Friday, February 27, 2004

Five Days, Six Poems, Random Friday

Listening to - Celtic Wedding - The Chieftains

Thinking of - going to see Kathryn Tickell next Friday.

What does a drone make you think of? Those long, low sounds become you in the darkness, the sound of blood in veins and arteries. See that pipe up there? That is one new sound, like a pipeline to heaven, the buzz of reeds and bones; the resonance of teeth in face of that wonderful sound. I am in the middle of money and it did not quite gel until John Self sat down with Martin Amis himself. I thought they were going to fight but there is no way I can like John like I like Will. Was Will a friend at the time. I was still at college then and this literary highlife was just the glow of dawn on the horizon, the beating of Gareth's whoops and yells, his theology, the intelligence I was looking for. He showed me Godel, Escher, Bach and I was hooked. Writing can be just like music. Read it on painkillers and see the world as pure number, the flute as a harmonic curve, dragged out from olod oscilloscopes. We had half the army's dronign green in that room, a mess of technology we though was the end of technology, the future in out dusty office. I used to steal the sugar and play with the mercury. We had a blank remit to write poetry or report on nothing. Life caught up with us and we forgot those viewers but I think we had found something new, the eye is tired and rests, switches to its brother just to get away from the horror that we force it to watch. We switch red to green and in any given minute see half-and-half but it is the frequency that changes. Some may change just once or twice in the minute while others switch every second. I got the feeling that some of them were playing games with us. Making a living. That's all we want of life.

Waiting for wintering. I wish I could finish this book but it has dragged me in and it is not the book to read at all times. Some books make you carry them round; annoy you when you are away from them and misuse colons, semicolons. Punctuation is sooooo important but so difficult. Where does this apostrophe go? Between Joy and Division. Those black-coated harpies are stealing the love from all those poor decrepit boys lined up in the snow, stamping to keep warm. Who made them stand on that bridge by that inner city, decaying in the face of so little interest? Love Will Tear Us Apart. Brilliant! And then the traffic started, released like fire and water at the dams of Manchester, until the snow faded into mud and the ruins were washed away in a mess of syllepsis and antonym. And the summer they executed those poor boys I thought I had diphtheria, maybe just for the lunchtime but diphtheria it was. We dissected various animals and they all made me think I was ill, those red-raw internal organs seeming still to pulse. How to play your own internal organs, that pipe is one way how, to make the body resonate, that sound with its random little black sparks, that kill a blood cell with a dance and spike and spark and power. This place is wholly magnetic; I have to spin to keep myself happy that the world is still in place, turn every knob until it lies as I would wish it to be. I am the boy who spun. Space is my place. I am a citizen of the universe and all this talk of killing aliens is so insulting to me and my kind. We would not be like you. I could be just a shade of blue, a gathering of gas between the stars, a particular flow of water which chaos gives an air, a mind or something much stranger, a flute note or the fur on a small peach, the very one Thomas Stearns dared to eat or not. Hi there J Alfred. How the devil are you? You got what I got? So much money for your fluted voice. There was that recording of Robert Lowell, the one with the Drowned sailor, and everyone laughed at you. Or maybe you prefer the wife of bath. I present to ungulates the deep resonance of this long-dead, punctuated language. This means so much to me; do not do me wrong by not completing these sentences. They reply with indifference and oceanography takes me back. Of course they prefer Chaucer; it takes them that long to learn the lingo here and after all they have so much digestion to do instead of thinking or learning. I, in allth innosentcia hath repealed thy storine with thine eyne and mine hath covered up your beauty with a mess of hope and death. You think so old and yet look so young. The music must be right and cold and the sky just right for me to love you like that wife, the tale of knights and love. The Raaby child is just a child, the walking dead of memory but in my mind so tall and black and perfect, the sink of all my fantasy and might and poetry. The meadows beckoned in the dreary light of England, Middle English was the words I spoke and how this rhythm broke my will.

The water is deep, as deep as any pacific trench and I want this to be one long line of poetry. Some words do not fit or seem to fit hexameter. The prose novel is not an option for the true poet. The White Stuff? Must see that laureate. Thought was robbed of that young man. I am still a young poet. There is time and we will endure the imposter until the empty winds take him away as hob-nobber of the other one who never was. The police view all music as riot here today. I see the green hair, the schoolboy rebellion in those deeply intellectual gatherings, the jazz and drink of every dark night out from there to clubs and dancing. They played great stuff that night, Bauhaus and Talking Heads. David was suitably manic that night and killed a duck for tea until it went off in his cupboard and gamely escaped, rising from the avian dead to be the saviour of the farm ponds and brooks. Bright and shining ducks and drakes in the moonlight. Any other over six is such a bonus. Thank you Simon for the lessons. Perfection in your high tower. That drive home will bore me always. I never get home refreshed.
God, Not God, Dog

I got told off last night while we were watching the BBC's debate of 'What the World Thinks of God'. My views on the subject are predominantly secular and scientific (as if you didn't know) and I jokingly said Jonathan Miller was a real candidate for the post of supreme being. I was told that I was being blasphemous. Now I like Jonathan Miller, even he does take sometime to get to the point and this was one of the main problems with the show; none of the participants was allowed more than a minute or two to make a point and Jonathan Miller needs a lot longer than that. Also, the 'world-wide poll' was just a joke. As Mr. Miller said, to reduce such a complex subject down to a few bullet points is just ludicrous and makes people jump to conclusions without thinking about them in any depth.

