Another poem on the theme: 'What is poetry?'

Well, kind of.

I found this while rifling through the bookshelves of a friend I visited in London last month. I'm afraid I know nothing at all about the author, other than her name... and that we share a similar sense of humour.

This Poem....

This poem is dangerous. It should not be left
Within the reach of children, or even of adults,
Who might swallow it whole, with possibly
Undesirable side-effects. If you come across
An unattended, unidentified poem
In a public place, do not attempt to tackle it
Yourself. Send it (preferably in a sealed container)
To the nearest centre of learning, where it will be rendered
Harmless, by experts. Even the simplest poem
May destroy your immunity to human emotions.
All poems must carry a Government warning: Words
Can seriously affect your heart.

Elma Mitchell

Return of the Oppressors

Yes - in my still anonymous country of residence, Blogspot is once again being blocked.

It is possible that the paranoid control-freakery of the government has been energized by one particular potentially subversive comment on one particular blog, and that this is the reason for suddenly denying us the whole vast panoply of Blogspot blogs; but I haven't yet heard of any such reason, not even at the level of rumour or wild conjecture.

It is often a mistake to expect a reason out here. Instead of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, this is very much the country of The Random, The Illogical, and The Obtuse.

The last such interruption of service miraculously 'corrected' itself after just a few days; and we frustrated bloggers were left to speculate that the fine young men in the Net Censorship Division down at Kafka Central had simply been playing with some of their new filtering 'toys' and had forgotten to reset all the switches afterwards.

As you can see, I am not in fact prevented from blogging by the present 'block' - since posts to Blogspot are made via Blogger, which is still freely accessible. Nor am I prevented from viewing my finished work - or from reading the few other blogs for which I have developed a fondness - because the pages of Blogspot are easily reached via proxy services like Anonymouse and Proxyline.

Unfortunately.... these proxies do not give you access to any pages with a sign-in feature: so I can't currently read or respond to any comments that any of you might leave me.

Please do not let this dissuade you from commenting! I will catch up with you all one day, I promise. (An increase in the number and diversity of commenters has been one of the more pleasing signs of 'progress' with my blogs over the past few weeks. We've even had chaps look in from places like Kathmandu and Kerala in the last few days! I hope this momentum is not now going to dwindle away again...)

Does anyone happen to know of a "secure proxy", or something similar, which might allow me to access the 'Comments' pages on Blogspot? I have been canvassing all my 'Net Nerd' buddies, but haven't received any answers as yet. [If you do know, please e-mail me. At present, I CAN'T READ YOUR COMMENTS ON HERE!]

[Ooooh - CORRECTION: Yes, you can just tell me in a 'comment', if you like. I had forgotten that all 'comments' are forwarded to one of my e-mail boxes!!]

A long suppressed Roger Hargreaves title? (Where in the world am I? [29])

One of the (many) ways I earn my keep out here is by recording voiceovers, audiobooks, and English listening practice tapes & exams.

The scripts are endlessly recycled, are often seemingly transcribed (badly) from uncredited radio sources, and almost invariably feature a generous smattering of dodgy English. This will almost always lead to at least one moment of extended corpsing in each 3-hr recording session.

Amongst the commonest errors - the regular recording artist's pet peeves - is the choice of rare, misspelled, or otherwise outlandish and inappropriate names for the characters in the dialogues. Another, related one is the almost invariable use of a title - Mr, Mrs, Dr - with a first name only.

This happens so often that we regular recorders are pretty much inured to it now, it rarely gets to our funnybone.

Until this, today:

"Hello. Could I speak to Mr Randy, please?"

That brought work to a halt for a couple of minutes, I can tell you.

If I ruled the world....

A friend recently recommended a website to me called Adbusters. Literary activism! Worth a look.

My imagination was fired by this piece. If only....


The Poet of the United States

Citizens crowd the ropes. Most of them are in a good mood, joking with the cops on the other side. Tiny droplets drizzle out of the gray sky, good weather for this time of year. The people are glad to have good weather for this occasion, their city's special day. Some of them hold flags. A few carry signs close to their bodies, trying to keep them dry.

