Titanardis!

Eye-Stubble from Tennant.

A special Saturday entry for you! You are lucky people! Of course you know why. Martha gone! Jack – the FOB! The Tardis getting its chameleon circuit back in working order and pretending to be an Iceberg! Actually that was my daughter’s idea and she is currently standing behind me to make sure that I don’t steal credit for it. She also made up the title at the top there. And she bawled when the Master died. There was something in my eye too – not quite of the intensity of that created by “Daddy! My Daddy” but something.

But seriously – what a ride that was. No drama has been this compelling since … er… since …. actually I can’t think of anything at all. We are all quite sad at Martha’s departure but maybe it is actually a bit of a trick to build up a legend round her. We shall see.

Anyway – time to detach the baby from the back of the sofa.

Six-Part Rice Pudding? I Was Coming to That.

Congratulations Ed.

Due to some financial advantage I took the plunge and bought a new copy of Godel, Escher, Bach at the weekend and felt heartened that it was worth it just for the preface to the new edition, which I read with increasing excitement at the up-coming delights of the rest of the book. I was then disappointed to discover that the book was misbound with the first 19 pages replaced with ones from somewhere near the back which means that as I bought it in a Bricks-and-mortar outlet I have to wait until the weekend to get a new copy or just get the money back. Well the only reason I got it from a shop was because I felt a bit of a cheat looking at the quality of the pages which had been criticised in the online reviews and then getting it from the internet. Anyway, return it and save 10 quid I think. I am slightly bugged that GEB being a book in part about strange loops, the missing pages might actually be part of the structure and I have kept looking for them elsewhere. I don't remember them missing in my first copy.

I am now reading Goodbye to All That, the autobiography of Robert Graves. I was, like one of the reviewers on Amazon; slightly worried that it might be a bit too literary for me but it is not. Instead it gives an eloquent and funny description of times long gone with a very contemporary feel. So far I have not been able to get a handle on how much of it is irony and how much straight talk. I will let you know if I feel like it. It might have sparked me into actually reading I, Claudius though of course the best thing that Robert Graves ever wrote is Welsh Incident. Though this page to be read in a good, Welsh Accent, I think it should say a good, North welsh accent which makes much more sense that using Richard Burton or Hannibal Hopkins who were suite donly for Under Milk Wood. I Can do a very good North Welsh accent having stayed many times near where Robert Graves used to stay in Harlech. Well it's recognisably Welsh rather than any of the stock accents which Welsh usually becomes. My mother could actually speak Welsh for some strange reason.

Para-Axiomatic

You have your poor, dead dummy look,
whitened through the lens, a faded dirndl
banishing your excoriated, branded whole
to torn-edged snaps in moleskin notes,
by women paled to death through romance.

These are stolen photos, unfamiliar made-up,
reduced to tours of lichen-covered milestones,
buffed smooth by many, listless hands
that would dig you up, and polish bones
and label you exquisitely in black and white.

Your journals, emulated, have darkened,
yellowed as the acid takes chemical revenge
on buried notebooks, merges ink and paper
of these dramas into dust and earth,
and coverings for faster lives than yours.

A history of primordial things is given,
all Identity so proved with writing.
A horned thing stands unmoved like thunder,
in the rain and noise of breaking minds,
to spook you with a board of yes and no,

for ideas taken by the smiling girl-primes
of this school, to darkened rooms for testing
theories of afterlives and how to live by spirits
stolen from the back of thought and words,
objective worlds of how we see everything.

A dash, expanding smoke, the open mind,
the poison stream of quiet, ending softly,
the slow rise of the earth to you and scream,
the gulp of water and another easy end,
the wish for all stopped dead at one command.

Some Songs In Green And Purple

Listening to Beauty and Crime by Suzanne Vega

I’m still buying these albums and still go and see her. Not sure how to describe that her music goes beyond the normal waify singer-songwriter stuff – maybe just because she was the first I knew but there is some definite depth to the words even if there is no punch line as it were. She tells these strange stories in between songs when she is on stage – none of which have any point other than to provide background to the songs or even just interest while somebody fixes a string or changes a sample disk. Something surreal in there as well. This album is about New York but then again I suppose that is like saying that War and Peace is about Russia. Not sure it will keep everyone happy.

