck... let's just forget about Mike Love.

The theme from Get Carter. I like this. So sue me. (GUGUG do a uke and bongos version as well...)

And some Yo La Tengo, just because (and because the video's great - it's, like, so 1993):

Nonsense (literary)

2010-08-15T10:36:00.002+01:00

Secondhand book shopping yesterday. I got Stefan Kanfer's biography of Groucho Marx and The Faber Book of Nonsense Verse (ed. Geoffrey Grigson).

I'm very happy with the book of nonsense. In the Introduction, Grigson says:

It wouldn't be sensible ... to be too serious or too historical about nonsense; or to say, with one's jaw stuck out, that proper word-nonsense is only of one kind or another. We see in front of us a poem. We prepare to read it in the poem way. It looks normal, the shape decidedly announces poem, it is divided into stanzas. We begin. The poem rhymes, it does no violence to syntax, and we discover that
The common cormorant (or shag)
Lays eggs inside a paperbag...

Later he says:

The moment literature develops, nonsense literature must be expected as both a counter-genre and an innocent game.

The book is from 1979 and he warns that nonsense is in danger because of the amount of freedom in poetry i.e. formlessness. Nonsense relies on an agreement of what a poem is... most people uninvolved with the silliness of the poetry world agree what a poem is - it's just them damn silly poets wot can't.

Grigson:

I suppose that nonsense set going by writing which is formless and anarchic won't be much fun.

***

I've written my fair share of nonsense over the years (some of it intended as such, incidentally). And it always required a rhyme or a bounce of rhythm, just to convince folk it was nonsense. It can be hard these days to tell the difference, donchaknow... I'm looking at you, Johnny Ashbery. :o|

I wrote some nonsense last night. It was for my 31 poems in August exercise (today is day 15) and it is also my first poem in Hindi! The slight problem being - I don't speak Hindi. And even then, not a poem as such... just a tumble of words to sound like something.

My first poem in Hindi

पानी - रानी
लेनी - वेणी
सुनी - बुनी
ठानी - तो

होम - काम
कम - हम
गेम - लेम
थमा - सो

पोला - ढोल
कला - चला
मेला - साला
घाल - धो

Phonetically:

Pānī - rānī
Lēnī - vēṇī
Sunī - bunī
Ṭhānī - tō

Hōma - kāma
Kama - hama
Gēma - lēma
Thamā - sō

Pōlā - ḍhōla
Kalā - calā
Mēlā - sālā
Ghāla - dhō

"Translation":

water - queen
take - braid
heard - woven
decided - then

home - work
low - we
game - claim
issued - sleep

void - drums
art - gone
fair - fucking
chow - wash

Sala apparently actually means brother-in-law... says Nit: "It's a swear word because when you call someone that, it means you're fucking his sister. It's a very common word, though and has lost most of its edge." But am I going to believe someone who speaks the language or Google Translate? Sorry Nit... Google wins. ;)

***

Here are some from the book. Many are by Miss/Mister/Master Anon.

Infant Innocence by AE Housman

Reader behold! this monster wild
Has gobbled up the infant child.
The infant child is not aware
It has been eaten by the bear.

A Fancy by Monsieur Anon (1656)

When Piecrust first began to reign,
Cheese-parings went to war,
Red Herrings lookt both blue and wan,
Green Leeks and Puddings jar.
Blind Hugh went out to see
Two cripples run a race,
The Ox fought with the Humble Bee
And claw'd him by the face.

Untitled by Herr Anon (collected by Carl Sandburg, 1927)

Did you ever, ever, ever,
In your leaf, life, loaf,
See the deevel, divil, dovol,
Kiss his weef, wife, woaf?
No, I never, never, never,
In my leaf, life, loaf,
See the deevel, divil, dovol,
Kiss his weef, wife, woaf?

Tenuous and Precarious by Stevie Smith

Tenuous and Precarious
Were my guardians,
Precarious and Tenuous,
Two Romans.

My father was Hazardous,
Hazardous
Dear old man,
Three Romans.

There was my brother Spurious,
Spurious Posthumous,
Spurious was Spurious,
Was four Romans.

My husband was Perfidious,
He was Perfidious
Five Romans.
Surreptitious, our son,
Was Surreptitious,
He was six Romans.

Our cat Tedious
Still lives,
Count not Tedious
Yet.

My name is Finis,
Finis, Finis,
I am Finis,
Six, five, four, three, two,
One Roman,
Finis.

Chatwin and Borges

2010-08-09T23:00:00.007+01:00

About 10 years ago, there was a two part documentary about Bruce Chatwin on BBC2. I missed it then (I may not have been in the country) but it was repeated tonight on BBC4 - I've recorded the second hour to watch tomorrow.

When listing my "favourite writers (not poetry)", Chatwin is always there. He's there with Perec and Calvino and Isherwood and Mackay Brown and Borges.

Until tonight I'd never heard Chatwin speak, never seen him move. It was odd. But not incredibly so because I learned a lot about him from having read Nicholas Shakespeare's biography. Shakespeare also presented the documentary.

The best moment for me was BC talking about Borges. Here's the section from the biography:

In October 1983, [Chatwin] had appeared on BBC television with Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa in a discussion about South American Literature. He wrote: "... we both dutifully held our tongues when the Magus of Buenos Aires [Borges] appeared, and any attempt to have a chat thereafter was drowned in a flow of beautiful 17th Century English and beautiful Castilian verse." As Borges waited to come on stage, he overheard Bruce extolling him on the monitor: "You can't go anywhere without packing a Borges. It's like taking your toothbrush." Borges responded: "How unhygienic."

Not that I like to contradict Borges, but being compared to a toothbrush is actually very hygienic...

That little section where Bruce told us how great Borges was was magical. I couldn't quite believe I was seeing it.

***

Here's some aphoristic Borges from transcripts of lectures he gave in 1977. (Translated by Eliot Weinberger.)

"Lately I've been rereading psychology books, and I have felt singularly defrauded. All of them discuss the mechanisms of dreams or the subjects of dreams, but they do not mention, as I had hoped, that which is so astonishing, so strange - the fact of dreaming."

"We say that Spanish is a sonorous language, that English is a language of varied sounds, that Latin has a certain dignity to which all the later languages aspired: we apply aesthetic categories to languages. Erroneously we suppose that language corresponds to that mysterious thing we call reality. The truth is that language is something else."

"How does one define the Orient (not the real Orient, which does not exist)? I would say that the notions of East and West are generalisations , but that no individual can feel himself to be Oriental. I suppose that a man feels himself to be Persian or Hindu or Malaysian, but not Oriental. In the same way, no one feels himself to be Latin American: we feel ourselves to be Argentines or Chileans. It doesn't matter, the concept does not exist."

Songs recently loved

2010-08-08T20:29:00.003+01:00

Arcade Fire do some-kind-of-disco...

2010-08-08T19:47:00.002+01:00

... on their new album. It's quite good.

***

And in addition... these days, it's always hard to find proper rock'n'roll moments. Most bands are too careerist, label-led or polite. But I found this:

Philip Glass on Sesame Street

2010-08-08T19:45:00.002+01:00

Yes, you read that correctly... I found this yesterday and posted it in a comment below. But it's too good/weird to leave in a comment.