Someone says,"Look!" and points to what could be a morning star burning through the overcast. But it's not a star. The light grows brighter, closer. It descends.

At the back of the crowd, a man and a woman hunch their shoulders against the damp and clutch at their coats. It bothers them that the crowd is so happy, so eager to see the man who will soon arrive. They hate him. They hate the way that the country has embraced him. She's the president of a company. He's the president of another. He writes letters to the paper. She calls her Congressman every week. The letters get printed. The Congressman takes the calls. But none of it does any good. No one listens to them, to people like them. No-one takes company presidents seriously.

"See the airplane, Honey?" a mother says to her child. “That's Air Force One. That's his plane."

The plane lands and taxis. Motorcycle police lead a string of six limousines out onto the tarmac. Citizens crowd the ropes. Some start waving their flags. Some hold small children up to see. The citizens with signs now raise them up. One sign says:

black fir and pine trees
before the red clouded sky—
night fills the river

The door to the plane opens, but for a long time no-one comes out. Then, without any fanfare, there he is at the top of the steps - the Poet of the United States. He smiles and waves. People cheer. Alone, he descends the steps.

"Mr. Poet!" someone shouts. "Welcome to Oregon!"

The police try to usher him toward the waiting cars, but he instead strides toward the crowd.

"Mr. Poet!" another voice shouts, "Roses are red, violets are blue, we're glad that the Congress is working with you!"

The Poet laughs. "I appreciate the effort," he says, "but I know you can do better than that." He points at the haiku sign. "That one I like."

The woman holding the haiku whoops. People standing close to her laugh and tell her to hold her sign still so everyone can read it.

"Thank you for coming out today," the Poet says.

"We're behind you, Mr. Poet!" a man shouts. Applause.

"What can we do?" a woman calls out.

"Well I can tell you what I'm going to do while I'm here in Eugene," the Poet says. "I'm going to go to a dance recital. I'm going to listen to people I've never met before. Maybe one of them will tell me something that ought to be in a poem. Then I'm going to walk along the Willamette river and pick blackberries right off the vine. You do still have blackberries, don't you?"

"Do we!" Laughter.

A man shouts, "Take some vines back to Washington!"

Another says, "Please!"

"Yeah! You can have the ones taking over my yard, Mr. Poet!"

The Poet of the United States smiles. "I plan to pick berries a handful at a time. I plan to enjoy the tart ones, the sweet ones, the ones that are hard and dry as well as the ones that burst and stain my fingers with juice as soon as I touch them. I expect to snag my sleeve on the spines once or twice. I'm going to eat blackberries and enjoy eating blackberries. That's the sort of thing you can do, my friends. You can enjoy your lives." He waves.

From the back of the crowd, one of the presidents shouts, "What about arms manufacturers? They're not enjoying their lives so much!" He tries to shoulder his way forward, but a woman turns and waves a flag in his face. "What about money for bombs? This country used to be feared!”His companion shouts, "The business of America is business!" She also tries to advance through the crowd. "The business of America is business!" People in front stand their ground.

The Poet of the United States has already turned away. He is walking to the waiting limousines. If he hears the presidents, he gives no sign.

Bruce Holland Rogers

The Schizo Spring (Where in the world am I? [28])

I should have known by now.

Nearly 5 years I've been here: my fifth Spring, and every year Spring has arrived, dramatically, definitively on the last weekend of March.

We often get a few misleading 'early onsets': many times the weather will start getting very mild early in the month - even in February on occasions - and then suddenly, brutally revert to Winter for a few days. The central heating gets turned off on March 15th - by official decree (although the government will sometimes grant an extension of a week or two if the March weather has started out particularly icy; and I think individual apartment buildings are starting to exercise a lot more discretion - or contemptuous disregard of 'the law'? - in implementing this); and we usually get punished by a few icy blasts immediately after that.

