International League of Morons’ Day Out in Hull Daily Mail Comments Stream A Resounding Success

Proposals by Hull City Council (since scrapped (the proposals, not the council) to spend £200,000 on a series of fibreglass toads to mark the 25th anniversary of the death of Philip Larkin provoked, inter alia, the following comments on the Hull Daily Mail’s website, and no I didn’t make any of these up. The Hispanic inverted question marks in the stirring poem I quote at the end here are also sic:

my flat has damp issues and plaster falling off walls .seems council have high prioritys

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“I think you've got to face up to the fact that Larkin is the most significant cultural artefact to be produced by this city”
Do you indeed?

I think not. I care not one jot for Larkin, his ponsy background, perverted lifestyle nor stupid poems and judging from this thread neither does the majority of people. You have the right to express your views but you're outvoted my old son. We do not want our money wasted on this sort of twaddle, so let's move on, case for wasting taxpayer's money dismissed. Next please.

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Glenroy - the chattering class looks after it's own. "Ordinary" people do not count, because we don't talk crap and fuss about arty farty crap, pointless poems or spend our life daydreaming in the University all day.
We're all qualified in the only University which really counts - the University of Life, but it's not recognised by the chattering class - what a surprise.

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What a waste of money. The man may have been a famous poet but having just read his offerings for the first time in my life (and I am 70) I wonder why the HCC want to spend money on him in the first place. I found his so-called poetry pretty poor, to be honest. It didn't scan, it didn't rhyme in most cases and the subject matter was boring. Oh! and it wasn't really about toads or toads revisited at all, just the misery of his life in general.

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Thanks for the Larkin poems.It just proves to me what a load of drivel he produced

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I thought I was still dreaming
Not Getting up till late
April the first already?
No - that¿s not the date!

Who spawned this crazy notion
It is a tad pole emic
And truly symptomatic of
A madness epidemic

Can this really be the way
To add to our renown
Come and pay a visit
To this toad infested town?

Will there be loads of lurking luvvies
In simpering, vacuous mind
And love sick lasses kissing them
A prince they¿ll hope to find.

Mon dieu, what if we are sued
For broken tushy pegs
By coachloads of French tourists
Biting on their toady legs?

This thing just leaves me hopping mad
Miss Piggy and Gonzo agree
I may be slimy, green and wet
But it smacks of farce to me.

Postwar British poetry
Is for the toilet wall
He¿s rated midst the best of them
Which surely says it all.

And what of Hull¿s young people
As we try to to teach respect
Who question these amphibians
Whose honour do they reflect?

It¿s Phoul Mouthed Phil, they are put there by
The public so adoring
Profanity, children, is quite OK
So long as it is boring!

{Snip}

Hull Orange Man Prevented from Following Traditional Route (to Foot of League Table)

Nothing is More Real Than Nothing

Beckett pseudofact (hors série)

At the heart of Beckettian nothingness is a rhetorical paradox, profound and playful at once. In a moment of ill-judged rabble-rousing, politician Robert Kilroy-Silk once proclaimed that the Arabs had given European civilisation nothing. As the history of Western numeral systems shows, this is all too true: the Arab word sifr gives us the English ‘cipher’, a number or a nothing, or both. Pondering the problems of arithmetical representation, the Greeks wondered how ‘nothing’ could be ‘something’ in paradoxes such as those of Zeno of Elea and Eubulides of Miletus (the same paradoxes that reappear in the problem of the ‘impossible heap’ in Endgame.) ‘Nothing is better than the kingdom of heaven’, begins a syllogism that proceeds ‘A crust of bread is better than nothing’ before pouncing to sophistic victory: ‘A crust of bread is better than the kingdom of heaven.’ Lear’s fool and not a few Beckettian ne’er-do-wells might be inclined to agree. John Donne explored the productive womb of absence in ‘A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day’, in which love expresses ‘A quintessence even from nothingnesse’:

He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darknesse, death: things which are not.

‘There is nothing between us’, Sylvia Plath writes in ‘Medusa’, in a pun that brilliantly conflates intimacy, distance and denial. Wallace Stevens provides one of the most celebrated modern inflections of ‘nothing’ in its positive and negative senses in ‘The Snow Man’, whose listener, ‘nothing himself, beholds | Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.’ As a performative contradiction, this recalls the characterisation of Joyce’s Ulysses as an attempt to turn the light on quickly enough to see the dark, but example after example from Beckett reminds us how something (or nothing) can simultaneously be and not be, be present and absent at once.

{Snip}

From an essay on Beckett and Shakespeare, for more on which see here.