I went to the woods today...

2010-08-08T19:12:00.002+01:00

There was a normal, everyday, boring field mushroom as I approached the gate - I touched it lightly with my boot but it unfortunately broke off and the white top flipped over to show the brown gills underneath and the white stalk with a circle's worth of radii.

***

The gate is a useless gate in many ways - the little hook on its chain is always hooked back on, but if the aim is to keep sheep out it fails as the 18 inch gap could let a few in (and the gorse shortly after is often covered in wool).

***

Several years ago, a tree was hit by lightning - it's the tree near the badger sett. It bent in half and now forms an arch over the path; the wood is faded and grey, but it sticks to being an arch, supported by a few inches of wood.

I hadn't been up there for a couple of months - but I did expect it to have fallen down. What watershed made me think that? At what point did I think: it should have fallen by now?

{Like the bit in Snow White where the Mirror-Mirror-On-The-Wall decides that the Queen is no longer the fairest of them all, but now little SW is...}

***

Spotting some more fungi, I hunted in the places I know fly agaric grows... but there were none. Possibly waiting to pop up... or already taken by someone for nefarious use.

***

At the river I decided to make some towers of stones and rocks. I spent over half an hour building up tower after tower. I wanted there to be more than 100. Why? Because "more than 100" people died in the recent floods in Ladakh and I wanted to do something to remember them by.

I imagined the flood waters also knocked over dozens of the towers of stones that dot the Ladakhi countryside. Here, in South Lanarkshire, I've built up some replacements.

I also put them in the river, knowing that when the next rains come they will all be knocked over. Some Buddhist impermanence.

***

I found a short metal tube amongst the pines that the local youth go to drink in - and burn down trees in. It was amongst the broken glass, the empty beer cans, the lighter fluid bottles, the poppers bottles, the other rubbish, ...

For no reason I slotted it over a broken branch.

***

On my way back Ithrew some pebbles against he walls of the motorway tunnel I had to go through. It creates a lovely ping-pong echo. I heard a much more impressive version of it at Chichen Itza when a guide hit two rocks together in front of the staircase of the pyramid.

Poetry in Manali

2010-08-07T13:45:00.002+01:00

Manali is the other-side-of-the-Himalayas from Ladakh.

I got two books when I was there - the first was a Neruda collection: Fully Empowered. Apparently one of Neruda's favourites of his own books. Here's a translation by Alastair Reid (whose name is proudly large on the front cover):

In Praise of Ironing by Pablo Neruda (trans. Alastair Reid)

Poetry is pure white.
it emerges from water covered with drops,
is wrinkled, all in a heap.
It has to be spread out, the skin of this planet,
has to be ironed out, the sea's whiteness;
and the hands keep moving, moving,
the holy surfaces are smoothed out,
and that is how things are accomplished.
Every day, hands are creating the world,
fire is married to steel,
and canvas, linen, and cotton come back
from the skirmishings of the laundries,
and out of light a dove is born -
pure innocence returns out of the swirl.

***

I was also lucky enough to find a copy of The Complete Works of Sir Thomas Wyatt - a Penguin Classics edition from, the book tells me, 1978 but I don't believe it - it's a later edition: late 80s, early 90s.

I like Wyatt an awful lot... he's just so tragically despairing! Maybe he had reason to be: he was imprisoned in the Tower of London twice and had an affair with Anne Boleyn (when she was married to the King). Go burning sighs indeed...

Here's a sonnet of his:

My galley charged with forgetfulness
Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass
'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas,
That is my lord, steereth with cruelness;
And every oar a thought in readiness
As though that death were light in such a case.
An endless wind doth tear the sail apace
Of forced sighs and trusty fearfulness.
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain
Hath done the wearied cords great hindrance,
Wreathed with error and eke with ignorance.
The stars be hid that led me to this pain.
Drowned is reason that should me comfort
And I remain despairing of the port.

Sheesh! (But note - this is Wyatt's version of a sonnet by Petrarch.) Here's something else - a riddle with no answer given:

A lady gave me a gift she had not
And I received her gift which I took not.
She gave it willingly, yet she would not;
And Ireceived it, albeit I could not.
If she gave it to me, I force not.
If she take again, she cares not.
Construe what is this and tell not,
For I am fast sworn I may not.

What do you think? The notes say:

"Rollins relates the story of Peter Motteux who asked the readers of the July 1692 issue of The Gentleman's Journal for help with the riddle and reached the tentative conclusion that the solution was the lady's virginity. One might also construe it as the lady's vagina - a 'negative' entity - in the act of sex."

Floods in Leh

2010-08-07T13:34:00.004+01:00

I was , literally, horrified to hear about the flash floods in Leh in Ladakh - I was there last month and it was blue- sky high-altitude calmness - the rivers fed by snowmelt, not rain. It looked like this...

Over 100 dead in the floods. Terrible news. I'm thinking of the people I met in the hotel, my jeep drivers, Phanday - the guide who showed us around - and also my ukulele friend from a few posts down.

Music and po-hems

2010-08-07T12:10:00.004+01:00

Walter Pater said (I almost wrote "famously said") that "All art aspires to the condition of music"... But he was a namby-pamby aesthete.

In recording myself uke-ing over the past week I've been constantly surprised at what my fingers do... I confess to watching some of the videos over and over. It just looks quite complicated... can I really do that? But then, I also cringe at my sloppy playing and the stupid mistakes I make. As I wrote in a comment at a post below - in music you either hit the note or you don't.

When I'm playing it's completely different matter - I'm playing simple little patterns that seem very basic to me. I'm self-taught - technique and theory are just words and don't help in any sort of "composition".

Here's me playing, pretty much, the same thing over and over again (yikes! you can see my face...):

Repetitive, endlessly, over and over again.

What did Wally P. mean by his "all art..." statement? Maybe this: music is about nothing. It's sound over time. The end.

For me, when writing po-hems I, basically, want the reader to want to get to the end. And to enjoy each part as they get there - I want the reader to hear the poem. In fact, if mine were considered little pieces of fluffy music and nothing more I'd be very happy. In fact, like the video.

To paraphrase Georges Perec*: "Content? We can put that in later!"

* To a film maker who objected to Perec's lack of characterisation and his focus on the mechanics of the film, Perec said: "Feelings? We can put them in later!"**

** Now that, people, is a sentence that demonstrates what the "passive voice" is.

More Me Play Uke

2010-08-04T23:47:00.003+01:00

The video is out of synch with the audio... so best to listen rather than watch. A pat on the back to the first person to recognise what I play initially. After that it's a bit of Glasgow quirkiness by yours truly.

PS The title is from the last semi-serious haiku I ever wrote:

sunshine rainy day
glasgow streets are made of gold
when they are not grey

Found at the back of a book

2010-08-04T23:16:00.002+01:00

A little book by Ivor Cutler has this quote on the last page:

A man has more in common with a snake than a roundworm has with a flatworm.
- Miriam Rothschild

***

While the book's in my hand, here's some Ivor:

The Sun

The sun quietly withdraws its light from the bit of the earth you are living on to give to people who are just about to get up. But anyway, you are tired by then, so you just go to bed.

