Slow Lane Shuffle

Oh go on then... a poem

2012-02-29T10:44:00.007Z

Weird picture I took the other night. I'm big on reflections at the moment.

So there have been some murmurings about poetry here and elsewhere. Have I given up on poetry altogether (answer - about once a week... no maybe once a day...)? Will I be putting together another book of poems (I'm thinking about it at the moment actually... maybe a pamphlet... I have a title anyway...). Have I stopped putting poetry on the blog (proper poets don't post online anyway you know... bah!)? Oh the joy it would be to have Faber & Faber publish my every word and not need to have these concerns... but it's not looking likely for now so in the meantime here is the first poem of mine on here for a while. It's one I wrote last year for a project that pretty much came to nothing and so far only a couple of people have read it. See what you think.

Working

I don't know where I'm going
I said
I don't know where I'm going
but come with me

I said
look how empty it all is
you can scrape your hands around it
feel where the dirt was
where people sat
just waiting

I said
I might well stay in bed forever
tuck me in
throw me out
post me where I need to go

I said
standing on this wave
I can see everything
how to describe it

I said
a woman alone is a thing to fear
still

I said
body of work
my arse

I said
(to death)
hello
have you met my body of work?

I said
now
is the hardest word
not sorry

I said
la la la
blah blah blah
what are you reading me for?

I said
(aloud)
I'm looking for what isn't there
in the skin

I said
when shall I stop?
Now?

RF 2011

So what was that you were saying about my hair..?

2012-02-25T10:49:00.007Z

Some talk this week of the redheads... well, in the last post anyway... and that made me want to show you this (the picture above). It comes from a new Pixar “animated picture” (er, long cartoon) that's called “Brave” and that we'd not heard about until we were at "The Muppets" last week and saw the trailer (still singing that Muppet song, are you? I know I am...). "Brave" will be at the cinemas later this year and I'll be interested to see how it does here as it's set in Scotland and features a whole lotta tartan. Will Alex Salmond be at the premiere, for example? Will there be "Brave" merchandise in every petrol station and fast food outlet in the country? Will anyone in England watch it..?

We'd probably be more excited about it if the trailer at the cinema hadn't already shown us the whole film (feisty heroine, Billy Connolly does the King, it looked a lot like a Scottish version of the recent "How to Train Your Dragon" that DreamWorks had a few years ago...). But we will see it partly because, as you can see, the heroine has the kind of hair I spend a lot of time, these days, picking off the floor. Here's our in-house heroine posing for a photo for a school World Book Day competition (her hair, I should point out, was not brushed, or in any way prepared for photography, before the shoot...). The setting was her idea.

I did think this week about writing a redhead poem... it is something I think about often as I look at that pretty head. The nearest I've got so far is this one about squirrels... it is about humans too, in part, of course.

And finally, this Tuesday 28th the guests at the folk club in Montrose are Patsy Matheson and Becky Mills (formerly of Waking the Witch). Matheson is fairly red of head too... so it's a good excuse to play a clip of their music. This one is “Spring Song” - it seemed apt as the weather here has been glorious of late:

Boozing and the work of a lifetime

2012-02-23T11:33:00.012Z

A.L.Kennedy (this photo borrrowed from the Telegraph from a few years back)

Just to show it isn't all fun and muppets here... yesterday, whilst doing my chores, I listened to a radio play about a pair of alcoholics by Scottish writer A.L.Kennedy. Kennedy must write about alcoholism a fair bit because I read her book "Paradise" (2004) a few years back and that was its subject matter too (it's reviewed by Ali Smith here). I didn't enjoy "Paradise" much... but then I guess I wasn't really meant to (it's fairly grim). I got a bit fed up with all the drinking because whilst I've done my share of drinking (and beyond) I don't think I've ever been anything remotely like an alcoholic. I have, however, encountered a few and my goodness they are usually enough to put a person off drinking forever (how boring! how predictable! I worked in a real "alky's pub" back in my youth, it was revolting...). That doesn't sound very kind, does it... so for balance I will add that there are other ways of being boring and predictable (and indeed revolting) and I'm sure I've been guilty of some of those myself over the years... at least now and then. Also we went to an A.A. picnic in California last year (here) and I was pleased to learn that recovering alcoholics can be some of the least boring and predictable people on the planet - what a great party, that was...

Anyway, the radio play ("That I should rise") is on the i-player for two more days (here). It's an hour long, not bad and features some good performances from actors Tim McInnerny and Harriet Walter. My favourite bit of the whole thing though was Kennedy's introduction. In it she says (in that inimitable A.L.Kennedy I-dare-you-not-to-take-me-seriously way):

"I wanted to look here at the opposite of ruin, at how someone might save themselves or be saved. I wanted to look at how any of us might realise that living in the moment and loving those we need to love as well as we can is pretty much all that's important; the work of a lifetime and all that's important."

Then came her less appealing side (see comments...).

Blatant muppetry

2012-02-20T09:33:00.003Z

Well, nothing much to tell you right now... school holidays... all the usual stuff... did even write a poem the other day... can't show it to you... lucky escape...

Anyway, we did see the new Muppets movie yesterday (h was SO keen to see it... she loves movies... loves Muppets... and yes, I do give Muppets a capital letter and I rarely give it to other more conventionally "important" words... ). The Muppets always get big showbiz names to appear alongside them and in this movie some of the cameos were... OK but there was one surprise one that we really enjoyed. It's in the clip below so if you want a surprise at the cinema then don't watch this:

And don't watch this either. It features the same actor and the bonus treat of my favourite regular guest on this well-known comedy show:

Hell, if I had to have a crazy-for-Jesus, Texan Mom then I'd happily take Laurie Metcalf. I've loved her since "Roseanne". Oh go on... here's a little bit of that too:

Next week something sensible. Maybe.

x

Music, music, music...

2012-02-12T20:05:00.006Z

Montrose beach, end of January this year

I've been on a wander around music lately. I started listening to some Unthanks after hearing them on the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards (I already have their first 3 albums but I haven't listened to them much lately). They performed this song at the awards ceremony, about a pigeon... by Dave Sudbury):

One of the comments on youtube said the Unthanks stole the Awards show this year with this performance (though they didn't win anything this time) and although I only listened on radio I'd have to agree. There's been lots of argy-bargy about the folk awards this year... which makes a change from argy-bargy about poetry I suppose... and I suppose there probably always will be trouble about awards and prizes in the arts. In so many ways they are all a certain amount of nonsense (of course x isn't this year's "best" singer... just as of course y didn't write this year's "best" poem or book of poems) but at the same time we do all hear about a lot of good music and other arts via the prize systems. I often hear about new music (new to me anyway) via music prizes like the Mercury... maybe I wish I didn't but at this stage of life I just do (though I hear of quite a lot via blogs and radio and facebook as well of course).

Speaking of which I saw on their website that the Unthanks had recently done an album of songs by 2005 Mercury winner Antony & the Johnsons and Robert Wyatt (called Diversions Vol 1) so I went off to one of the free places to give that a try. After a few songs I realised that I'd never really listened to Antony & the Johnsons properly (just not been in the right mood at the right time before) so off I went to listen to him... and ended up spending all my birthday money/vouchers on A&tJ albums. Here's a song from one of the albums I bought (the 2010 album “Swanlights”) called “Thank-you for your love”. It is perhaps an atypically bouncey and cheery song for this artist but it is you-know-what day this week (clue:hearts and flowers):

Also this week former Unthanks pianowoman/songwriter Belinda O'Hooley has a new album out with her O'Hooley & Tidow duo project. I love the music these two make (their first album “Silent June” is one of my favourites of recent years) and the new album is called “the Fragile” (you can find details on their website). The only song from the new album I can find to show you is this one:

I've ordered my copy of “The Fragile” and am very much looking forward to hearing the whole thing. O'Hooley and Tidow are on tour just now too... though sadly nowhere near here.

And then later in the week we listened to some Guns'n'Roses* (ugh), some Thin Lizzy ('ray!), some Janis Joplin, some James Brown... it's been a noisy week.

*I should have made this clear to begin with... we were listening to this band because we have been watching the US comedy series "The Middle" and the eldest son in that is called Axl (after Axl Rose of G'n'R) and so h wanted to hear what they sounded like. She wasn't hugely impressed. Luckily they appeared long after my heavy rock phase (approx 1980-1984) so I missed them altogether first time round. Phew!

x

Quick protest link

2012-02-09T12:58:00.005Z

Just a quickie (after that last long post what else could it be?). Former Chumbawamba band member Alice Nutter (above) had a play called "My Generation" on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday. It's about politics and protest (and ordinary lives in Leeds) and I listened to it today. If you've got two hours to give over to listening, I'd recommend you give it a try too. It's on the i-player (here) till Sunday late evening. Plenty of swearing but only where appropriate, I assure you.

x

More about laughter - from Langston Hughes to Stewart Lee

2012-02-07T10:15:00.017Z

In the last post I wrote about Langston Hughes' short novel “Not Without Laughter” (1930). The quote in the book's title turns up in my copy on page 180. The narrator, Sandy, has taken to visiting a local pool hall (against the wishes of his serious aunt) and he likes to watch and listen to the old men who frequent the place:

"Then, often, arguments would begin – boastings, proving and fending; or telling of exploits with guns, knives, and razors, with cops and detectives, with evil women and wicked men; out-bragging and out-lying one another, all talking at once. Sometimes they would create a racket that could be heard for blocks. To the uninitiated it would seem that a fight was imminent. But underneath, all was good-natured and friendly – and through and above everything went laughter. No matter how belligerent or lewd their talk was, or how sordid the tales they told – of dangerous pleasures and strange perversities – these black men laughed. That must be the reason, thought Sandy, why poverty-stricken old Negroes like Uncle Dan Givens lived so long – because to them, no matter how hard life might be, it was not without laughter."

I guess, these days, you could pull that paragraph to pieces if you felt so inclined (clichés of poor people laughing through all their suffering etc.) but I'd really rather not. It was written nearly a hundred years ago and it is a great book. Plus we all know what he was talking about – the human spirit, the urge to find enjoyment and good humour whatever our circumstances, the simple, straightforward desire to laugh and feel good. Also how attractive laughter is – how we are drawn towards it, how we want to be part of it so often, how we look for it, work for it and, these days more and more, pay for it.

After finishing “Not Without Laughter” I read a very different book, but one that is also about, if you like, the business of laughter from a different viewpoint (and written in a different era). That book was “How I Escaped My certain Fate – the Life and Deaths of a Stand-up Comedian” by Stewart Lee (2010). Its various covers are above.

Some of you will know comedian Stewart Lee... and some of you won't. He's been around on the comedy circuit (in the UK and beyond) since about 1990, he's been on the radio, he's also had a few TV shows (though nothing especially mainstream), he turns up writing in “The Guardian” a lot these days...and he was one of the writers behind that “Jerry Springer – The Opera” business (which you might have heard of... I've not seen it... but then I've never watched Jerry Springer either come to that... or much opera...).

