Friday, August 27, 2004

Clap, Clap, Grabowski

Listening to Labour of Love by Frente!

The second poem from the Heisenberg Suite

Too Good For Gary 26/08/2004

A cat in a pram, of a colour –
some technical patter,
known to catty people –
but a nice, slatey coloured cat,
with eyes to match.

The sum of all cats over history,
makes images of minds unswingable,
an oriental cat of many thoughts,
not this mangy feline in a pram
on the way to the vet.


I had a day off yesterday and as you can see I got some really deep poems written. The cat was actually in a cat box on pram wheels but if you can't use poetic licence when you are a poet then when can you?

The Jonathan Meades show (actually Abroad again in Britain) was excellent this week. He was talking about Cragside, that wonderful faux Wealden house in Northumberland with all the gadgets. Meades also visited the swing bridge in Newcastle where he examined the letters from children thanking the bridge engineer for showing them how its worked. I only just caught that one of them was from Adam Hart-Davis - aged 61 and another from Fred Dibnah - aged 66. The rest of the programme was of course wonderful. Some people may say that Jonathan Meades is an infuriating and pretentious presenter but he does see to take a back seat at appropriate moments to let the images carry the message. My wife says that Cragside seems to lack character but I argued that even if it wasn't quite as well proportioned as somewhere like Chatsworth, it was interesting in a very engineery way. As it is NT and we are now family members, a visit to the other side of the country looks likely in the next few years.

Well that's your lot for today. Were you maybe expecting a random Friday?

Wednesday, August 25, 2004

Poetry - Blog - Poetry - Blog - Poetry ...

Whiskey Tango Ghosts and Dear Catastrophe Waitress arrived in the post today which defines the soundtrack here anyway. Reviews later possibly.

We may have a new reader. My aunt has taken the plunge at last and got her computer. She is up and connected and I have of course put this URL into my reply to her first email. Hello there if you are here.

What goes on round here at the moment? I am having my normal discussion with myself about whether hypothetical questions actually need a question mark. Well do they? Someone email me and concrete over that debate.

This week's educative statement from my daughter on watching some cartoon with Polar Bears and Penguins in the same place. "Penguins come from the South Pole - The Antarctic and Polar Bears live at the North Pole - The Arctic - with Father Christmas." Hopes dashed for a scientific career - she is talking about being an actress like her friend Angela (Lansbury).

I had several weird dreams yesterday, one of which involved driving the car backwards and seeing other cars coming towards me but never hitting me. All seemed positive in mood so I am not really sure how to attach any interpretation to them. There was some altercation with a small yob who was stealing bits of the car from inside the radiator and that is even further away from bringing any meaning to mind.

More on those two new CDs later.

Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Field Recordings

Listening to From Gardens Where We Feel Secure by Virginia Astley.

Why is Virginia Astley only on such things as Stuart Maconie's Specialist Corner? I was very uncool at college for admitting to listening to From Gardens .. but then I didn't care much. To be honest I can't really remember what my contemporaries were actually listening to at the time anyway. This always brings home how complex listening habits are. If your tastes are wide then you at least avoid becoming one of those genre prisoners who listen only to Appalachian Rockabilly or Hi-Energy Japanese Washing Machine music. (No sites I can find for either of those). From Gardens Where We Feel Secure just sounds like what summer should be. I can't say why but then I still don't care much. It might explain the poetry, which started about this time as well.

On that subject, I am trying to decide whether to put some up or not. Some of the recent stuff has tended to be diary-like noodling. Here is an example.

Rattle 17/08/2004

Surfacing this morning, blowing tanks,
I arrow tides, a metal whale crowning
in this blue arena, this murky seaway.
And I am in the stream,
the lanes of oil and junk,
some random lines between the tips and dumps.

To see refugees, sunk seamen, dry for days
in rain and storm that covers all their enemies.
And I regret my missing of them,
how I leave all of them to dessicate.
The stopped soldier climbs a net
to tumble into shallow camber
where the water spills its ink.

I have the day as mine, all things in it
made real by how I choose them,
how I wish to kill a cat
or sink a ship and save the crew

The sad city is laid out here, insensible,
flat and open for dissection,
washed out with the temperance of ages,
the rain of summers to be forgotten.
The cat complains of weather,
how she may not leave the house,
may not play in sunny corners,
where the green cools the yellow sun
spotted over concrete of the garden.