I made a lot of ludicrous points regarding cosmology which I am afraid is the only place I can even begin to entertain the idea of a creator; obviously, I do not have the science to understand the implications of recent cosmological theory for the existence of a creator but the 'brane theory opens up the possibility of things (space, time, concepts) before the Big Bang and so why not things before those things ad infinitum. Extremism and local, personal beliefs are my problem. There is the problem with 'I am right and you are wrong' which is so obviously means that any belief system must account for Pluralism (word of the week - having replaced pragmatism). At least my wife is a pluralist but then again she says if you take the big three religions with their belief in the SAME GOD, you do not need to be a pluralist; even Hinduism can be seen as monotheistic in certain lights (officially I think it is seen as such in at least one country which prohibits pantheism - maybe Burma but I am not sure).

Strangely, I see the practical religions such as animism and dynamism as probably more valid even if they do have a far higher supernatural content than more iconic beliefs. In Bali you begin to believe in the spirits in the trees and fields and rivers. I really did believe that one of the local gods was keeping the plane in the air through a bought of turbulence on the way back. It took me weeks of reading Richard Dawkins books to get over this.

Thursday, February 26, 2004

Peter, Peter, Popcorn Eater

Listening to - Innocence and Experience - Blake Babies

I broke by pledge not to but books until I had finished all the current ones. For all my complaints about Andrew Motion, I bough his biography of Philip Larkin (along with Larkin's collected poems for useful reference as AM would say). The review on the back says something about not an ounce of boredom it its pages. I do hope the reviewer is right. Anyway, as I sat in the cafe yesterday I looked for the Larkin poem that was read on the BBC poems-read-by-ever-so-good-actors programme. I could not remember the title but I knew it was about one of those Church tombs for a great man and his wife and hence An Arundel Tomb. Look at the rhyme scheme - ABBCAC - a sort of perverse limerick and the actual words - a brilliant poem. Now Larkin was not a man I would really like to have met; the impression I have from my limited knowledge of his life is not of a nice man. I am prepared to have my image of him altered by Mr Motion and therefore I have to give some leeway to my dislike of our famous laureate.


Wednesday, February 25, 2004

Taxonomy and Taxidermy Taxation

Listening to - One Step Beyond - a Ska Collection

Now I know that the root of pupil as in scholar and pupil as in eye is the same as it was once thought that one could see a small girl in the reflection in the eye but do all those Tax words have the same root? Anyone who does not care about this can go and get stuffed or classified. The answer appears to be that they are all related but I cannot be sure.

Apologies for the missing days. I was writing poetry again. My wife read yesterday's poem and said that I was becoming like a real poet in that I was able to take the minutiae of daily life and create a verse from it. Of course rather than making me happy at the compliment, this just made me ask why all the old poems were not those of 'a real poet'. She likened this paranoia to that in a woman who when told that her hair looks great today, responds with 'what was wrong with my hair yesterday?'

Yesterday's poem was about the common cold.

Artist of the day is Peter de Hooch. These pictures have a fresh, light quality about them, which is not present in Vermeer's paintings. I like Vermeer because of his photo-realistic views of the world around him but there is always this oppressive light which makes me think of the old instructional and pious views of sunlight through cloud which I always associate with Sunday evenings.

Monday, February 23, 2004

It's Like Having Two Popes Again

Forgive me: I know that this poem by Andrew Motion is supposed to be in Simple Language but that does not make it good does it? I commented on the bit about the 153 fish and how Mr. Motion said is suggested that the author (John in John's Gospel) must have been there to count them. My colleague pointed out that John's Gospel was written around 150 years after the events it described. Unless John was Methuselah, then he wasn't there at all. That does not mean that the figure of 153 is not correct of course.

This poem has made me think about metaphor. Sometime the central metaphor of a poem (if it has a metaphor at all and they usually do even if the poet doesn't know it) can be born of an almost complete overlap between the metaphorical thing being referred to and the poem referring to it. Sometimes there is such a tenuous link that it is almost impossible to get what the poem actually means. This poem seems to have gone one step further and the only link between the poem and the metaphor is the mind of the author when he says what it is about. Well at least it rhymes. Maybe he is saving all the good poems for his books or to sell to some newspapers.


Friday, February 20, 2004

Scents and Sensibility

My nose seems to be picking up more smells than normal. I know that smell is the most evocative sense but the extent to which a slight wiff of something similar to something from the past can bring back whole rafts of images in the mind. Yes, we are back to the old Proust/Biscuit combination.

We watched Fairytale - A True Story again last night as we had visitors. Eldest daughter was rapt throughout which is quite unusual and says something about how good a film it actually is. It was only this-morning that my supposition that the returning father at the end was played by Mel Gibson was found to be true. Now the reviewer on IMDB says that they object being lied to because the story is not true. Now I think I knew that (my book of strange phenomena pretty well debunks most of the film) but that is not the point of saying it. It may well have no trace of irony but it means something and something not so subtle that I could not pick up on it without having seen the film. The point is that it is a film which children like because there are fairies in it - real ones and ones which are spot on for the centuries-old imagining of fairies by children and adults alike. Adults like it (even if they do realise that there really are no fairies) because it gives them hope that things can be better. The reviewer admits that they have not seen the film so to criticise what we know is NOT a true story because it says so for reasons that are not clear to this person seems rather sad. Unless you have documentary evidence of fairies and are producing an edition of Horizon about this then "True Story" is obviously NOT GOING TO BE TRUE. This one is for my daughter.