I am interested in comedy, generally speaking, though so I don't really know how my life has managed to remain so Lee-free up to this point (because it has). It might be partly to do with that one year (somewhere around 1989/90) when I was the cabaret/comedy reviewer for a West Yorkshire what's on magazine and I went to see so many comedians that I was quite put off them for the next few years or so. Instead I just made do with my friends and nearest and dearest – if you pick them carefully they can be much funnier than the “professionals”, I think... plus you don't have to hear just the same routines over and over again (well, on the good nights). It might also be that my TV watching has been fairly erratic – there have been years here and there when I've had no TV at all and other times when I've only watched what feels like one genre, or even one show, for whole years at a time. Plus there was those ten years when I hardly left nightclubs...

Lee is an Edinburgh Festival regular too but I haven't even seen him there because I've only ever seen one Edinburgh fringe show in my life (and that was a poet...). I think now maybe I would like to go to Edinburgh Festival some time – see lots of totally-unsuitable-for-children shows, stay up late, drink with abandon... but I don't see that happening for at least another couple of years. And by then all the comics will seem really young! I may even have got to the stage where younger people feel the urge to stop me in venues and tell me how nice it is to see someone of my age still “getting out and about” (that did once happen to a friend of mine in a nightclub... she was in her early 30s...). So on second thoughts, maybe it doesn't sound so great. Plus it'll cost a fortune (have you ever stayed in Edinburgh at festival time.. crazily expensive).

Anyway... for all these (and, no doubt, many other) reasons I've only really come to know Lee's comedy over the past year or so via youtube clips (they're free, you don't have to leave the house, they don't go on too long... comedy in a cheap, little box, it's perfect). I have laughed (probably many times) at Lee's Harry Potter feature (available here... along with many other good clips about Top Gear, tabloid journalists, “Braveheart” etc. etc.) and although I might call myself a minor fan I'm still not sure I like him enough to go and see a live show (though he's on in Aberdeen in May and I'm thinking about it).

So the book? What about the book?

Well, I laughed... repeatedly... and I'd recommend it... unless you hate the very idea of Stewart Lee (and quite a lot of people do, judging by all comments online related to him and his work - there is a selection of them on his own website... presuming they are real ones...). Things you need to know:

A lot of the book is transcripts of Lee's live shows (“Stand-Up Comedian”, “ '90s Comedian” and “41st Best Stand-Up Ever”). These bits are OK most of the time... and very good in places. Non-fans say his shows are just “not funny”, “not enough jokes” and so on... but that is part of his style (it is a very rambly delivery... much more Dave Allen than... well, Dave Allen really... kind of Rick from “The Young Ones” doing Dave Allen maybe..). And it's quite challenging stuff throughout – he is trying to be different/awkward/tricky (and he is). And sometimes he is just boring.

A lot of the rest of the book is very long notes related to parts of these live shows (explanations, background material and so on). Some of these bits are very entertaining... again rambly for sure but sometimes rambling just is the best way to talk about something. There's quite a lot about word choice in his routines, for example, which will either tickle your fancy or untickle your... (what shall I choose) teapot? And so on. A lot of his point with this book really is to let us know what it has been like to stay an alternative comedian (when many others from that genre crossed over to mainstream long ago). Lee has never really taken the panel shows/big bucks road that so many other comics have opted for (though he has hopped onto it now and again) and so this account is made partly, I'm sure, to provide contrast to all those other comics' books (the thick, cheerily-titled tomes that appear around Xmas time every year... and then in charity shops a couple of months later...). This, in comparison, is quite a dirty, grotty book at times. It can be annoying, repetitive, whingey, small-minded (or small-worlded perhaps)... but then at other times it is absolutely joyful and piercingly spot-on and just really funny. I liked it overall.

Lee gives a lot of detail about the early days of alternative comedy, the comedy business from the 1990s till now and other comics (past and present). Sometimes I was surprised by the well-known comics he doesn't lay into (somehow I expected him to hate Ricky Gervais but he doesn't – has only good things to say about him). And then other times I was surprised by the ones who did get a knife somewhere painful (Alan Davies – I never knew he'd done anything to upset anyone... but then I don't read tabloids...). He even has a go or two at radio DJ Stuart Maconie... and I never knew Maconie had haters (I'm so naïve.. but then I never read the “NME” either...). Comics who get the most aggro (and I might have got some of these wrong... apologies if so..) include cuddly Peter Kay, Ben “We will rock you” Elton (Lee really didn't like that musical... again I've not seen it... why would I?), Jack Dee, Russell Brand and there are quite a few digs at Eddie Izzard too (“ 'I'll improvise like Eddie Izzard... pretends to do' “... and there's a hooray from me for that one). Successful/mainstream comics who he seems to think are OK include Harry Hill, Jimmy Carr, Mighty Boosh, Johnny Vegas (the latter I've hardly ever seen but Lee makes such a longwinded plea for his canonisation that I feel I must put this right at some point...). And some I really couldn't tell what he thought of them (like Frank Skinner). Sometimes it is hard to know when he's taking the piss and when he isn't... I don't suppose it really matters. It's only one opinion...

And in fact you can't always be sure how straight Lee is being with us (the readers) about anything anyway. He makes quite a lot of stuff up (about the history of comedy, about other acts...). He also repeatedly tells you how the Lee you see on stage (and in the book) is a persona... but then there are twists to that too – “here... I am sort of in character as a smug, stuck-up, politically correct, holier than thou leftie, a character I have researched so fully I often feel obliged actually to behave like it in my own spare time, sometimes for years on end”. Basically it's just not a one-way-street kind of a book and there are a lot of lines like this one “Having sat in on the edits of three live DVDs and a TV series, I have nothing but sympathy, generally, for people who find my work intolerable.” Yes. And no. And then yes again. Nothing's easy and you have to keep your brain switched on whilst reading (easy for all you clever poetry types, no?).

Does he sometimes get a bit grand in his ambitions for stand-up comedy? Yes. Is it sometimes a bit cringey (the whole New Mexico bit)? Yes. But is it understandable? Well, yes... because comedy does get pushed aside (it's not real art, not to be taken seriously and so on). And aren't such accusations usually uttered by folk whose art just can't reach the kind of audiences that comedy (and say, popular music, TV drama and movies) can? Yes (damn those popular artforms). Plus comedy is hard (much harder than, say, abstract painting...). Well, it was "Official Worldwide Say Something Controversial" week recently, wasn't it?

Unlike a lot of his vintage of alternative comics Lee went to Oxford University and he makes interesting reference to this (well, it's interesting to me anyway... but then he's about my age... and has been about the same disappointment to his longsuffering mother... so there is some common ground in this area... oh, why didn't we choose Manchester and not get their hopes up so much..?). If I were to live over again I would teach myself one thing – don't peak too soon...

There is much talk of performers you might not have heard of – some of them are Lee's influences (like Ted Chippington, Greg Fleet... there's a film about Lee meeting Chippington here... presuming they're not just making him up too) and others are people he has worked with and obviously has much admiration for (Richard Herring, Simon Munnery, Daniel Kitson, Josie Long*). You do get the feeling that he wants all of these performers to get more recognition than they do but knows they probably won't (well, maybe Long will – I seem to have seen her on TV now and again of late). But overall our comedy scene makes big names via TV and big, much-viewed TV at that... and most of these people are not mainstream TV artists... some out of choice, some because of their material, some... just because it hasn't worked out that way, I suppose (I'd have quite liked to have the Nobel Prize for Literature by now myself but it's not looking good either). Lee just says of TV that it is “insane” and I should think that's probably about right. He also raves about Jerry Sadowitz (as people do) but I saw him once in Leeds and can't tell you much other than I got bored of the incest jokes (and how often can you say that?).

Lee calls poet John Hegley his “teenage comedy hero” and there is a good little section about Hegley's advice (“you only need a few thousand fans. And if they all give you ten pounds a year, you're away”.)

He writes quite a lot about that “The Aristocrats” movie (the one where they all tell the same joke). I just couldn't get through it (the movie). Maybe it works if you're in the business.

He really doesn't like sport or sports fans. Meh. I have one sportsfan I like especially so I have learned not to be so small-minded in this area.

There is good stuff about how people routinely mix up political correctness with health & safety legislation. But then, as the Daily Mail has recently recognised, right wing people are thick. Either that or they are quite the opposite and the whole Daily Mail thing is a trap to show up their opposition as smug, know-it-alls... Well, we knew that too.

There's quite a lot of talk about music in the book... and none of it anything that I like very much (The bloody Fall - always the Fall...) but I still found it interesting. I guess that makes me a fan (of Lee, not the Fall... not yet... but there's always time...).

Although Lee tries to stress that this book is not about him (“you will notice there is precious little personal information in this book”) of course this isn't really the case - there is plenty about his life and how he has spent his years if you're a person who's interested in such things. There's stuff about being adopted (it's wrapped up in theories about comedy and language but it's still there) and scraps about family and illness and so on. I really liked all these bits (my favourite section is probably the trip to his Mum's house... I love all that “but how can you be famous if I've not heard of you” stuff... though that is not an actual quote... ). Lee won't like this maybe (it's about the work not the person, I know, I know...) but you can't actually tell people how to react to you or your work no matter how clever you are. Plus maybe I am just a bit of a clichéd girl in this regard and more interested in people's lives than in theories of comedy (or the Fall). Certainly academia suited me like a knighthood would suit Stewart Lee. Maybe I should just get a subscription to “Heat” magazine and be done with it (“irony”... I think).

There is quite a lot of material in this book that could shock some readers, I suppose (many holy cows dragged in and milked... is that possible..?)... what with the Jesus references, poo references, “Scotch” jokes, 9/11, even Princess Di pops in at one point (“I don't really believe that there's such a thing as dated subject material, or clichéd subject material. There are only dated and clichéd approaches, and even some of them are still funny”). But none of it is used lightly or without giant amounts of consideration. And I would refer you to the quote from the Hughes book at the top of this post as a kind of guide (“belligerent” is OK, “lewd” is OK... as long as under it all you feel that the comic is “good-natured and friendly”)... by which I mean that I suppose it comes down to personal taste (and taste in people). I'm not saying I'd ever want to hang around for Lee's autograph or anything but he does seem, to me, like an OK guy... like a writer and performer who really is more interested in ideas than money, who wants to do something with the medium, not just regurgitate the same old stuff, or take the easy routes. And he is clever – painfully so at times – and probably usually right (but then I agree with him a lot so I would say that).

Or maybe I'm wrong and he's just a wanker and it's all an elaborate con trick and I have just been played like the sucker I am. It's possible. Take this from Lee's book:

“Audiences, in my experience, are like cats. They don't respect you if you seem too desperate for their affection, but disguise your desperate need for their love as a kind of bored indifference, and soon they will be eating out of your hand.”

