“Please send mescaline if possible. Need transport out of the area.”

After watching the BBC documentary on John Cooper Clarke (which was  decent – weird to see how much Plan B, Kate Nash and especially the Arctic Monkey’s Alex Turner really want to be him, but can’t because they’re stuck in this plastic sales-indie limbo, and because they have neither the wit nor flow), I’ve been reading some of William S. Burroughs’ letters  this evening. The one that amused me the most was his letter to his parents, where he kindly and casually lets them know his discovery of grammatical entropy:

“PS. If my writing seems at times ungrammatical it is not due to carelessness or accident. The English language—the only really adjustable language—is in state of transition.. Transition and the old grammar forms no longer useful..”

In another letter, he describes the cut-up technique to his son, without labelling it as such. Interestingly, he seems to frame it as a pasttime:

“A game I play is to type out phrases from Rimbaud or any poet I fancy. Then I cut into sections. Rearrange putting section four with section one and section two with section three and select a new arrangement.Try it some time with Rimbaud or any writing.”

I’ve read a lot of Burroughs – alongside James Joyce, he’s probably my favourite author. But, unlike with Joyce, I’ve yet to read much criticism or analysis of his work, as it always seemed fairly straight-forward to me. As such, I don’t know if anyone has ever noticed that his (well, Brion Gysin’s) cut-up technique was the predecessor of the way the 21st century web-assaulted consciousness hungers for small bites of data and finds block text oppressive.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who “reads” the internet in a cut-up manner, flicking between multiple tabs on my browser in a compulsive info-binge.

Burroughs saw cut-up as a way of breaking the back of the oppressive autocracy of narrative but, as an addict, he of course would. Because what I suspect to be the case is that information is addictive and, like a dealer who gets you hooked on smack by giving you less potent doses each time, the more our brains become conditioned to process it, the smaller and more frequent the fixes they allow.

I could be wrong, but this at least seems more interesting than the “internet is killing our attention spans!” argument I keep seeing everywhere. If the internet was killing attention spans, then blogs like this wouldn’t even exist. There’s simply too much information about in cyberspace for a 20th century mind to reasonably cope with, so what we’re seeing is an evolution from attention spans to lattice frameworks that dice up the infostream to make it more manageable, with the internet as the testing ground.

In Watchmen by Alan Moore, (written in 1986, before the internet had become widely available,) Ozymandias identifies a precedent for the cut-up technique in the practice of shamanic divination by random scatterings of goat innards, both of which allow “subliminal hints of the future to leak through.” Ozymandias, described as the Earth’s premier mind, takes this to its logical extreme, setting himself up in front of a large network of televisions intermittently switching channels so that he can absorb the zeitgeist in a fugue state.

Moore, channelling Burroughs, was customarily ahead of the curve. In 2012, we’re all Ozymandias, and we’re all Burroughs, in that we’re constantly putting information into a blender and drinking the smoothie. But the reason we haven’t all become super-polymaths like Ozy is because we’re drinking it out of shot glasses, and shots of a low concentration. We get the hit, but not the content.

Are we getting better, or worse, in this regard? Difficult to say. 1), the future right now is insidiously hard to predict, and yet 2), futurism and futurology are stronger fields than ever.

1) might be explained by Claude Shannon’s equation for the informational content of a message:

H = -Σpi log pi

As I understand it, “H” is information entropy and a symbol carried over from Boltzmann’s H-theorem, Σ means “the sum of”, “pi” means the various probabilities we can predict in advance, and “log” means that the relationship described accumulates logarithmically rather than additively. The minus sign is the biggest piece of the puzzle, and the conclusion is that the information in a message (any message, from this sentence to Moby Dick to a text to your boyfriend) equals the negative of the proabilities you can predict.

So, the easier premonition is, the less information the message contains. And, as mentioned before, there’s a lot of information in the fugue right now, more than at any point in human history and doubling at a more rapid pace than ever.

2) might be explained by the fact that, well, technology is so damn interesting, and in the age when Moore’s (no relation) Law is kicking into overdrive and when CERN are firing shit at relativistic speeds in order to falsify the standard model in Switzerland, it’s no wonder people want to know where we’re going next. But it could always be the case we’re being seduced by the subliminal hints of the future that are sluicing through our transpersonal macrocut-up, sneaking past the entropic units to beckon our minds forward.