Disappointed

A woman once asked me what it was like being a man. What kind of man? I asked. She gave me all the details so I took off my clothes and showed her. As I dressed I could see she was disappointed. Is that it? she sighed. I'm afraid so, I replied. To cheer me up, she told me what it was like being a woman and I was a happy man for about three days till the memory faded.

Growing

You do not hear me when I say I love you. You know what I mean, so you shut off.

Fresh Soda Water

Writing a poem is like laying eggs in lines. Then you shut the book and sit upon it till the words hatch. The murmuring noise through your trousers feels like fresh soda water creeping round your thighs to settle like dew, and is the signal for you to open the book and read.

Oh, It Can't Be True!

When a man is busy looking at a woman and thinking how ridiculous she is, choosing clothes like that, and complicated hair, and powder on her face where men can see it and don't want to kiss her, and the peculiar emphasis in her thinking. Well - she is busy picking him to bits, and if he knew he'd go mad with humiliation and want to explain himself and might even hit her for kicking away his self respect from underneath him.

Try playing truths while you're making love. That is, if you want to end the relationship.

So we'd all better get used to the idea that men and women are very different.

Invert
In utter darkness I stand on the table with one leg tucked under me, simulating a sleeping goose. From downstairs she calls tremulously , when are you coming to bed?

All from Is That Your Flap, Jack? by Ivor Cutler.

And a song by him:

Randy Newman wrote it...

2010-08-03T23:48:00.002+01:00

... the three below sang it. There are several arguments on YouTube about which is "best".

[...INSERT GENERIC ARGUMENT CONCERNING THE FUTILITY OF ARGUING ABOUT "BEST" AND HOW "IT'S ALL SUBJECTIVE AT THE END OF THE DAY"...]

But no-one mentions Randy for actually having written the thing... poor songwriters. :(

"Thirty One in August"

2010-08-01T23:42:00.004+01:00

Do you remember last September I wrote a poem a day and posted them at starlings? I said I wouldn't do it again.

Guess what?

I'm doing it in August instead. Damn. You could read, if you want, the posts here.

I've written this as some intro:

Here I go again... posting a poem a day in August. Last September I did the same thing - one poem each day for 30 days. This year I need one extra - 31.

31 is a more interesting number than 30. Hopefully these 31 poems will be more interesting than last September's bundle. The thing to remember is this:

31 = 1+2(1+2(1+2(1+2)))

And remember it for all that you think it implies...

I'd quite like these to be good poems, but I can't guarantee it. I used the word "edibles" to describe these to Nit i.e. those that are keepers and editable. She is also doing her daily poems and posting them at Facebook.

***

I've reached a bit of a block when it comes to Lathynarn. I hope to pick it up on the first September.

Combinations scribbled down in Alchi

2010-08-01T09:27:00.005+01:00

I was dreaming I was sleeping
and forgot to dream at all.

I was dreaming I was dreaming
but had to sleep it all.

I was sleeping, I was sleeping -
and the world? I dreamt it all...

I was sleeping, I was dreaming
and the hours? Hours fall.

***

I had actually used the first one at dinner that night.

S: I don't dream.

Me: Maybe you actually dream that you don't dream.

I got a funny look for it.

"But it's wrong!"

2010-08-01T09:10:00.003+01:00

And I'm looking for proof...

In Delhi Airport -Domestic Terminal there were banners hanging from the roof. They had travel quotes on them: Tolkein, Hesse, Melville... and one that said TS Eliot at the bottom. The banner said:

"Take only memories, leave only footprints. - TS Eliot"

Erm, did he say that? I was quite indignant. I may have been slightly angry (only slightly, I only do anger twice a decade). Then I thought: maybe something similar-ish is buried in one of his plays or a forgotten part of Four Quartets.

I've looked and couldn't find it. One site attributes it to Chief Seattle but that throws up a whole different kettle of postmodernist trickery-fish. (Read this page at Snopes.)

It seems to me that it's just a general bit of hippy-lite fluff created by an advertising copywriter.

Or is it? Are your google fingers better than mine at finding an origin?

Artlessness

2010-07-31T10:47:00.005+01:00

Yesterday - I left work. Out on to Argyle Street. A man walked towards me:

shortish
40s-ish
plumpish
curly haired dyed black
a naval jacket with brass buttons
a white vest
a pair of dungaree shorts (with the dungaree part hanging down like a sporran)
black and red Dennis The Menace striped socks
a pair of doc martens, the laces not done up

All so compulsively artless.

***

There I was in a bookshop in Dharamsala - all the bookshops are poky little rooms the size of a larger bathroom. From behind a counter, apparently made of books, a voice asked:

"Are you looking for anything in particular?"

"Erm, no..." I said. But then: "Have you any poetry?"

He pointed me in the direction of something called Timely Rain, saying it was "Tibetan poetry, very good". The book was wrapped in plastic. I bought it on his recommendation.

But yes, erm, right, ok...

When I opened it I saw something that would have made me not buy it: the front cover.

Timely Rain

Selected Poetry of Chogyam Trungpa

Foreword by Allen Ginsberg

Sigh... I'm allowed my petty dislikes. And I pettily dislike Allen Ginsberg. And, therefore, I have trouble with things he liked.

You can read about Trungpa here.

Here's one of the poems:

Afterthought by Chogyam Trungpa

Such a precious human body,
Difficult to rediscover;
Such precious pain,
Not difficult to discover;
Such an old story
Is by now a familiar joke.
You and I know the facts and the case history;
We have a mutual understanding of each other
Which has never been sold or bought by anyone.
Our mutual understanding keeps the thread of sanity.
Sometimes the thread is electrified,
Sometimes it is smeared with honey and butter;
Nevertheless, we have no regrets.
Since I am here,
Seemingly you are here too.
Let us practice!
Sitting is the jewel that ornaments our precious life.

My definition of poetry for a long time has been: interesting things done with words, as opposed to sentences/images/paragraphs. It all boils down to the words for me. The poem above - after the first six lines - doesn't seem to care that much about the words its made of and is more interested in saying something*. That something need not be in the form of a poem. So why choose to make it a poem? Why not just call it prose? There's nothing wrong with it being prose.

What I'm maybe saying is this: poetically, I find the poem a bit artless.

In the afterword to the book, the editor says:

Some will find Chogyam Trungpa's verse too unpolished to qualify as great poetry. Be that as it may, I believe that attentive readers will discover that itis real poetry.

Hmmm...

"Poetry", as I've said before, is an indicator of form not an indicator of quality and those who talk of "real" poetry perhaps shouldn't.

* I've no problem with saying something - but it should be a joint effort with what that something sounds like.

***

Some time ago I got an anthology of poems by Billy Childish. He's an odd beast.

Here's something artless by him:

a message to the ants by Billy Childish

come visit my poems
at nite
your armys are legion
children want to see you
make war
and
like them
you love sugar

you walk
up the sides of trees
milk aphieds like cattle
and your eggs
are
food for goldfish

with boiling water
magnifying glass
and
liter fuel
i killed so many of you
when i was a child
now i beg your forgivness

***

What do I mean by artlessness? I think, maybe, a resistance to flattening the crumpled paper you scrawl on with a blunt pencil.