Well, whichever... I really enjoyed the book (and what else can you ask?). You can buy a copy via his website here, if you like (the website itself is worth a look too).

*Yes, not many women mentioned in this article (or indeed in the book). Miranda Hart sneaks in, as does Lee's wife Bridget Christie but there aren't many others... so once again we come to the (eternal) question of why comedy (stand-up especially) is so dominated by male performers. My theory is simple – I just think that not many funny women (and of course they exist... sometimes in the unlikeliest places...) like the idea of repeating themselves over and over and over (ad nauseum) and stand-up does largely require that. There are women who want to repeat themselves (hell, we all know some of them) but they are the BORING women, the ones we all run to avoid when we see them coming down the street (over the playground, to the front door). We wouldn't pay to go and listen to them! And yet men somehow manage to turn being boring and repetitive into an artform**. We could learn from that sisters, we really could.

**But is it an artform (haven't we already covered this)? Here is one of Lee's favourite performers on a related question:

For me, I think maybe the whole idea that stand-up comedy has developed into a separate genre (and one we expect so much of) is a bit weird. It's such a pressure to be funny on stage all night (and that's why the likes of Lee really refuse to do that and spend a lot of each night not being particularly funny at all... and I've an old poem about comedy performing here). It's a pressure on the audience too (we must be amused and only amused ALL NIGHT LONG) and it's not natural (no matter how drunk you are... in fact especially if you're drunk... drunks are only happy briefly, on the whole). Maybe that's why I don't go to comedy gigs any more ... because it's just not right. More controversy... and now my eyes hurt. This post wasn't meant to be this long!

x

Langston Hughes' "Not Without Laughter"

2012-01-31T11:00:00.000Z

Just recently I read the book "Not Without Laughter" by Langston Hughes (1902-1967). I bought it in the U.S. last year (possibly when we were in Memphis...) and most likely because I knew the name Langston Hughes but had never read anything by him. I think he's best known as a poet but this is a prose book – the story of a young boy, Sandy, and his life in a small Kansas town in the early 1900s. It is about family life, the racial prejudices of the time, poverty, work, music, education... in some ways a fairly straightforward coming-of-age novel (first published in 1930).

However although "Not Without Laughter" is a slim book (about 200 pages) I would have to say that it is, quite simply, one of the best books I have ever read. I would guess that a lot of the material is from Hughes' own life and yet it still feels very much like a fictional story. It is very moving and yet it isn't at all sentimental or cloying. It is beautifully, delicately written and yet it spreads its aim wide too (the reader witnesses many different points of view via Sandy, his hardworking Grandmother, his lovelorn mother, his upwardly mobile aunt, his downwardly mobile aunt, his various friends and employers...). And all this is encapsulated in such a small book – it's a real piece of work. I can't believe I've never come across it before.

It did make me wonder why some schools don't study this instead of the inevitable "To Kill a Mockingbird" (or at least as well as - they would make great companions for study)? Maybe I'm out-of-date (I hope so), maybe this is different in other countries... but when I did some teaching in England (not that long ago) it was still Lee's book that was high on the list and there was no sign of this one. Aged 15 or so (back in the early 1980s) I studied Harper Lee's classic (and loved it) but how much I would have loved to have read "Not Without Laughter" too. Whilst Lee's book has racial prejudices as a central theme (if in a southern town and set slightly later in the 1930s) all of the main characters are white whereas in "Not Without Laughter", instead of the black characters being bit parts ("Mockingbird's" accused Tom Robinson), they are centrestage. And "Not Without Laughter"s clever Sandy is every bit as a strong a child-narrator as clever Scout (even if the book does lack the high drama of "Mockingbird's" court case). So why is this book so little mentioned (over here anyway... is it better known in the US, American readers?). This is not to say that kids shouldn't study "To Kill a Mockingbird" (not at all) but just a wonder about balance, about how some writers and books get the label "classic" and read for ever whilst others get forgotten, overlooked, passed by.

Unless of course this is just my ignorance and everyone else knew this book but me. Is that the case?

Here's a bit from "Not Without Laughter" (from near the end as Sandy approaches adulthood):

"I don't blame him," thought Sandy. "Sometimes I hate white people, too, like Aunt Harrie used to say she did. Still, some of them are pretty decent – my English-teacher, and Mr. Prentiss where I work. Yet even Mr. Prentiss wouldn't give me a job clerking in his shop. All I can do there is run errands and scrub the floor when everybody else is gone. There's no advancement for colored fellows. If they start as porters, they stay porters for ever and they can't come up. Being colored is like being born in the basement of life, with the door to the light locked and barred - and the white folks live upstairs. They don't want us up there with them, even when we're respectable like Dr. Mitchell, or smart like Dr. Du Bois... And the guys like Jap Logan – well, Jap don't care anyway! Maybe it's best not to care, and stay poor and meek waiting for heaven like Aunt Hager did... But I don't want heaven! I want to live first!" Sandy thought. "I want to live!"

To finish off here is Hughes reading one of his poems:

Quite a week

2012-01-25T14:20:00.008Z

New Poetry Bus magazine cover - “Red Wolf” by Abby Diamond

The Monday just gone was my 45th birthday and whilst some birthdays can be pretty crappy this recent one was really quite enjoyable. It started well on Sunday night when we managed to see the Aurora Borealis out of our bathroom window. We didn't get any great pictures – partly because it was all a bit last minute (“get the camera!”, “where's the tripod?”) but it was amazing to see it anyway (our first time). It seemed a good early birthday present.

I remember back on my (very drunken) 30th birthday saying I'd like to try and see the Northern Lights on my 40th. The thing was that once I got to that next milestone I had other priorities so instead of Mother Nature's greatest light show I managed a (very welcome) trip to the Glasgow music festival Celtic Connections in 2007 (saw Kate Rusby and Crooked Still – both grand). All this considered, I thought it very considerate of aforementioned Mother Nature to arrange the lights for my 45th. Better late than never.

On my birthday itself (this year) ever-thoughtful and beloved man took the day off work and away we went to Aberdeen to just be somewhere different (we like that)... to look at stuff, eat, drink fancy coffee, watch a movie. A friend had recommended “The Artist” so we caught a matinée of the silent one (friend was right – it is a gorgeous film). Whilst the star (Jean Dujardin) is great and the little dog cute-as-cute a lot of the gorgeousness, it must be said, is down to the actress (Bérénice Bejo) who is simply stunning (and on screen a lot so why she is nominated for Best Supporting Actress and not Best Actress I have no idea). It did make me remember once again that whole “male gaze” thing I studied years ago though and how so often, in movies and in life, women are pretty much allowed to be beautiful/sexy above all else (depressing) whilst men can be “interesting”, “tortured”, “deep”... all sorts of things... as well as beautiful/sexy. People debate about this don't they (has it got better? has it got worse?) and to an extent it depends which film you saw last (I saw “Bridesmaids” the other night on DVD... it had some good moments and certainly not all the actresses were out of the cookie cutter... but still... it was just a rom com with a few feistier bits... everybody did get their guy in the end...).

Anyway, all that considered I did really enjoy “The Artist” – the music, the acting, the writing (not many lines as such, obviously, but still a lot of writing in there somewhere!). You really have to look and concentrate on it (and I liked that). I especially liked that for much of the early part of the film we could hear the guns of the First World War (coming from a nearby screening of “Warhorse” I imagine). It added another dimension of strange (and I like that too).

Then we went home, ate fish and chips (lovely), ate chocolate birthday cake (delicious – thanks cousin, Jo!) and, as if my day wasn't going well enough, there, amongst the post, was my copy of the new Poetry Bus magazine! Hooray!

If you haven't ordered a copy of the new Poetry Bus yet you can do that here (and don't forget you get a magazine and a CD too). I haven't read the magazine at all yet but I listened to the CD yesterday and the pieces that first jumped out at me were the ones by Quincy R Lehr, Pamela Clarke Vandall, Paul T Dillon, Kalle Ryan and Kate Dempsey (though it should be noted that not all poems from the magazine are on the CD, as before). I'll be interested to read the magazine now and see how my first favourites hold up as I get to the know all the writing in the magazine better. I was very excited to hear the song “Happy Ending” by the Watercats at the end of the CD too (I am more and more of a fan of theirs – I wrote about them not long back, here) and in a way the CD needed it because there's a lot of sad stuff on there – a lot of winter, a lot of wrong... another reason Kalle Ryan's lovely, funny “The Night Before...” spoke loudly to me on first listen I suspect. Also listening to the CD I was horrified to learn that I seem to have picked up a bad case of “poet's voice” (ugh! Where did that come from? I never used to do that...). Maybe I'll get someone else to read for me next time (if there is a next time...).

My poem in the new PB3 is “Mélodie” which I wrote for the old online Poetry Bus so I'm glad it's found a new direction. I first posted it here (and you can see the, ahem, intended lay-out there...) and I was interested to go back and read the comments it provoked (y'all were too kind!). It was especially interesting to read, PB editor, Peadar O'Donoghue's comment (“poetry is pain”) and on a more personal note it was a bit weird to see that I posted that poem on 29th May 2010... and that my Mum died on 14th May 2010! I guess I was still in shock...

Anyway, you can see some of the Dublin launch of PB3 here and the rest here (though you might want to fast-forward now and again... unless you really like watching people buy Guinness). It was funny to see our editor in the flesh, as it were (after all this time...) and I don't want to get soppy here but I so love what Peadar does with the poetry magazine format. I love that he does a CD (yay for audio... well, apart from my voice obviously...). I love that he writes “yabbadabbadoo” in the introductory 'words from the editor' (poetry editors can be soooooooo up their own seriousness...). I love the artworks he chooses and the music and the mix of poetry (though a rhyme here and there wouldn't kill you, you know...). And will I (once again) change my mind when he doesn't pick a poem of mine for one of the issues..? Will I hate his guts and want him slaughtered by bedtime? Possibly but let's not think about that right now...

So, here I am... 45 and, thus far, enjoying this (bus) ride over the hill. Next stop Boo Hewerdine at the folk club here tomorrow night.. and here's one of his many lovely songs (it matches the name of this blog too):

We get slower but maybe we get better at the same time. Well, we can hope.
x

Moving words

2012-01-19T12:33:00.014Z

Some time before Xmas Mark rented a film I'd never heard of – 2009's “Invictus”. This movie, directed by Clint Eastwood, stars Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela (see above) and focuses on the year South Africa hosted (and won) the Rugby Union World Cup (1995). To be honest, not being much of a sports fan, I didn't even know about this particular part of South Africa's history, why it was important and so on. I'd never even heard of the team's captain, François Pienaar (Matt Damon in the film), although Mark insisted that I have been in the room when he's been on TV (it's amazing what you can blank out... especially when it involves balls...).

