Misanthropism Sucks!

I am in the mess of having a number of books half-completed. I was in a phass where I was finishing books before starting others but I am back in book-pile-mode.

I have just finished Night Train by Martin Amis. I'm not sure you would want to bother. For all his 'War on Cliché', Amis seems to have got into creating a meta-cliché in the form of his stream of what I have heard called 'clever neologisms'. A little less clever-clever Martin and a bit more concentration on writing like he did for Time's Arrow. I will not be getting Yellow Dog any time soon.

Other books in the pile are :-

Frida Kahlo Biog
The Savage God - Al Alvarez
Wintering - Kate Moses

I am just sitting back lost in all the beautiful flow of Music for 18 Musicians. Why does my wife hate this one so much? I think if a snippet of melody is good and hooky, then it is worth repeating. It is better than this if, in the process of repeating it you change it over time to produce another killer tune. If in this process of change, every intermediate melody is beautiful as well then you have perfection. Add in some mega-chord changes - turning 18 musicians on a dime - then to make a superlative absurd - what more could you want. Here comes a change, a fade out and another melody overlaid. You can hear the rain outside the studio, or then cracking of paving in some back-lot. The staff of the building sit on upturned crates on the sidewalk outside but in the shade of the building, probably smoking but happy anyway. The city would make noise like this; it does make music like this. Listen to the repeating things of the city you are in. This takes everyday life and makes it beautiful. Poetry rooted in this can make concrete and steel seem like living things, the tissue of some giant organism.

Eurydice in Pieces
06/07/2004

Out of the close, old summer air,
there comes a thump of cracked geology,
the white and marble of someone
edged deeper in their mind of glass
and fluid, stretched by hated physics
to some string or particle of math.

Here is a blur of ice and words,
a book and paper in her arms
to detail cracking and implosion
with every tracking thought and view,
this book of empty mind and scars,
a charm, a shield against the drugs.

I used to dream of cold, sunny days,
against the sky of mountains,
as we climbed to snowlines
through the sharper light of forests.
And here is my companion, eyeless
in her graceful lope and prayer.

Here, some talk of submarines,
some line about her school for me
to understand her days and thoughts,
poured white through mirrors.
And even then I guessed her end,
her shattering through dogma.

Not a city poem but from the same place I think. I have not written any poems for about three months and I really though that the crazy rate I was writing them has gone forever. It seems that I am like a capacitor; I build up little by little and then all the metaphors I have stored away shoot out in one big lump.

Radio 3's Morning on 3 programme is currently featuring many pieces of music about Orpheus and Eurydice by way of explanation.

I almost forgot to mention Robert Hughes' The New Shock of the New. For all my admiration of (some of) the Brit Art mob, I sneakily found myself agreeing quite a lot with Hughes' championing of what you might call 'proper' art. It was strange to find myself falling back to agreeing that David Hockney and Paula Rego are the real owners of the current champions of art. I like Damien Hirst and was quite surprised to find my Aunt who is 'alternative' in her politics and social outlook but quite traditional in her liking of art, was quite taken with the Hirst Book. However, personally I think he does not have a personal element to his work. Which is of course a pompous way of saying that money is probably his main concern.

I have just reached fuddy-duddyism. Maybe I should head this entry 'I don't know art but I know what I like' which is honest if nothing else.