I'm not necessarily saying it's a bad thing - just that sometimes it should be, by my definition, called prose as opposed to poetry.

***

More on crumpled paper.

Here's a piece of origami. From a flat piece of paper you get: a piece of crumpled paper.

Maybe if you crumple the paper yourself before scrawling with that blunt pencil... maybe that's the way round it. It's maybe the same as the difference between these two:

A few more pictures

2010-07-31T10:42:00.003+01:00

Uke 'n' me

2010-07-31T09:54:00.003+01:00

Now, it's no secret I play the ukulele - I took my little one to India and got a friend as a result:

(He's one of the waiters in the hotel I was staying in in Leh - he asked to borrow it to show to the guys round the back.)

One good thing is that I broke down a few uke-beliefs - it's not all George Formby.

I also had a request for examples of me playing. So, yesterday I did something I said I'd never do: I got a webcam! Crikey...

Here's me playing two things wot I came up with. The first goes a bit dodgy at the end as I was improvising - it's also quiet quiet as I missed the "microphone volume" option. Oops. "Sundar pani" is Hindi for "beautiful water".

Rain of an existential variety

2010-07-27T23:37:00.003+01:00

Today I mentioned rain and existentialism... which always brings this song to the front. (I can't find the original recording... so this is a live version.)

I love the lyrics:

It's Raining Today - Scott Walker

It's raining today
and I'm just about to forget
the train window girl.
That wonderful day we met.
She smiles through the smoke
from my cigarette.

It's raining today.
But once there was summer and you
And dark little rooms
And sleep in late afternoons.
Those moments descend
on my windowpane.

I've hung around too long
Listenin' to the old landlady's
hard-luck stories.
You out of me, me out of you.
We go like lovers
To replace the empty space...
Repeat our dreams to someone new.

It's raining today
And I watch the cellophane streets,
No hang-ups for me
'Cause hang-ups need company.
The street corner girl's
a cold trembling leaf.

It's raining today.

So...

2010-07-27T23:22:00.003+01:00

... there I was in India. I did mention I was there, didn't I?

Here are a few pictures. Many, many more at flickr with more being added over the next few days.

Knock, knock... I'm back!

2010-07-26T08:55:00.005+01:00

Hello all, how are you?

I've woken from 12 hours sleep after having got home yesterday afternoon.

India in two words? It's great. I'll (obviously) write a bit more later, but the highlights? The Himalayas and finally meeting Nit and her hubby, Sanjay. Here are two pics, you can work out which is which:

[UPDATE: Dear all, due to sweatiness and general cheesy-grin-iness I have censored one of the above pictures. I hope this does not inconvenience you, nor affect your reading of this post. Regards, Blog Management.]

And one last thing about India (and risking exoticising and peacocking it far too much)... it is crazy, it can be hard to understand, it's full of people, lots of it went over my head. It's like this video which I insisted Nit send me a link to.

More, much more, later.

:)

The Last Post

2010-07-06T23:41:00.004+01:00

Not for good, oh no... I had one of them at my previous, now-aborted blog* and it wasn't a happy post (nor a happy time, though I thought it was for a while). It was a week after I came back from Cuba.

Someone asked recently: what happens to blogs when they die? Good question... they are either ignored and remain static at, say, 25 November 2004 or they are removed, deleted. But like most words ever written, they'll not be read again.

Anyway, this is my last post before flying off - I'm all packed, my ukulele is dreading the flight, the cards for my camera are all blank. And my mind is all blank for what to expect - I'm expecting nothing.

I'll be back to bore you silly with stories and photos near the end of July.

Bye. :o)

***

* It was called When I am a veteran with only one eye... named after a line in Auden's Roman Wall Blues:

Over the heather the wet wind blows,
I've lice in my tunic and a cold in my nose.

The rain comes pattering out of the sky,
I'm a Wall soldier, I don't know why.

The mist creeps over the hard grey stone,
My girl's in Tungria; I sleep alone.

Aulus goes hanging around her place,
I don't like his manners, I don't like his face.

Piso's a Christian, he worships a fish;
There'd be no kissing if he had his wish.

She gave me a ring but I diced it away;
I want my girl and I want my pay.

When I'm a veteran with only one eye
I shall do nothing but look at the sky.

I've just discovered that Alex Harvey did his own version of it. I don't mind him, but I don't really like this:

AG+Penpont+other art

2010-07-06T20:26:00.005+01:00

Two things brought Andy Goldsworthy to mind today.

Firstly, this picture Nit took in Ladakh (she and S. have just returned from there! Coincidences are great, no?)

And secondly, I read in this post where Titou le Chien is based - Penpont. I believe that this is where AG lives as well.

***

I quite like AG. It's impressive stuff and it makes me think. I believe the art world doesn't like him, perhaps because his books sell and are often on coffee tables. Tut tut! Here are a few...

***

In the GOMA today (see no. 4 in the previous post) - the whole ground floor is taken up with one installation. The GOMA's blurb:

GoMA presents the video installation Tomorrow (2005) by internationally renowned artist Fiona Tan.

An installation on two screens, this work is an atmospheric portrait of a group of schoolchildren that challenges assumptions about identity, race and ethnicity. It is the first solo exhibition of Tan's work in Scotland.

Tan lives and works in Amsterdam and is best known for skilfully and visually rich photography, film and video. Characteristically, her artworks explore issues related to human representation - such as concepts of identity and nationality - often through portraits of people or places.

Hmm... first question: can an exhibition consist of one work and one work only? Or is it a plural of works? I don't truly know...

Secondly, I thought it was a good idea but not realised well enough. I'll have to have a long think about why... and how I would have done it (had I wanted to). Most conceptual art seems to revel in an amateur spirit. No virtuosity for most. I like some virtuosity... I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of.

Thirdly, her name made me think of Shaun Tan.

Nine odd things...

2010-07-06T19:55:00.007+01:00

1. Kevin Cadwallender in this morning's Metro:

2. Poems come very easily, but perhaps not well:

Moon in Daylight

You surprise me! Hiding there
in the corner, in your comfy chair
a comb dragged through
your neat, trimmed hair.

Come in, come in, and see the view
out the window - all this under you
in the literal sense, eh Moon?,
get out your seat! pull up a pew...

What's your news? What've you done?
Still thieving off that thieving Sun?
What lists have you made to follow freely
before they end and after they've begun?

Och, be like that! Stay stoosh and cry
your ghost white way through your chairy sky
and lift your head again, some dark
magpie on crowblack night-light lie.

3. Persian restaurants serve LOTS AND LOTS of meat. But nice meat at that. :)

4. That person whom I thought I recognised on the train turned out to be someone I did! But only just... She works in the GOMA. Though I can be forgiven for not automatically noticing the staff in art galleries, can't I?

5. Cup in Byres Road serve their hot chocolate like so: a mug of hot milk is supplied along with a wooden spoon; at the end of the wooden spoon is a solid chunk of chocolate which you dunk and melt yourself. I had the chilli-choc which also comes with purple glitteriness.