Stretched and Huddled

A review (by me) of Spanish poet Enrique Juncosa, here.

Also, from the same paper, an interesting piece by Terence Killeen on the new ‘corrected’ Finnegans Wake, whose editors have decided to make 9,000 changes to the text without, it seems, the slightest explanation of why or how or what their rationale was.

The Way Taken

Reedbed

Facade

Train to Nowhere

Dead or Alive Motorcycles

Bleak Prospects and the Non-Existent Wildcats Society

Humanity’s long war on nature, as described in Christopher Reid’s ‘Men Against Trees’, with its legion of anti-arborealists:

I saw one last week on a daylight job:
reversing under the boughs of an ash,
he tore a limb and left an enormous gash.
You had to admire the insouciant slob!

The environmental theme I will return to in a moment, but first, a question. Can living people have ghosts? Dante confers ghosts on selected then-still-living Florentines, but if we extend the principle slightly, then hark, what is that knocking sound I hear? It can only be the ghost Christopher Reid left behind to pace the corridors of Hull University, banging his head repeatedly against the nearest whiteboard or drinks dispenser. And why? Robert McCrum, in a discussion of writers and fame in today’s Observer (‘In the 1980s writers entered a world of large cheques, literary awards and celebrity’) cites ‘the intriguing case of Christopher Reid, the Costa prize-winning poet.’ Go on. ‘On the face of it, Reid, who is 60, has the profile of a writer marginalised by dominant market forces. (...) A Scattering was a well-kept secret, shunned by the book trade. Waterstone’s, for instance, declined to stock it. Until Reid won the prize, his prospects were bleak.’ Alas, McCrum could only have whispered to anyone who still remembered this witty, entertaining, moving poet, editor of Ted Hughes’s letters, former Faber poetry editor, and more recently Professor of Creative Writing in t’North Country, or somewhere north of the Watford gap at any rate, to anyone who still remembered a time when Reid too might have entered that world of ‘large cheques’ and ‘celebrity’, and then to our collective dismay didn’t: his pre-Costa PROSPECTS WERE BLEAK, McCrumb would regretfully have averred.

The Observer newspaper, historians record, was once in the habit of acknowledging the existence of poetry, or at least allowing A. Alvarez to review the odd book in its pages half a century ago. There was a brief recrudescence of reviews, by Adam Phillips, about three years ago, but having gone away again (though I notice Katie Price bagged an Observer review for her last novel) their prospects of return look, well, bleak.

Now, back to those trees. Elevating a position of unexamined individual privilege into a general rule (‘In the 1980s writers entered a world of large cheques...’) is certainly an unpleasant sight. Reviewing John Lister-Kaye’s At the Water’s Edge: A Personal Quest for Wilderness in the Guardian, Sean O’Brien cannot help noticing how its author’s sensitivity to nature is helped along by his owning a loch in the Scottish highlands:

He is clearly a man of principle, but his immediate world is very different from one occupied by the long-term unemployed on a sink estate in Hull or in small towns in Northern Scotland. In the afterword, stung by accusations of privilege he states: ‘As with any situation in life, it ultimately boils down to what you make of it and how determined you are to stick at things when the going gets tough.’

This sounds pretty lame, does it not. But when O’Brien moves on to attacking Lister-Kaye’s desire to emulate or enter the world of a wildcat, a fairly tough call while we insist on holding onto to human consciousness, I feel he overplays his hand:

[Love and hate] are characteristics that accompany consciousness, which is exactly what we don’t share with the animals Lister-Kaye so admires. His longing to surrender a sophisticated self in favour of the animals’ natural fit with their environment, to stop thinking and simply be present, would make no sense to a wildcat. Nor would the sheep and deer he resents for replacing older Highland fauna be concerned that they are beneficiaries of environmental damage by early farmers who cleared the forest and killed the bears and wolves. In this sense, there may be no nature to go back to.

{Ends}

The opening ‘is’, rather than an ‘are’, suggests it isn’t love and hate O’Brien believes we do not share with animals, but consciousness. Animals are devoid of consciousness? That’s harsh. But our respectful attention to a wildcat is compromised by our inability to shed our humanity and be wildcats ourselves? This position sounds to me like D.H. Lawrence’s Walt Whitman: I empathize with you by becoming you. Should I do something about your pain? Why would I, when I’m sitting here feeling it with you? There has be another way of getting closer to that elusive Big Other. But, getting back to Lister-Kaye, we contemplate the wild things across a species divide, and if we feel L-K is getting sentimental about it, then do it some other way, or ponder the insuperability of it all. But O’Brien’s response to this is a mixture of the salutary-sceptical and an apparent desire not to have the debate at all:

Above all, though, nature doesn’t care whether you’re on its side. And perhaps what makes the piety of some environmentalism so annoying is the sense of being addressed by someone who thinks they’re a member of a club that doesn’t actually exist.

