From Plath to Panel : The Nao of Brown

I've found what must be the third of a great trilogy of graphic novels in The Nao of Brown by Glyn Dillon. (The other two are of course Logicomix and Nelson). However this was a truly random find - where the previous two had been bought after reading reviews, I found this after a good twenty minutes of perusing the comics shelf at Waterstones (no apostrophe required now). It was a no-contest - a few seconds of page flipping and it was decided on - the graphics are exquisite watercolours. But the story does not let you down either. A quirky-yet-gentle tale - without real anger despite the compulsions of Nao Brown which lead her to imagine herself committing acts of violence on the closest and most loved of her friends. I've not yet reached the end - maybe these obsessions will be made real - I hope not - but even then this will have been a beautiful thing. My daughter was also immediately taken by the artwork and I hope she reads it because it is as literary as any of the classic books she loves and hip enough to keep her in with the cool kids too.
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It makes me want to draw - like reading The Waste Land made me want to write poetry. It is unfortunate that I draw far less well than I write poetry and I do that far less well than any of the poets I admire. However looking back my poetry has improved so maybe given time (in more ways than one) I could draw as well. I move from obsession to obsession without focus. As I said before, I am having to turn off the wifi to avoid being distracted while reading. And it works.

Your World and Mine is Full of Enemies

… and the spice of foreign wars safely out of sight.
The echoes of bombardments just across the sea,
Negotiate the mean free paths of rolling downs,
And at their end meander, dying in the city streets,
Mere annoyances to those that war has immunised.

The murmurings of gunnery, barely break the dreams,
Of those knocked into each other's sleep and arms,
By drink the night before, taken in fear of death.
One breathed love into the other's ear to beat,
The jabbering of basement bars in cheap hotels,

And so they meet and stalk the sticky corridors,
Rolling hard like on the first days of sailors' leave,
Falling on the bed and breathlessly, forgetfully,
They roll and dance, considering this day their last,
And later they wake fitfully to guns and thunder,

Merging in the dusty streets and Tenements of London.
They'll call him up this day or possibly the next,
With darker lotteries, and in turn they'll press his lover,
To dull and grimy service in the new factories,
And she'll convince herself it's better than before,

A warm room at night with friends and food and circuses,
With days of tedium, the sound of war masked by lathes,
And engines falling in the arcs of shelling.
She'll make the bomb that kills him blue-on-blue,
One accident in many yet she'll never know or care.

Mad Girl's Love Song

(Click here for Poem Text)

For years I thought that Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems was the definitive edition. I was aware that Ted Hughes was berated for lumping together most of the material written before he met Plath as "Juvenilia" and it was indeed clear that a lot of these poems were deserving of inclusion in the main body of work. Perhaps Hughes was not then aware that his own Collected Poems would include true Juvenilia such as "Wild West" written when he was 16 :

I'll tell you a tale of Carson McReared,
Who, south of the 49th was feared
Greater than any man ever before,
And men went in fear of his .44,
For he'd shoot the ears from any man
From Two-Gun Ted to Desperate Dan.

There ain't nothin' like that in Sylvia's Collected Poems. And there should be. We deserve nothing less than a matching complete edition. The title of this entry is also the title of this recent Plath Biography by Andrew Wilson which I've just finished reading, only after forcing myself to turn the internet off while I read it to stop myself looking up diverting details on The Interwebs.

In Forbidden Planet Action Figure terminology this is "Next Wave". After the crop of biographies gathered temporally around Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson's detailed but definitely-flawed biography, (written jointly as Stephenson almost put it, with Hughes' sister Olwyn - so much so that it might have been better to attribute the book to a literary equivalent of Alan Smithee), there has been a gap of some years with just academic volumes. The fiftieth anniversary of Plath's death has sparked a new crop of popular biographies and the absence of Ted from the world seems to have lessened his family's desire to manage his image and to have allowed a refocusing of the analysis on Plath's life away from his influence.