6. Rhoda likes sentimental Victorian paintings.

7. An anagram of Melody's name is coy and humble. Also, cold hyena bum.

8. This time tomorrow, I will be on a plane on my way to Delhi. From their I will fly to Leh in Ladakh properly in the Himalayas. I will make my way to Amritsar, then back to Delhi.

9. Related to 8 - I will finally meet Nit. How bizarre. This is where I wonder if I should send her an e-mail saying that everything about me is a lie and that I'm actually__ oops, almost said too much. ;)

More on the translation - and then about love poems

2010-07-03T10:15:00.003+01:00

Further to my post below, Mark Eisner commented with his translation. Better than my version:

Leaning into the evenings by Pablo Neruda (trans. Mark Eisner)

Leaning into the evenings I throw my sad nets
to your ocean eyes.

There my loneliness stretches and burns in the tallest bonfire,
spinning the arms like a drowning man’s.

I cast red signals over your absent eyes
which lap like the sea at the lighthouse shore.

You guard only darkness, my distant female,
sometimes the coast of dread emerges from your stare.

Leaning into the evenings I toss my sad nets
to that sea which stirs your ocean eyes.

The night birds peck at the first stars
that twinkle like my soul as I love you.

Night gallops on her shadowy mare
scattering blue wheat stalks over the fields.

His translations can be found in The Essential Pablo Neruda from Bloodaxe. I'm going to get my copy after my holidays. :) You can never have enough translations, I say.

***

Rachel also commented, saying: "This may be going against the tide but I can live without his love poetry!"

I have a few difficulties with love poetry in general - the cynic in me never really believes it's love motivating the poem, but a desire on the part of the poet to get into someone's pants through the use of flattery. However, if they have some wonderful lines along the way, then I'm more than happy.

In Dichtung und Wahrheit (An Unwritten Poem), Auden says:

I read a poem by someone else in which he bids a tearful farewell to his beloved: the poem is good (it moves me as other good poems do) and genuine (I recognise the poet's "handwriting"). Then I learn from a biography that, at the time he wrote it, the poet was sick to death of the girl but pretended to weep in order to avoid hurt feelings and a scene. Does this information affect my appreciation of his poem? Not in the least: I never knew him personally and his private life is no business of mine. Would it affect my appreciation if I had written the poem myself? I hope so.

I wish I wasn't infected by this modern desire to know the poet - though this desire goes back beyond Auden. Schopenhauer wrote about it as well:

The public is much more interested in the material than in the form. It displays this tendency in its most ridiculous shape in regard to poetic works, in that it painstakingly tracks down the real events or personal circumstances which occasioned the work and these, indeed, become more interesting to it than the works themselves, so that it reads more about than by ....

Can't I just be allowed some history-less words? That's what I like about really old poems. Who wrote them? Who cares?

***

Auden says later in D&W:

"I will love You forever", swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. "I will love You at 4:15pm next Tuesday": is that still as easy?

That's the bit that's stayed with me since I first read D&W back in my teens. Some things are easy to say and, more damningly, even easier to believe.

***

Have I ever written a love poem? I don't think I have... I've written ones to people I've been in love with, but never to say I love them. They were undelivered as well.

***

Some last words from Wystan:

"I will love You whatever happens, even though ..." - there follows a list of catastrophic miracles - (even though, I should like to say, all the stones of Baalbek split into exact quarters, the rooks of Repton utter dire prophecies in Greek and the Windrush bellow imprecations in Hebrew, Time run boustrophedon and Paris and Vienna thrice be lit again by gas ...)

Do I believe that these events might conceivably occur during my lifetime? If not, what have I promised? I will love You whatever happens, even though You put on twenty pounds or become afflicted with moustache: dare I promise that?

Which reminds me of a line in this:

"If you ever go lardy or go lame,
I will drop you straight away.
Well that's the chance you're going to take
for every stupid thing you say."

Keith Haring

2010-07-01T23:39:00.002+01:00

Melody introduced me to Keith Haring. I've been looking at a lot of his pics which just make me very happy. Here are a few:

Another attempt at "translation"...

2010-07-01T23:02:00.007+01:00

Here's my go at some Neruda. This is no. 7 of his Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair.

Original first:

VII Inclinado en las tardes - Pablo Neruda

Inclinado en las tardes tiro mis tristes redes
a tus ojos oceánicos.

Allí se estira y arde en las más alta hoguera
mi soledad que da vueltas los brazos como un náufrago.

Hago rojas señales sobre tus ojos ausentes
que olean como el mar a la orilla de un faro.

Sólo guardas tinieblas, hembra distante y mía,
de tu mirada emerge a veces la costa del espanto.

Inclinado en las tardes echo mis tristes redes
a ese mar que sacude tus ojos oceánicos.

Los pájaros nocturnos picotean las primeras estrellas
que centellean como mi alma cuando te amo.

Galopa la noche en su yegua sombría
desparramando espigas azules sobre el campo.

Now my version - which I've altered a fair bit, dropping words here and there:

Leaning into Afternoons by me (after Neruda)

Leaning into afternoons
I cast my sad nets
on your oceanic eyes.

Stretched and burnt
in the highest fire
my lonely arms turn
like a drowning man.

I send red flares
over your empty eyes
that weave like the sea
by a lighthouse.

You keep only the dark,
distant woman,
your eyes lift up
the terrifying coast.

Leaning into afternoons
I throw my sad nets
to the sea that beats
on your oceanic eyes.

The nightbirds peck
at the first stars
that spark like my soul
when I love you.

The night gallops
on its sad mare,
scattering blue
tassels on the land.

As ever, I had some issues with the translation I have (by WS Merwin in 1969). The one that bothered me most was what he did with the word señales . Merwin translates it straight as "signals" like so:

I send red signals across your absent eyes ...

That can't be right, I thought. What is a red signal? Surely there must be something more precise than this vague word? A quick investigation revealed that cohete de señales means, amongst other things, a flare, a distress rocket. Much more in keeping with the maritime theme, no? (And I checked Merriam Webster to see if "signal" was/is a synonym for flare - it suggests not... But then, I'm being arrogant enough to presume that señales means flare in the poem.)

He also changes the second use of ojos océanicos to marine eyes. Why?

(Incidentally, I'd have no issues with the translation if the cover said that this was Merwin's version of Neruda. But it says it's Neruda's version of Neruda...)

***

Oh, and I think it would be better without the last two stanzas... but who am I to tell Pablo what to do, write or publish?

Sad Song + Poem

2010-06-28T19:18:00.003+01:00

Wet Day in Summer

"I hear the drizzle..."
Yes, it falls
in a silence under
the traffic calls.

And it tracks a path
on the bus-glass
in and out and if
the folk see through it

is a point, a doubt
undoubted in its light,
light drizzle and cloud.

What can you see, what can I,
when the drizzle soaks
our avoiding eyes out?

Lazy Lathy

2010-06-27T22:33:00.003+01:00

For those reading Lathynarn as I write it... you'll have noticed a couple of empty weeks. My tight 24 week programme has slipped somewhat.