This year, March started out pretty nice. In fact, the day before my party a couple of weeks back, the midday temperature was briefly nudging 70°F. The next day was misty, drizzly, and chilly...... and then it snowed! Then it perked up again, and a few foolhardy trees were starting to put forth their buds. The following weekend a vicious wind came down out of the North-West, and it was pretty bloody cold. Most of last week was sunny, and the temperatures were getting into the upper 50s, low 60s: blossoms thought about coming out again, but were more cautious this time; on Sunday night, rather oddly, it actually got warmer in the evening - I went out with just a jacket rather than a fleece or a sweater.... and took it off. Shirtsleeves in the middle of March, at night? Inconceivable!

Today has been miserable again: cold, foggy, the sky opaque, white-as-clay.

I should have known better by now. Two more weeks. Two more weeks until Spring arrives....

Thought for the week

"Tomorrow is the day-after-tomorrow's yesterday."

Deeper than it looks.

A proper war poem

Finding myself somewhat dissatisfied with yesterday's offering from Eric Bogle as a 'poem' (whatever power it might - certainly does - draw from the subject matter, and from the quiet passion of his live performance of the piece), I looked around for a First War poem written at the time, and naturally turned first to Wilfred Owen.

This is probably one of his lesser known pieces, but I really like it - not least because it's not really specific to the War; but it does a brilliant job of evoking that disordered mental state that we all encounter sometimes on waking, or when feverish.

Conscious

His fingers wake, and flutter up the bed.
His eyes come open with a pull of will,
Helped by the yellow may-flowers by his head.
A blind-cord drawls across the window-sill...
How smooth the floor of the ward is! What a rug!
And who's that talking, somewhere out of sight?
Why are they laughing? What's inside that jug?
"Nurse! Doctor!" "Yes; all right, all right."

But sudden dusk bewilders all the air.
There seems no time to want a drink of water.
Nurse looks so far away. And everywhere
Music and roses burnt through crimson slaughter.
Cold; cold; he's cold; and yet so hot:
And there's no light to see the voices by,
No time to dream, to ask - he knows not what.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Where are all the Irish jokes?

Gone, gone, every one.

A few days ago, I started trying to collect them (a cultural curiosity, for the benefit of future generations) in a post over on Barstool Blues.

All contributions welcome! (But please leave them there rather than here.)

And a very happy (and bibulous) St Patrick's Day to you all!!

Not dead, only gigging

I have just posted a brief appreciation of the Scots/Australian folk singer Eric Bogle over on Barstool Blues, including the lyrics of his somewhat scathing comic song 'Plastic Paddy' (very topical!).

I saw him play at the Anzac Club in Toronto back in the early summer of 1998, where he told a rather nice story about the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Apparently Blair (or, more probably, one of his speechwriters) had recently chosen to profess that his favourite 'war poem' was Bogle's 'The Green Fields of France'.... but had suggested that it was written by a soldier who had died in the First World War (a particularly lazy assumption, given that this does not really fit with the perspective of the piece at all). One of Bogle's formidable, elderly Scottish aunties had been incensed by this, and had had a letter published in one of the national newspapers to correct the error. She wrote: "I can assure the Prime Minister that my nephew is still very much alive and well. And to prove it, here are the dates for his upcoming tour:..." Classic.

Here is the 'poem' in question.

[And no, I don't really think this is all that good on the page; I'm not at all sure that it counts as a poem at all, really. And, as I mentioned in the post over on Barstool Blues, 'folk singers' aren't my thing at all, in general. However, I was very pleasantly surprised by seeing Bogle perform live: he's one of those people with whom the conviction of the delivery entirely overcomes the obviousness of the sentiment, the triteness of the expression.

And by the by, a little trivia note: one of the many, many people to have covered this song is another of my comedy folkster heroes, Attila the Stockbroker - once mentioned from the Barstool here.]

The Green Fields of France

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride?
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside
And rest for awhile in the warm summer sun?
I've been walking all day, and I'm nearly done.

And I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916.
Well, I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean.
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Chorus:
Did they beat the drum slowly, did they play the pipes lowly?
Did the rifles fire o'er you as they lowered you down?
Did bugles sound 'The Last Post' in chorus?
Did the pipes play the 'Flowers of the Forest'?

And did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind?
In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that loyal heart are you always 19?

Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame?

The sun's shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plough;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.

But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land,
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.