Doing the Business

Listening to - Floored Genius - Julian Cope

I have worked out that Iain Banks is just using up all his old ideas to complete The Business. It uses the conceit of 'The Business' to allow his heroine to flit from one strange activity in a strange place to another. So we see here taking part in a new form of target practice involving an Oerlikon cannon and and an old drive-in movie screen followed by her on an old ship being driven at the Pakistan Coast where it is to be broken up. She was in Berlin when the wall fell and now she is in a weird high-Himalayan principality which may or may not be based on Zanskar. It suddenly struck me that it was like the novel that Adrian Mole tried to write where his hero found himself at all the significant places in the world. So Adrian went to Moscow (as part of some dairy tour) and his book then had a scene set on a tank when Yeltsin stood up against the Communists. I am feeling a little cheated to be honest.

I always believed that Zanskar was a made-up place. There was a series on the BBC about it and because I had never heard of it, I was convinced it was some sort of joke. Of course the problem is that Zanskar is not actually a separate country, more of an autonomous zone of another nation. Anyway, The Business is nearly finished and so on to Money.

I dreamt of meeting Sylvia Plath the other night and not the Paltrow version either. She wasn't sad or mad or ill at all, just business-like and poetic which probably is my sub-conscious view on what the film has done to her image. I think I dreamt of meeting her mother some time ago but Plath has never been there herself.

Thursday, February 19, 2004

Call Yourselves Pwaetowian Guards?

Listening to - Spooky - Lush

My mind is a blank. It cannot be MORE of a blank but it is a blank just at the moment. Trying to think of anything without a required external action (such as typing this) seems to result in mental blind alleys without any of the normal passing of interesting things.

I found the tape I made years ago which used a sample of Sylvia Plath reading the last line of Daddy. I am not sure whether I feel that it is just naff or actually quite good. After all the poem itself is written in a repeating nursery rhyme format and the sample simply repeats this line over the drum pattern and the melody. I think it is probably best left on my tape and not made available here. All the things I used to do using the three keyboards, Drum machine, sequencer, two effects boxes and 8-track mixer are now possible on a PC. I keep thinking about buying a program to do this but I am quite happy with the ability to access the available midi instruments from within a program. This seems to me to be the ultimate use of technology applied to music. We think of music as art and that only gifted individuals can excel at it. That is probably the case if you want an emotional content which is the point of most music but it is quite possible to produce catchy melody from automatic processes. After all how much range in the attack, decay and velocity of notes is noticeable by human beings.

My aunt always dismisses my ideas about computer music as technological rubbish but I am sure a computer can record ALL the nuances of keyboard playing so why can it not create them from scratch. Like the line from The Six Million Dollar Man which I am fond of quoting, The existence of a human arm in physical form is proof that a properly constructed artificial version will work. The existence of the human ability to play music is proof that a properly programmed computer will be able to play as well. Some modern-day Luddites may well insist that artificial music will never be as good as human produced versions but I disagree. The bottom line is that technology will one day be able to do everything humans can and do it better, longer, faster etc. This opens up all sorts of issues regarding soul and being which obviously are discussed by better men than me on a website near you.

Robert Brown cannot play an instrument to save his life.

Tuesday, February 17, 2004

Jumping the Shark

Listening to - Early Music - Kronos Quartet

Not typical Kronos but then what is and it is obviously them.

A very strange dream most of which is probably irrelevant but had an interesting conclusion. I had to get some medication for someone who had been shot while in a sort of dogfight. They seemed very ill at the beginning and were fussed over by someone none of us liked and it became obvious that the illness was being faked to get the person to leave. My task was to locate the doctor but I only found his partner/wife who, although aware of our need for medicine, had nothing to give other than a short computer program regarding dosages. She sat down with me and went through the source code thinking her early 70's BASIC to be very good. I spent this period of instruction trying to stifle yawns and resisting saying how old-hat this all seemed. The last bit is very weird and was the wake-up section that left me feeling very odd. Ron Howard walked in with his baseball cap on but he had severe Hydrocephalus, making his head so much wider than his face. He seemed totally normal otherwise and expected me to be as well. I cannot recall what I was talking about but I don?t think it was happy days. I woke up in a weird state, expecting Mr. Howard to be waiting for me. I had to keep convincing myself that I was awake.

The Business is beginning to annoy me. The Wasp Factory was brilliant and original and all the other things that have been said about it. Many of Banks' other books have been nearly as brilliant and always slightly at odds with the normal fiction. The Business seems to be failing on all counts. The main problem is that the characters seem so flat, out of a teen-ager's idea for a novel. It is almost as if Banks has something he wants to tell us all and had foregone plot and character in order to put out his (admittedly sweeping) vision of a global pan-chronic organisation. There is the same sense of little danger that Whit had, a sort of laid-backness, but Whit had .. er .. wit and the business has an airport novel feel. Stick to the whiskey. Maybe I should stick to familiar stuff after reading Martin Amis. There you are. It is the Martin Amis affect.

Monday, February 16, 2004

Eglantine?

Listening to - From Gardens Where we Feel Secure - Virginia Astley

I had to watch Bedknobs and Broomsticks FOUR times over the weekend - well I watched it once and it was on in the background while I was trying to read. Once through and it is a great film, not quite as good as Mary Poppins but up there with the best of Disney. However, three further times through and it begins to seem ridiculous - like repeating the word 'Chain' over and over.

Our film for the weekend was The Man Who Wasn't There with which, in my wife's view, the Coen brothers have redeemed themselves for Fargo which she hated (apart from that nice Marge Gunderson). For a film with so many pauses and long silences it kept attention and even mentioned the Uncertainty principle. black and white is always difficult to pull off as well and this one did not use B&W stock but printed the colour film to black and white which always seems like cheating. Read the stuff on the web if you want to know what it's about; I won't be telling you anything more other than it is superb - reminded me of Sunset Boulevard.