Eaten, satisfied I drive this magic road,
this runway to a paradise of work.
Gas station scene, a Western Romeo,
brought down by lighted gasoline
has thrown himself three thousand feet
straight up to hell or heaven.
And over us the Hueys clatter,
a draft on us to damn our conflict.
Out of us the storms of worship,
come like venom spat by snakes,
a poison dinosaur of on-foot battles
raging years before we dig up skulls
and reconstruct the face.

Today is obtuse rattle,
a mix of split memory,
a neurone analogue
to show all the world as flow.


I wanted to document the day in a poem but it got away from me slightly. I should really concentrate on writing verse that sticks to its theme. I try to not use common phrases and that just makes things obscure. Oh Listen! There's the donkey.

And now a swing translated into a two-note piano phase. I could end up gibbering on the floor if this gets any better. You have the whole world and I have this.
PJ Harvey in a Red Dress

This is the voice of a true poet. I can't trail back to why I started reading about Clare Pollard yesterday but I am now a fan without having read any of her poetry, if of course the Clare Pollard of the linked article is the same as the poet. The two books are on the list. Excuse all the links.

Books are on the way, if that's not part of Ms Pollard's rant against the shopping society. No spell check today.

Friday, August 20, 2004

Twang, Twang, Twang

SScraweeaaallllll, Twaeaaeeennggg.

I'm just a kid in sweet shop today. She's coming along that road like a sexy tree in some warm, tropical wind, a blow of iris and orchids and sweet feet made soft in the salt-water of some sunny bay. Out in the road, someone starts their breakfast, a mix of chilli and eggs mixed up with something that western words cannot describe. This is just a bass line, no more to this song that this line and a few mumbled squawks from the old devil n charge. He she is, stopping by the windows to look at shoes or dressed, made real by all the men she must see in the glass, howling silently like the wolves in 1940s Warner B cartoons, tongues hanging to the dust and eyes out in front like shiny squash. This music sounds like it should be from some kids' show out n the mid-west, probably presented by uncle pappy and a puppet president called Cletus. The Spanish Moss hangs down, a curtain for her debut on this stage, this town of dust and depression. We all spent the night warm and comfortable but the blues had us then and we did not sleep. The blues had us certainly.

I thought I had the key that night, the direct line to God, straight up like an optical fibre with all that spirit bouncing around in it, up to the sky and out into the universe. I could choose to talk to God this way but what would I say? What do you say to someone with a questionable existence? This is a drugs song I think. Poppies and trash and moons. Yes there is some powdery stuff in there somewhere, some jangle and sparkle in that stuff he keeps wrapped up in his back pocket and doles out to friends in dark corners. He would take this woman with him if he could, some sort of control rod for the runaway reactor of his life, some brake to all this dark poetry that he thinks is the way forward. This might be a dire warning but I cannot do it to anyone. Live your life I say. It is not mine and as long as you choose not to hurt me I am happy.

Some blues key now. (Should that be capitalised?) And a twang or jangle for the rest of the day. We must be in the Netherlands now, in the Hague or perhaps some other town with 'The' in the title. There is some place, in Africa I think, with just one letter in its name but then again one letter, one syllable; what's the difference. All day long I watch this hourglass. Back in the spicy street, the chatter is of who dies in the bomb going off. The fan turns slowly in the ceiling and all this just seems like a search for images, of stereotypes of eastern streets and cheap boarding houses in those tropical storms. We could be in China, or Singapore or even some Southern part of America, North or South. The volcanoes rumble in the background, telling us so long beforehand how unhappy they are, how dangerous they might be in the next few weeks. They will die at their own hands, anthropomorphised out of existence and screaming as the hot rock burns ther throats. It's like some filmic lovemaking with all the clichés of passion made into rocks and mountains. We slip away, hand-in-hand, down to the boats under the rain of pumice and Pele's hair. The rocks built up in the bay, rafts of white floating stone and we walk out across it to our little tug, fired up and ready to go on the edge. The sky is lit with the explosions from the mountain up above - angry swearing from the middle of the Earth. How many has this geology killed tonight?