And I can't help but wonder, now, Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you "The Cause"?
Did you really believe that this war would end all the wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain.
For, Willie McBride, it all happened again.
And again, and again, and again, and again.

Eric Bogle

What's on the other channel?

Birthday celebrations, that's what!

My other blog, Round-The-World Barstool Blues, born 8 or 9 days after its big brother Froogville here, has just passed the 6-month milestone. And 'they' said it would never last!!

These days, I fear, it is being overlooked rather, starting to lag behind its elder brother in number of hits. Please, don't forget about it; do go over there and give it a look once in a while. There is some good stuff on there from time to time, really.

It's haiku time again

The sunlight shatters
In a million tiny stars:
Breeze on the water.

More on The Evil One

The Evil One is the 'codename' I have given to the great Lost Love of my life, someone I have mentioned a few times before on this blog: an elegant, feisty (stark raving bonkers) Australian academic. It may not seem a very flattering appellation (a more recent ex-girlfriend was chiding me about this the other day, fretting that she might undergo a similarly denigratory rebranding), but I assure you it is meant jokingly, affectionately. I think she would, in fact, have been perversely proud of it. She did like to see herself as a tormentor of men, once even likening herself to Estella in 'Great Expectations' - raised from earliest childhood to wreak revenge on the entire male gender!

I knew things were going to be difficult right from the outset because she told me she wasn't interested in a "relationship"..... but would give me two weeks of wild, no-strings-attached sex. I turned her down. We ended up dating - fitfully - for nearly 6 months. Crazy times. Wonderful times. Anguished times.

Anyway, to add to last week's poem on that relationship, here's the one I composed challenging the 'two week time limit'. Well, actually, it was composed much later in the relationship - but looking back on that rocky start, trying to build something positive out of it.

a method of counting


you gave me a fortnight
(at best)
wary of happiness
or convinced
that you would bore me
and I you
you said 14 days
and no more

but I prefer to count the nights
I am actually with you
14 nights
in your arms, in your bed

or better yet
to count the hours
that I spend with you:
whole hours only
not the aggregate of stolen moments
minutes here and half-hours there
the cursory morning farewells
the street-corner chats and hurried cappuccinos
or those public gatherings where
I must pretend that we are strangers
(though lightning forks between us
with each glance)
but hours
whole hours alone together

and when I have counted
my 336 hours
I will ask you
for another fortnight

NASTY food! (Where in the world am I? [27])

They do eat some strange things in this country.

For example, 'jerky' - dried meat (or parts of an animal, anyway) - is unaccountably popular, along with various forms of desiccated marine life.

But fruit jerky? That's a new one on me.

In general, I like dried fruit. And I love mangos. So I thought I'd give this packet of 'dried mangoes' I found in my local supermarket the other week a try. Big mistake. It's not just dried, it has been treated with some other arcane processes - perhaps 'tanning'. It is pretty much the colour and consistency of leather, but harder. And, in addition to being gaggingly sweet, it is tainted with a number of inappropriate, unidentifiable 'spices'.

I only know this because, in a spirit of investigation, I held a piece in my mouth and sucked on it for as long as I could bear it. After about thirty seconds I could feel my tongue shrivelling, and thought it might not be safe to push the experiment any further.

It is utterly unchewable, unbiteable. I thought I'd hit on a way of using the stuff up: perhaps one or two lumps of it might add an interesting flavour note to the banana & mango smoothies I've been having for breakfast most of this week. Now, here's the really scary thing: the stuff is so bloody tough even my blender struggles to cut it up! No kidding - after a minute or so at maximum churn I thought it would have been reduced to tiny, inoffensive fragments, but no: it was still in 3 or 4 large, leathery, indigestible pieces.

What is this stuff?

The Science of Sleep

One of my most recent DVD purchases. The title appealed, obviously, because of my current insomniac troubles. And the trailer - which I'd seen during a trip back to the UK last summer - looked intriguing. And I really liked director Michel Gondry's previous film, 'Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind'.

Big disappointment! It does look for all the world like an attempt repeat the success of 'Sunshine' by focusing on similar dreamscapes (though mostly with a rather more cutesy, 'Amelie'-ish feel to them).... but without the benefit of a razor-sharp Charlie Kaufman script.