Mad Girl's Love Song does indeed leave Ted as a blurry presence at the beginning and the end though last word really belongs to Richard Sassoon, who although a major presence in all the previous biographies, seems to have become The Colossus that Plath aspired to, and despite only having a few emails and stories from Sassoon, Wilson manages to give us a clear idea of his and Plath's relationship in a way I've not seen before. The pivot point of the timelines of Plath, Hughes and Sassoon is described well, in a way which re-balances this triangle of egos in a way which puts Plath and not Hughes at the apex. Sassoon is still alive and I am sad that he is not more well-known. Maybe he was never after the fame which Plath both craved and achieved but from this book it is clear that he had the intellect to match Plath and to obviously surpass Hughes.

I've always tried to step back from the vitriol that Hughes seems to attract and I still want to but the problem, as a fictitious academic with mild Aphasia once said of a past paramour, the trouble was that he had such a small .... what is the word .... intellect. Well when compared to Plath that is true.

Poem for a Birthday

They've sidelined misery today, turned away from hope,
With the nighttime wake guards, rifles down in due respect,
And strangely I'm elated this hot night, happy in the drip-drip,
Break-away of nations all in worship like a new religion,
Born of nothing but the mis-directed reverence for lineage.

We have our common kin, a lichen maybe, or a single cell,
As much an accident in this chain of errors made successful,
Through survival, the beating down of rivals, stealing food,
Being born just so and in the right position to claim gods,
As parents, like a gold idol levitated as proof of magic,

Proof of right to rule through ruthless mob denial of rights,
Of others. Keep it up - you need no guards these days,
Years ago you bred out revolution with your little gifts,
To the well-fed, to the entertained and reverent crowds,
Slack with the lottery of waiting, the public as the news.

And tomorrow they'll roll out the guns to celebrate a birthday,
Mark life with the instruments of death, the very limbers,
Made to carry to their final Mass, the passing monarchs,
Passing undivinely like us all, mortal after all, commoners,
Like us all, signed out for good like us all. Just a circuit,

And maybe I'm happy for the humans in this messy show,
Made possibly complete by birth in all this chaos of no function,
Drowned in a sea of goodwill and unblushing praise, but,
You'd think that reproduction was by decree and by degrees,
The truth of how the world should run is made plain to us.

Electra on Ctrl-Z Path

This may be the undoing of you,
The visit you audited yourself.
You tied your mind to paper,
And though you never said,
I saw the sun through leaves,
Dappling the track to your father,
The pulse of light matching you,
Beat for beat in love and fear,
For the magician bent double here,
Crushed roughly in the tomb.

You saw the bees still sleeping.
But now their waking hum pervades,
All you notarised, my small doll,
And I have begun the rollback of you,
Keystrokes repeating at my fingers,
Two little movements diagonally
Linked by Thumb and index,

I am rebuilding, fixing the failures,
With caresses of machinery and mind,
Mending your sparking cortex,
Every neuron undone and reconnected,
Reconditioning the cosmic clockwork,
As the world stops dead around us,
Undone, undone, you are undone,
Disassembled until you are just parts,
Laid out and lost under the chairs,
Unrepeatable in the chaos of the world.

Your trajectory is proof of my misguidance,
The failure of audiences everywhere,
Their peanut-shell detritus haloing
The dead ground of cheap movie houses.
You are a remade film, shrunk in dissection,
To your own pale, blank shell,
Like every dead, rock-star poet,
Burned out before achieving orbit.

But I have inserted an alternative,
I have the agility of hindsight,
A quick reply to All the Dead Dears,
Made to be forgotten in no weather.
You are in the moon your daughter sees,
Orbiting not this but every planet,
Not clockwork, but instead quantum,
Occupying all points simultaneously,
Surpassing the God you’d never speak to,
All history in one remembered line.