Anyway, we watched the film and I really enjoyed it (even with all the running about and throwing of things). It's pretty hard not to enjoy watching Morgan Freeman though, isn't it? He seems to be one of those movie stars who you could watch doing just about anything. And it seems like he's even a nice guy too – when we were in Mississippi last year we visited the blues club he owns in Clarksdale (see back here). It was a great place – friendly and welcoming. We added our names to the wall (you were allowed to... indeed encouraged to).

But my subject this post is not really Morgan Freeman... it's poems in films/movies. I've written about other poems-in-movies before (e.g. a Sharon Olds poem being used in 2007's “Into the Wild”, back here) and it's strange because whilst often I don't really feel part of "poetry" in any sense (hence the no-go-to-poetry-festivals-urge discussed in last post) sometimes... when I'm watching a movie and a poem gets used (in a good way) I do feel a weird kind of what must be, at least in part, poet's pride. In “Invictus” much use is made of a poem that Mandela read in prison (and let's not forget he spent 27 years in prison – hard to imagine that perhaps... 27 years!). The poem is also “Invictus” (trans. unconquered) by a not-particularly-well-known-or-fêted-these-days English poet called William Ernest Henley (1849-1903 worth reading about him, the inspiration for Stevenson's Long John Silver, apparently...). How proud I felt (for some almost indescribable reason!) that a little old poem helped Mandela through the hardest of times! And how happy I was (ecstatic!) that it rhymed (have I bored you with how many people have started the response to my new writing project with “well, I don't really like rhyming poetry..?”). Still, suddenly I don't care any more! Mandela loved a rhyming poem! This very good movie featured a rhyming poem! Was I getting too carried away with this..? Losing sight of the movie itself..? And Henley wrote free verse too, you know (even way back then!). And "Invictus" has had some less impressive associations (see here and read down to "influence"...). Anyway, back to Mandela and the movie, here is Freeman reading “Invictus” (other longer clips with more of the film won't embed but there is one here if you want it):

And the text of the poem is below (though for some reason in the version Freeman reads “chance” in line 7 seems to have changed to “fate”... maybe there are different versions...):

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul.  

In the fell clutch of circumstance
 I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
Under the bludgeonings of chance
 My head is bloody, but unbow'd.  

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
Looms but the Horror of the shade, 
And yet the menace of the years
 Finds and shall find me unafraid.  

It matters not how strait the gate, 
How charged with punishments the scroll,
 I am the master of my fate:
 I am the captain of my soul.    

by William Ernest Henley

There is a webpage listing lots of movies that feature poems here (though it doesn't have everything by any stretch) but I wondered... do any of you have any favourite poetry-in-movies moments? And please don't ALL mention “Four posh weddings and a gay funeral”... (though I do like the poem they used... and they used it well... ). So..?

Festivals and hate

2012-01-17T08:57:00.006Z

the sky here on Friday 13th... apparently it gets called a "mackerel sky"...

So, tickets are on sale for Scotland's StAnza poetry festival. Since we moved to Scotland in 2002 I have been to the festival most years (apart from last year, obviously, as we were far, far away - oh, how lovely that was!). Since I've been blogging I've mostly written about what I've been to see/hear at the festival too (2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010... seems I didn't write anything that year... I think I only went to one event). But this year..? I just don't feel the urge to get down there and soak up the poetry. I could bore you with moans and groans about why that might be... but no! There will be no moaning and bitching on the internet for me! No! No! No!

If I did go this year I'd probably try to hear the delightful writer Jackie Kay (go here for a lovely video of her reading “Old Tongue” - packed full of Scottishness). I would have liked to embed the video but it wouldn't let me (lots of other poetry videos here). Instead I'll embed this one... a song we were singing this week thanks to the TV show “Glee” (season 1 first shown here in 2010 but h got the DVD for Xmas – and loves it!). In the show it is sung by Amber Riley (playing Mercedes) but this is the original from 2007. Apparently Jill Scott, who is also a poet... and an actress, wrote it about finding loads of hateful comments about herself online. It's a great song - and what a way to turn bad into something better!

How my Granny inspired Beyoncé... and other true life stories

2012-01-11T14:20:00.004Z

My Granny and Beyoncé... but what is the link? Read on... read on...

One of the nicest things about my Mum was that she was genuinely more interested in other people than she was in herself. I think maybe that's not a very fashionable feeling just now, is it? It may even have got to the point where if people do feel that way these days they don't like to own up to it very much... like it's not very 21st Century or something to not be obsessed with yourself (the push, the shove and all that...). But back to Mum... after a tricky start in life she pretty much always spent her time doing things for other people – whether working with children in an official capacity (she was a social worker just after WW2) or working with people of all ages in more unofficial ways. One of my friends said to me after she'd died that my Mum was the first person who ever really showed her that all children deserve to be loved. It made me choke when she said that (partly realising how often I'd not appreciated her...). She was a good soul, my Mum, strong, patient and caring.

Partly because of this interest of hers in other people our house is full of biographies (many of her possessions are still here – it was her home for her last six years of life). For Xmas and birthdays “any good biography” was always on her short list, somewhere near the top. Chocolate was usually on the list too – partly because after a life positively peppered with sadness and bereavement she had learned the lessons that Michael Rosen refers to (see last post) and she knew well to have that one happy thing a day (if not more if possible). For her that thing was often chocolate-related (though cake would do too).

Now she's gone it does sometimes seem that the cliché is true and that I am turning into my mother (at some speed...). I'm hoping to get the good bits and bypass some of the snobberies she picked up along the way (“well, did you go to university, did you, did you?”) but it does mean that I have got a few biographies on the brain too just now. Mum liked literary biographies most of all but for me it's often music that wins the day. I have, for example, recently read Nile Rodgers' autobiography “Le Freak”. It looks like this:

I hugely enjoyed “Le Freak” as it is a monster of a life story (and it's not over yet – though Rodgers is seriously ill). I've loved Chic's music since I was about 11 (see here) and knew about their work with Sister Sledge of course (see my first poetry postcard – back here) but I didn't know he'd worked with so many other artists too (in the book there are details of working with Diana Ross, Bowie, Madonna - all on key albums). Even before all that though the tales of his childhood and adolescence are really worth reading. Rodgers is a person who isn't well known (partly his choice) but I'm glad I got to know him a bit through the book. He was quite the hedonist too (as well as a hard worker) and I've never minded a bit of hedonism myself. You can hear Rodgers talking about his 1970s on Johnnie Walker's radio show this Sunday just gone (here) but it's only available till Sunday and his bit starts well into the second hour of the show.

For my second biography... this Sunday on Cerys Matthews' radio show she read Philip Larkin's poem “For Sidney Bechet”. This made me look up more about jazz musician Bechet... and then order his autobiography “Treat it Gentle”. I have told you many times how much I love Larkin – I wrote about him on the old blog regularly and even got him into a nightclub in a poem here and wrote him a toad poem here. Larkin's Bechet poem goes like this (text here) – and this clip is worth it for the intro by Larkin alone (Matthews used it too):

And then, as if that wasn't enough, recently writer Lemn Sissay reviewed Gil Scott Heron's memoir “The Last Holiday” (here). So now that book has gone straight to the top of my birthday wish list! I will not be able to leave the house at all soon – too many lives in here waiting to be read about.

Finally one more life... my maternal Grandmother (though I mainly called her Granny – her photo at top of the post). Born in 1900 she was originally named Ivy but she changed her name to Frances once she was in a position to do so. My Mum said this was because she considered Ivy a “servant's name” and wanted to sound more sophisticated (she came from a Wiltshire country family, nothing flash, and she wanted to get the mud out of her hair... or something). She was very beautiful, by all accounts, a dazzling redhead, a flapper and once away from the fields she went on to be married four times (I've told you before that widowhood is a big thing in my family). Ivy/Frances died in 1979 when I was 12 but our girl (the younger redhead) is fascinated by names and so is always asking about this name change of her great Granny's (fancying, no doubt, what names she'd choose for herself, given the chance). We were talking about it just this week and I happened to say “the way fashions work the name Ivy will be back in fashion at some point”. And then Beyoncé (and Jay Z) had their baby... and lo, an Ivy was born (Blue Ivy, but Ivy all the same). So you see, this Mum was right... you wait long enough and everything comes back in fashion eventually! Even Ivy...

Ups and downs

2012-01-06T12:11:00.004Z

In mid December Helena Nelson recommended a book on facebook. It was this book:

“Michael Rosen's Sad Book” by, well, Michael Rosen, illustrated by Quentin Blake.

Sometimes there is something about a recommendation that just makes me reach for the “order” button straightaway... and this was one of those times. I can't even quite describe the formula that makes for “order straightaway” instead of “think about it for a bit” but I know it's some kind of blend of the following: tastes I know I share with the recommender, emotional state at the time, finances... and a whole lot more besides. In this case I hardly read a thing about the book before ordering it. I just clicked... and then got on with bloody Xmas preparations. Man, I'm glad that's over.

Anyway. The book. When it arrived I was quite surprised because... well, it looks like a kids' book (as I said I read very little about it before ordering). I knew Rosen wrote for kids but I knew he'd done all kinds of other writing too and I suppose I expected this to be something more... adult... with more words. But in the “Sad Book” (2004) there are very few words really. It's a simple book about sadness – largely the sadness brought on in Rosen when his teenage son died in 1999.

I don't want to write a whole lot about it – though there is much I could say... about death... and depression... and pharmaceuticals... – but the book really says it all so I would just back up Helena Nelson's recommendation and say “yes, get this book – for your kids, for kids you know, for yourself, for adults you know”. I think that really the best kids books are for adults too (if not more so) and vice versa (some content depending...).

The illustrations are just perfect. For a start Michael Rosen actually looks like a Quentin Blake drawing in real life (something also mentioned in this article about the book) and that is some relief in our world of ever-more plastic people. I read the book with our girl last night and we talked about the pictures (she knows Blake's style well from Roald Dahl books, like many kids). “They're kind of childlike” she said (getting very fancy now at 11...). “Well, yes, but in a good way,” I said. And I realised that she may be growing up but I am definitely going in the other direction (but then I was one of those kids who wasn't really a kid at all... unbearable, no doubt).

One of my favourite bits in the “Sad Book” is the section where he tells himself how to cope, how to carry on. There are four suggestions/instructions:

“I tell myself that everyone has sad stuff. I'm not the only one. Maybe you have some too.

Every day I try to do one thing I can be proud of. Then when I go to bed, I think very, very, very hard about this one thing.

I tell myself that being sad isn't the same as being horrible. I'm sad, not bad.

Every day I try to do one thing that means I have a good time. It can be anything so long as it doesn't make anyone else unhappy.”

All sounds pretty sensible to me.