{Ends}

The fact that a wildcat doesn’t care if you’re on its side or not strikes me as an excellent basis for starting, not ceasing to have this debate. The idea is to get yourself out of the way, and doing this probably shouldn’t involve displays of piety or unselfconsciously privileged guilt. But, to invert Groucho Marx, I can’t think of a club I’d be happier to belong to then one that ‘doesn’t actually exist’. It strikes me as objectively the right side to be on, in any given argument.

And, my God, as Sean O’Brien would be the first person to tell any of us, but there’s a lot of wildlife on Hull council estates that would make any wildcat turn tail and run. But prospects of making contact with it are, well, here again, bleak.

Claire Crowther

The current issue of New Welsh Review features a review of mine of Keri Finlayson’s excellent collection, Rooms, which I hereby recommend. But it also reminds me of a review I had in that journal an issue or two back of Claire Crowther’s The Clockwork Gift (Shearsman, £8.95), and which I hereby recycle in a similar spirit of recommendation.

Philip Larkin’s ‘Dockery and Son’ judders to a halt against the buffers of ‘age, and then the only end of age’. If is seems a terminus, many writers (not least Larkin himself) have found it a starting point too, and much of Claire Crowther’s new collection, The Clockwork Gift, addresses itself to the condition of grandmotherhood. A grandmother is an ‘Endpaper, Scissorsmile, Leatherface, /Filetongue, Veinlady, Spiderheart...’, to list just six of the terms from ‘Names’, none of them exactly flattering. ‘Woman, Probably one of the Fates’ considers representations of the older woman in art, and the older female body as a metaphorised space of self-representation: ‘When wrinkles etch so deeply they lattice neck /and muzzle forehead, skin takes over, //makes a fabric of old stone.’ ‘Skin’, the poem concludes, ‘is resistance.’
To introduce Crowther’s work like this may set up unfairly thematic expectations of a book’s worth of cheery gender reclamation and uplift, but in truth Crowther’s poetry is thematic only in the sense that C major is the theme of a Bach prelude or fugue. The skin of Crowther’s poems is resistant to obviousness. Among the successes of her style is her ability to seem mysterious but not forbidding or arch, burrowing into her material, whether archaelogically or with her gardening gloves. ‘Lines get broken’, she writes in ‘Petra Genetrix’, and throughout The Clockwork Gift she shows a deft and unusual way with lineation. Alternating long and short (sometimes one-word) lines are a recurring pattern, or wandering indents in the style of Lorine Niedecker, as in ‘Empire’, with its consideration of (cue catastrophic true lineation failure; now you know what that mermaid looks so glum):

dead-nettle and betony
and the supposedly graceful
Festucca elatior,
cramped under wicker fingers
that could slit hands,
your eyes once.
You tried to dig it out.
Its roots are infected
by some virus
that turns the clay soil
round the stems to cement.
The tiny eyes of its leaves
flash open each year
among dog grass,
dog campion, dog roses.

Still on the subject of what might lurk in the garden, The Clockwork Gift makes a notable contribution to English suburban gothic in the ‘thike’, an imaginary creature that stalks several of these poems, whose feet ‘stick to any surface’ and whose corpses ‘smell of fresh grouting’. A close cousin of Raymond Briggs’ bogey, perhaps? ‘Sleeping on a Trampoline’ ends with the richly absurd image of a thike so desperate to exit its mother’s uterus it calls to a passer-by, threatening to jump. Like any good nonsense writing, Crowther’s poem has no difficulty in making you ‘agree to wrong /ideas.’
Eavan Boland has written at length about ageing in her poetry, but Crowther’s work is much less reminiscent of Boland than it is of another Irish poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, as in the sequence ‘St Anne’s Apocrypha’, with its troping of Catholic iconography and subtle intimations of the pressure-points between the actual and the numinous. Earlier in the book, ‘Xylotheque’ introduces the theme of ghosts, and the central poem ‘The Herebefore’ is a long meditation on the commerce between the living and the dead (‘It’s indefensible, falling in love with the dead’). I can’t help being reminded by that title of Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘wha’s been here before me lass’, in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, and Crowther’s poem conveys a similar generational continuity and mystery, ending with its female figure ‘arc-lit /in gold water’:

We would watch her cross the wall

with her words, the woman below copying
the woman above, an image of synchronicity,
as tightly turned as her every stall at my desk.
No skull but a new-coined queen.