Fanfare Funfair

Feeling Crabby

Many years ago when computers were dangerous and new, I was given an Oric 1 in return for some work I did. This slab of plastic and mysterious, magical innards had a rudimentary sound chip which allowed me to program in notes and actually to play several notes at once. The very first piece of music I put in was a Crab Canon by Bach which had the brilliant time-saving property of being the same when played backwards or forwards and hence meant only half the amount of data input. I don't have the recording I made of it or even the Oric but I have been able to create a new version which you can listen to here. It's not long. Go on. I know you want to.

World Poetry Day - Culture Wars

For ChrisH

Usefully I'd legislate myself away he says,
Borne on the red wind to my oblivion,
But he is a deep sea fish, all teeth and rot,
A compound fury concealed in doggerel,

Barely holding back the spit and fleck,
Of rage and half-concealed despair,
We fail him with our lack of intellect,
One word in three or two above us,

And he berates obscenely, all our errors,
How we fail to understand the world,
Our place in it to serve just ourselves,
And now we are in the next war,

Unarmed with wit and cool obscurity,
One side victorious in Martin’s war,
The other trained in ill-formed invective,
Built on the containment of emotion,

And here I walk the narrow line myself,
Versed in biofeedback slowing hearts,
To limit tremors in the bolts I loose,
Secretly aching for that killer blow,

The froth-corrupted injury of silence,
That staggers; that shuts him up for good,
A word or two as a billion hollow points,
Launched late in this oh-so civil war,

At seven tonight we win, we break the news,
Of victory, the climb to sunlit uplands,
We can predict it perfectly, to a moment,
The fall of the last soldiers, posed on hills,

And left and right stand hand-in-hand,
Awaiting approbation that must surely come,
Citations, mentions in despatches, medals,
Glinting in the bloody light of evening,

But there are dead fonts now, empty op-eds,
The raw, unfollowed critic’s training course,
Swinging in the winds of change and spite,
It’s all one-sided now and in the name of balance,

Mash-ups (No Zombies)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they vapourised Syme, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Is there anything else on Radio 4 at the moment? George Orwell and Sylvia Plath seem to have taken over and I'm expecting one or both of them to be guest editor on Today sometime next week. Not a complaint of course apart from the time it's going to take to listen to it all once it's off the PVR and on a device somewhere. 

Albert Farrar Gatliff and John Caulfeild Wolseley Gatliff

I didn't know but my dad had this picture of my great-great uncle - Albert Farar Gatliff, a general in The Royal Marines and a bearer of The Unknown Warrior in 1920. I've been trying to find him in this film ...

... but the picture was taken 20 years previously. Dad also has his swagger stick.

However, none of this is as important as another discovery prompted by discussions with members of The Gatliff Trust who were at my aunt's funeral. They asked me if I knew what happened to my grandfather's brother - my great uncle. We knew he died in 1914 though his date of birth would have made him 15 at death, a very young age for any combatant. However a few fuzzy google queries actually turned up that he was a Royal Navy Cadet and he died during surgery at Dartmouth. So John Caulfeild Wolseley Gatliff has been belatedly added to the Commonwealth War Graves Commision list of casualties - one of the youngest ever.  

Elizabeth Noel Gatliff: 1926-2012

My wife has pointed out almost every day for the last week that I have not blogged since September. Well here we are again. Sadly this hiatus has been because my wonderful aunt, Elizabeth Noel Gatliff, died on Boxing day. She was 86 and had a life of excitement and joy that most of us can only dream of. I'm posting this picture of her in the crowds on VE day which is how she should be remembered - with spirit and laughter. She was a nurse and health visitor for many years, working in Canada and Australia and visiting every part of the world without fear or anxiety. She did not see any divisions in the world, only people and believed that everyone could be better off basically by having a bit of respect and by giving up a bit of oneself to others. I am comforted that she died peacefully in the Horton Hospital in Banbury because she had campaigned with many other people to keep services from being moved from there to Oxford for the sake of saving a few pounds. I was touched and overwhelmed by the number of people who came to her funeral and I can only hope that I managed to convey the colour and excitement of her life in the tribute I wrote.