Apropos of something, this week I have been mostly thinking about architecture. There is a lot of it in Alice in Sunderland which you may have gathered was my Fathers’ Day present yesterday. It sometimes reads like a straight local-history book and yet the interest it generates is multiplied ten-fold through the jump-cut, post-modern story-telling and fantastic mixing of media throughout. It changes from ssurreal Bash-Street-Kids style version of Henry V, through Boys-own adventure to a dreamy walk through Sunderland’s Riverside sculpture trail with the real-life creators. All the sly references make this one to start again once you have been through it the first time.

We don’t look up enough. I was in Liverpool for years before I noticed some of the special things that were visible above eye-level. There are small staircases in some of the streets that must be a hundred years old and yet look like they were created as part of some modern building. Buildings jump around in time, creating a consistent whole in space but making a strange, disjointed things if you try and undo them like trying to work out the order of scenes in Pulp-fiction. (Damn! I’ll get in Pseuds’ Corner one day.) I have nearly always been very unfortunate with the locations of the offices I work in. I started out well with my first job on the second floor of the Bristol and West Building right in the centre of that fair city (My bit was the shorter bit on the right of this picture) but since then I have had brick walls or anonymous industrial parks as the view that I get during my working day. I hope one day to get an office with a view that matches my desires. However, with the non-stop rush to complete buildings for the Capital of Culture in Liverpool, any view that might once have been is rapidly being destroyed in order to put up sheds which look like vertical Nissen huts. We used to have one of the most distinctive skylines in the country and it is now just a grey version of every other city in this country. We do not take our planning regulations seriously. How permission is granted for these things is beyond me save for the simple understanding that it involves money and lots of it. They do love their numbers.

Real and Imaginary

Listening to Mouth Music by Mouth Music

You will never hear anything quite like this album – forget Afro-Celt Sound system and every other techno/trad cross-over – this is as original as original gets. There is nothing that sounds forced in this matching of Scottish Gaelic, African beats and technologically based instrumentation. You will want to sit amongst the islanders and join in with this, marvelling at the deftness of their craft and their stoicism in the face of everything from the clearances, through the excise men of the time of Polly to the seeming loss of the traditional links to the country. And to include a song that was played at JFK’s funeral seems like bravado on such a thing but it is right in the extreme.

I think Gaelic is the most beautiful language, the strange combinations and mixtures of letters seem just perfect even without knowing their meanings and when mixed with music they become something almost excessively spiritual, something that does not seem to match with the normal everyday things which the language itself must have been used to describe. Mix this with pipes or fiddles and you have the sound of ecstasy born of hardship, nourished by clean winds and fixed in memory forever.

Well it rained some more. The garden is flooded and half of Liverpool lost power when a sub-station exploded. Not sure if that was to do with the rain but it did seem a bit like a larger disaster than it actually was because of the dark skies and squally wind. In the back of a Black raincoat jungle we are – slowing to nothing in our appreciation of the rightness of this music and bowing to the superior knowledge of the blues fans who dye their hair green and are so superior in almost everything. Sing and sing ‘til the ground vibrates and the long-sleeping faeries come back to brush the ears of the torpid king and court that hide in the hill awaiting disaster and nothing less to bring them back to our aid. And grammar is nothing heard today, lost in this music like meaning and thought, squashed out of us until we can think no more. Alice will save us – save us from the rain and tears that may be hers anyway. She will make us race and make us safe. Victoria falls to Earth unreasoned, shadowing me from all those years back and laughing at my poetry that took all my courage to hand over in those concrete corridors of light that made adolescence flee in all the hardship of just surviving on your own wits. I wonder where all those blues records have gone – whether she still plays them, reverently lifting them from their sleeves and placing them on some dust-free player in a clean room somewhere. They were her father’s records and I am not sure whether she stole them or inherited them for she was a mystery, not revealing anything other than her green hair and inscrutable face to us. Maybe she has a shop now, left her art degree and started a laid-back retail empire where she keeps everything for herself, all the rare marks lifted from the incoming boxes to the lined walls of some cheap flat somewhere. And the funeral march in blues for dead presidents had defined her life. Great rats, rats in the skies, flying like bombers to take us all away from here, a strange life of unreason in the absurd and drafty alley-ways of a northern city, faded with the clean-up, into the backdrop of the green, northern fields that takes us from industrial hell to bucolic heaven in just a few miles. We are in full control and yet the revolution does not interest us any more. Kings and Queens for ever we are – dead to the real world but still watching for any kink and crack that might take us back through all those extra dimensions, into the breeze and rain that tells us how life should be.