And if you see it with the illustrations you can see that the thing he's proud of (in the book) for point 2 is cooking a roast dinner – which I loved! We can all do that, right? H and I tried the suggestions last night – what were we proud of for yesterday? What had we done to make us have a good time? It was simple... but effective (my catchphrase...). Try it tonight. Try it every night...

And finally, I heard this song on the Cerys Matthews radio show on New Year's Day (well, actually on replay a few days later). How did I ever miss this one?

Labi Siffre from his 1975 album “Remember My Song”. He's not an artist I've known much about in the past (didn't even know that Madness' “It must be love” was his song...) but I will be learning more about him this year...

In the meantime here's wishing you happiness... and strategies to get through sadness too. It can be done. For the most part.

x

And in with a poem...

2012-01-01T00:01:00.003Z

So – Happy New Year friends and visitors. 2012... sounds kind of dramatic, doesn't it? This time last year we were just about to set off on our big 6 month trip abroad but right now we have no such adventurous plans. This year will see our girl move into high school (adventures of some kind for her in store, no doubt - it's her above with her film guide xmas gift...) but for us adults it will be... well, who knows? Just another year? Something completely different and unexpected? One thing I do know... at some point I will have to decide how much of 2012 I am going to spend trying to do something with the huge poem I have just written... a lot, a little, none at all..? Will it be wasted time? Does anyone really want a 142 verse rhyming poem in 2012? For now I'm avoiding thinking about it. We've still got visitors, girl is still off school, there are lots of other things to do and think about...

One good thing is that I've managed to read a little over Xmas. Lately I've been reading one of my presents (Nile Rodgers' “Le Freak”... he of Chic – a great read, what a life story...) and before that I read “The Room” by Emma Donoghue. I'd never heard of Donoghue's 2010 book until it was recommended by Kat Mortensen a little while ago (who told me nothing other than it was something like brilliant/unusual) but soon after that I spotted a copy in a charity shop and so paid a whole 99p for it. It's got quite a best seller look to it and whilst in theory I don't have anything against bestsellers (who wouldn't like to write one..?) in practice I do often find that they're a bit slight or predictable or something else that doesn't work for me. “Room”, however, is every bit as good as Kat said it was. And though it starts off fairly grim it has so much else going on once you get into the story. You can find critiques of the novel around of course, if you look for them (especially highfalutin ones) but I'd have to say that there are sections of it that I really loved and I found the central character (who to me was Ma, much more than the young narrator, Jack) a magnificent portrayal of a young woman. The book is about many things and that's partly what makes it good. Yes, there is the story of the room (which you'll either know about or you won't... as I say I had read or heard nothing about the story and I'm sure this helped me get more out of the book... I went in with no preconceived ideas) but there is so much beyond it too – about family, childhood, relationships, modern society. It's not everybody’s idea of Xmas reading but it worked for me. There's only so much Santa I can take.

One character in “Room” quotes poetry now and again. First there is a bit of Louis MacNeice's “Snow”, later a bit of T.S.Eliot's “Burnt Norton” and then there is a little from this poem by Emily Dickinson (punctuation and so on below from Faber & Faber's “A Choice of Emily Dickinson's Verse”, 1968):

The Soul selects her own Society ―
Then ― shuts the Door ―
To her divine Majority ―
Present no more ―

Unmoved ― she notes the Chariots ― pausing
At her low Gate ―
Unmoved ― an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat ―

I’ve known her ―from an ample nation ―
Choose one ―
Then ― close the Valves of her attention ―
Like Stone ―

by Emily Dickinson

And that's it for today. Good wishes for 2012... and beyond.

x

Go out on a song...

2011-12-24T13:36:00.003Z

A couple of posts ago I was mentioning Xmas music... and a few years ago some of us chatted about it on the old blog too. Here's a song a friend of mine posted on facebook this week... and though I'm not a big cheerleader for Xmas music... or a big fan of this artist... I really liked this song:

I enjoyed watching the movie "Nativity" last night too (we'd seen it before but it was funnier than I remembered). Yo ho ho, indeed.

See you after the break.

x

Sights of Midwinter

2011-12-21T17:09:00.012Z

Yesterday cousin and I headed south (well, to Forfar) for lunch and an art exhibition. Forfar is the Angus "county town"... it's also pretty grey and landlocked (unlike coastal Montrose and Arbroath - the Angus towns I know better). In Forfar you can see the hills... and get a very good lunch at a place called Springers (best chocolate cake I've had in a long time). We hit the charity shops, the gallery, looked up at the lights.

Road to Forfar:

Forfar Xmas lights:

Something missing:

I do like a Xmas tree:

Something with bells on:

Well, some of the lights came on:

Santa really does fly over Forfar:

No snow here yet but some over on the Angus hills (road back towards Brechin):

And then today the schools broke up at lunchtime. In the afternoon I walked the dog on an old railway embankment nearby and watched the sun go low (this photo taken at 15.03... sun set not long after):

And tomorrow our visitors arrive and then it's cook, cook, cook and non-stop games playing till Hogmanay. Happy holidays everybody.

x

Hallelujah for inappropriate Xmas music...

2011-12-15T09:29:00.003Z

So, here I am in the edit stages of my first draft of the long writing project. My head is spinning, the house is a tip, the Xmas cards largely unwritten... and one minute I think it's worth all that and that the piece isn't bad and then CRASH it's the worst thing ever written and what the hell am I doing? But that's normal. I think. Isn't it?

Anyway, night off last night for our girl's last primary school Xmas show. Her class did some Beatles songs (and I really can't comment on that for many reasons...) but the class below hers did a brilliant job with three Queen songs. They did possibly the most enjoyable version ever of "We will rock you" (not a favourite song of mine in normal circumstances), a good "Another one bites the dust" and then a version of "Don't stop me now" which actually brought a tear to my eye in a Freddie-was-my-childhood's-Jesus (hilarious!) kind of a way. "DSMN" is a song that gets played/sung/covered so much these days (it was in the panto here last week too - the baddie sang it...) but there was something about a group of 10 year olds singing it with gusto and abandon (and style - well, done that teacher!) that really moved me. I was about their age when the song came out (in 1978) and I remember absolutely loving it (though I was never what you would call a Queen fan). One of my older brothers had the 7 inch single (like the devil he had a lot of the best tunes...) and I remember listening to it over and over in his room (when he was out - I don't think I was allowed in otherwise). I sang along a lot too no doubt - it really is the best song for that time of life (and I'm pretty sure I never even noticed the "sex machine" section of the lyrics until recently...). Here is one of the best front men ever at work:

Another favourite from brother's record collection around then was also from 1978, this one by George Clinton's Funkadelic:

But I think that one involved more dancing around the room... and in those days I actually believed that one nation under a groove was a possibility (I know better now of course...).

So who needs Santa songs and "Jesus, it's your birthday" or whatever. Not me, baby, not me. Let the good times roll... on the jukebox/record player/mp3 player at least.

No time to shop...

2011-12-10T10:01:00.004Z

No time to blog, no time to shop... but there's always time for poetry! I've been working pretty much non-stop on a long writing project this week... and dealing with the weather (power cut on Thursday evening)... and girl's pantomime business this week (in 3 shows - last one tonight)... and this and that.... but still I have been following the progress of other poets in IPYPIASM (see here). I've hardly been in any shops myself this week (hurrah!) but I did just quickly knock this little number up with the "In a Shop" feature in mind. Maybe someone else would like to get it onto the shelves for me (STOP PRESS Titus did it - here) ... or maybe I'll manage it next week. Here it is:

Smells like corporate machine spirit

Who wants to smell like famous folk?
The pong of Katie Price?
Sex and the City's flashy brew
The whiff of Old Posh Spice?

I'd rather smell like just washed hair
Or even just washed dog
Who needs Tulisa's X appeal
Or Britney's boxed-up fog?

RF 2011

x

Pamphlet Power

2011-12-01T12:32:00.008Z

I have three fairly new poetry pamphlets just now that I would like to write a little about. Regular poetry reviews bore the life out of me so I'm not going to attempt such an exercise. Instead I'm going to do something that looks more like a survey/questionnaire (market research has been one of my, ahem, fields of expertise...). *Most of the "questions" are self-explanatory but the “first/last poem power” may need some introduction. I remember hearing or reading Don Paterson talk about first and last poems in a collection (I think when his book “Rain” came out). Basically he said they should be the best poems in the collection and whether we agree with that statement of not I want to test these three pamphlets on that criteria. Just for fun partly.

So, pamphlet one... into the ring!

Title – Vintage Sea
Author – Marion McCready (formerly known as the blogger Sorlil... now blogging under her own name here)
Publisher – Calder Wood Press
Price – ￡5
Number of poems – 29
Cover – artwork by possibly the internet's finest purveyor of images Roxana Ghita

Recommendations – on the back James Owens, morgan downie and Hugh McMillan say nice things about MM's poetry. I like morgan's offering – “it is not magical realism but a realism that becomes magical”.
Phase in career – first collection
First poem power (*see introduction) – “Razor Shell” is probably my favourite poem in “Vintage Sea” thus far so yes, a good choice of opening poem. It is possibly the plainest poem in the collection but it is very effective. The title comes from it too.
Last poem power* – yes, definitely a powerful piece once again... though perhaps more so for a person of some religious leanings as one of the quotes is from the Bible (I only know because I asked...) and the poem references “the Eternal”. Still, I like it anyway especially “the sun-bell of your arms”.
Everything in between – there is a lot of beauty in this book, a lot of nature, colour and birdlife. There are also a fair few “I”s, a huge amount of water and quite a few mysterious female characters/spirits/mysteries. It is undeniable that Marion has the voice that some poets look for and never find or hear and her voice says things like “My hair rests on the waist/of the North Sea” (from “Castle Sands” – the book is full of sea and hair!). Marion writes often of her admiration for the poetry of Sylvia Plath but whereas I find Plath's poetry almost (heresy alert) comical at times I can enjoy Marion's poems without sniggering – especially the subtler ones. Plath was a little distracted by her own brilliance, I suspect, but sometimes the less glittering life can help the writing, I think (and Marion lives fairly quietly on the west coast of Scotland, has worked in a fish factory, went to uni but has a practical, regular life that keeps her grounded, at least most of the time...). Perhaps because of this (at least in part) Marion can write simple lines very well (and that is to be cherished, I think). Take “I am pushing this pram/uphill forever” from “Becoming Spring” or “I'm up to my knees in nothing” from “Child” – so easy-sounding but so right. And then on the other hand she has a kind of mystical side that stops the work being too mundane (so she has the lot in some senses – in terms of potential anyway).
Overview - if she keeps hard at it (perhaps with some kind of mean mentor) I can see Marion's writing career panning out nicely as Scotland looks for more strong, dedicated women poets to fill up the ranks. Onward, watery woman of the west, onward!

and our next contender...