I finished Experience as well. I got Money out of the library but I ot it along with The Business by Ian banks which I think is probably only for completeness after having read all but the last two of his books. Now The Wasp Factory was excellent and The Crow Road and Complicity where nearly as good (if a little lacking in point). However I maybe getting too old because The Business seems Juvenile because, even if the idea of a two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old business group seems intriguing and rather satisfying, it also seems to be some sort of mad conspiracy theory and of course you know I don't believe in those. I really want to start Money but The Business is easy to read so I will wait.

See you later.


Friday, February 13, 2004

WH Auden? Good job his name wasn't Smith

There is a long interview with Virginia Astley here. I am trying to make up my mind as to whether it is worth getting the remastered version of From Gardens Where We Feel Secure. I have a Japanese import, which has lots of extra tracks from the 12” singles, but a remaster of that epic exercise in pastoral weirdness is very tempting. I used to listen to this over and over when I was cramming. I can remember the exact position I was in when I found the vinyl version. It swept away the city I was in and took me back home. God! How your presence shapes me.

It starts on this line, the power that shapes us. A poem spills out like so much water from the mouth of a decrepit fountain. I am a fish, freshwater food for the people who never managed to reach across to this time. Beatrice Dalle with her eye up to the sky, blind I think. Oh that old spirit, how daybreak takes us to and over the edge. Syllepsis defined is no syllepsis at all and all these tracks will fade out in the middle of a verse. It is as if we had ingested some unseen chemical poured into the water supply as source until the whole world slept at the feet of the warriors responsible. They are soldiers they say but they do not go after soldiers; they cheer the death of children and the innocent. My revenge, is rethink, rebuild, redo, remake them. We could engineer the twisty guitars until the strings became their downfall, the noose we use to hang them all. This is the same knot and further than this I can make no comment. It means nothing, for nothing we say can ever make anyone return. I repudiate. A sentence complete without ellipsis. There's a novelty. There's posh.

It rains. The air fills up with water and I wheeze and shake, fall to the floor unhelped and helpless. I think of haircuts and architecture where it means something. The shallow men, the hollow men, all the great men they pay to make the world look like it does; they've died and gone to heaven by ladder, by taxi, by anti-missile missile. Look! See them clinging to the point as they streak upwards with the Patriot, Polaris, Sidewinders, Phoenix. At fifty miles up they detonate and we see dust shake out into the orbits that can only bring them back to us. Sid floats around an airport. We think it's what he would have wanted. See the oceanographer, the diver, foul-mouthed and likeable. We like him. Blake knew him. His angels have no defined gender. Poet and illusionist.
Remember Bhutan

Listening to - Night Song - Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

Not sure what to right about ... and damn it I should stop using ellipsis to start every entry. Anything technical at home seems to be breaking down at the moment. I think it all has built in intelligence that senses when things are going well and causes malfunctions just to keep you on your toes.

I have nearly finished reading Experience. (I was going to start that sentence with 'Nearly finished reading .....'). So many times I have though about giving up but for all the boring bits there are an equal number of fantastic anecdotes (well anecdotes of a sort). The main fault is that it is too novelistic (in a sense which may be peculiar to me); it jumps back and forth, sometimes in the same sentence which can be distracting. However, Amis seems to be doing this for himself and no one else so why shouldn't he jump? You could call the whole thing weird and it is but it also comes across as a very affectionate look back at his (for us) un-conventional life. If I was a literary critic I suspect that this sort of life is the norm but for us plebs it seems rarefied and exciting. Vanished cousins who turn out to have been victims of Fred West, fights, abusive letters from fellow novelists, long-lost children you fathered 19 years before; they are all recorded because they are the main events and yet they seem normal parts of his life. I can only be grateful that my life is not the same but maybe that is the inherent Asberger's.

Thursday, February 12, 2004

For a Timepiece Never Changes Pace

So True!

Listening to - Treasure - Cocteau Twins

Wrote a poem about sharks yesterday inspired in some way by the article about the surfer who drove to get help after a small shark attached itself to his leg and wouldn't let go. Apparently squirting fresh water into the gills gets them off. I will have to remember that for the next time I go surfing; there are Grey Nurse sharks all along the Merseyside coast you know.

The big news of course is the cloning. I have an intense moral dilemma over this because it seems that the idea for this is to produce stem cells for creating body tissue for medical use rather than to create copies of anyone. I can see that these are human beings in a lot of people's minds but do the possible benefits outweigh these moral arguments? My wife is adamant that we should not do this and sometimes, when I think that a syringe of salt-solution is all that is needed to cure some diseases that cause huge amounts of misery, I wonder if we have our priorities right. Food is all we need to remove a great deal of suffering and surely we should concentrate in this first rather than finding solutions which will only help a few people, mostly in the Western world.

We do of course need to progress or else nothing would ever get done. I may have mentioned about my wife's statement about spending the money we spend on space research and exploration on more pressing terrestrial matters I countered with the view that taking that to its logical extreme would have left us in a swamp of decay sometime about 3000 BC. She did not like this but had to agree, if only grudgingly.




Wednesday, February 11, 2004

In Excess of a Million Words - and The Some

Listening to - Gala - Lush

I think I might have exhausted myself this morning. Knoxxy Eugenia is tapping gently at the window but she can't come in just like Kathy. In Limbo, there exists a place of sadness without torture where the unbelievers live in continuous deeps. This is my destination, destiny and destined non-ending. I thought of Limbo on listening to some squally stuff today. I have favourite words for ending with and always using. The dingy apartments of some academic town have covered everything today. This stain, that patch of damp, the ragged sofa, scene of so many liaisons and couplings: they are all created out of nothing to make an ambience of how life used to be. The bathroom, the home of so many endings, is white and clean, not the source of illness and depression like you made out. How do we see forty years ago? It is not what we see but what we want to see.