Other enjoyable moments from this collection include the austery era echoes of ‘A Seafront Wake for the Postwar’, the witchy overtones of ‘The Blood Queen’, and the single-sentence rush and McGuckianesque lushness of ‘Lucy’s Light’. Crowther’s line in tangy natural detail with a mythopoeic edge (not to mention the odd burst of Latin too) can be evocative of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns minus the Anglicanism. We are not told where Crowther lives, but the clues suggest the West Midlands (Hob’s Moat), which I feel licenses my detection of a Roy Fisher influence too, notably in its description of parks and public spaces. But this is not to play spot-the-influences in the usual way of explaining why the author of a first or second collection has yet to achieve artistic autonomy. The Clockwork Gift comes just two years after Stretch of Closures, Crowther’s distinctive debut, and between them they add up not just to a promising first collection and a speedy follow-up, but a real and achieved body of work by a striking talent. The Clockwork Gift is a pleasure to read.

Gigantic Near an A—hole

Speaking of parodies, as I was the other day, what a pleasure to stumble again on Swinburne’s parodies of the Brownings, far more readable things than any amount of Atalanta in Calydon or the algolagniac and roundel-addicted bard of Putney Hill’s other more self-consciously (which is to say humour-bypassed) decadent productions. I am also reminded, now that I mention Swinburne, of the story of George Moore dropping in on him only to find him dangling upside down naked, and descending to ask the interloping Irishman, And what the hell do you want? But how could one not fall for the four-piece suit of that Victorian punctuation (the comma tucked inside a close-bracket), the swagger stick of the double em dash prodding you to fill in those filthy gaps, the over-emphatic italics, and the outbreak of the too-rarely-seen q-word:

That is a p——,
But this is a c——!
For a cripple, a stick;
For the hounds, the hunt;
And for you, my duck,
(As you are such a brick
As care to f——,)
Here’s a q—— to lick,
And an a—— to suck!

An academic I greatly admire recently told me about a spot of bother from a student when, in a lecture, he quoted Swinburne’s lines on the death of Oscar Wilde (‘it was for sinners such as this, /That Hell was created bottomless’), suggesting that all that anti-Christian posturing must have enjoined a refusal to (wait for it, wait for it) turn the other cheek. But the parodies get better than the one I just quoted. How about this:

‘There is no c——,’ the b—— saith,
But none, ‘There is no bottom’;
And Paphos oft, with bated breath,
Will use the terms of Sodom:
And what, when seen by girls in front,
Was but a lank limp tassel,
Becomes, though puny near a c——,
Gigantic near an a—hole.

The last two lines here remind me of the joke about Winston Churchill taking a pee in the House of Commons gents’ when Clement Attlee walks in and stands beside him. Churchill begins to edge away nervously. What’s the matter Winston?, Attlee asks, What have I done to you now? Nothing, Churchill answers, but it’s just that whenever you see anything big you want to nationalize it.

That’s a very tenuous segue, I now realize, but I never yet saw an invitation to lower the tone I couldn’t take and run with. Anyone with bawdy parodies of their own or smutty jokes triggered by reading bawdy parodies, into the comment stream with them, please.

Ali & Toumani

First son who has never been matched,

thank you for what never ends, yes!

Cliff Collapse

The Lads Were Really Up For It

Meditation at Lagunitas, with Bacardi Breezers

Carcanet have revisited the 1979 anthology Five American Poets thirty-one years on, and a peculiar assembly they make now, as they did then, Robert Hass, John Matthias, James McMichael, John Peck and Robert Pinsky. The presence at the outset of the book of Hass’s ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ though, reminds me, again, of that poem’s almost totemic representativeness, as short lyric poems go. It also reminds me how much that poem embodies so much about a certain kind of lyric poem that I find, well, hard to stomach. Here in parody form is an attempt at explaining why. Hass:

There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed.

And my parody rewrite:

There was a woman
I met down the pub and I remembered how, holding
her garish tattoos in my hands sometimes,
I felt a nauseous boredom at her presence
like a thirst for Bacardi breezers, for my childhood clone town
with its pound shops, hospital radio from the cancer ward,
muddy places where we caught the little shit-eating flatfish
called spunkbubble. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless tedium. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way she devoured the take-away
pizza, the thing Tyson the staffie did that hurt her, what
she puked.