Title – Grave with Lights
Author – JoAnne McKay (blogs as a dog – here, damned clever canine...)
Publisher – self-published, handmade by the poet indeed, available at blog (link above)
Price – ￡10
Number of poems – 13
Cover – Like fancy wallpaper and the whole thing comes in a little fabric bag/slipcase, images inside the pamphlet are by Victor Henderson

See JoAnne holding a copy of the book at this blog post
Recommendations – as with JoAnne's previous two pamphlets this one is introduced/endorsed by Hugh McMillan. No matter how flattering the intro I'd have to say that if you keep this up guys people will talk... maybe someone else next time?
Phase in career – third self-published pamphlet (and I self-published... we are the true hardcore!)
First poem power* – (not counting the poem on the dedication page) “The Countess of Bathory of Romford” is a poem of JoAnne's that I have come across online once or twice and somehow I do like it more on a proper page (maybe I'm just getting old...). It is a kind of Essex anthem and I love the cheek of “for we all hate grass”. It sings pretty loud and clear.
Last poem power* – “Grave with Lights” is my favourite in the book, for sure. A tiny little slip of a thing it will even fit in here:

Grave with Lights

When the sky is great,
such night as this, and not sky
but heavens to ask
why do I feel
this thing, that thing
is child's why.
Because I said so.
Because why not.
Because you are so
very, very

small.

by
JoAnne McKay

So yes, a good end.
Everything in between – I much enjoyed JoAnne's first pamphlet “The Fat Plant” (and wrote about it here) but her second one “Venti” (near prize-winner and very beautiful item, as it was) didn't do so much for me, I'm afraid. Maybe I'm just allergic to prize-winners (near or otherwise) or maybe it was the balance within the book (there was more of JoAnne's erudite content in “Venti” than the “Plant” and I have my allergies to that too I think, though I'm not proud of it...). Maybe it was also that some of the “Venti” poems felt more consciously poem-y, if you know what I mean, than those in “The Fat Plant” and I like a poem that isn't too excited about itself being a poem on the whole. Whatever... I never judge prizes (and we all know prizes are the way to proceed) so JoAnne should probably ignore everything I say! Bad news for her is that I enjoyed the work in “Grave with Lights” (as well as the first and last poems I liked “On Looking”, “Edge”, “Romford Handfasting”, “I Shall Give You”) so I hope that doesn't jinx its progress...
Overview – despite being of English origin (if married to a Scot) JoAnne is still managing to make her way as a poet in Scotland (ours is the last voice Scots ever want to hear really but sometimes they just can't ignore it...). JoAnne does have a strong voice too (like Marion) though the McKay version does splinter off in many directions thanks to the many strands of her personal history (Essex abbattoir survivor, horrific experience survivor, ex-copper, mystical mother, at times ferociously academic expert type person, at others weary working wifey). One thing you can never say about JoAnne McKay, however, is that she is boring. I hear she never sleeps.

and finally...

Title – The Heavy Bag
Author – Ross Wilson
Publisher – Calder Wood Press (them again... they have published several of my favourites now...)
Price – ￡5
Number of poems – 24
Cover – Sepia family photo, nice and fuzzy... and I'm no whizz at typefaces but that doesn't look like one of the approved "poetry" ones (good).

Recommendations – first a cringe-moment... Colin Will did you really write “This collection marks the emergence of a refreshing new voice in poetry”? I feel like maybe I've read that line a few hundred times before (naughty Colin). Luckily the back cover also contains, in place of the usual recommendations, a charming quotation from one of Ross's school reports that kind of makes up for the first sin (I'm presuming the quote is genuine... and OMG was RW really at school – primary school – in 1989..?).
Phase in career – first collection/pamphlet
First poem power* – Yes, Ross (and Colin?) have done their first poem homework because “What's in our Hands” is an absolute cracker and I won't show it here because then you might not buy the pamphlet. To be honest it's so good that it sets quite a high standard for the rest of the book to live up to (like a really high-achieving first child...).
Last poem power* – “Milne's Bar” is yes, another really strong poem (linking with the title, linking with the opening poem...). Good work, very good work.
Everything in between – there is a lot of family content, a fair bit of Fife and a lot of boxing poems (unusual... but Ross was a national schoolboy boxing champion). These all ring good and true (though I suppose they could all be fiction – how the heck would I know?) and they all contain well-drawn characters and crunchy snippets of dialogue (“The Way John Went Out” is my favourite just now). There are also several crap-job-and-crap-training-course poems which I enjoyed too – “Stuck” perhaps most of all (“Because we were unemployed/we had to get up early every morning,/ sit in a portakabin in Kirkcaldy,/ and listen to a man speaking/ through a rolled-up cigarette/ as though it were a microphone.”). There are few women in the book (just a lassie here and there, a factory full in “The Old Patterns”) but that's fine – it balances out nicely with Marion's sea full of mysterious long-haired, seaweedy females and, heavens, poetry needs the male point of view too (especially the, if you like, ringside view that Ross works pretty well). My least favourite parts of “The Heavy Bag” are the end rhymes (for example in the sonnets “Friday Night” and “Saturday Morning”). I love end rhymes but on this evidence I don't think they're Ross's strong point (not as yet anyway). He gets away with the rhymes in “Milne's Bar" but they are more scattered and casual, somehow. Still, a lad doesn't have to be good at everything does he?
Overview – “The Heavy Bag” is a very strong first book – varied, rich, individual and a refined-kind-of-raw. Let's hope he keeps that edge (and in contact with interesting, vibrant content) as his writing career progresses. Scotland has a lot of successful male poets – it's some crowd to stand out in – but I think he could do it, given time. You could say that he's challenger material alright (and he will have to get used to bad boxing references from other people writing about his work...). It's lazy, isn't it, just lazy...

So that's my survey over. I hope you've seen something that interests you.

p.s. pic at top of post is this week's art class offering... my first try at a watercolour (messy but I enjoyed it... I like mess really).

Rambling, comedy and winter words

2011-11-25T16:06:00.008Z

Some of you will remember that the subtitle, if you like, of my old blog was “rambling with Rachel Fox”. Well, when I started this new blog I deliberately left the “rambling” behind – I thought it was time for a change or two, I suppose. I thought maybe I would ditch the longer posts, the general vagueness of direction, maybe even the ellipsis habit. But of course old habits die hard... and sometimes that's no bad thing... so here is a good old rambly post.

This week I have thought a fair bit about comedy. As I mentioned in my last post comedy is one of my true loves, one of the staples of my life (that's true for many of us, I think... TV comedy in particular has a special place in our hearts) and certainly I have written about it plenty on the old blog. Many of us were raised on TV comedy – I know I was – so it can feel a bit like family almost (I've said before that Morecambe and Wise were like uncles to me in some ways and sometimes I even think Dave Allen was my Dad-substitute... remember I was fatherless from the age of 6). So what of the current crop...? Well, this family feeling does mean I take an interest in it all whether I like it or not. I watch the new Gervais/Merchant “Life is Short” (at least to start with), for example, and observe how disappointed many viewers are (I'm not particularly... I only thought “The Office” was OK, never brilliant or genius or any such... though brilliant at making money perhaps!).

But mainly, instead of the new stuff, I've been concentrating on catching up with shows that I've missed somehow. Take “Black Books”... for various reasons (mainly to do with giving up excess and having a baby in 2000) I never watched this one when it came out (and there are 3 series – 2000-2004). So recently I've been making up by watching it all... this month. It is very amusing too – quite “Fawlty Towers”, more than a hint of “Ab Fab” and “Young Ones”... but all in a good way – and of course the three principals are very, very good (Bill Bailey seems to be one of the very few comedians who doesn't have an army of haters online... unless I've just never come across them...). Over here you can see/hear the co-writer of "Black Books", Graham Linehan, talking about writing comedy (he also worked on “Father Ted” and “The IT Crowd” of course – quite some CV).

Oh, and while we're on the subject here's a nice bit from the“Black Books” centrepiece, comedian Dylan Moran... perhaps not for any of you who are very devout... or who can't bear the odd f-word though...

I quite liked this bit too... laughed out loud and everything...

Then on facebook I came across a comedy show I don't know at all yet – a bit of Louis CK's show “Louie”... via a post from poet Colm Keegan about the new Gervais/Merchant thing. The clip I watched is here but beware because (a) it is very explicit (lots of cock-talk) and (b) stick with it... it starts like just another tired bit of potty-mouthed misogyny but it does get to its, as it were, point eventually (then it goes a bit soft-focus, flag-moment “West Wing” at the end for me in fact... but you can't have everything now, can you..?).

So that was comedy... what else can I ramble about? Well, I've been walking a lot – clearing the head which has been a bit full of work stuff, family stuff... you know the kind of thing. I haven't made it to art class for a few weeks (because of the just-mentioned lots-going-on) but I've been taking heaps of photos – especially in the grounds of the (very) local mental hospital that's being closed down this month (one such photo at the top of the post – still working out what kind of tree that is...). And I even reworked an old poem the other day (I don't do that very often). The old version was here... but a snappier new version is below (it's still a bit doom-laden but it is snappier).

Bleak and winter

Suddenly the trees have less to say
The sun just blinks, then folds again
Barely a whimper of warmth for us
Huddled in our burrows for the snivelling season

Then we hark at the calendars 'Xmas is coming!
The goose, where's that fowl? We will eat till we burst!'
But even the feast has us cold these days
Nothing's right, all is humbug - no wood, fewer trees

And we don't even know why we want what we want
Our guiding lights have turned dim and dirty
Stars, twinkling smiles, any flash can switch us
We hunger for warmth - because apart it's all gone

Though it pains us, the forced plastic party of Xmas
Its bright crumpled hat and its family affairs
Without it what's left - the bitter midwinter
The coughing, the quiet, dark nights, darker days

RF 2009/2011

So that's me... ramble, ramble, ramble...ha, ha, ha...boo, hoo, hoo. Crack open the December cheer early, why don't you?

x

Some movie talk

2011-11-20T21:54:00.011Z

I promised you a movie post recently... and here it is.

While we were away for the six months earlier this year we didn't get to see many movies... and the ones we did see were usually h's 11 year-old choices (she was with us pretty much all the time). Even in hotels and motels we had to watch junior-compatible fare as she was often awake till quite late (and even more so if we were trying to watch something - “what are you watching?”, “what are they doing?”, “who's in this?” - she's more the movie geek with every passing day). We managed “The Social Network” and the new “True Grit” whilst staying with relatives in Canada and found the former not too bad (if fiction, so they say) and the latter really very good. We also managed to sneak in series 2 of “Nurse Jackie” whilst with relatives elsewhere too but otherwise it was pretty much cartoons, tweens and Lindsay Lohan all the way (for 6 months...). Good job we had so much else to see and do...