In Watchmen, there is one character who can see the future. Dr Manhattan has precognition because he perceives space fourth-dimensionally. This ability is obscured due to a collation of tachyons, theoretical subatomic particles that can move at superluminal velocity.

Why? Because of a contradiction between the existence of tachyons and causality, which in special relativity means the timing (sequence) of two events related by a signal exchange can never be inverted by a coordinate transformation (that is, transformation of the reference frame). In other words, cause is always earlier than the effect in arbitrary frame of reference. A tachyon has an imaginary mass and can carry no information, and a tachyonic signal event connecting two spacetime events inverts causality, scrambling events.

If that sounds too complex, what I’m saying is that, in a universe where faster-than-light particles exist, string theory is fucking with relativity. Wouldn’t it be weird if that reading at CERN last year that clocked neutrinos at superluminal velocity was down to more than faulty wiring? And if cause and effect are exchanged… would that be the future fucking with us?

And because all that’s all too much like boring, unbroken, 20th century paragraphs, here’s a photo I randomly came across yesterday. It was in a series depicting literary greats in their bathing suits, so we 21st century interneters chuckled healthily at everyone from Ernest Hemingway to Virginia Woolf as they were caught with their trousers down. With one final exception.

Peter Orlovski, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs at the beach.

It looks like he’s laughing at us.

He isn’t, right?

My favourite poet?

DOCUMENTARY: Evidently… John Cooper Clarke
On: BBC 4
Date: Wednesday 30th May 2012
Time: 22:00 to 23:00 (1 hour long)

Documentary which records and celebrates the life and works of ‘punk poet’ John Cooper Clarke, looking at his life as a poet, a comedian, a recording artist and revealing how he has remained a significant influence on contemporary culture over four decades. With household names from comedy, music and cultural commentary paying homage, the film reveals Salford-born Cooper Clarke as a dynamic force who remains as relevant today as ever, as successive generations cite him as an influence on their lives, careers and styles. From Bill Bailey to Plan B, Steve Coogan to Kate Nash and Arctic Monkeys front man Alex Turner to cultural commentators such as Miranda Sawyer and Paul Morley, the film reveals the life behind one of Britain’s sharpest and most witty poets – a national treasure.

Nothing has ever come so close to killing me as John Cooper Clarke – his stand-up is phenomenal in its craft and his poetry is funny enough to leave me gasping for oxygen every time I watch him or go to see him. With the backcombed mop, emaciated physique, snappy suits, hangover shades and Salford accent, he’s definitely one of the coolest poets around, too, especially now that his aged visage makes him look like Keith Richards’ anorexic skull given crack up the snout to perform.

So I’ll definitely be watching this BBC documentary, but in the meantime:

John Cooper Clarke – How to Kill Dracula

John Cooper Clarke – Beasley Street

John Cooper Clarke – I Don’t Want To Go To Burnley

I love lists…

… And totally agree with Umberto Eco that they’re boss.

So, some writers I haven’t read, but want to:

Thomas Ligotti

Robert Aickman

Hannu Rajaniemi

Henri Barbusse

Blake Butler

Blaise Cendrars

Russell Hoban

Niall Griffiths

Robert Musil

Teju Cole

Djuna Barnes

Herman Broch

Alexander Theroux

Roland Topor

Ann Quin

Jean Ray

Luis Aragon

 

Hmm. Lots of French. And not enough women. Should rectify the latter.

Winner and losers

“The Legend of the Pool is to Dutch football what Guinevere and Lancelot were to Camelot. The pure totaalvoetballers were a football version of the Knights of the Round Table – a unique band of righteous, egalitarian athlete-warriors…”

David Winner at the start of one of many passages in Brilliant Orange in which he catches himself comically overstating his case (“Perhaps I’m taking the analogy into the absurd,” he acknowledges a paragraph later).

Winner’s book is not just a book about Dutch football, but a book about how Dutch football is in some way representative of a deeper ethnic psyche. Hence the sweeping chapters about Dutch art, Dutch photography, Dutch politics, Dutch architecture, even Dutch agricultural planning, and the traits they share with totaalvoetball – the appreciation of space, the strict discipline co-existing with moments of brilliant individual expression, and democracy.