What I don’t like about the original is its intense atmosphere of privileged private experience. George Orwell used to intone threateningly about how some things could in fact be true even if they were in the Daily Telegraph, and if this sounds like I’m coming out in an Easthopeite or even Sillimanesque allergic reaction to Hass as quietist, I hope it’s not quite that reductive. I really dislike the paternalistic, patronising narrative framing of ‘There was a woman /I made love to’, and the litany of self-consciously sensitive associations she triggers. ‘I must have been the same to her’, we are told. How does the speaker know that? He or she is silencing the other’s perspective to speak on her behalf, but with a sanctimony and a show of benign superiority I find oleaginous and fake. ‘The thing her father said that hurt her’ is as queasy a moment as any I can think of in contemporary poetry. But consider this comparison. MacDiarmid’s ‘The Watergaw’ ends:

There was nae reek i the laverock's hoose
That nicht - an nane i mine;
But I hae thocht o that foolish licht
Ever sin syne;
An I think that mebbe at last I ken
What your look meant then.

Here again is private lyric experience. But the reader experiences this privacy as something disquieting, uncanny, alarming even. Whereas in Hass’s case we are flattered into the illusion of a shared intimacy, but one against which every fibre of my instinctive response rejects. My use of the term ‘privilege’ has nothing to do with class, since in strict fairness the woman in Hass’s poem might have been just as fond of Bacardi breezers down a grim boozer as the speaker of my parody. It has to do with a sense of self-importance and assumed readerly consent which I find, finally, repellent, and which I find utterly absent from the alarming privacies of the MacDiarmid poem. No doubt there is a dollop of terrible unfairness in this judgement of mine. But there you go. I can’t read ‘Meditation at Lagunitas’ without pulling a very sour face indeed, not just on its own account, but because of how much po-faced, prissy, bloodless, downright terrible contemporary poetry I think flows from its example.

(Five American Poets, ed. Clive Wilmer, Carcanet, £14.95)

Return of Keats and Chapman

Keats and Chapman hired a gardener, one Shmuel Abramovich. It all worked out very nicely, and a dab hand he proved to be in the cabbage patch, and as for the turnips! Unrecognisable was hardly the word, from the washout of last year’s paltry crop. Soon it’d be like New Jersey in a Philip Roth novel, Keats joked. How, Chapman foolishly asked. With a rose in bloom on every corner, honk honk, came the reply. There was only one problem. Shmuel repeatedly, and in ways that seemed beyond his control, broke into Fiddler on the Roof routines, usually in response to some gardening-related stimulus. ‘Shmuel, I was thinking about the marrows for the garden fête...’, Keats would begin, only for Shmuel to launch into a rendition of ‘If I Was a Rich Man’, kicking and lurching round the garden in a most theatrical way. It got worse and worse, to the point where he was ringing in sick most days. Chapman decided that firmness was required and, noticing a climbing-plant infestation on the side of the house, made him come back to deal with it. But it was too much for Shmuel, and a half-hour of klezmer-themed song and dance routines later, the poor man keeled over and died. ‘I blame myself’, announced Chapman. ‘Don’t do that’, said Keats, ‘It was obviously a case of Poison Oi Vey’.

Off to the sunny south-west for a few days.

The Pine Marten

There is blood on the snow
and a trickle of rowan berry juice

on his bib where the pine marten
stands for a moment like a man.

What colour should I turn, slipping
after him into the woods, his trail

gone cold and his scent lost
among the dead leaves and tree bark?

Elusive familiar: there is no reason
why we need meet. Will we

have so much as been here at all?
I too have never seen my own face.

The Weasel

This time I have you
I tell myself pouncing
on the tip of your white
weasel’s tail in the snow
who am left with a mouthful
of wiry black hairs
and the line of your pawprints
in that white carpet
telling me where to go.

Icebergs

I was asked, the other week, to write something for a forthcoming anniversary issue of Icarus. Looking through the issues of that magazine I edited in 1988-9, in between squinting, grimacing, and yelping at practically everything else I contributed to the issues (which was a lot, pseudonymously), I came across this translation from Henri Michaux. What a fine poem it is, in French:

Icebergs, without parapet or girdle, where ancient
crestfallen cormorants and the souls of sailors
recently dead come lean against the hyperboreal
nights of enchantment.

Icebergs, icebergs, secular cathedrals
of eternal winter, enfurled in this planet Earth’s
calotte, all frostyfingered.
How high, how pure your brinks,
children of the chill.

Icebergs, icebergs, spine of the North Atlantic,
august Buddhas frozen from seas uncontemplated,
sparking beacons of issueless death,
the aghast cry of silence lasts centuries.

Icebergs, icebergs, wantless solitaries
countries numbed in distance, beyond the vermin’s prowl.
How well I see you, original parents of the scattered islands,
the headstrong currents, how intimately you move in my mind’s arena.