Afternoon Toppo! How Terrific are The Weasels?

Listening to Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin

I was nearly allowed my Fathers’ Day present yesterday but I have asked for it to be hidden until the day itself to make for the traditional lie-in/Breakfast/Card/Present sequence. However, I do know what it is.

My obsession with rain has been fed muchly over the last few days and allowed me to sit in the porch just out of reach of the showers and to get to sleep listening to the white noise of heavy rain for a couple of nights. I’m thinking of getting a CD of rain if there is such a thing as help for my insomnia though maybe some fast speech would be better at keeping my mind from thinking too much about things which worry me. Distraction is what I need. I like thunder as well by the way – it always seems familiarly calming rather than containing any threat of danger.

I want to right that I am feeling a bit ‘undefined’ at the moment but I’m not sure I can expand on what that means. I have been reading nineteen-eighty-four half-heartedly for the last few days as recent changes in my own perception of the world seem to have rendered Mr Orwell’s views on the world as a bit blunt but then every so often the complexity re-asserts itself and I see the point. The idea that the removal of undesired aspects of language could in itself remove the possibility for thoughtcrime is a breathtaking one and yet I keep feeling that humans must be able to think things without having to have language to back it up. I suppose it all links in with the development of language and how meaning is attached to words. “Nice” for example has changed its meaning through an evolution undefined by us which leads me to think that meaning is deeper than the words behind it. Do you dream in dialogue or images? How much of your day is actually defined by words?

Anyway nineteen-eighty-four has been jettisoned in favour of Polly – The True Story Behind Whisky Galore which was ordered from the library on Tuesday and collected yesterday – who needs Amazon? Well I do actually I suppose. Don’t believe the first review – it is wrong.

Prime Number Venn Diagrams

Listening to Victorialand by Cocteau Twins

Well I did manage to read some Auden poems though the only ones I have are in Anthologies – We have all of Plath, Hughes, Yeats and Larkin but very little Auden which is strange because from my dips into the work at the weekend, he seems both down-to-earth in style and yet other-worldly in meaning. Will try more!

It has been a very dark and cloudy day until the last few minutes. I love these late-summer-term days when it threatens thunder. One of the best days of my life was when the school took the whole of our year to an industrial museum in Birmingham on just such a day. As a bonus which I don’t think we were expecting we also got a tour of various canals, most of which were septic in the extreme but that didn’t matter. I think we managed to point out at least one dead dog along the way. I’m not sure it actually rained but inside the museum it was extremely dark in that stormy way. I even remember having a camera though the only picture I actually recall taking was of one of the sixth-form girls pretending to hold up the spire above the front of the school after we had returned and were waiting for our normal buses home; it’s not very convincing but I think I found it only the other day.

It was too hot for the children to have their normal time in the park on the way home from school yesterday so we went to the beach instead which was very pleasant – just enough breeze to keep the temperature this side of bearable. Seems to be a habit recently which always makes me realise how lucky we are to live this close to the sea. I grew up almost as far as it is possible to be from the sea and still be in Great Britain which does mean that I know the right people should it all go pear-shaped re Global Warming. Well upshot of this sojourn to the Earth/Ocean interface was a bath full of sand and a bag of strange bits and pieces liberated by my daughter. Personally I still keep an eye out for the message in a bottle I threw overboard from the Liverpool/Dublin Ferry in 1988. Problem is the address for return was for the site I worked at then which was so big we never saw it closing and now it is home to a cat and a few internet firms. I don’t see the cat bothering to send on the post and as for the internet firms ... I did see that nice Alex Cox on site once visiting some new-media company so maybe he will find it and pass it on. I can smell a Vesta curry in here now.


And now a plug for Orson Scott Card.

Four Things and a Lizard

Nothing but Strange Maps today.

but remember The Angels who took my phonebox.

Dear Ebenezer Knobdonkey …

Listening to 10 by Kate Rusby

Well I didn’t get to read any poetry – I suppose there was plenty of time but usual routines got in the way. So what to ramble on about now? What about people who can’t the difference between an Error Trap and a Gin Trap? Nah! Too easy! The parlous state of the National Tiddly-Winks team? Well in that case everything seems to be hunky dory at the moment.