Seeing All Possible Futures

Listening to - The Gathering - Kathryn Tickell

That's TickELL - never Tickle. This shows exactly how to keep traditionally based music relevant and meaningful for the current century. No need to stick sequenced drums over it - just play the music and see how many people get up and dance. Even my feet are beginning to move slightly and it takes bombs to bring out any rudimentary terpsichorean talents that I possess.

I dreamt about a huge computer printer last night. I used to work as IT support for a graphics production team but we only had A3 printers then ; this beast was a room sized thing, hidden away in some huge and empty building somewhere on this site. I was called down because the output was not consistent and the users were trying to blame the software we had written for the problems. I was insistent that the differences in colour were due to problems with the hardware and that they should call the manufacturers. The only meaning I can get out of this is my current work is very boring and text-based. (Thank you Lynne!) I want to be doing pictures or more probably poetry. Text vs. pictures. Right-Brain vs. Left-Brain.

My son had his first injections yesterday. He has been grouchy as the leaflets say but I think it was just residual resentment at us for permitting that to happen to him - two injections - one in each leg. My daughter never cries at injections - in fact at the last one when she was told she had to be brave she just put up with it and then said that she didn't cry so we told her that 'being brave' didn't mean not crying - just being still while it happened. Anyway - women have a higher pain threshold so I expect some belting tear-sessions from Number one Son. Anyway, he is back to normal this morning. Looking around for the next stimulus - milk - playtime - staring at the light. Why to babies do that? My daughter used to stare at lights and one time while we were staying at my parents she would fix on the light in the bedroom even when we dimmed it right down. Sometimes I ask her about these things but she doesn't remember them, though she does claim each day that she cannot remember what she did at school.

New Stereolab album out now - Margarine Eclipse. They seem to name all their albums after the fictitious bands which John Peel always announces one of at the start of his show (The Radio One show not Home Truths). Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Margarine Eclipse, Crispy Ambulance - Sorry! That one is really a band. Don't believe me? Go Here. (Actually I wrote about them years ago).

I listened to John Peel's show last night. Unfortunately, them music was not wonderful and I felt I was listening to hear John Peel. This will sound like the "We lived in a cardboard box in middle of t' road" sketch but I remember listening to John Peel in the early eighties when he played lots of reggae and stuff from groups like the Comsat Angels. Of course Peel was already a long-established DJ by then so to seem him still going with as much energy as ever is great. Home Truths is good as well but that may be because of my Bourgeois upbringing. Sorry but it is a rather middle-class thing. I don't actually get to listen to it anymore. I know there is the streaming but we are not allowed to stream here so lunchtime catch-up is not possible.

Too much writing this morning. My coffee has gone cold and viscous but I have to drink it. The childhood thing of eating everything on the plate is just too ingrained. All that stuff which I ate because my parents told me that there were starving children in the world who would be glad of it. The logic of childhood of course means that you cry out (internally at least in my case) that maybe if they were so hungry you should send it to them. Of course after the recent rant about food and starving people, maybe we should return to a sort of collective version of that logic. My general analogy for these things along with most of the work I do is that it is just like addition and subtraction with the occasional bit of multiplication and division; there is never any differentiation or integration. Then chaos and catastrophe theories jump on board and my analogy come crashing down in a shower of mixed metaphors.

It is four minutes to official start time and yet the office is nearly empty. It is Wednesday today isn't it?

Bye for now. Have a look at what the sky looks like here as you read this. If you have got here because I was on the recently updated blogs list then the sky is as it is NOW.

Tuesday, February 10, 2004

The Deepest Part of the Ocean Will Remain Forever Dark ...

... until the sun boils away the seas and we are long gone.

Listening to - Philip Glass - not sure which title though.

There are so many possible catalysts about. I cannot choose which to go with. The thought of the screen equivalent of blank paper is too much. In the poetry document (which is close by here - so close to you, like being just out reach in the fourth dimension), the moment after the chore of emboldening the title seems to be loaded with so much possibility. There are thousands of words in the language and so many ways to put them together. The first character almost seems to burn itself into the electronics and the recoil comes back at me through the keyboard. The poem last night was written in a notebook with a fountain pen and it felt so good; I love the little acts of crossing out and inserting words; it just seems so powerful to be able to command these images with just a pen. It is all very well with a photograph or a paintbrush but nearly everyone can use a pen. I could not imagine how those clunky typewriters ever caught on what with the need for snow-pake/Tippex etc. At the moment blank paper or screen seems to demand to be filled.

Why is modern life so obsessed with triviality? Maybe I take things too seriously. Recently I have become worried that I am recovering from autism. I had many obsessions in my teens, with turning off taps and shutting doors etc. I still cannot look a stranger in the eye; it just seems not right. Could someone with the emotional blankness that autism produces produce poems? Maybe I have learned the correct reactions like psychopaths learn how to react to the things that they are unable to connect with emotionally. Maybe other things cause my emotional problems.

As you may have worked out, I got these worries after reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. I see the obsessions of the main character as almost normal, the science, the lack of eye contact, the touch taboos etc. I have learnt to react over the years in order to get by. Maybe my brain has corrected itself like a stroke sufferer who loses the function handled by the destroyed part of their brain and regains it after the brain re-wires itself to bypass the damage and free-up undamaged circuits. I feel emotional at times; I cry at all the requisite things right down to the death of the Tsar and they feel real and deeply meaningful to me. My worries cannot have basis in fact.