Have You Seen This Cat?

Publicity Roll-Out for New Martin Amis Novel Includes Home Visit from Author Insulting Your Curtains ('I've Always Hated Your Curtains')

John Terry is a Rat-Faced Knicker-Model-Botherer, or, My Daily Mise-en-Abyme Hell, Never Mind the Other Things I Find to Worry About

One thing I’ve noticed in my life, and Lord knows there haven’t been many, is that I am never more than a prompt or two in the nearest media outlet away from a spot of absurdist mise-en-abyme, and this worries me. For instance, I see John ‘Champions League Vodka’ Terry (slogan: ‘Bottled in Moscow’) has got into a spot of misplaced-winkie-and-tabloids related bother. He attempted to take out not just an injunction against the media to prevent them reporting on his knicker-model-bothering ways, but a super-injunction to prevent them reporting that they were unable to report on his knicker-model-bothering ways. But would he then have had to take out a hyper-injunction to prevent them reporting on the fact that they were unable to report on the fact of his knicker-model-bothering ways, I wonder, and there’s my aforementioned mise-en-abyme in the bag. It could quickly spiral into a very time-consuming activity indeed, could it not. Someone once told me of putting an out-of-office automated reply on his email before going on holidays but sending an email just before he did so, which prompted an automated out-of-office reply at the other end, which then generated an out-of-office reply at his end, and so on, in a cycle terminable only in death or the uninvention of the computer, whichever comes soonest, a bit like the story Evelyn Waugh used to tell about his father’s thank you cards for birthday cards which generated thank you cards for the thank you cards which then etc. If there was any way of transferring his travails (travaux?) to the computer example I’ve just described, perhaps John Terry could bludgeon this story to death with a flood of automated out-of-orifice replies to requests for comment? Yes, that’s exactly what he should do.

In other news, I see a branch of Tesco’s in Wales has introduced a dress code to discourage people from wandering round its aisles in their pyjamas. ‘I’ve got lovely pairs of pyjamas, with bears and penguins on them. I’ve worn my best ones today, just so I look tidy’, snorted Elaine Carmody, in an I-really-am-too-lazy-to-dress-myself-have-you-got-a-problem-with-that kind of way. ‘Do they have any idea how difficult it is to get three kids off to school when you are a single parent? You haven’t got time for a cup of tea, never mind getting all dolled up.’ Which would be why I wander the streets dressed only in my underwear after staying up late the previous night doing a simplex crossword, and with my balls hanging out if I’ve gone for the cryptic instead. Put your goddamn trousers on women, with bears and penguins on them if necessary. I, however, am not putting my underpants on, because unlike getting your mewling brats out of bed, doing a cryptic crossword the night before - that is actually work.

The above two examples raise the question of standards and relative standards, even. Which brings me to my third point. Are appalling criminals in one particular field universally amoral or do they get to be judgemental about forms of criminality outside their field of, em, expertise? There is a sign on the back of Hull buses listing consequences of drink-driving, one of which is ‘Dropped by Friends’. Suppose you were a heroin dealer or paedophile and your fellow heroin dealer or paedophile, let’s call him Keith, got done for drink driving. What would you say to him when he rang you up for a bit of heroin dealing or bairn-worrying? Sorry, don’t want to know you, I think that kind of thing is disgusting? But if that seems disproportionate why don’t heroin dealers and paedophiles always make a point of drink-driving, since it’s hardly any worse than what they’re already doing, is it? Isn’t there a consistency issue here?

I bet you wouldn’t catch a heroin dealer or paedophile walking round Tesco in bear and penguin pyjamas though. These people have some standards, you know.

This is the kind of thing I walk the streets thinking about, believe me.

Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid has won the Costa Prize, outright, for his book of elegies, A Scattering.

I’m the riddle to an answer:
I’m an unmarried spouse,
a flesh-and-blood revenant,
my own ghost, inhabitant
of an empty house.

Ghosts don’t come more companionable than Christopher’s work, from which I have derived such pleasure these many years now. He’s not so bad in person either, and I salute him on his entirely deserved triumph, with much pleasure and fondness.

Zero at the Bone

I have written a play. That’s the title above. It features two men in the disused lighthouse on Spurn Point, and their various and violent shenanigans when a mysterious stranger turns up. Coming to a room over an East Hull pub any week now.