This film is an intriguing concept that goes nowhere, a plotless mess that completely wastes its very likable and sexy leads, Gael Garcia Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg (what is it about Charlotte Gainsbourg? She's not at all conventionally pretty - but damn, she's got poise, intelligence, something.... sexy as hell!). I suspect it's rarely a good idea to let film-makers direct their own scripts: too much ego, not enough self-criticism.

Yes, the fantasy scenes are nicely rendered - but there's no point to them. There's no characterisation, and the story doesn't go anywhere. In fact, it abruptly peters out, with no real resolution at all - giving the impression that Gondry got tired of the project (or ran out of money?) and left it "unfinished".

Bernal is a young commercial artist who has trouble distinguishing fantasy from reality, his dreams from his waking life. This makes his misfiring romance with his feisty next-door neighbour somewhat complicated. A reasonable enough premise; not just your run-of-the-mill rom-com. Unfortunately, however, Bernal's character soon emerges as merely an asinine man-child, and completely dysfunctional in society - he's so unhinged, in fact, that he starts to alienate your sympathy, despite the glowering charm of Bernal himself.

I think also that the film takes the confusion of fantasy and reality too far. At first the fantasy sequences appear to be intended as dreams; but soon we find that this dream-reality presentation (Bernal picturing himself as a TV presenter in a child's cardboard mock-up of a studio; observing - and attempting to control - events from this oddly detached perspective) is being used to represent his subconscious mind while he's awake; then he finds that he has apparently been acting out his dreams while sleepwalking; and then his 'reality' starts to take on an increasingly jumbled and fantastical character, so you wonder how much of this is just happening in his head also. I think you need to have some clearer demarcations between the two worlds, at least at first, if you are to provoke any worthwhile reflections on the interrelation between them.

When almost the entire film is unclear about the boundary between fantasy and reality, it just becomes irritating. I was surprised at the strength of the antipathy this provoked in me; but I have rarely been so bored while watching a film, so eager for it to end.

I think Terry Gilliam is for me still the best renderer of dream-like imagery in films. I adore his 'Brazil' - which has a broadly similar underlying concept. But in that film the dream sequences are clearly discrete from 'reality' for most of the film (and use relevant symbolism to advance the plot); only in the latter sections of the film do dream and fantasy elements start to invade the hero's 'reality'; and it is only with the shocking final revelation (a perspective-flipping trick that actually works..... unlike the obvious and predictable 'surprise ending' in the much over-praised 'The Sixth Sense') that we realise that much of what we've just watched and accepted as real was in fact the self-protective fantasy of a man who's suffered a nervous breakdown. (You can pinpoint where the 'break with reality' probably occurs in retrospect; although fans of the film sometimes argue for even earlier points in the story. The story is rich enough to feed protracted debate.)

But I digress. 'The Science of Sleep'? Yes, watch it as an intriguing oddity from a very original director; enjoy it for the actors, the special effects (especially the stop-motion animation in some of the fantasy sequences), and a few funny moments along the way. But a good film? NO.

It doesn't ***** work! (Where in the world am I? [27])

One of the more amusing disasters to befall me during the cooking marathon I undertook for my Bob Marley Party the other week was that my can-opener caught fire. I mentioned in a diatribe against my kitchen facilities last week that the gas flames on the stove are ferociously hot: I would have thought 4" or 5" away would be a safe distance, but it seems not: the ambient heat was so intense that the plastic body of the can-opener first began to melt, and then burst into flames. Lucky I was right on hand to plunge it into the sink before the conflagration spread to the whole kitchen, I suppose!

I commented in the post prior to the kitchen one (another rather whiny, ranty one, I'm afraid) on how difficult it can be to buy things out here. Canned goods are big business here now. Can-openers, apparently, are not. Something of a paradox. I should go and ask one of my neighbours how the heck they open tin cans.

Anyway, none of my local supermarkets (there are three quite big ones within reasonable walking distance) is currently carrying such an item. I eventually found one last weekend in one of the "foreigner-oriented" groceries that I described in that earlier post. It was modestly expensive. However, it looked good - clean lines, smart design, seemingly solidly built.