Oh yes! Putin seems to be on a roll at the moment . Offering to site the Missile Defence shield in Azerbaijan seems to have stunned everyone. The first time I heard about SDI all those years ago my systems tutor said that it was a great example of a system that could not possibly work – ever – and as far as I can see it still is. Unless you can get decrypted access to the launch codes then no system will ever be certain of catching every missile and of course the chances of the implied aggressors in all this actually using anything particularly sophisticated to lob their boiler-plate nukes at us is quite low. I see a few thousand fireworks stuck together in a giant, milk-bottle shaped launcher leaning in our general direction. Who’s most likely to get hit by that? Probably not us! At least we can feel safe behind the billions of pounds worth of hi-tech retaliation in our possession. Meanwhile – back at the ranch and home on the range.

I do wish it would rain again. I now have Air conditioning in the car and I have been feeling a little disconnected from the weather. It’s not that I am complaining – it’s preferable to being sticky and uncomfortable but it just seems that the seasons don’t matter any more. As well, it seems that in general people are unaware of where their food comes from and I suppose this gels with our disconnectedness from the world around. It wouldn’t be a hardship for some people to live their lives in windowless cities with nothing outside – like being in a space-station. I’m not a mad outdoorsy person despite growing up in the country but I do like to feel the weather and see the sky, the stars and trees.

Scotoma With Fortifications

Listening to Loveless by My Bloody Valentine

Reading Whiskey Galore by Compton MacKenzie

A wonderful book is this – dark and satirical but with warm and friendly characters and a to-die-for fade-out ending which now I come to think of it is a bit like Puck’s monologue at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The film is funny enough but the book has real depth and though a might less laughter-inducing overall is far funnier deep down in the long-term humour memory. It pokes fun at the officialdom that beset the stay-at-homes during the war and is in some ways a call to arms for a gentle WI-style of anarchy.

I desperately want to understand how time travel can be realised but it’s all just too paradoxical. I suspect that a childish interest in things that are not possible leads an adult to an investigation of the boundaries of the possible. Einstein started thinking about what it would be like to ride on a beam of light and of course keeping this in mind led him to develop the theories of relativity. My daughter has a friend who asks me all sorts of questions about relativity and time travel when he comes round for tea (before they disappear to play their Nintendo DSs at opposite ends of the room). I just wish I could answer them properly. The big question that get’s asked in the form of an assertion that it will happen is when it will happen. My view has always been that the non-existence of time-travellers proves that it will never happen but then that ignores all the paradox-busting loops and alternate universes that are proposed to do away with the peculiarities that arise from simply imaging a simple trip back. Maybe Doctor Who has got it right in that you will be able to jaunt backwards and forwards without too much damage occurring but I am sure the mathematically inclined amongst the definers of temporal transport will argue with that. I had so many sentences constructed to define what might happen but deep down in my head the illogcality of these ideas just render the statements meaningless – we need new vocabulary to handle it like Douglas Adams invented in THHGTTG. Could it be like the problems of understanding the fourth special dimension – you can define it in terms of mathematics (quite simple maths for the fourth dimension – just Pythagoras I think) but you just cannot see it because we have no mechanism for handling an extra dimension or time travel.

I want to write a poem but I just can’t seem to get started. I have so many ideas but none of them remain exciting enough for long. I have been spurred into thinking about this by some truly awful spoken-word stuff I have heard recently by someone who should no better – no names no see-me-after-school – but this is also what prompted the musing on time travel above. Martin Amis said this week, that poetry was dead – no one curls up with a poetry book at night any more. He is probably right about that but two things come to mind. Firstly the only time I ever curled up with a poetry book was when I read Philip Larkin’s collected poems after reading Andrew Motion’s biography of him which makes me wonder about who actually ever did curl up with a poetry book. Secondly does this actually mark the demise? He did refer to live events and this is probably where poetry is still quite healthy. You could hear poetry every night of the week on Radio 1 when Mark and Lard’s show was on – Simon Armitage and Ian MacMillan – he of the loud shirts and fruity Yorkshire tones. It would be nice to have that sort of commitment from broadcasters but it all seems to be talent shows and the abuse of anyone who seems fair game for the cocaine fuelled young things. And don’t you feel that we have all been got at by some huge practical joke with that Olympic Logo. I’m all for edgy but that looked like the start of some 80’s ‘yoof’ programme like the spoof one Ben Elton presented in The Young Ones. There must be someone laughing over their little mirror in the toilets somewhere over than wool-pulling. How did I get here from poetry? Well a little misdirection is always useful when you can’t think of what to write. I will make a point of reading some poetry tonight as there is nothing on the TV and nothing on disk yet. I will try some Auden maybe.