Hans Van Meer’s ominous picture of the 1997 Champions League first leg between Ajax and Juventus. His photographs, which seek to find a “moment of tension” rather than a specific goal, tackle or other event, are discussed in the book.

If that sounds boring, it isn’t – it’s fascinating, and there’s a real warmth and humour to Winner’s observations. It’s obvious that, despite not being Dutch, he loves and cares for Dutch things, beginning with the sport. And we care through him, especially when the meeting between the Netherlands and West Germany at the 1988 European Championships, 14 years after the Germans shot down Dutch Total Football in what should have been its defining moment, is described as analogous to the end of a Sergio Leone revenge Western.

I’ve always shared Winner’s appreciation of the Netherlands’ footballing history. I have unreserved respect for Rinus Michels and have argued his case as the finest manager the sport has ever seen, and Johan Cruyff is my favourite player of all time. The much-lauded Barcelona team over the last few years owes much to them both. There is an implicate order, and indeed an implicate disorder, to the tactical system they implemented. A culture that produced the Impossible Goal, the equally incredible Van Basten volley and a scintillating, beguiling way of playing football that left the giants of Brazil, Argentina and the world astounded deserves a book as good as Brilliant Orange.

But Winner, on the cusp of glory, has a habit of blowing it, running away from his own conclusions. Sounds familiar.

A Guide to Poetry: Ouroboros

And we come at last to the end of the poetry guide. But, because of the nature of blogging, where the newest posts are typically read first, it’s also the introduction. (I’ll be sporadically posting the updated, final versions of the poems I composed on the fly in a series of anthology posts, too.)

As I’ve said before, the guide was for myself, more than anything else, as I can only seem to properly learn something pragmatically! However, I hope other people find it useful. It’s not hugely extensive – I’ve focused mainly on Western forms, with the exception of the ghazal, as I’m finding Indian and Japanese rhythms harder to adapt to – when I have a better grasp on them, I may come up with a sequel.

One thing that’s come through in the feedback is I should have had a word on what syllables actually typically are stressed and unstressed. It’s not something that speaks for itself, and newcomers to English scansion are likely going to find it as difficult as I did. So, a general rule of thumb:

- Nouns are stressed. “Ball”, “game”, “Pete”, “fridge”.

- Action verbs are usually stressed. “Run”, “play”, “throw”, “catch”.

- Linking verbs, if you like, are usually unstressed. “Be”, “is”, “was”, “do”.

- Conjunctions are unstressed. “But”, “and”, “or”.

- Prepositions are unstressed. “By”, “on”.

- Pronouns may or may not be. This is all about context but, to be honest, nobody is going to jump on your back if you use them either way. You can treat them like jokers in a pack of cards if you’re having trouble.

- For words with more than one syllable, you’ll have to sound it out. For example, the word “castle” has two syllables, and it’s pronounced “CAS-ul”, so the stress is on the first syllable. Otherwise you’d say it “cas-TEL” or something. Sometimes there’ s a primary and a secondary stressed syllable, and an example of this can be found in the world itself: “SIL-la-bul”. Whether or not you stress one or the other or both will depend on the overall context and metre of the poem.

 

What have we learned, children?

Whether or not we’ve been conditioned to recoil from mathematical impositions upon poetry or not by some kind of “art is subjective” meme, it seems to me that amateur, alternative or underground poetry is usually characterised by a lack of metre and form. Free verse now seems the default for a lot of people.

Which I generally think is a shame. The metres and forms discussed below are the result of thousands and thousands of years of experimentation. Why would we want to get rid of them?

Especially when the result seems to have been uniformly shit poetry. Generally, the thing I’ve picked up from constraining myself to a scansion, even a lose one, is that keeping to a framework narrows your options and forces your brain to come up with something better. The framework slices off cliche and cuts down on laziness. It’s very much like a workout for your mind. There’s nothing inherently wrong with writing in free verse, but you should learn the rules before you decide whether or not you want to break them instead of being the 10,000th Bukowski wannabe.

Bukowski, incidentally, made sure he had a rich and studious knowledge of poetry, a knowledge that far outstrips my own, before he wrote in free verse. That’s why the people who inspired him are incredible; he himself is very, very good; and the people he inspired… well, I wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire, and neither would he.