Word does not seem to have corrected any grammar in this piece. Maybe I am beginning to learn Word's style. Maybe it is a trick like the Encarta Dictionary of World English, a trick to force us all to talk like Microsoft as well as to use their software. Well at least I can string some words together. Please tell me if there are any grocers' apostrophes. I assume that I have that correct, as it is many grocers who have apostrophes and therefore the apostrophe goes after the s which indicates the plural. Lynne Truss has made me a proto-stickler. I though the reviewer who complained that the statement about lack of capitalisation with reference to e.e. cummings (sic) was being a bit pedantic when he stated that Mr. Cummings always capitalised his name. This page proves that he DID but the point being made was that most people immediately think of lack of capitalisation in Cummings' poetry (See another one - they're getting in everywhere - there goes another one) and the best way to indicate this was to use the version of his name which comes to mind. It was - horror - a joke.

Some E.E. Cummings to end with i think.

anyone lived in a pretty how town
Frieda - I am so sorry

Listening to - Four Organs - Steve Reich

Don't listen to this if, like one person at the premier, you are the sort who will bang the stage with a shoe if you do not like something. If you are listening to a CD then probably all you will have to bash will be something of yours. Four Organs is the same chord played over and over against a maraca rhythm, just lengthened each cycle. I think it is wonderful.

My DVD copy of Sylvia arrived yesterday so after restraining my self enough to watch Terry Jones' wonderful programme about Medieval Lives, I dived straight in. Well I have to say that it spookily matched the images in my head. Even more spookily, there is an early scene where Ted and his mates are reciting poetry or plays at high speed. One does "Henry King" but Hughes' piece is Prince Hal's soliloquy from Henry IV Part 1 so Henry King and King Henry bookend the scene. What is spookier is that the soliloquy is the one long piece of Shakespeare that I have memorised after being forced to by my English teacher in about 1980. It was only Saturday that I quoted it for reasons I cannot remember.

I suppose I ought to make an effort and do a longer review. have to say that the film messed up real life quite badly for the sake of flow, though it may have benefited from being a bit longer and fleshing things out. Some aspects of Plath's character were glossed over - she used to re-use old papers so I suspect she would not have screwed up paper to throw away. In some ways though and contradicting what I have just said, maybe the film did not need to be made. People who know Plath's life would not really gain anything other than entertainment involving the object of their hero-worship and lay viewers might well be bored unless they like beautifully composed shots.

Over all I was not disappointed but I could not feel anything other than that the film was an accurate visual representation of what happened even if the characters were flattened. Contrary to what I thought, there was quite a bit of Plath's poetry in the film (none of Hughes' though) but it was often in the form of audio equivalents of the spinning newspaper to indicate time spent composing and even then I think some of it seemed made-up. Maybe I just do not remember enough of her poetry. As one reviewer said, what can a film about poets actually do other than show the hard life that inspires them? Well, neither Hughes nor Plath had a really hard life physically but Plath was bound in the cycle of her own emotional problems anyway. In a way I could say that this is a film about how the other half lives, the emotional, literary people whose outlook on life and love differ from us mere mortals though looking at the tabloids these days maybe I am the peculiarity. See this film and it will not be a wasted ticket but as you probably know, the end is what we expect. I am not sure whether they resisted temptation by not extending the film into the posthumous life or whether they stuck to the brief of the original title of the film - Ted and Sylvia - which leaves me with an image of a Venn Diagram of the lives of the two poets with the film being the intersection, which is what it was. Sylvia on its own suggests that the film should have started in the thirties and finished where it did.

I wrote a long poem after the film finished. The house was quiet as my wife had not managed to stay the distance. It felt quite unworldly like the house was all that the universe consisted of at that time, or maybe like the Tardis spinning in space, the atmosphere of so many of Plath's poems. I know this sounds like real self-indulgent, self-reference and maybe you are right but have a look at the poems inspired by Sylvia Plath page here. My poem is better than most of these. There is also discussion of the film on the same site.

Monday, February 09, 2004

Invective Perfected

In a quiet place, the non-humans come and go, silent things to stay hidden from us. They are always there, waiting for us to go but often they wait for years for an empty space.

I know there are no easy solutions but this makes me feel so bad. Political ambitions (though how wanting a nuclear weapon can really be classified as being political is beyond me) seem to be ultimately, consciously or subconsciously, about nest-feathering and have no real thought for the people they 'represent'. Yes! I am being naive and I know that the BBC have specifically put a picture of three angelic though rake-thin children at the head of their article but surely the provision of food and other basic staples of life should be the most important thing. The inertia in the world is disgusting. So you are all going to shout at me and ask what exactly I am doing. The answer, apart from ranting about it, is nothing. But the point being that the people who have the capability and the responsibility for doing something are also doing next-to-nothing.

Now the Fortean Times may do one of their Myth-Chasers about this but I have always been led to believe that the world has more than enough food to provide for everyone. It is just that the west is reluctant to part with its surplus either because it is difficult to transport that much food without costing a fortune or, more likely that, deep down, the western governments have a vested interest in stopping the rest of the world becoming too productive and taking over markets which have traditionally been served by the first world. Of course we need the third world so big business can get its supply of cheap labour - see here for Oxfam's take on this. If the Wal-mart and Teco so have ethical trading policies as they claim, then I would like to see them employing or, better still, funding someone to check-up on the supposed breaches.

Ranty Bob, who never gets up and does anything, just writes about it all. I feel so guilty that my lifestyle is funded by my inaction and reliance on the very facts about which I complain so loudly. And yet my family and I live our live quite simply compared to the majority of people. We only have one car, though technically we should have none as my commute is well-served with public transport.