Why?

Part three wasn't as completely thought-out as I would have liked it to be. So, I need to think it all out a bit more. And if only I had a three week holiday coming up - oh, wait! I do!

India will be my part three thinking time.

***

Oh, and I'm watching Stevie at Glastonbury as well! He's currently doing Higher Ground... I want these ones:

Poets Cornered #126

2010-06-26T11:47:00.000+01:00

We did know Poughbuoy was a hypocrite, yeah?

Two consecutive poems...

2010-06-26T10:47:00.004+01:00

... from my battered old copy of Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times which has a drawing by Kafka on the front.

The Tough Guy of London by Kojo Gyinye Kyei

Seen from within a heated room,
On a sunny February afternoon,
London looks like
Any other summer's day.

Step out in only
Your shirt and trousers
And, even, with a black belt in karate,
An invisible tough guy
With blimey cold hands and feet,
Punches you
Smack on the nose
Straight back in.

Depressed by a Book of Bad Poetry, I Walk Toward an Unused Pasture and Invite the Insects to Join Me by James Wright

Relieved, I let the book fall behind a stone.
I climb a slight rise of grass.
I do not want to disturb the ants
Who are walking single file up the fence post,
Carrying small white petals,
Casting shadows so frail that I can see through them.
I close my eyes for a moment, and listen.
The old grasshoppers
Are tired, they leap heavily now,
Their thighs are burdened.
I want to hear them, they have clear sounds to make.
Then lovely, far off, a dark cricket begins
In the maple trees.

Sticking to rules you know

2010-06-26T10:15:00.004+01:00

Jacques Roubaud wrote this in the 60s:

"A false idea that is current nowadays is the equivalence established between inspiration, the exploration of the subconscious, and liberation; between chance, automatism and freedom. The kind of freedom that consists of blindly obeying every impulse is in reality a form of slavery. The classical author, who when writing his tragedy follows a certain number of rules that he knows, is freer than the poet who writes whatever comes into his head and is the slave of other rules he is unaware of."

***

If you open your mind to let your soul spill on the page, how can you be sure that it's actually your soul and not just the way your synapses work? That you're not just churning out something mechanically?

Constrained writing (in the form of rhyme, metre, parallelism, etc.) exercises the brain and can perhaps make you certain that things are how you want them. And additionally - being aware of the rules allows you to subvert them, break them, play with them. If you write with no known rules... well, what're you to do with them? and how are you to know that the hidden rules aren't then ruling you?

***

Here is a piece of ridiculously constrained writing. If anyone can work out what the constraint is, I'll give you a nice big prize*. But the point is this: I have thought about every single word and its relation to the other words - no word is where it is by accident. (Other than the accident of where the words initially come from...)

Beehive ("I live the sweetened, fly-grab honey")

I lived in a skewed beehive -
lived the life plump bees fly
in Life, sweetened.

Honey days and a plump honey fly;
sweet, spill skewed bees;
days sweet...

Grab that beehive,
fly; and spill that honey.

* Erm, I think I still owe Rachel a prize for a crossword some time ago.

In searching for "fit poetesses"...

2010-06-23T20:01:00.003+01:00

... for the previous post I came across a picture of Jen Hadfield looking rather adorable in a pixie-ish, indie-girl, spectacled, short-haired* kind-a-way:

And to counter the base thoughts, here she is reading:

* I'm a sucker for the pixie-ish, indie-girl, spectacled, short-haired kind-a-look...

Poets Cornered #125

2010-06-23T19:07:00.003+01:00

Unsurprisingly, poets aren't automatically noted for their looks. Singers' faces? Vitally important - they sell the records. Poets' faces? Who cares?

Over at Rachel's, there was talk of Robert Graves nose and someone (who?) suggested compiling a list of the "fittest poets". The request for entrants for "Top 10 fittest poets (male)" stalled at precisely no candidates... Poughbuoy has been in touch with the editors of FHM to bring you this:

Cairnpapple + Legs + Indian Hill Birds

2010-06-20T23:18:00.002+01:00

I was in charge of the timer - Rhoda and I went to Livingston ahead of her interview on Wednesday.

It worked out at 53 minutes, but that included the time we spent waiting on the road going down to Crossford as the car in front asked directions of the police car coming up from Crossford.

***

After this we went for a stroll up Cairnpapple Hill. Lovely soft grass, lovely views of just about everywhere - Arran, Bass Rock, the Trossachs, the Pentlands, the Southern Uplands... I even saw little Loudon Hill on the horizon!

We sat on the grass by the neolithic burial site for over an hour while a family flew a kite (I like kites... remember I asked if someone else did recently?) and we wondered about the group of one man and three women. They had come on one motorbike and one white van. They left hand-in-hand in pairs.

"What's their story?"

"Go and ask them, David."

"No... no. It's more interesting not knowing."

I was accused of being a typical man for enjoying the view of one of the women's legs in quite the shortest shorts I've seen in some time. They were just as spectacular as the parallaxed view of Edinburgh, Arthur's Seat, North Berwick Law and Bass Rock (the latter glowing with gannets and guano). The legs are probably more precious though: I can go back to Cairnpapple any time I want...

***

We came back and stopped off at a garden centre-y type shop-y place with added antiques hall and second hand books.

They made the mistake of many bookshops: just because it's old and is a first edition doesn't mean a random customer will want to buy JT Wringley-Smythe's History of Contemporary Politics (1906-1909) for £45.

However, I bought a book - Indian Hill Birds, Salim Ali, Oxford University Press (Indian Branch), 1949. A fairly steep £8, but it'll be of use next month. It was originally owned by Margaret B Kennedy of 2 Mansionhouse Road, Edinburgh. She seems to have gone to India in 1950 and ticked off several birds she saw.

In the section on the Spotted Babbler she has underlined the bit that says: "It [the call] is repeated with great persistence and monotony at intervals of five seconds or so, for over fifteen minutes at a stretch..."

In the margin she's written: "oh dear me!"

Flowchart

2010-06-20T23:13:00.003+01:00

I created a flowchart at work for a new admin process... I sent it to all of the admin staff. They liked it and think it should be implemented immediately. I agree.

I presented it to one of the managers last week when he was asking for help.

"Please work through the new admin process," I said.

He traced his finger over the lines.

"My head hurts," he said.

(You may have to click it to read it properly...)

"Being interested"

2010-06-20T22:49:00.002+01:00

A few years ago I was talking to someone about things. She said she was a writer - though, except for one half page, I never read anything she ever wrote.

I suggested to her that writers should be interested in absolutely everything. They should people watch, they should tune into bad television, they should read/listen to/watch things they know they might not like. They should read about subjects that might not inspire them. If an atheist they should read about religions; if religious they should try and write an atheistic text; if a sport hater, learn the rules and try and have some kind of conversation with a sport lover; if you hate jazz, listen to some jazz - you don't have to like it, but be aware of it. Et cetera.

Why? Because it might be useful... the best thing for a writer to be is a dilettante.

She didn't like this suggestion and continued with narrowness.

***

It's a question of tolerance - be tolerant of the world and your intersection with it. Seek out as many intersections as you can find.