So, without further ado, here is the Guide to Poetry in its (thus far) entireity:

 

A Guide To Poetry

1. Foot, Metrics, Prosody and Scansion

1.1 General Overview

1.2 Anglophonic metrics

1.3 Romance Languages

1.4 Classical languages

2. Verse Forms

2.1 Sestina

2.2 Villanelle

2.3 Pantoum

2.4 English Sonnet

2.5 Rondelet

2.6 Italian Sonnet

2.7 Pushkin Sonnet

Experimental Intermission

3.1. Iambic pentameter stanzas

2. Verse Forms

2.8 Terza Rima

2.9 Ghazal

2.10 Sea Shanty

2.11 Sapphics

 

Lifting Weights

One of the things I liked so much about William H. Gass’s A Temple of Texts was his returning to the analogy of literature as both food and exercise. At one point, he describes how a passage by the estimable John Hawkes “nourishes more certainly than lunch”, or at another says that a passage from Dickens is “like a meadow, there is so much that is tender to be chewed”. And this, from the first essay in the collection, was what really drew me in:

“The healthy mind goes everywhere,” he writes, “one day visiting Saint Francis, another accepting tea from Céline’s bitter pot—ask for two sugars, please—and hiking many a hard mile through Immanuel Kant or the poetry of Paul Celan—a pair who will provide a better workout than the local gym.”

Books have been my food, sustaining me through empty mealtimes when the coins have been in short supply. They’ve been my booze, as intoxicating as any wine (“Books,” Gass has remarked, “need to breathe, too.”) . But, alas, they’ve also taken the place of actually getting up off my arse.

Then

Me in about 2006.

There was, not so very long ago, a time when actively participating in sport was a regular part of my life. I used to play football daily, and rugby for a team. Then, as I became a reader (and a drinker), it became football monthly, perhaps, and rugby not at all.

Oh, I joined gyms, took up running and swimming, but never for long. The only thing I ever kept up for any sustained period was lifting weights – big weights, lifted for not so many reps, so my 6’4″ frame was supplied with large, but very undefined, muscles. But in my second year of university, illness, firstly physical and then mental, meant that even the time on the benchpress ebbed away to nothingness. I still play football, but in the spring and summer, and I never instigate it; only follow along when others organise it.

My only workouts have become mental ones rather than physical. I am constantly seeking out more and more challenging books, whereas once I might have saved some of that ambition for keeping in some kind of shape. It’s one of the reasons the quoted essays by Gass resonated so much with me: they’re, to a degree, justification. I’m completely projecting, of course, but on some level, I think my subconscious suspects that the same thing that happened to me happened to Gass.

Whether or not the man is making excuses for himself with these seductive turns of phrase, as I am for myself, though, I wouldn’t be so rude as to speculate. And I’m absolutely not saying that reading or writing or being clever makes you fat. But there’s something about fat writers or intellectuals that seems somewhat endearing, isn’t there? G.K. Chesterton was the size of a small moon, and who could imagine him otherwise? As Hemingway’s prose became leaner, his belly grew in response. I’d cuddle Umberto Eco as I wrap my mind around his brilliant essays. Stephen Fry was of a morbid corpulence around the time he did his In America programme.

Me in 2009

Not that I’m comparing myself to such men; simply wondering if they shared my predicament, just like when I was an asthma suffering child I was heartened by the news that Ian Thorpe also had it (I was a competitive swimmer once upon a time). Perhaps, also, I’d subconsciously wished to emulate them. At my peak weight, a little bit after the photo above, I was around 21 stone (294lbs), the same weight as Fry before he heroically lost 6 stone in as many months. A similar crash diet dropped this to 17 (238lbs), but I still wasn’t happy with my appearance. I’m one of these people who is constantly checking themselves out in mirrors, which probably seems obscenely vain to others. Whereas, in fact, it’s simply because my self-image is extremely fragile. I feel fat, constantly, even now as I type, as well as ugly, ungainly and uncouth.