Anyway, once back home (and needing to stay in a bit to save money...) we have been catching up on some serious grown-up movie-watching. Below are the good (and the average) of what I've watched since the beginning of August (all at home on TV because we are, once again, miles from a cinema now we're home). The only exception was our trip to Dundee to see the documentary "You've been Trumped" (but I wrote about that a few posts ago - here). So let's start with...

The Good

Four Lions (2010, dir. Christopher Morris)
This is a really excellent film - a perhaps unlikely comedy about British jihadists from the Chris Morris house of he-didn't-he-did-he-really-did humour. It's funny (always good from a comedy) and then really not funny at all in places (as you might expect... considering the subject matter). There is top notch acting too (Riz Ahmed as the lead is very good, Kayvan Novak as the daftest terrorist is... terrifying) and it's a really effective movie all round. A must-see really... unless you have no sense of humour of course.

Waitress (2007, dir. Adrienne Shelly)
This is the one where the writer/director, Shelly, died before its release (murdered in her New York apartment). Reviews for this one were good and they weren't wrong as it really is a charming film about crap marriage, pregnancy and pie. It was beautifully made and well-acted too (Shelby acted in it as well as everything else – she was in several Hal Hartley movies in the late '80s/early '90s). Try to catch this one - that's my tip (sorry!).

Inside I'm dancing (2004, dir. Damien O'Donnell)
(Also released under the title “Rory O'Shea was here”).
In this one the central characters Michael and Rory are both in wheelchairs (Michael has cerebral palsy and Rory muscular dystrophy) but whereas Michael is quiet and well-behaved Rory is gobby and full of ideas and schemes. The story starts when Rory (James McAvoy, as good as you've ever seen him) moves into the residential home where Michael has lived for years and pretty much turns lives upside down (Steven Robertson does a great job as Michael too). I loved it, really loved it. Proper drama, proper moving - superb.

Goodfellas (1990, dir. Martin Scorsese)
Well, most of you will have seen this one by now. Daughter was away for the weekend though and this movie was on the free film club thing so we threw ourselves once again into the world of pasta sauce, mass murder and hiding cocaine all around the house. The best mob film ever made? Quite possibly. I find it almost too enjoyable in some ways.

Burn after Reading (2008, dir. Ethan & Joel Coen)
For me Coen brothers films are a bit hot and cold but this project, luckily, is one of the hotter ones. Clooney plays a blinder (a really weird blinder...), McDormand likewise and the whole thing is kind of a “Tinker, Tailor, Shagger, Spy”. We loved it.

Un Prophète (2009, dir. Jacques Audiard)
This one came via the postal dvd business. It's a French film that doesn't rely on pretty little brunettes and moody music and, that for me, was a plus point straightaway. Instead it's a fascinating story of life in a French prison – seen via a young Arab inmate, Malik (Tahar Rahim). It's quite a long film but hey, time takes time and I'd say it's really worth the hours. It features a great central performance, an unpredictable story/screenplay and it is really quite a “Goodfellas” in its way. Highly recommended.

A Mighty Heart (2007, dir. Michael Winterbottom)
I've yet to see a Winterbottom film I don't like in some way or other (2002's "In this World" is excellent, for example) and this is quite some movie too. Even though it's based on the true story of Daniel Pearl and his kidnap and murder in Pakistan it's hard to feel sympathy for the journalists in places (and I should think that's no accident). Still the film draws you into the Pearl story bit by bit... and from so many other angles. Angelina Jolie is pretty good as Mariane Pearl and some of the details (like music choice) are so well done - good work.

Mean Girls (2004, dir. Mark Waters)
OK, so we're still watching some Lohan... but this one is so well-written in places that it makes me want to weep with joy (screenplay by Tina Fey, based on the original book by Rosalind Wiseman). Its certificate is 12 but in places it's so brutally honest (and just plain brutal) that I wonder really how good it is for the younger end of its audience (or at least the portion of that audience that is sensitive and thinks about things at all). Still, it's a very good film and in fact we've liked a few of Mark Waters' movies (the Lohan/Lee Curtis “Freaky Friday” is excellent and we enjoyed the “Mr Popper's Penguins” this year too). I notice that Waters' brother Daniel wrote “Heathers” back in 1988 (surely a prequel of “Mean Girls”). Interesting.

Funny People (2009, dir. Judd Apatow)
Though I've heard of some of his titles, I haven't seen any of Apatow's films to date (“The 40 year old virgin” etc.). Then I read about this one in the papers a while back and it did sound like my kind of thing (I'm interested in almost anything to do with comedy – good comedy anyway - and this story concerns Adam Sandler as a successful stand-up/comic movie star who is facing death). Again this is another quite long movie but it is one I really enjoyed – lots of humour, a good story and the very likeable Seth Rogen as the real hero of the piece (a wannabe comedian). Other comedy stuff I've enjoyed recently includes this interview with English funny woman Sarah Millican (currently at the “in everything on TV” stage) and this piece on the edgiest of edgy comedians (and one of my current favourites) Stewart Lee.

Field of Dreams (1989, dir. Phil Alden Robinson)
Somehow I missed this movie in the '80s (and boy, is it an '80s number!) but it came up in a movie quiz game we were playing recently and I fancied giving it a try. I expected heaps of baseball (the reason I had “somehow missed it” no doubt) but I wasn't expecting all that interesting stuff with James Earl Jones as the radical writer in hiding. I was surprised to really enjoy it ('80s hair and all).

The Devil wears Prada (2006, dir. David Frankel)
Daughter wanted to watch this so I tried it with her recently (I avoid fashion movies on the whole – I don't get any of the references for a start...). However this one, of course, has Meryl Streep in stunning form so its appeal cannot be denied. We both loved it but I was pleased to note that I still hated all the clothes the characters were all drooling over. I've always been more Millets than Milan when it comes to clothing (and accessories).

So that was the good – the films I really rated. Now let's have a go at...

The rest
(and see if I can diss/dismiss them all in one line each... though I may bend that rule here and there).

I am legend (2007, dir. Francis Lawrence)
Will Smith looks gorgeous, the dog is cute (and you know what that means...) and the zombie things are nasty.

Casino Royale (2006, dir. Martin Campbell)
James Bond is still pretty predictable – it just takes longer to find out (good freerunning scene near the beginning though).

The Road (2009, dir. John Hillcoat)
All I can say is... life is depressing enough (nice to see more of “the Wire”s Omar/Michael Kenneth Williams though).

Swimming with Sharks (1994, dir. George Huang)
The Spacey is great (as ever) as an evil movie boss in this cheapish “Player” meets “Misery” drama (in fact all the cast are good) but the script has some major holes for me (I hate watching a film that makes me shout “there's no way he wouldn't know that!” at the screen).

Shutter Island (2010, dir. Martin Scorsese)
Scorsese films are always watchable and/or striking but this one needed a script edit or two maybe.

Inception (2010, dir. Christopher Nolan)
Just because something is complicated and/or expensive that doesn't necessarily make it good.

Submarine (2010, dir. Richard Ayoade)
I so wanted to like this movie from the “The IT Crowd's” Ayoade but it just felt really unoriginal in the script department to me (I kept feeling like I'd heard it all before a bit... maybe a younger/less jaded viewer would get more from this film though... and it is about youth).

Twilight (2008, dir. Catherine Hardwicke)
We watched this to see when it would be suitable for daughter but really it's “Endless Love” with vampires (yawn)... saying that I adored “Endless Love” when I was about 13.

Salt (2010, dir. Phillip Noyce)
Featuring Angelina Jolie doing a “24”/Bond/Bourne type thing, this is preposterous (unless you like action movies... in which case it's all the usual stuff... leaping off buses, buildings etc.)

Music and Lyrics (2007, dir. Marc Lawrence)
OK, so this one was with the daughter (she likes a rom-com here and there). I expected to hate it but it was really quite funny in places (the com is ok, the rom is painful). The opening '80s video spoof (see here) is really quite amusing and Hugh Grant, perhaps unsurprisingly, does ham pretty well.

Now shoot me.

x

City sights

2011-11-17T11:01:00.017Z

So we were in Glasgow yesterday (man and I). It's not somewhere we get to very often but, considering it's November, it was a lovely day so mostly we just did strolling around and looking at things in the city centre. A lot has been done in recent times to clean up Glasgow's centre and you would have to say that a lot of it is looking very smart and spruced. It always reminds me of Leeds in some ways... and yesterday, with all the hills, it even made me think of San Francisco a little (that might sound odd but I think if you added in some streetcars and a few hundred thousand tourists you might see the resemblance too).

Anyway I'm too weary to write much today but here is a mini tour (some photos by me, some by him). First (above and below) the views from our lunch on West George Street:

And then some views from further up West George Street (I know these are similar - I can't decide which I like most):

One for a regular visitor:

And then just another view:

Here are a couple in Blythswood Square:

Here's one in the CCA (Centre for Contemporary Arts) on Sauchiehall Street:

This one is outside the famous School of Art on Renfrew Street:

Then down on Buchanan Street the front of Princes Square is pretty fancy:

Next door looks like this:

More of Princes Square:

A bit of Xmas cheer on Argyle Street:

And then several cocktails and a good meal later here we are on our way back to the train station... first on George Street:

And then in George Square (full of protestors not so long back - just a Xmas tree there now... but that photo was a bit fuzzy...):

And now we're home again.

x

Poetry this and that

2011-11-10T13:29:00.004Z

Sometimes there is very little poetry in my life... but lately I have been:

listening to this Guardian interview with king o'the north poet Simon Armitage. It's about 40 minutes long but not uninteresting (shorter video version available too). In the long interview I liked the part where he talked about studying geography instead of literature (I hadn't heard any of that before) and he's also pretty good on not living in a capital city. It was interesting to see what poems people on't street could remember in the voxpop thing at the start too (Larkin wins! Yeh, Larkin... well, in England anyway). Would anyone know any Armitage out on't street now, I wonder? And will they once he's gone and buried and taken that kind of 'endearing delivery thing' he does with him..? Just a question... not meant as a slur (I quite like him... even if his face does look like a cartoon moon... or maybe because of that...).

reading the first part of Richard Holmes' Coleridge biography “Coleridge - Early Visions” (along with a "Selected Poetry" by STC). I have somehow missed Samuel Taylor Coleridge out of my life completely (see portrait above - by Pieter van Dyke, 1795) and I am trying to make up for this just now. In the biography I am just at the bit where he is writing “The Ancient Mariner” (hear it read by Orson Welles in five parts – here, here, here, here and here). The film that you can see with the Welles reading is by Larry Jordan (1977), using engravings by Gustave Doré. Here is the first part of the film embedded to give you a taste of it:

I have half a mind to write a long story poem packed with drama... but as yet it is only half a mind, sadly. I must get on and look for the other half...