The world spins in the inside reflection on the window of this flat, in this tower block, in this grey, rainy town. There might be a face in that reflection but who cares today? Not so manic now, we have a small incident here, a door smashed in with some big yellow lump of metal, the splintered doorframe. And then a calm trawl from room to room, trying to find the spark of life that might be left in this tiny world. And then, off-camera a mumbled call to the other searchers and maybe a gasp from those who have not been here before. The personal things are gathered and the remains taken and disposed, made to walk an aisle to the ovens and sent into the atmosphere without memorial. It doesn't take a miracle.

This is a long life, spotted with small crises, births and the other usual things worthy of marking with gatherings. But what really means so much to all of us is the continuous rush of experience, the ability to choose the nice things, the great music, and the attractive and intelligent friends who know you well and who you can't offend. We are dizzy with all this. The deaths are intense but rare in this timeline, this trail of a thousand billion moments, all stored away somewhere in the massive corridors that make up minds. What great music makes us all great? We have this on repeat. We have the world defined and tied down. It has no suddenness for we have everything planned. I cannot tell you any more about how this works for it is part of that great spiritual con trick about leaving everything to God.

This whole town has so much in it, so many deaths and births , all in one day. I love it and hate it at the same time. I don't want it to happen because it is just going too fast for me to know about everything, but if it didn't happen then nothing would be interesting. Think about this and you will be ready.
E is for Enthusiasm

I just heard about Travis backing up Susie Hug on her new record - A is for Album. This entry has been prompted by listening to the second album by The Katydids who glowed briefly in the late eighties/early nineties. The first and eponymous album was by far the best though Shangri-la still surpassed most collections of its ilk. (Can you tell I have been reading the review on the media player?) Anyway, I may see about getting the new one but it’s only available from certain places. Many of my Friends heh?

Excuse me while I bliss out to Some Mysterious Sigh.

3-2-1 - You're back in the room. Actually I have decided now that Shangri-la is nearly as good as the first album. Must be getting old.

So what has happened at Scouse Towers this week? Every organisation in Liverpool seems to have attached a Capital of Culture badge to their logos in recent months. I suppose the problem is that the culture in Capital of Culture has been widened in scope to include basically everything which humans experience. After all, I suppose that is what culture is all about anyway. Never mind. As a poet, I can quite safely say that I am covered. Not that you'd know from these pages. Let's see if there's anything for you today.

Fading Away

Rain falls at me, vocations in the spheres and lenses
downed by salty fluctuations,
each drop a carrier of other routes
of other universes, where the famous dead
still live and eat with me.
The wide drawl of me as southerner,
an American, has dragged this wave-equation
back through many miles of cracking air,
of radio and Heavyside to singularity of now.

That’s me up there, the calm and cool,
protected by guitars and lights and monitors.
I dream then of being now and normal,
of tea and afternoons in rainy, cheap resorts,
with oil and scandal fading on my fingers,
an affair someway back in life,
made clear in all the glass of time
as one-way street, as me up there.

The right way comes to me,
a festering of half-caught phrase
and resonating, Celtic poetry.
This preacher, black, at the sea-edge
declaims Civil War nostalgia
with a sniff and gesturing
from filmic dreams and scientific shadow.


How's that? It proves my credentials if not my talent.

Well I finally finished Vernon God Little. I was steeled for a squalid ending. You will have to read it to find out whether I was justified. I can say that I was gradually drawn into the story which had (as I am sure you have found out if you have read a few proper reviews) plenty of echoes of The Catcher in The rye and even The Bell Jar. Worth reading for my previously-made assertion that this is how Martin Amis thinks he writes but doesn't because too much Martin Amis comes through in all his narrators. VGL took so long to finish because I read Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now in the middle - stacked as it were. Now HKIMN takes me back where Andrew Collins took me with Where Did It All Go Right? Mr. Collins is a nice guy with wide areas of interest and yet he still distills the ache of the first day away from home into an easily-readable but punchy paragraph. I left home at 18 and I had exactly the same sense of despair on the first day at college rather than the first night away. I'm all OK now though - I think. Now confusingly, I am also about to start another book called Where Did It All Go Right? This is Al Alvarez's auto-B. Report on that later maybe.