I hope it doesn’t sound arrogant to say that my appearance and my intelligence have correlatively had an inversely proportionate relationship. Because it’s also the case that my self-confidence and my joie de vivre have generally gone the same way as my looks. In that 2006 above, I was cocky, brash, self-confident. I had things to prove. I was nervous, sure, and frightened; very, very frightened, as only teenagers can be. But I was yet to suffer real heartbreak, betrayal, loss, or the dull banality of lengthy major depressive episodes…

…God, this has all gone a bit LiveJournal.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary about any of the above. Most of us get lazy, intellectually or in day to day life. Most of us aren’t happy with our appearance, but feel like we’re banging our head against a brick wall when we try to change it. We all have identity crises to some extent. I had – I hope I had – my quarter-life crisis a year or two early, but that’s not unusual. All of us, especially those of us in our mid 20s, idolise our late teens with rose tinted spectacles – I remarked to a friend recently that I even miss the enemies I had then! Alan Moore’s superb spoken word piece, The Birth Caul, is some of his finest writing for this reason:

“17 is like gold, slow and hot in the warm drunken blur of the crowd, in the heartbreak and sway, and we dream we’re the people in songs, suck our cheeks in like filmstars with walk-on parts. We wear our moods like t-shirt slogans: garish, confrontational… but quickly dated, easily discarded. Everything is possible, a glorious potential deep inside our chests. Nothing’s decided yet. We could still turn out to be anyone.”

But that potential, whilst not as raw and unshaped, never goes away, and it’s a shame when we lose sight of that. I’m sure it’s the case that anyone who is obese now as I have been, or much older than myself, or suffers from a more acute or manic depression, would read this and tell me to count my blessings.

Now

But that sounds a bit complacent to me. So, back in early April (it’s mid-May as I type), I decided to, at the very least, lose a bit of the fat that still seemed to define my appearance.

The course I began was one of those 8 week boot camp things. To motivate myself, I told people I was doing it, so that when they asked about it I’d have to have something to tell them.I didn’t exactly follow it to the letter – I was too large and out of shape to actually complete some of the workouts. In my defence, after the very first one, the instructor, who is a martial artist, was sweating and out of shape; I could feel the sweet touch of death approaching.

Nevertheless, I bore with it, and energy did return to me. Unfortunately, I did two and a half weeks of it before the black dog descended, which I told everyone was “an injury” (there are maybe a handful of people in my life who know I’m depressed – I’ve never had the courage to “come out”). I think partially it was the routine, which is something I’ve never had much endurance for. Other factors I won’t discuss now also played a part.

I did stick to the diet, however. The results thus far:

5th April                                   19th April                                 15th May

It’s not a dramatic change, and I’m certainly slouching in the first two pictures (though this wasn’t any sort of pre-emptive attempt to emphasise any weight I did lose: like a lot of tall people, I slouch out of habit). Really, all I’ve done is cut a bit off the beer belly and lost some jowly flab. Nevertheless, I am pleased. I feel better. You can clearly see that the muscle I gained in the second picture has wilted away, but I never particularly wanted to be big.

I’m also pleased to report that my reading hasn’t died off as a result. I finished Wittgenstein’s Nephew yesterday, enjoying every word of it. I hope this balance can be maintained, perhaps by adopting the Fry method of listening to audiobooks whilst walking. I’ve rediscovered LibriVox in the last few months, so it’s certainly an option. The above is a flattering final photo and I’m still not exactly thin, but it’s shown to me that a change is possible. It could well be that, like I have in the past, I let it all fall apart again, but I think the key thing has been making lifestyle alterations I feel I can stick to, rather than just going mental for 8 weeks and then letting myself go afterwards.

The diet, for the record, is dead simple. If anyone wants to try it out, (not that you’d be consulting a book blog in lieu of a nutritionist or anything), here are the things I’ve allowed myself to eat:

Carbs: Whole grain pasta, brown rice, vegetables, brown bread. Avoid: syrup, dairy products, white bread, white pasta, white flour, table sugar, honey.

Protein: Oily fish (tuna or wild salmon), skinless chicken breast, poached eggs, beans, lentils, almonds. Avoid: red meats.

Fats: Peanut butter (brilliant, eh?), avocadoes, olives (and cook with olive oil). Avoid: saturated fats, such as red meat, poultry skin, butter, cream, whole milk.