Don't Care About Spots on Apples

Listening to - Fairytales of Slavery - Miranda Sex Garden

This is far better than I remember it. I bought this record on the back of their wonderful Madra, which was unaccompanied madrigals and other such stuff. Fairytales of Slavery is more like some definitive If-you-are-a-goth-you-MUST-do-it-like-this manual. If you like your goth sweetly singing with weird 4AD style rumblings in the background then get this. If you don't then ... er ... don't.

Notice the entirely correct use of the apostrophe there? Well I finally succumbed and got a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I always knew how to use an apostrophe - you sling it over your shoulder, blow into one end and a noise like a sick duck comes out of the other - though you may not believe me looking back at the archives. The author of this sweet little book (not sure about commas yet though) is entirely correct that punctuation is important. Sadly these days, the problem is not really just one of bad punctuation but of bad writing in general. I know I am not the most wonderful of writers but some of the memo I have to read are just sad; they need rereading to get any meaning from them because all rules of grammar seem to have been ignored. More to report later. Just a joke there. This is conversational and the occasional ellipsis is permitted.

I watched Powaqqatsi yesterday, on my own because my wife, despite liking Koyaanisqatsi more than she thought she would, was not able to take two plotless movies in a week. There are some excruciatingly powerful shots in this film; the South-American dancers were amazing and together with the music made a film which said so much without any words at all. An acre of meaning could be gleaned from every minute, far more than say a whole afternoon of "live from the jungle". It is very like Man With a Movie Camera except that Reggio and crew had a helicopter and air-travel. I have just noticed that Koyaanisqatsi is mentioned in the IMDB review of MWAMC - which is nice.

Friday, February 06, 2004

Pip Pip!

Yesterday was the 80th birthday of the BBC time signal pips.

Listening to - Powaqqatsi - Philip Glass

Now koyaanisqatsi was wonderful. I have seen it several times before, once when it was shown very late by Channel 4 and I could not sleep afterwards. The long section called The Grid is just breath taking. It consists of static shots of cities sped up and gradually sped up further until near the end of the sequence it is difficult to work out what you are seeing. Now there was a passage early in 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time' where the narrator hits a policeman because he asks him questions without giving him time to reply; the information just builds up in his head. This struck me as similar to what I experienced when watching The Grid section.

I was driving in to work the other day when two massive building cranes loomed out of the mist. They were angled so that the jibs were facing in exact opposite directions like a massive honour guard or those two giant statues at the end of the first Lord of the Rings film. I though that it would have made a great time-lapse sequence to have them move slowly throughout the sunrise but of course the film-maker didn't script anything for Koyaanisqatsi. The film looks stunning; some of the cityscapes are so beautiful and together with the music they create real 'tingle factor' and yet all the time it is in the back of your head that you are supposed to be horrified by what humans are doing to the planet and that you are part of the problem. My memory of this film has always been that it was a gritty low-fi thing meant to make a point rather than be beautiful but watching it yesterday I was struck by how perfect it actually was.
Slow Waltz with Building Cranes

Listening to - Sheryl Crow - er by Sheryl Crow

Like that is so eponymous!

There was halo around the moon last night. It was full and at about ten lunar diameters from the moon itself, there was a light line caused by the moonlight in the thin layer of cloud that was up there. Lunar Halos are probably not quite as rare as I made out to my wife but it is the first time I have seen one. What with that and it being my birthday as well, I felt quite content last night even if I am now 40.

That meant DVD frenzy, with the double DVD pack of Koyaanisqatsi / Powaqqatsi. Now these being scored by Philip Glass, my wife was expecting a night in the kitchen but she decided to put up with Koyaanisqatsi and had to admit that she quite liked it. Cue one smug birthday boy. We didn't risk overload by trying to watch Powaqqatsi but instead went on to Anita and Me. Ok so it wasn't deep but contrary to what some of the reviewers say, I think it stuck at least to the emotional side of the book.

Just read this article sparked by John Lydon's outburst and departure from I'm a Celebrity, get me some more publicity. Nice to see Roger Mellie still reminiscing.

More on the DVDs later.

I also got more books, which has prompted my sister to suggest that we may not actually have room for them all) - The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, which is so easy to read that I am already up to Chapter 97. Well that sounds more impressive than it actually is because the chapter numbers are all prime so it is only chapter 25 really. Actually that sound quite good as well. I am getting worried. In both the program by Luke Jackson, the teenager who wrote Freaks, Geeks and Asperger Syndrome and in the latest book, I have though that the supposed symptoms of Asperger's syndrome seem no more than normal. I don't think of myself as unemotional but as a teenager I seem to have had trouble working out how people reacted to me and always assumed the worst. I am more able to work things out now but sometimes the flashbacks hinder me. I can still understand the 'proper ' answer to the Monty Hall problem though even if I went along with the intuitive answer (which is the wrong one). The other book is Wintering by Kate Moses, the concept of which sounded so horrendous at first but the reviews have convinced me to try it. The author writes about the final months of Sylvia Plath's life. I will let you know.

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

Return With a Muted Trumpet

Well I wanted to start writing a few minutes ago but I couldn't think of any thing but after a few minutes away on the Amazon web site I have come back. Not that I want to write about anything I saw there though there may be some purchases made over the next few days.