Good Byche

Friday, August 13, 2004

Shaded and Jaded

Much rain this week. The sly and slimy snake with two heads has left the lake and is on the footless march to our building. Standing by the fountain this morning I saw the world with all its workings exposed, every thought and comma broken down to parts and laid out on the grass like one of those diagrams in a car manual. I could almost see the little lines linking the small and well-formed numbers to each component. I have here a diagram of the world and how to put it back together. Here is a solution for every problem, food for every starving person and a new mind for every melancholic. Lake and snake. See rhymes in all landscape and those starving girls with their notebooks and tiny writing, hunched up, darkly cool in the corners of the hospital. I loved all of them and knew deep down I could make them better, make them whole again. I have a blue tool box, filled with music and happy sounds, the sounds of going home for Christmas, filled with sky both grey and blue. These high clouds have shown you islands in the far Pacific and you hight above them like some dream of flying. We sledged over the edge here one year when the sky was grey to the horizon and down from the sky came millions of spirits, each flake possessed and subject to gravity. They tell me we were happy, holding each other onto the sledge as it hurtled down into the fog and white voided fields. We have all this snow to ourselves, a perfect sheet of nothing to join the dots on.

Where is the world going today? I still have the back off it, no place for these leftover bits and pieces. We must just sweep them under the carpet and hope everything still works. Maybe somewhere, some sad person will be better because we have lost their dark soul. Some goth will jettison her black dresses and all that dark make-up and instead lighten up. Well at least we made her parents happy. There was a drunk and sun-tanned shaven-headed man at the take-away yesterday. Some woman was with him, following his instructions over what to but but she was in those black clothes with dark eye-shadow and small-rimmed glasses. He was too intoxicated to ask his own questions but she understood him, shrugging and tutting when he stumbled next door to get the paper. She had to be his girlfriend but she might have been his daughter. I hope they didn't see all this floating into my head before them.

I sat once on my own in Belknap house and made music for it, floaty, drifty pieces where the machine made more of the sound than I did. Here is the lack of melody and drive that means so much to people now. Two ns in this sentence and no apostrophes. This is Spooky like love and relatives. How could these people have known so long be even friends of mine? How is my father my father? What makes a family? Turn it all up so loud that the very thoughts are knocked around and made more real. I think I love everybody at this moment. The trains come and go and seem to talk of art, some reference to old stuff, dusty paintings from at least a few years ago. And the fire said it was safe to go out, that the enemies had left. It was safe we thought. I'll make you smile. Those angels standing in the rain outside the only club in town, waiting to get in and drink themselves silly in the view of the made-up boys with there silly clothes. Once we tried to see Throwing Muses at the Poly student union. It was so full and there were no tickets left so we had to leave via various pubs on the way home. Disappointed we heard the Sundays doing their support slot and never knew what we missed. And Kristin ran after us with the list that our names weren't on, dancing down the boulevard like a dervish. Here she is, two people mixed up into one with talents spilling out. She is some benevolent goddess, listing with the weight of all her gifts and poetry. I am important, taking you through a lie just to explain it. It is a secret that I have a secret to keep no longer. And we are back trying to write down guitar music in words. Here is that word - squally - a perfect word, an overused word but still perfect for what it is used to describe.

It must sound so sweet, this music of bees and other flying insects. I sit back happy in this garden, shaded near the bottom hedge, in all the flowers and insects and lost in some book here. And yet all the insects are in some horror story. Their sweet life is one step away from disaster, from a flattening hand that will take them to mush in the quiet afternoon. How are we for time? 35 minutes? Plenty more to come.
Ironic and Maybe in a Good Way

Good article in the Guardian about renewable energy sources and the current wave of nimbyism etc about windfarms. Prince Charles' tirades against modern architecture used to give him some plus points for me but recent pronouncements have made him appear like some mad and irrelevant has-been.

Waiting for Dear Catastrophe Waitress from Belle and Sebastian and Whiskey Tango Priests from Tanya Donelly. Reviews soon maybe.

Thursday, August 12, 2004

See You at Erwin's Coming-Out Party

Music is - for Eighteen Musicians.