And the packaging proclaimed: "The company assured customers that its products' usability is good."

Was I comforted by that statement? No, I've been in this country far too long for that! It made me feel distinctly uneasy....

The circular 'blade' is not in fact sharp enough to cut into anything. The cogged wheels which are supposed to rotate the can are misaligned, and do not mesh with each other or with anything else. The gap between these cogs and the blade is too small to admit the edge of the can, so it's practically impossible even to attach the opener to the can - and when, if you do manage that, you certainly can't open the can with the wretched thing.

The astonishing thing about this is that it is well-made, all metal, and attractive to look at. The local manufacturer has painstakingly copied the outward elements of an impressive foreign design - without the least attempt to understand the engineering principles that actually make the device work.

Absolutely unbelievable! There may be some other countries in the world where this kind of thing happens..... but I am not aware of any.

PS The plastic here is useless too. Any plastic item (dustpans, washing-up bowls, buckets, wastepaper baskets, ice-cube trays) is incredibly brittle - and effectively one-use-only. Really, a washing-up bowl will SHATTER the moment you drop a cup into it from a height of greater than about 3". I've lost count of the number I've been through.

I am terrified lest this same disregard of the fundamentals of the science of materials may be at work in the aerospace industry or major construction projects here.

The School for Henchmen

I'm still not sleeping well; I haven't done since I got back here a fortnight ago. One of the few plus sides to this is that I have been having some wild half-waking dreams. This morning's was particularly amusing.

Igor, the well-known hunchback sidekick (bearing an inevitable resemblance to the classic Marty Feldman incarnation of him in 'Young Frankenstein'), was going into business for himself, setting up a 'School for Henchmen' (although I suppose he should more properly have called it the 'School for Laboratory Assistants'; but perhaps he was trying to broaden his appeal to the market).

Items on the promised program included:

Angry Mobs and How To Deal With Them

The 7 Key Principles of Subservience

Grave-Robbing and Body-Snatching Compared

Your Pension Plan - filching gold from the Master IS an option

How Mad Is My Scientist? (When "Fools - I'll destroy them all" Includes YOU...)

and...
Exit Strategies - Staying One Step Ahead of the Pitch-Forks

On enrolment day at the start of a new semester, Igor was assessing his eager prospective students, a motley rabble of slack-jawed yokels (many of whom appeared to be rejects from the 'Academy of Village Idiots' down the road) who were all - unaccountably! - called Stacy.

His opening address focused mainly on the necessity of having a hump - "No deranged genius worth his salt is going to take you on if you look normal," he berated them scornfully. It transpired that he had an ulterior motive for this: there was a large additional fee for the optional 'body realignment therapy' on offer in the castle dungeon. Most of the yokels were making do with the much cheaper 'prosthetic humps' being touted. A few were trying to fool the watchful Igor by stuffing armfuls of hay up the back of their smocks.

One game young Stacy was trying to make do without any of these props. "Where's your hump?" demanded Igor testily. "I've got a mole," offered Stacy, hopefully. "It's not a hump, though, is it?" reasoned Igor. "It's a very big mole," ventured Stacy, with admirable persistence. Whereupon Igor squashed the proffered mole flat with a vicious slap on the boy's bare shoulder-blade.

Honestly, I swear this was all in the dream. Worrying.

The Land of the Blind (Where in the world am I? [26])

I have heard it said (one of those made-up statistics, and probably unverifiable anyway) that above 95% of people in this country are seriously short-sighted. I can well believe it.

Laser corrective surgery has yet to make many inroads here, and even contact lenses still seem to be something of a rarity, even amongst the super-rich. The modestly affluent still wear glasses - and often with frighteningly thick lenses that you suspect were issued without the benefit of a proper eye assessment, and certainly without regular updating. Almost everyone else walks around with uncorrected vision.

So - when drivers, cyclists, pedestrians do something incredibly selfish, obtuse, reckless.... sometimes indeed (all too often, in fact) run right into you in apparent oblivion of your existence, and you are tempted to yell, "What's the matter with you?! Are you blind??", you check yourself and reflect,"Oh my god, yes, the poor sod practically is."