Superfoods!: Citrus fruits; berries; green tea; a handful of either walnuts, brazil nuts or pecans; oats; spinach; tomatoes.

Avoid the bevvy, and drink lots of water.

I realise all of this has been a bit of a nonsequitur in a blog that’s primarily about literature. I don’t normally like talking about myself, but getting all this out and putting it up online is cathartic for some reason. At the risk of sounding Cartesian (or just pretentious), it’s the psychological weights that are the hardest to lift.

A Demisemieducated Discourse

Drawing to the end of Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard, I came across this sentence:

“At Bräunerhof one’s thoughts are immediately stifled by cigarette smoke and kitchen fumes, and by the twaddle that is talked by the semi-educated and the demisemi-educated of Vienna as they let off their social steam at midday.”

This comes in the middle of a polemic against… well, every aspect of Austrian culture, but especially the Viennese literary coffee houses (I am amused to see that the Wikipedia entry for the Café Bräunerhof as “most known for being the famous author Thomas Bernhard’s favourite café”).

I was drawn to the entertaining word “demisemi-educated”, as I’d never seen it before. At first it struck me as being the unfortunate translator David McLintock’s attempt at finding a fitting substitute for one of those beautiful German compound monstrosities that pop up, those muscular portmanteaus like gesamtkunstwerk or schwangershaftverhutungsmittel. Bernhard had little regard for translation (just like everything else), so on this level, that it would probably annoy the character even further than he already was, I found the word funny.

This is the face of a man who would like you to fuck off.

Then, suddenly, some residual flotsam of my ancient musical education rose to the surface and I realised that “demisemi” is from music theory. Which makes sense – Wittgenstein’s Nephew, and the two central characters, are united by their passion for music. The reader gets the definite impression that the titular Paul Wittgenstein’s opinion on music is the only one that Bernhard (either the character or the writer, if they’re not the same person) has any respect for.

So, whereas before, the sentence just seemed to transliterate as “stupid, and even stupider people, chat stupid shit in the Bräunerhof,” the implication is that they were mainly chatting shit about music. A wryness and a dryness has entered the passage, as this is more likely to annoy Bernhard than shit chatting on any other subject. And, exploring it further by applying the music template to the subject of stupidity, we see that the semi-educated aren’t simply semi-educated in the normal sense that they’re half-clever, or have some formal grades but no intelligent application, but have received only a 16th of an education: a semiquaver lasts a 16th of a full note. And a demisemiquaver lasts half as long as a semiquaver, so I infer that a demisemieducated person has only a 32nd of an education.

The next fraction, by the way, would be a hemidemisemieducated person (someone with 1/64th of an education), before the prefixes reset to semihemidemisemieducated.

It is in this way the more Asperger’s-inflected parts of my personality can occasionally make me laugh.

Sapphics

The Story So Far

1. Foot, Metrics, Prosody and Scansion

1.1 General Overview

1.2 Anglophonic metrics

1.3 Romance Languages

1.4 Classical languages

2. Verse Forms

2.1 Sestina

2.2 Villanelle

2.3 Pantoum

2.4 English Sonnet

2.5 Rondelet

2.6 Italian Sonnet

2.7 Pushkin Sonnet

Experimental Intermission

3.1. Iambic pentameter stanzas

2. Verse Forms

2.8 Terza Rima

2.9 Ghazal

2.10 Sea Shanty

Sappho

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet born on the island of Lesbos, included in the canon of the Nine Lyric Poets. Only fragments of her work remain now, fragments I have a deep and enduring admiration for. Her work is characterised by transcendant and mortal passion, as well as supreme technical ability.

I’m going to digress slightly here, as I feel Sappho is deserving of more than a few biographical lines followed by a clumsy attempt at approximating her work. It would be tawdry and predictable to decry the undoubtedly huge loss to the world that was the bulk of Sappho’s poetry, which is why, if you want to properly appreciate what remains of her work without knowledge of Greek, your best option is Ann Carson’s If Not, Winter. Carson is probably the finest living poet that I know of, with an understanding of space that’s second to none. As such, she makes as much use of the gaps as she does the actual words. Furthermore, she resists re-ordering the word to hammer a square Ancient Greek metre into a round English language hole, nor does she add possessive pronouns where none exist in the original. The result is quite haunting; Fragment 31′s narrator is now disembodied, ego-less, as ephemeral as parchment:

He seems to me equal to gods that man

whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing – oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead – or almost
I seem to me.