Hour after hour finds lined up, stern to prow,
boats from Monrovia, Gdansk or Nassau,
fabulous holds containing Lord knows what,
a UN of unknowns sailing past each night.
Try out my binoculars on the view
and someone’s training his right back on you.
[Pause.]
I see things that are there and things that aren’t.
At me too they are looking. [Pause.] What do you want?
[Pause.]
To think I stand here gazing at the south bank
and ask why life clings on somewhere so blank,
human life that is, life other than mine,
as if a total blank wouldn’t suit me fine.
A low tide’s worth of curlews now, or ruff,
or godwits, that’s what I call world enough,
here where earth and sea and sky collide
and the only place a man might hide’s a hide.
I never saw a bird I would not follow
if only mine were, like birds’ bones are, hollow.

Beckett Speaks

This is unexpected. A youtube clip of Beckett reviewing footage of the TV adaptation of What Where. Sound quality poor, but nevertheless: Beckett on tape.

Voltaire on Earthquakes

O malheureux mortels! ô terre déplorable!
O de tous les mortels assemblage effroyable!
D’inutiles douleurs éternel entretien!
Philosophes trompés qui criez: « Tout est bien »;
Accourez, contemplez ces ruines affreuses,
Ces débris, ces lambeaux, ces cendres malheureuses,
Ces femmes, ces enfants l’un sur l’autre entassés,
Sous ces marbres rompus ces membres dispersés;
Cent mille infortunés que la terre dévore,
Qui, sanglants, déchirés, et palpitants encore,
Enterrés sous leurs toits, terminent sans secours
Dans l’horreur des tourments leurs lamentables jours! (...)
Un calife autrefois, à son heure dernière,
Au Dieu qu’il adorait dit pour toute prière:
«Je t’apporte, ô seul roi, seul être illimité,
Tout ce que tu n’as pas dans ton immensité,
Les défauts, les regrets, les maux, et l’ignorance.
Mais il pouvait encore ajouter l’espérance.

Renowned for their Larders

The butcher bird, or shrike, is given to impaling its prey on ‘larders’ of barbed wire or branches. As noted in passing in my review of Simon Armitage and Tim Dee’s The Poetry of Birds, here.

Apparently Not Enough Dumb Animals Suffering in the Snow For Liverpool's Liking (So Here's Another Eleven)

The I Don't Believe It Ref That Was Never Offside Curlew

The Path Taken

Rampaging Hordes of Mink Wish Roger Scruton Harm

Gathering some thoughts on animality in Beckett, I find myself reading Randy Malamud’s Poetic Animals and Animal Souls, an unusual book, in the sense that most academic critics would not interrupt their thoughts on animal poetry (composed by, rather than about animals, you understand) to give you their email addresses, and request you send them any examples you’ve encountered (I’m presuming he’s already seen the above example from icanhascheezburger...). There is also a lengthy description of his son’s experiences at ‘bug camp’, and of a trumpet-playing elephant. But I digress. Malamud frequently finds himself in the position of preaching a state of virtuous ignorance, I find. Are you reading this blog in Scandinavia? If not, then the chances are the view through your window does not include any reindeer. And careful not to go in search of one in the nearest zoo either! ‘I believe strongly’, he writes of Marianne Moore’s ‘Rigorists’, that ‘Moore feels, as I do, that Brooklynites like herself are simply not meant to be in immediate proximity to reindeer, and that we do them (and ourselves and our art) a disservice when we glibly traipse through their habitats, or imprison them within our own, for the purposes of observing them or representing them aesthetically.’ (Since he mentions Brookyln, I can’t help thinking that world’s-single-most-boring-woman, Eilis from Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn, which I read during 24 hours of enforced captivity in Dublin Airport the other day, would strongly agree about the undesirability of reindeer around the place in Brooklyn: I mean, whatever would Father Flood say, not to mention her landlady Mrs Kehoe say, eh? What would they SAY? Are reindeer even CATHOLIC?!) No, those ‘vast herds’ belong in the ‘altogether elsewhere’ Auden imagined for them in ‘The Fall of Rome’, leaving us to contemplate them from afar, but in a state of virtuous ignorance. For such an ardent admirer of Moore’s work (as am I), he would seem to skirt round the small, or not so small, problem from his point of view of her delight in zoos. But maybe that’s a debate for another time.