I sometimes fret, though, that the limited visual field with which so much of the country suffers also contributes to another problem that is ultimately perhaps more serious - a limited field of imagination. A lot of people in this country do seem to have a serious handicap in terms of altruism - the ability to consider anybody's welfare but their own - and foresight - the ability to anticipate and plan more than a few minutes ahead.

I'm sure there must be some kind of connection between the two. A lot of people here don't seem to be able to see their hand in front of their face, literally or metaphorically.

Thought for the week

"Why is it that naïve people never realise how naïve they are?"

Do you find that irritating too?

Dissing the poets

I run the risk of being 'flamed' by any Irish readers out there for the slighting remark in my last post on their exalted poet Patrick Kavanagh.

But I find from the Wikipedia article on Kavanagh that my great literary (and boozing) hero, Brian O'Nolan (also known as Flann O'Brien, the nom de plume under which most of his books were published, and Myles na Gopaleen, the comic alias under which he wrote a long-running humorous column in the Irish Times called 'The Cruiskeen Lawn'; I have commemorated him on my other blog Barstool Blues as one of my 'Unsuitable Role Models', here and here, and he has earned at least one previous mention on Froogville, here) did a much better job of denigrating him.

As it says in the Wikipedia entry:

Arriving in Dublin in the late 1930s, Kavanagh often found his rural mannerisms and imagery the subject of mockery by the city's literary community. When the Irish Times published an early Kavanagh poem, "Spraying the Potatoes", Myles na Gopaleen responded caustically:

"I am no judge of poetry - the only poem I ever wrote was produced when I was body and soul in the gilded harness of Dame Laudanum - but I think Mr Kavanaugh [sic] is on the right track here. Perhaps the Irish Times, timeless champion of our peasantry, will oblige us with a series in this strain covering such rural complexities as inflamed goat-udders, warble-pocked shorthorn, contagious abortion, non-ovoid oviducts, and nervous disorders among the gentlemen who pay the rent."
[This last expression was a common Irish euphemism for a pig.]

Time for a poem

I posted one of my poems on Barstool Blues the other day - about recollections of a weekend romance in Dublin many years ago - which included a reference to a famous statue of the poet Patrick Kavanagh on the bank of the Grand Canal.

I really don't know much about him (other than that he is not to be confused - but often is! - with P. J. Kavanagh, an English writer and broadcaster, and creator of The Oxford Book Of Short Poems, which is one of my very favourite anthologies), and find, on looking into it, that I don't really like much of his stuff. But it seems he's terribly popular with the Irish. Revered, indeed. Oh yes, up there with Yeats. There's no accounting for taste.

Anyway, this one I quite like.


Memory Of My Father

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.
That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumbled on the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.
And I remember the musician
Faltering over his fiddle
In Bayswater, London,
He too set me the riddle.
Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me:
"I was once your father."

Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)

Unexpectedly Canadian

My mention of The Crash Test Dummies the other day (no hyphen for them, it seems) brought to mind this great image from Gary Larson. Pity I can't find a bigger version of it.

I have just learned that The Dummies were a Canadian band! Funny how many bands are, without you even realising it. Especially the quirkier, more humorous ones.

Apparently, they are now pretty much defunct, as leader Brad Roberts pursues other projects. They did tour and release albums intermittently throughout the '90s and well into the '00s; but their finest hour surely remains 1994's "God Shuffled His Feet...."

What a wonderful thing Wikipedia is! And what a wonderful thing Proxyline is, which allows us to use sites like Wikipedia even in censorship-raddled countries like ****!

Art angst

I am about to head out to the city's 'art zone' - an industrial estate on the north-east outskirts that in recent years has become heavily colonised by studios and galleries (and, increasingly of late, by trendy boutiques, coffee-shops, and restaurants) - for an afternoon/early evening of 'culture'..... followed by some subsidised drinking!

The prospect does occasion a certain trepidation. Art today has surely become more elitist than at any time in history, the creators forming closed, incestuous cliques, cultivating a wilful obscurity in their work. These days, you almost always seem to get a mini-essay accompanying each work to 'explain' it, since there would be no chance that Joe Public would 'get it' otherwise. Now, I like some modern art; and I try to be open to all of it; and I do, in fact, have a few friends in the art community here. But gawd, it's hard work sometimes.