I have the added advantage that I genuinely am interested in everything (except economics... I don't understand it - but I'd like to).

***

Back in August 2000, in Greece, I remember sharing a lunch table with Gordon and a man from the south of England. I asked this man what he did. He told us in great detail: he worked in a peanut factory - it also made jam - he had a forklift and moved bags of peanuts around. The conversation lasted 'til the end of lunch.

Gordon was in a slightly grumpy mood that day - he chastised me for some years after this. The man, he claimed, was annoying and boring.

But I was interested in this man. I love listening to people and what they do. Sometimes I get bored and annoyed myself for allowing them to monopolise my time. But I want to know. And my interest is never feigned.

***

Be interested. It's not hard. And it could be useful.

Big, stupid songs (with interesting words)

2010-06-20T22:27:00.002+01:00

I have been known to claim that this was the last "Great Rock Song". Very shortly after this, extreme genrefication took over. I still want to be a debaser when I grow up. (Lyrics inspired by this.)

Except for three little Es at the very end, this is just two chords... that's all. (D and A, chord fans). And one less than the song that inspired it.

Virtually everything in this video/song is ironic (and yes, it's the same band as wot done this):

Birds and hills and poems

2010-06-17T22:30:00.003+01:00

Nit's facebook status today:

"Photographing birds is like writing poetry. Sometimes, you have to wait for the bird to emerge, hunt for the perfect light (so that it nets the flash in the bird's eye) and look for the finest perspective in order to make the ordinary seem momentous and the spectacular seem universal. At other times, you simply rush in with your camera and hope that the bird is there, right there, waiting for you. And the poem, too."

Said me:

"For me it's photographing hills... the sun, the clouds and the light can be very capricious."

Said she:

"Perhaps I know that. For me, photographing birds is somehow more evocative because of the uncertainty and the forced faith in spite of that uncertainty."

***

I'm not a very patient photographer - the longest I've ever waited for a shot is about 5, 6, maybe 7 minutes. And it was this shot I waited for:

Most times, I'm walking and take the world in as I go past and if I see something of interest, I'll take a picture (or three) of it. Walker-photgraphy doesn't lend itself to close-ups of birds - I've very few shots of birds up-close. I most often catch them flying away:

I'd like to be able to WAIT more and see a picture emerge, but I'm too itchy - my feet need to move on down the road, along the path, past that bend, into that crowd.

***

When I'm out for a walk in the hills or on the moor and the clouds are dappling the sunlight struggling through them and it's all moving and altering and creating different landscapes every 10 seconds or so, I watch as I'm moving - I could stay in one place to frame a shot and wait for the light to be just so, but no - I'm walking, I have to move. Keep going, keep going, tramp-tramp, tramp,...

For me, it's flux - and that's the writing of a (certain kind of) poem for me: words swirling around me as the world swirls around me and I swirl through the world and the clouds of words all around me. I have to find the right place to stop to record the words when the light (moonlight in poetic cases) is the light I want. Or maybe "sound" and "moonsound".

That's me.

Joy of Geeks

2010-06-17T19:54:00.003+01:00

geek - "sideshow freak," 1916, U.S. carnival and circus slang, perhaps a variant of geck "a fool, dupe, simpleton" (1515), apparently from Low Ger. geck, from an imitative verb found in North Sea Gmc. and Scand. meaning "to croak, cackle," and also "to mock, cheat." The modern form and the popular use with ref. to circus sideshow "wild men" is from 1946, in William Lindsay Gresham's novel "Nightmare Alley" (made into a film in 1947 starring Tyrone Power).

Are you a geek? I'm a geek... what kind of geek are you, or not? You can be a geek about everything. In the office I regularly call John and Gordon "architecture geeks". Why? Because they can sometimes get Building Design magazine's dot-2-dots without joining the dots.

But yes, anyway... I'm a geek as well, are you?

I can be geeky about poems and books and maths and folding paper and words and anti-grammar-Nazism and music and ukuleles. I try not to be geeky about cameras (but it's hard). The razor blade you try not to slide down in these situations is the one of being a boring know-it-all... I have plenty of cuts from that blade. Ouch.

***

Eight xkcds ago there was this cartoon. I don't have strong opinions on this... however, you can be both and not have strong opinions, and you can have strong opinions and be neither geek nor nerd. Therefore, there's a whole set missing.

You see, I can be a Venn diagram geek as well - call that display-of-information geek if you'd rather; I'd rather you did. But I'm geeky about these things.

***

Are you a geek?

Are all enthusiasts geeks? Is it only the social unacceptability of things that makes things geeky? Of course it is...

***

I'm a people-watching geek. I'm a noticing-things geek. Maybe, given the hair and all that, I'm a sideshow freak as well? Just as it suggests up there at the top in that etymology...

ROLL UP! ROLL UP! COME SEE DAVID THE HIRSUTE HOUND, THE GEEKY GORILLA!

Some aphorisms...

2010-06-14T23:28:00.003+01:00

I found these in André Breton's Anthology of Black Humor. All by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

***

If you want to see what man can do if he wanted to, you have only to think of those who have broken out of prison or tried to break out. They have done as much with a single nail as they could have done with a battering ram.

***

Man loves company, even if it is only that of a smouldering candle.

***

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

***

Whereas everyone these days is writing for children, it would be a good idea to have, for once, a book written by children for adults. But that is no mean task, if one expects to stay in character.

***

He marvelled at the fact that cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were.

The Underworld

2010-06-14T23:04:00.003+01:00

From Eric Partridge's Dictionary of the Underworld:

Figging law - pickpocketry, 1591, Robert Greene, A Notable Discovery of Coosnage, details the terms proper to the craft:

The Cutpurse, a Nip;
He that is halfe with him, the Snap;
The knife, the Cuttle boung;
The picke pocket, a Foin;
He that faceth the man [the victim], the Stale;
Taking the purse, Drawing;
Spying of him, Smoaking;
The purse, the Bong;
The monie, the Shels;
The Act doing, striking.

***

Has anyone seen Bresson's Pickpocket? Here's a clip -

It's a joy to watch, no? One of the men in the scene, Kassagi, was a professional pickpocket. And I'm wondering if Alan Bennett's recent pickpocketing was as skilful?

On the Radio...

2010-06-14T22:34:00.003+01:00

I hardly ever listen to Radio 4...

My manager was discussing Desert Island Discs - Frank Skinner was on it yesterday and chose songs by George Formby and The Fall. As you do.

So, in our vaguely muso way, we imagined that we were famous enough to be on DID and set about discussing what songs we'd choose.

There are a few ways to fill up the list numbered 1 to 8: you can choose songs you love (qualitative choices); you can choose songs that remind you of times in your life (autobiographical choices); you can choose things that people said you should because you don't like music (ignorant choices).

You can also choose ironically and snobbishly.

Here's a list I've come up with (plus youtube links) - Gordon will shake his head at some choices.

My list might be very different tomorrow.

Happy Song(s)

2010-06-13T11:58:00.003+01:00

Because sometimes you need to smile.

(I've been listening to Odelay following sad song Jackass the other day...)

(More true words from Mozza - it is nice and it can stop you.)