Still reading Experience and I have to say that I have been impressed by Mr Amis' lightness when it comes to talking about himself. The fact that his cousin, Lucy Partington was a victim of Fred and Rose West might have meant a continuous miasma of gloom over the whole thing but it is not like that at all. Occasionally he comes out with some short invective about the murderers and yet when this is over, the overriding sense is of celebration of the Lucy's life. I am only a third of the way through and I could not tell you if the book is in any way chronological or not. The letters he writes to his father and Step-Mother that are interspersed throughout the book seem to be in order but the rest of the book jumps back and forth seemingly as he thinks of things to write about. You may think that this makes the book confusing but again it adds to a new image of someone who probably seems very serious to those who are familiar with his writing. I need a good editor; the one in my head is useless. Maybe I just can't write.

This sounds terrible - like sixth-form magazine stuff. Coupled with this little local depression a great wave of “no future” has swept over me, well maybe not a long term thing but a wish to stop the current action and do something completely different. Like swimming through treacle (sorry! Golden Syrup).


A Swamp of Fear and Loathing

"The trouble is that he had such a small ... intellect."

Listening to - Heaven and Earth - Jah Wobble


We watched a couple of the episodes of A Very Peculiar Practice that I taped from BBC 4 over Christmas. The book of the same name had a gimmicky insert at the start of each chapter in which the writer of the TV series (a guy called Rust rather than Andrew Davies who actually wrote both book and screenplay) talks to the (real) producer of the TV show. Yes! Confusing isn't it. Well it worked in the book but it is good that this device was not carried over to TV. It struck me last night that AVPP was actually quite gimmick free and I was trying to work out whether this was a feature of such drama at the time or just a refreshing reaction to the need to keep people's attention. There were many pauses which today would be filled with music which would then bleed into the dialog and make it inaudible. I know it seems that TV drama these days is a lot more sophisticated but in a lot of cases this is because the production values vis-à-vis the visuals, the picture composition, the lighting etc are so much higher. For a lot of people I think this makes something better than the writing would suggest. Now is this wonderful visual style done in order to paper over the cracks in the writing or is the writing so much worse because the writers know they cannot compete with the rinky-dinky little camera tricks?

For years I have periodically employed the phrase "rinky-dinky-little" as an adjective for many things and yesterday I realised that I had nicked the phrase from Bob - Sorry! Robert Buzzard in AVPP. I like to think it was an ironic theft rather than a subconscious admiration for the monster that was Dr. Buzzard. Maybe my understanding of irony was at American levels when I stole it.

A Very Peculiar Practice seems to have brought attention to many of the ludicrous attitudes and actions of people which at the time of transmission were probably under the radar for the general public but which now are part of everything from business to government. It was a sort of Catch-22 for academia though Heller has updated Catch 22 for a business situation.

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

Pouring Out Attitude

Listening to - I Can Hear the Heart Beating - Yo La Tengo

Ooh! Dig that loungy sound!

As someone said, maybe it is not only the case that complex cases should be heard without a jury but without a judge as well. Ouch! Roll on the next 'inquiry'.



Monday, February 02, 2004

Preparing to be Disappointed?

Listening to - Eight Lines - Steve Reich

Maybe the BBC are not that good after all. This article seems to be saying that the film Sylvia is all gloss and no substance. This may be the case; I am already prepared to be very disappointed but the article has a picture of Ted Hughes and a woman they claim is Plath who is in fact Hughes' wife Carol. (Update at 12:37pm - They have taken the picture down and replaced it with a picture of Gwyneth Paltrow).

They also have a picture of Shannon Hunt, a student at Smith, who processes Plath's manuscripts into online lists, dressed as the poet for a college ball. Reminds me of Woody Allen's dismissal of Plath in Manhattan :-


WOODY ALLEN'S GLIB LINE from Annie Hall: "Oh, Sylvia Plath, whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the schoolgirl mentality."


I am still in the middle of reading Experience by Martin Amis and have just read the paragraphs about his contemplation of suicide that he says he would never have carried out while his parents were alive and not ever now he has children. Thinking of suicide is an insult all suicides I think he said, probably meaning that a very few people may have a genuine reason for taking their own lives but normal melancholia is never enough. Though as this admission was prompted by discussion of problems with his teeth (which are far more painful than my one brush with root canal work), it does seem to be trivial from the start, which I suppose is his point. It is all a bit breath-taking what with the stuff about Nabakov and you could easily feel that you are in danger of sounding like Sting with what must be the worst and most pretentious line ever in a pop-song (sounds like a category at the Brit Awards). Witness in case you have forgotten :-



He starts to shake he starts to cough
Just like the old man in
That famous book by Nabokov



(Great tune though! Well the original certainly is. Not sure about the 1986 version.)

Now Listening to - Whore - a tribute to Wire

Resolution - Make the poetry less over-blown. I have been telling myself for ages that poetry should be passionate, the verbal equivalent of gothic and yet having read all the poems I have written in the last two years in one go, I have decided that they are just too much. They need to be lighter in voice if not in subject matter. Maybe that is just what comes of reading them all in one go, late at night.
DVD Overdose

Listening to - Achtung Baby - U2

I love DVDs. We watched at least two over the weekend, not counting the continuous playing of Sooty DVDs by my daughter. The first of ours was The Shop Around the Corner which was the original inspiration for You've Got Mail. Now I was not expecting a quite convincing portrayal of a small gift shop in 1930's Budapest. The film was actually a version of s stage play. I thought it was going to be some soppy 1930's romantic comedy and while it wasn't exactly Kafka it was better than I was expecting. Not of course that I would watch anything based on something by Kafka by choice.

The second DVD was Catch Me If You Can which I quite liked the look of when it came up as part of an offer somewhere but which my wife was not really expecting much from. We both though it was an excellent film. It appears from Internet searches that Frank Abignale's life was just as wacky as the film shows. The book might be an interesting read.

Not exactly an overdose was it. Well the Sooty maybe. I hate sooty.