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty

The Stanza
The Sapphic stanza is composed of three hendecasyllabic lines followed by an Adonic line. So (and I apologise again for the formating fucking up after the scansion marks, I are no good at WordPress):

/ ˘ | / ˘ | / ˘ ˘ | / ˘ | / ˘ x3

     / ˘ ˘ | / ˘

This is a difficult metre if you ask me, even if we're counting it qualitatively (being Ancient Greek, it would have originally been counted quantitatively). Here are some examples in English.

Examples

So the | goddess | fled from her | place, with | awful

Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;

While behind a clamour of singing women

           Severed the | twilight.

Swinburne

Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid,

He to the overbearing Boanerges

Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor

           Blessed be the vintage!)

Rudyard Kipling, in a tribute to Shakespeare called The Craftsman

Such shall the noise be and the wild disorder,

(If things eternal may be like these earthly)

Such the dire terror, when the great Archangel

           Shakes the creation,

Tears the strong pillars of the vault of heaven,

Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes;

See the graves open, and the bones arising,

           Flames all around 'em!

The third and fourth stanzas of The Day of Judgment by Isaac Watts

Let’s give it a go!

/ ˘ |/ ˘|/˘˘| / ˘ | / ˘ x3

Light, from conservatory windows, enters

Splitting night, unfolding the vision, brightly

Bringing Bast's visage, holy pagan

/ ˘ ˘ | / ˘

           Goddess of morning,

 

Telling me, obscured though she is, Heaven's

Gaze a spinning shroud (that which speaks to angels

Sears the eyes of men), of those sacred orders:

           Love for the worldly.

19/12/11

Closing thoughts

I found this very very difficult. It took about an hour and a half to compose two stanzas. To fit the rhythm, I had to use enjambments that probably come across as awkward. Bast, of course, isn't, to my knowledge, the goddess of morning, but the subject matter is based on personal experience (don't ask; I have some kind of weird epilepsy.)

I think next time I use hendecasyllables, I'll probably use the English version: an iambic pentameter followed by a very short unstressed syllable, e.g. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (see here). I wonder if it would be acceptable to write a Sapphic like this?

Sea Shanty

A folk song that was designed to accompany labour on board merchant sailing ships, with the rhythm often matching the motion of the work. They more or less died out after the advent of steamboats, but their influence can be heard on modern bands like The Pogues or Tom Waits.

I sort of admit, I just wanted to blow off a bit of steam (no pun intended) here.

Let’s give it a go!
/ ˘ ˘ ˘ / /

˘ / ˘, ˘ / ˘

/ ˘ ˘ ˘ / /

˘ / ˘ / /

Sing, you little bastards

of Charley, of Charley

Sing, you little bastards

of Charley MacGraw

In docks of far cities

She'd smoke and look pretty,

Leaving her lipstick

On filters of fags

The sea was her darling

Her temper alarming

Whether or not she

Was still on the rag!

If you travel to her town

And don't let your hair down

Buy her a lager

She'll give you a shag!

Sing, you little bastards

of Charley, of Charley

Sing, you little bastards

of Charley MacGraw

If our song sounds too coarse

About this auld war horse

Go ask about her

In pubs near the bay

Most girls'll get frisky

At one or two whiskies

Or at the jingle

Of a dock worker's pay

But if you're in rehab

Buy Charley a kebab

And soon you'll be soaked

In her vaginal spray

Sing, you little bastards

of Charley, of Charley

Sing, you little bastards

of Charley MacGraw

Infusions of barley

They suit our young Charley

Likewise the vodka

They sell in Tesco

A rental of Con-Air

And buy her a Donner

Soon you'll both be

Dining alfresco

Next time you're down that lane

And you need your balls drained

Flag down a taxi:

“To Charley's, let's go!”

Sing, you little bastards

of Charley, of Charley

Sing, you little bastards

of Charley MacGraw

Sing, you little bastards

of Charley, of Charley

Sing, you little bastards

of Charley MacGraw

Laurence Thompson, 18/12/11

A pub right down on the Liverpool docks I used to drink in. I remember one time, when the whole city was frozen, practically crawling along the ice to get there with only the warming thought of whisky keeping me going.