I was only too happy to see Malamud attack the tedious Mary Oliver, who may not want to skin and eat the animals she likes at, but seems, to me at least, every bit as determined to subjugate the animals she looks at to her entirely anthropocentric sublime (‘If an animal lives in the forest or river, and a poet like Oliver does not see it, does it make a noise? Yes, but we wouldn’t know it from her poetry’). But here’s a conceptual brick wall he finds himself contemplating more than once. If a lion could speak, Wittgenstein said, we would still not be able to understand it. ‘The more we know them’, John Berger has said of animals, ‘the further away they are.’ So when Malamud devotes a chapter to ‘Mesoamerican Spirituality and Animal Co-Essences’ he has to remind himself, a couple of times, that the coyote or the rabbit no more cares about our certified-sensitive indigenous ecopoetic posturings than it does about some piece of lazy schlock by Mary Oliver. All the animal wants is for us to leave it alone. Which is what makes Marianne Moore’s formulation, in a review of Wallace Stevens’ Ideas of Order, so striking: ‘poetry’, she says, ‘is an unintelligible unmistakable vernacular like the language of animals.’ An animal poem does not get any extra points for saying Love the animals! Care for them!, which is one reason at least why the arch-carnivore Ted Hughes is the astonishing animal poet he is. The animal poem is engaged in an exercise in non-relational art, writing for and about a subject from which it should expect neither understanding nor approval. And this is an entirely praiseworthy thing to do. In fact, I can hardly think of a better basis for writing something, anything.

Poetry is a non-relational art.

Elsewhere, I have enjoyed reading Roger Scruton’s latest attempt to grapple with the concept of animal rights in a TLS review of Andrew Linzey’s Why Animal Suffering Matters. I think of Scruton as a Jeremy Clarkson with a taste for Wagner, and down the years, in between, I presume, throttling Down’s Syndrome babies to death with his bare hands, he has resorted to the argument that animals cannot have rights, as they don’t have any responsibilities either (a less amusing variant, perhaps, of Mark Twain’s crack about animal rights meaning ‘Votes for shrimp’). Recalling, in a passage on fur-farming, John Stuart Mill’s argument that ‘the coercion of the criminal law can be justified only in order to prevent us from harming others, and never in order to force our compliance to a moral code’ he then wonders ‘what happened to the argument for decriminalization of homosexuality, despite widespread moral outrage’, meaning what, I wonder. Gay people should not be persecuted because right-wing Christian types (like Roger Scruton) find them distasteful, therefore people who want to skin mink should not be prevented from doing so either, despite my, em, distaste for them? ‘He is right to want to protect animals from people. But people also need to be protected from people’. At which point he has begun to sound like Sarah Palin, who likes to remind us that if God didn’t want us to eat animals he wouldn’t have made them out of food. Dangerous things too, mink. I mean, remember what that kind-of-a-mink, an otter did to Terry Nutkins’ finger. And what of the pine marten, ‘the most nasty, vicious bird you have ever seen’, as former Westmeath Fine Gael councillor Michael Newman recently described it. So be careful in the barn, Roger, and keep the shotgun loaded at all times.

Finally, for factoid-hunters, does anyone know the personal connection (well, almost) between Beckett’s Watt and Roger Scruton? Answer in the comments stream.

Six Steps from Iris Robinson to a United Ireland

Iris Robinson toyboy story sparks wave of sexual hysteria among female DUP voters, leading to collapse of Unionist family values.

Mental-health services stretched to breaking point by resulting hospitalization of guilt-stricken Evangelical types.

Smug-marrieds’ tasteless mansion sector of Northern Irish construction industry implodes, contributing to general economical collapse.

Sammy Wilson seizes control of DUP, squanders province’s entire budget on creationist display at Ulster Museum, leading to widespread food shortages, breakdown of law and order, general anarchy.

Dissident Republicans enter power-vacuum.

United Ireland established.

Arse to the Wind

Powerscourt Waterfall

Icicles, Maulin

Mont Sainte Victoire, Otherwise Sugarloaf

Caution Tree Feeling

Djouce

Pines, Devil's Glen

Devil's Glen

Still South I Went and West and South Again

Wretched Spew

January first,
Two-faced, like Janus:
Shooting a soldier,
Taking a bonus.

February next,
A poet’s Valentine:
Roses are red,
Sir Fred’s a swine.

March arrives
And spring’s at the door,
March-ing the daffodils
Off to war.

For the rest of this parody, titled ‘Bankers and Soldiers’, and a much more enjoyable and accomplished piece of writing than the wretched laureate fare Carol Ann Duffy has been spewing for the doggerel-loving House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, see here.

Advertising High-Definition TV on non-High-Definition TV

He shoots, he scores. My word! Fine set of freckles on the lad Rooney too (handy third-round cup win for United at the weekend, I see (ha ha)). Well, that’s high-definition TV for you, as this ad has just more than comprehensively reminded me. Is it even possible to tell Wayne Rooney and Didier Drogba apart on non-HD TV? Probably not. Lucky for me then I’m able to see just how wonderful this HD TV business is on the ad for it I’m watching now on that poxy old TV I have, imagine how miserable the image quality on that piece of junk must be [snip].