(Many of the lyrics here are wrong...)

(I've been known to put this on repeat for ages and ages and ages...)

(Scottish band in twee pop shocker!)

Two poems

2010-06-13T11:03:00.003+01:00

Penzance / London by WS Graham

From this point onward we become aware
Of valleys to the sea. Closed as they are
From passengers with intent they fly behind
Lost in their trees. I, myself, beyond
Everything fly lost forever looking
Out of my window. Was that you I saw
Making love on the embankment among the daisies?
The speed I travel you would not catch
Me seeing you. Nor would you be put off
What you were doing. You fly away behind
Beyond two bridges into the summer day.

***

All These Miles by Julia Copus

What can I tell you with all these miles pulled taut
between us and time split like fruit so everything

happens to me two whole hours before
it happens to you? Here, already, I can feel

the dumbstruck night disintegrate. Listen: it is
the hour of the dog - a thousand husk-throats hacking

a beach-long ache of sky. Beneath it someone
is walking me home, just inches from the quiet

shift and swell of the sea that takes us,
almost without sound, past the statue-white

chairs in the tea-garden crowding
the waterfront, facing seawards like ghosts.

My door is open; we climb into its shadow,
saying nothing, until only the moon is left

unchanged and familiar, and his face closer in, his
breathing like the sound of the whole sea in one, small

uninhabited shell; like the sighing of steam which starts
deep in the pistons, then shudders an engine into life.

Flogging a dead egg

2010-06-13T09:49:00.002+01:00

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's all."

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them - particularly verbs: they're the proudest - adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs - however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

***

Words are just arbitrary sounds, and we decide what they mean by agreement - we don't always agree using words - sometimes we nod - sometimes we agree by experience (e.g. "don't" really did mean "don't".. ouch).

Rebels like Humpty hold themselves as masters of language - he's an arrogant fool who supposes his words are correct. And his words are chosen to be perfect, and defined as perfect against the ruler of perfection - himself.

Humpty is, unfortunately, a poet.

And yet, and yet... his master-words get thrown up against one another and for those of us who agree with Alice, Humpty can appear to be nothing more than a machine that produces perversions of words.

WS Graham asked this question several times: "what is the language using us for?" One of his answers was:

"It uses us all and in its dark
Of dark actions selections differ."

Quite. But think of any difference between words and language. A dictionary is not a language.

The problem with masters of language is that they can very, very easily be mastered by language. (cf. Finnegan's Wake) Perhaps Humpty holds his position on that wall of words only because Language put him there?

(I should add that Humpty is generally called a nominalist...)

***

"Is that all?" Alice timidly asked.

"That's all," said Humpty Dumpty. "Good-bye."

This was rather sudden, Alice thought: but, after such a very strong hint that she ought to be going, she felt that it would hardly be civil to stay. So she got up, and held out her hand. "Good-bye, till we meet again!" she said as cheerfully as she could.

"I shouldn't know you again if we did meet," Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake: "you're so exactly like other people."

"The face is what one goes by, generally," Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.

"That's just what I complain of," said Humpty Dumpty. "Your face is the same as everybody has - the two eyes, so -" (marking their places in the air with his thumb) "nose in the middle, mouth under. It's always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance - or the mouth at the top - that would be some help."

"It wouldn't look nice," Alice objected. But Humpty Dumpty only shut his eyes, and said "Wait till you've tried."

How an 8-year-old sees...

2010-06-12T23:21:00.007+01:00

Today, I went to Strathaven for gala day, barbecue and meeting new people. By the end of the day I was completely soaked - Lochlyn threw a bucket of water on me while Devlin made do with a cup. The water fight had been going on for about half-an-hour. (Jack, whom I hadn't met before today, said at one point: "I'm only going to shoot [his waterpistol] at people who don't have a weapon!" He meant me. And he meant it.)

***

I took my camera. But most of the pictures on it weren't taken by me. 167 of them were taken by 8-year old Jennifer. (This is complicated - she's the half-sister of my brother's girlfriend's daughter. Got that?)

I had gathered Lochlyn, Devlin, Jack and her together and said: "who wants to take a picture?"

"ME ME ME ME ME ME ME!!!"

"But they have to be of interesting things."

"Is this an interesting thing?" they asked me about lots of things. I answered "yes" to them all.

After this madness had passed (and a few pictures taken) I said to Jennifer: "Do you want to take more pictures?" I could sense that she had liked doing so and wanted to some more.

"Yes!" she nodded. Then asked: "Is a dog an interesting thing?"

I told her that anything she thought was interesting was an interesting thing. She smiled and, with camera on auto and a quick lesson in focussing, off she went. (Anyone who knows me in Real Life also knows that I don't like other people using my camera... but I trusted her.)

***

I've just spent a long time going through her 167 pictures and I smiled an awful lot. Some are really good. Her sister (much older) called her a "weirdo" for taking pictures of "random things".

I think they're all wonderful. Here are 10, including two self-portraits.

stars sliding

Yikes...

A handful of recent PCs

From an e-mail I've just written:

Cover Versions

Sigh... here comes a rant.

Some PCs - click for bigness

Pleased to meet you...

Collisions from both sides...

For Nitoo...

As I start typing...

More PC

Musical Poems Recently Loved

Poets Cornered - no. 11 & 12

3 x Noisy-Pixies + 1 x Quiet-Pixies

Armenian Miniatures

Russian Fairy Tales and Long-Time-Ago Japan

Poets Cornered #9 & #10

Five Things

Occasionally...

Poets Cornered no. 7 & 8

Blogthargia

If you cry, cry only one tear...

Why oh why oh why oh why oh why___

Poets Cornered - no. 6

"... a mouse is used to draw."

Poets Cornered - no. 5

And so, the next Poets Cornereds...

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT (no, really...)

Poets Cornered #127

"Women of India: Protected and Progressive"

The future's bright, the future's less straight-lined

Meme-a-licious

Another two of these...

Oh, the pains of unknowing!

My last two imaginary film covers for a bit...

Scott Pilgrim

What do mathematicians know about the English language?!

More imaginary film posters

Beautiful and floaty

All those poems in a row...

August 31st / Titles

Posters

Don't think once, twice, thrice, ...

Saul Bass

Bitzenbobs (being six 14-liners)

Something noisy to waken up the neighbours...

Ridiculous

Some very old poems for Rachel

Girl with a frog hooded jacket + Book buy

Man in a Shed

Poems by Groucho, John and Edwin

Edwin Morgan

Songs recently loved

Nonsense (literary)

Chatwin and Borges

Songs recently loved

Arcade Fire do some-kind-of-disco...

Philip Glass on Sesame Street

I went to the woods today...

Poetry in Manali

Floods in Leh

Music and po-hems

More Me Play Uke

Found at the back of a book

Randy Newman wrote it...

"Thirty One in August"

Combinations scribbled down in Alchi

"But it's wrong!"

Artlessness

A few more pictures

Uke 'n' me

Rain of an existential variety

So...

Knock, knock... I'm back!

The Last Post

AG+Penpont+other art

Nine odd things...

More on the translation - and then about love poems

Keith Haring