Closing thoughts

I probably like this a lot more than I should. I wasn't just thinking of sea shanties that I knew when I wrote this, but also Irish pub songs and that sort of thing. As can be seen by the scansion markings above, I had the tune in my head early on and worked out the metre of the chorus before I even knew the subject matter.

I thought a loose, pretty woman was as good a topic as any, it's the sort of thing that would keep me warm if I was away at sea. It's probably more humiliating than I wanted it to be, however, so I've given it an ironic title in the anthology.

I actually think it's less misogynistic than Evening Queen, in a weird way. At least you can more or less imagine Charley McGraw as a real person and not some abstracted Nick Cave-esque femme fatale Goth wank fantasy figure. She doesn't fall into the bullshit whore-with-a-heart-of-gold stock character either – she just likes booze and kebabs, and shagging. Nothing wrong with that. Oh, and Nicholas Cage films, but I'll forgive her.

I don't know if it works on the flat page. It really, really should be sung, by a lovely, generous singer who will make up for the failures in metre.

Charity Bastard

I spend a lot of my breaks in charity shops, looking at the books. For some bizarre reason, I will occasionally see a book I want, but not buy it.

I have no idea why this is. It can’t be due to expense (as is the case in most outlets), or out of guilt (as is the case with Amazon) – it’s a charity shop!

Nevertheless: “Next time,” I think. I’ve even on one occasion made a physical note of the book, and the address of the shop, for my return. Only to find it gone, predictably, when I do finally come back.

I’ve missed out on some beauties as a result – in fact, the main reason I haven’t read Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is because it brings back painful memories of my own idiocy.

Instead of the correct response (“Why? Why didn’t I just buy the fucking thing when I had the chance!?”), I began to imagine a mythical, covert figure who goes around the same shops as me, buying up all the books I want. I call him/her the Charity Bastard.

“Charity Bastard” may sound oxymoronic to you, but that’s only because your brain doesn’t work the way mine does. The Charity Bastard doesn’t buy these books because s/he believes in helping the poor/aged/cancer-ridden. S/he does it to fuck with me, to keep me on my toes.

The Charity Bastard is devious and the Charity Bastard is smart. Of course s/he’s smart. S/he’s got a 1st edition print of André Gide’s journals… in French! S/he’s got Clausewitz’ On War. S/he’s by now surely an expert on several fields I always wanted to read up on but never had the time to, from feng sui to the social geography of Peru.

I hate hir for all these reasons, but mostly because I feel that if war hadn’t been declared, we could have been good friends. Maybe even lovers, under the right circumstances. But it wasn’t to be. And it’s all hir fault.

So, I took war to the next step. I mean, this is really it now, Charity Bastard (I know you’re reading this as well). This shit just went nuclear. Because over the last 7 days, I have liberated these from various charity shops around West Kirby and Heswall (oh yeah, that’s right: I finally figured that the places where the rich cunts live would have the best shit):

Wittgenstein’s Nephew by Thomas Bernhard (translated by David McLintock)
Correction by Thomas Bernhard (trans. Sophie Wilkins, with an introduction by George Steiner!)
The Oriestea by Aeschylus (trans. Robert Fagles, who did perhaps my fave version of the Iliad)
Prometheus Bound and other plays by Aeschylus (trans. Philip Vellacott)
The Theban Cycle by Sophocles (trans. Fagles)
Electra and other plays by Sophocles (trans. E.F. Watling)
An anthology of Greek lyrical poets such as Sappho, Archilochus, Alcman and Pindar, trans. Richmond Lattimore
Travels in Hyperreality by Umberto Eco
Byzantium Endures by Michael Moorcock
Cocaine Nights by J.G. Ballard
The Restoration Game by Ken MacLeod
The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa (trans. Edith Grossman)
What is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger
Natasha’s Dance by Orlando Figes
Nobody’s Perfect by Anthony Lane
The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon

That’s right. In order to defeat Charity Bastard, I had to become Charity Bastard.

We’re at DEFCON 2, you sneaky cunt. Your move.