Last time I was up in the 'art zone' a few months ago, I found myself being interviewed for one of the local radio stations about one of these artist friends. Trouble was, I hadn't been able to find the piece he was showing, so I floundered rather. I don't think they broadcast that.

So, yes, I face my expedition to the north-east with enthusiasm tempered with a certain bewilderment - and an anxiety that someone may ask me to say whether I like something, or, worse, whether I understand it. Let's hope not.

This was a feeling amusingly captured by Brad Roberts of the Crash Test Dummies (whatever happened to them??) on his song 'When I go out with artists', which I was listening to just the other day. I've always particularly cherished this couplet, a great near-rhyme (deliberate bad rhyme):

If I were David Byrne
I'd go to galleries and not be too concerned

Quite.

Another old one

A small thing, but mine own. Continuing the 'What is poetry?' series.... Continuing the 'silly love poems' series....



is this a poem?


you can get away
with anything
so long
as it's real

you can even
get away
with calling it
'poetry'!

but the real poetry
is the way
you make me feel

Men of Respect

Amongst the several hundred (yes, pirated) DVDs I own, I finally got around to watching one last night that I had picked up a few years ago, a New York gangster flick of the above title from the early '90s. Ever heard of it? Probably not. It seems to have sunk without trace at the box office, and has hardly registered on IMDB (only a few hundred ratings and 5 reviews). A shame, because it's actually well worth a look.

Its 'gimmick' - which may have led to it not being taken as seriously as it deserves - is that it is based on Macbeth. Shakespeare purists are going to complain about the changes necessarily made, and the loss of the Bard's language. Scorsese devotees may gripe that it somehow shows a lack of respect to the gangster genre to rehash such an old story. And there is inevitably a certain lack of suspense, since the story is so well-known; also, a certain flagging of pace towards the end.

However, it has a top-notch cast: Peter Boyle, Rod Steiger, Dennis Farina, Stanley Tucci, Michael Badalucco, and a very funny cameo from Steven Wright as the "night porter". 'Lady Macbeth' - Katherine Borowitz, John Turturro's wife, an actress who has, sadly, rarely appeared on screen - is terrific. (The main weakness, in fact, is Turturro's 'Macbeth', really a bit over the top: he starts off pretty wired, and as he descends into madness becomes all goggle-eyed leers and twitches.)

And the script, by director William Reilly, is quite brilliant in many ways, inventively updating several of the key elements (the "witches", an eccentric family of spiritualists, are thoroughly creepy, yet also somehow believable; Banquo's son is established as a credible candidate for future power, and rather sinister), and slyly poking fun at some of the elements of the original that seem absurd or implausible to a modern audience. It really is one of the best modern-day adaptations of Shakespeare I've seen. Go check it out.

What would Zoltan do?

I don't do this very often. In fact, I've never done this before, and I may not do it again for quite some time. I am going to recommend someone else's blog!

In the last few months, I have made a new cyber-buddy here in the 'blogosphere' - a grad student in California called Leah. Her posting is infrequent (so, at least she doesn't overload you with too much to read, like me), but diverse in range, quirkily eclectic, and very well-written.

I particularly liked this recent post on the 'ethics course' her Faculty required her to take - in which the benchmark of moral rectitude is an elderly University gardener of Eastern European extraction called Zoltan. (Sorry, that name cracks me up. I know it's a perfectly legitimate and sensible name, but.... to me it always sounds like a Star Trek or Flash Gordon villain.) Honestly, read this and you'll soon find yourself, whenever faced with any kind of moral quandary, asking yourself not "What would Brian Boitano do?" BUT......

"What would Zoltan do?"

That would have been quite enough to keep a smile on my face for one week, but yesterday she dug up this absolutely brilliant video on Japanese sushi-shop etiquette. It would appear to be Japanese-made. If so, I find it very reassuring to learn that the Japanese do indeed have a sense of humour, and are capable of making fun of themselves. (If I discover it was made by non-Japanese I might have to reappraise my responses to it!)