Weirdo, Jumpy Stuff

Listening to Music for 18 Musicians

I have just discovered that Hapworth 16, 1924 is available online because The Complete New Yorker is out on DVD. Not sure what the status of this online version is but if you don’t publish what must be the ultimate in Salinger completists’ fetishes, this is what you get. I’m not sure that I should read it right now but I may. I’m also not sure what to write about today. As usual all that seemed bright and important over the weekend now seems dusty and irrelevant, like a forty-year old magazine but hey - who cares?

This music makes me think of sunny days, an indeterminate number of years ago but before the various Orwellian distortions of the truth regarding certain declared, disastrous futures came to haunt our waking lives. I like a music that is out of time, something which references nothing but itself with a melody that just soars and repeats like a continuous happy memory. But then again, maybe the bad feeling around is due to lack of emotional connections with the world. You know those days when there is nothing remotely interesting on the horizon? Well today is one of them – not that it leads to depression - just a sense of boredom and resignation. Anyway, this is where the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is supposed to kick in isn’t it? I am afraid that the sun shining is not enough to lift this feeling – I prefer it raining and you may say that I have been satisfied over the last few weeks but it is never enough. My son likes to sit with me in the porch when there is a belting rain-storm. The air seems to flow through the house, giving a delicious feeling of being safe and dry but with the potential to run out and get soaking wet. Of course the white noise is part of this as well, the calming sound that fills up any gaps where the worries creep in, a blank nothing with no associations and no positive or negative – just the sound of something – like the monsters coming out of the sea in Welsh Incident. I was coming to that.

It was nice to see Shetland on the new series of Coast yesterday. We went there once in 1974 I think but I can still remember the silence that seems to still be there. We stayed at a remote hotel where there was a permanent resident who had run away to sea during the First World War. He looked at us kids with horror as we poured sugar on our porridge. We’ll be back there one day. I hope it stays as quiet. I am shocked to realise that it is ten years ago that we went on Honeymoon to Lewis and I only hope that that place has not changed either. It might not be so wonderful in the winter but I suppose I would like a good storm. We had one day of rain and wind and the rest of the time it was like The Mediterranean or even somewhere in Oceania, white sands and balmy sea-breezes.

Where in Another World in Miniature.




An armature – a suture – like a small animal curling round like your daemon from another universe. Here’s the jangly feeling you get when you find a shuttered door between worlds, the tiny spark like the green flash when the sun goes down and explodes into the here and now. And that beat powers it all, keeping time in the background, in the ambience and silence of most of the unoccupied globe. And every sentence starts with a proposition if that is something up with which you cannot put. In the end there’s nothing really showy here, just the lights of a mediocre country fading from it’s golden age into the fug of the end of history. And now I dive into the microscopic, a safe viewer of all these little insects, this alien place of danger and beauty, where tiny things get imprisoned in a drop of water. Trouble down the milky way we think – a dream of loud music in the heads of people stuck on desert islands somewhere on the crazy ocean – blue and Higher definition than we remember from those days we didn’t worry about anything – backed by a sort of punky electronica that defines the start of memoirs, all those tales of childhood that you think might make a good story. So loud is all this, quirky bass and percussion that you seem to find by the side of the road, running along the fence with a stick, the missing posts beating out the rhythm of some familiar but lost song – the new electric band. Trying to surface through the oil of some pacific battle, through sharks and debris, torn and useless life-jackets, still with names in orange where the ship went down for nothing. Call it all in, all those favours you did for paradise and see where it gets you, all that call to white and calm, through doorways into other places, other lives; they get you nowhere, and know where you live for that is it for you in this world. All this is just trying to talk like music, like Gareth taught me all those years ago though maybe I missed his point for he was deep into the maths of music and all I thought was how it fitted into the sounds of language, the analysable sounds of speech matched up with musics meant to thrill and inspire. I am a music, a genre like the siren’s call or gamelan, beating bronze to death in the humidity and depth of things.