I get annoyed by small things changing the way I see the day. I was happy enough this morning when I sat down here. In fact I was about to write what I thought would be some great poem and then just a tiny event, the knowledge of something imparted, made me so unhappy that I just shut down the document with the title of the poem on it and went off to read the paper and listen to MFEM again. I know these things should not get to me but the feelings they promote are like the Emitter on a transistor triggered by a tiny Collector. I should stop talking about it as this is making it all worse.

Read The Diameter of the Bomb and maybe things can be proportioned correctly. A killer Chord change and the truth. That other chord is redundant. Oh well. On to purgatory.

Wednesday, August 11, 2004

Now his Jailer had an only daughter ...

Listening to On Air by June Tabor

I have just been looking at the various 360 degree photos of various places I know. I am getting quite homesick as it has been a long time since have been back here. Hopefully we will be visiting soon. The one of sledging on the hills is taken at the car park for the Western side ascent of the Worcestershire Beacon. We also used it for sledging and we have a family anecdote about either me or my brother sledging over the edge of the carpark and down into the path of the traffic on the main road below. I used to be sure that it was not me but after arguing about it for so long, the truth has been lost.

Of course I was never so mad for Malvern when I lived there; kids never like where they live until they move away from it. Nostalgia is only for the old anyway. We watched Trading Ages yesterday, part of the BBC's Time Of Your Life strand, in which a thirty-two-year-old man with no cares was transformed into a pensioner of 72. He was then dropped into various oldie clubs (day centres etc) and less wrinkly locations to give him an insight in what it would be like to be old. He was not happy and it was obvious that he was worried that he would end up like the various D&Js he became friendly with. Recently I have been aware of the rushing of time, not in any desperate sense; more like a detached observer of how age affects other people. All these 70 year olds were only 50 when I left home - that's ten years older than I am now. That sort of shift backwards through age brings home how fast things go. We all like to think we are going to remain cool and alternative in our old age, still listening to Peel (though for us wrinklies that is getting harder now he's been moved to 11 O’clock - Shame on the BBC - think about the old folks for a change) but the truth is we all probably start liking all the things we hate our parents and grand-parents liking.

Robert Brown is 40 years old, has no living grand-parents and only one parent.

Tuesday, August 10, 2004

If all the World Were Paper ...

Listening to a random playlist from Windows Media Player.
(Currently Romance by Vaughan Williams)

The office ingress ambience is punctuated by many, many cries regarding the awfulness of the weather at the moment. Even our resident statistician (to degree level) has decided that this is an unusual summer and that we just have two seasons now. As you may know from previous entries, I quite like the rain though I don't like muggy weather that goes with it. A quick weather report for this morning is grey - headlights required - rain varying from slight drizzle to middling continuous. I have now realised that this is just talking about the weather and needs to be stopped before any more readers leave (or maybe just the one reader I have - you know who you are).

We went to Rufford Old Hall at the weekend to get use from our NT membership. This is a rather small and variously added-to building North of Ormskirk. Its main architectural attraction is the huge great hall that has everyone looking up. My daughter went round with the quiz that kept her interested. Even number-one son didn't fidget in his sling and seemed to be interested in something in each room. Not sure what that would be though. Final attraction for daughter was best part of an hour of close-up magic, which had me amazed despite my assertion that all magic is just tricks. I have to admit that I am far more impressed by a few sleight-of-hand tricks than David Copperfield making buildings vanish; you just know that somewhere, so many people must be in on the trick.

Apologies for this but the rain has just started again. It is heavy and wonderful, white noise at its best.

And now for some serious stuff. I read this article in the Guardian, with horror last week. Doctors still retain a lot of trust in society but for one (a young doctor I imagine) to report these feelings just shows that anyone can have immature, almost juvenile opinions even with all that education. The response should be read as well; the author puts my anger into far more eloquent prose than I ever could and is qualified to do so as well. As for any suggestion that Self-harmers are a burden on the Health Service, there are plenty of targets to attack before manifestations of mental illness; all the usual suspects. They could give us a war just to keep us amused. All of which makes me think of Newspeak for some reason. They think we are all blind. Which sounds very paranoid doesn't it? Time to go.