And just in case you feared that my literary mind was filled with men... I have been reading Alice Walker's short stories too (as recommended by poet Judith Taylor in a comment some posts back). Each of the Walker stories in "The Complete Stories" (1994) is so huge (in terms of scope and content) that it feels like it almost needs its own book. As a collection it feels over-full somehow... but I suppose that is a compliment.

I've been recording some more audio poems lately too... and watching a whole heap of movies. I'll get to a movie post soon, I hope. Just for a change.

Green and greenerer...

2011-11-07T09:04:00.004Z

Photo taken just up the road here, whilst out dogwalking last week. This was the photo I used for the pastel pic that I put on facebook this weekend (for those of you who saw it). That was class number 6. This week watercolours!

Last week I did something I haven't done for ages - I read a poem of mine aloud at the local folk club. It was a new poem (very new) inspired by the documentary about Donald Trump and his Scottish golf project (that I wrote about at some length here). Obviously all the Occupy protests are probably rolling about in there somewhere too. And lots of other things.

Now I know Trump will be quaking in his... what would it be... overpriced loafers to hear that British poets are writing about him... but still, protest comes in many forms... and from tiny acorns and all that.

Money for green

As always money talks
it says 'move over'
'what's yours is mine'
and 'boy, I like it here
this place is fine'

As ever money curls
it twists the path around
flashes its golden grin
buys up the open road
then kicks the bloody door right in

As always money burns
smoke in your eyes
it takes the cleanest day
stamps on its face
thinks that's o.k.

And money may not show
it's busy all the time
it may not even call
and then who knows for sure, for sure
if it's really there at all

RF 2011

The wonders of Watercats

2011-11-01T11:51:00.012Z

It's always odd when you feel your music tastes and habits changing... well, that's the way I find it anyway. Suddenly I don't know what I want to listen to, all the CDs on the shelf seem wrong, nothing seems to be just what I want at that particular time. It's been a bit like that here of late and maybe that's why I've not written much about music since starting this new blog. I suppose this kind of phase feels so odd to me partly because music has been such a big part of my life – certainly I've loved it more than almost anything else – and so when it seems to fail me I feel really exposed (no religion to lean on, no sport to support, now not even the trusted parent to turn to... agh!). But even as I write this I wonder if what really happens in these changeovers is that bits of me are changing and so my music habits have to change to fit that. Who knows... which is chicken, which is egg (and of course, like most things, it's probably a bit of both...)? Whatever it is I know I haven't been listening to much music lately and it's been weird... kind of empty. Without the revolting (but very funny) “Inbetweeners” on replay on TV I don't know how I would have survived...

Then recently I got a CD in the mail – from fellow bloggers and some time Poetry Bus riders the Watercats. And with it my heart sings once more. Here's a song from it:

Vick and Ron (for the Watercats is these two somewhat playful individuals... see photo further down) insist that the CD they sent is a demo/not good enough/needs rerecording etc. but I have to say that for me it is pretty perfect as it is – with its lovely rambling guitars, handful of harmonica and, of course, Vick's warm but wistful voice ('wistful' gets a bit overused for voices but really it does seem right in this instance). I even like Ron's less... conventionally pleasing vocals as used on these songs (well come on, we all like Tom Waits, don't we?). And speaking of Waits, there's a good recent interview with him here and a song of his that was played on the radio this week here (it was on the Jarvis Cocker show on 6 Music... and chosen by his guest Lawrence as one of the saddest songs ever... it was an interesting show altogether).

But back to Ireland... and the Watercats... the mood of their songs takes me back to when I was about eleven or so and used to listen to the sounds of long, meandering '70s albums coming out of my older brother's room when he was back from uni (I didn't always know which album was which but I know it all sounded good... and I'd hazard a guess that maybe someone in the Watercats and my brother share a little musical history too... let's hope that's all they share...). And the best thing of all, for me, about this collection is that there are ten songs on the CD (“Week Long Day”, “Even Odds”, “Tip of Sorrow”, “Begging Time”, “Blinding”, “Wolves”, “Scriptures Said”, “Remus Jackson”, “Perfect Weather” and “Avoid the Crows”) and I really like all of them (and how often can you say that of a collection of ten original songs on a demo?). All round it's a winner for me and the sooner they have an album out that people can buy/own/hear the better.

In the meantime you can hear more of the marvellous Watercats on their blog (right hand side to hear tracks) or at soundcloud. And a little bird tells me there will be Watercats content with the next issue of the Poetry Bus magazine. Go Cats.

p.s. I've been reading more on the Trump affair from last post (it gets worse the more I read...). More on that soon. Open letter from "You've Been Trumped" filmmakers to Scottish First Minister while you wait.

x

Trump, trump, trump

2011-10-27T15:20:00.007+01:00

This week we finally got to Dundee to see the documentary film about Donald Trump's Scottish golf course project - "You've Been Trumped". I had read quite a lot about the film - partly because the site of the course/resort is quite local to here (just over 30 miles north of here in Aberdeenshire) and partly because the film was made by a Montrose-based filmmaker Anthony Baxter (and it can't get much more local than that, Montrose being our nearest town).

“You've Been Trumped” is very interesting and I urge all of you to try and see it when you can (all showing details at the film's website). It's a documentary but quite a gentle artistic one and it shows some great shots of the beautiful north-eastern coast of Scotland. What it tries to do above all, however, is to provide some balance to the whole story of the golf development up there by allowing the wider public to meet the locals whose lives have been most affected by the Trump project at Balmedie/Menie Estate and to see how that project has been carried out to date (no surprise perhaps considering Trump's reputation – the whole thing is an outrage). Trump and his entourage have done their best to paint the locals who opposed him (or you could say 'those who just refused to be bought by him') as the lowest of the low, as slum-dwellers, as people whose opinion means nothing but what the film does, very successfully, is to show these people for what they are - an ordinary mix of extraordinary folk, people who deserve the right to be protected and listened to, people who deserve more (much more!) from their national politicians and agencies.

Below is a photograph of two of the locals taken by Alicia Bruce. The photo is titled "Mike and Sheila Forbes: Mill of Menie" (copyright Alicia Bruce) and, along with others from Bruce's excellent collection "Menie: a portrait of a North East Community in Conflict", it is featured in the film. The full collection of photographs is currently on show at the Moray Art Centre (until 26 November).

Some of you will know the story of the Balmedie golf course but others will not so I will try to provide a quick summary. If any of the facts or order here are wrong please feel free to put an oar in. For some balance Trump's site for the subject is here, wikipedia's is here and a group that opposes Trump's plans is here.

A few years back Donald Trump announces he wants to build “the best golf course in the world” (complete with hotel, luxury houses etc.).
After some umming and ahing he chooses a site in Scotland, just north of Aberdeen. Some of the site is a particular type of dune system and therefore an SSSI (Site of Specific Scientific Interest).
He buys up a lot of land at this site (2005/2006).
Aberdeenshire Council deny permission to build the course/resort (2007).
The Scottish Executive/Government override this decision and permission is granted (2008).
Building commences, locals are treated badly, local police act terribly (even on one occasion locking up the filmmakers for what, looking at Trump's rep in a funny way..?). There is much talk of Compulsory Purchase Orders for people who live adjacent to the site but eventually these are not brought into use.
Trump receives an honorary degree from Aberdeen's Robert Gordon University (autumn 2010). Former Principal of the same institution, Dr. David Kennedy, returns his honorary degree in protest.
Trump announces that whilst the course is still being built the hotel and housing part of the project is on hold because of global recession/economic problems (June 2011).
The film “You've Been Trumped” is released (2011). Trump says it's a “failure” but it starts to win prizes and get very positive reviews.
Recently there is coverage of Trump's objections to a windfarm that is due to be built just offshore near the Balmedie site (it will ruin the view from the 18th hole, apparently). It appears the Scottish Executive may stand firm on the windfarm issue. So what will happen now..?

After watching the film I would really like the answers to some of the following questions:

If some of the site is an SSSI how was the Trump golf course project allowed to be built on that area at all? I thought the whole point of an SSSI was to protect the area. I thought Scottish Natural Heritage (at the very least) had the job of protecting such areas. There is some detail here of how SNH were involved in the early stages (advising Aberdeenshire Council). But then what happened?
How can the Scottish National Party's Scottish Executive explain their decision to override Aberdeenshire Council's original denial of permission?
Do the SNP now realise they made a mistake and is this windfarm debacle a way of avoiding the bad publicity by easing Trump out by another door? 
What on earth did Robert Gordon University think they were doing giving Trump an honorary degree? (To be honest I find the whole business of honorary degrees baffling – either you get a degree, by working for it, or you don't. The rest is just so much PR. )
How much benefit will the Trump project bring to the area of Aberdeenshire? Not much according to some economists. And how much of a “billionaire” is he anyway?

And now some background material and links connected to the story.

Here is an interview with the film makers:

Here is a page from Scottish Natural Heritage on SSSIs. I also read an SNH document called the “North East Coastal Plain” online which refers to the need to “protect, restore and maintain coastal habitats” but I'm not sure how the Trump project fits in with that.

Here is an article from “the Guardian” published when the film came out.

A recent interview with Trump on TV's “Scotland Tonight” is here. In it he calls the windfarm development “ugly and depressing” - interesting for those of us who have seen the film and therefore some of what has been done to the local landscape in the last couple of years. “I've left the dunes largely alone”, he says in this interview. It didn't look like it from what we could see on the film.

Art featured in the film (and on the film's poster) is by Scottish artist David McCue. Bold and startling work it is too.

Music in the film is by Icelandic favourite jónsi.

Scottish singer/songwriter/folk favourite Karine Polwart has a new song (“Cover your Eyes”) that is available to people who donate $100 to the film's distribution costs. There are lots of other perks available to those who support the project for this or smaller/larger amounts (all details here).

And this is a trailer for “You've Been Trumped” (along with an appeal for funds for distribution at the beginning).

To finish this post I would say that watching “You've Been Trumped” made me in turns:

angry about how a “billionaire” can somehow avoid all the rules and regulations that the rest of us have to observe,

angry about how easily the Scottish government and local police force were ready to roll over and obey this same “billionaire”,

repulsed by some of the footage of Donald Trump... and I'm not talking about the infamous hair and gross facial gestures but about sections in the film where he was talking to the media and particularly when he was talking to women (e.g. to one young Miss Scotland). Ugh.

angry about the sand dunes area that has already been torn up to provide this new development,

angry and upset at how local people were treated by the Trump organisation, the Scottish executive and the local police,

pleased to see local people standing together against injustice.

As for what happens next.. apparently the first part of the golf course is due to open July 2012. In the meantime see the film, support the film, write to your politicians... I know I'm going to.

Work, progress

2011-10-21T11:04:00.004+01:00

We've had an old friend staying this week and there has been lots of walking, even some cycling, much talking, giant eating, a bit of music, some dressing up. I still managed to get to art class on Wednesday though and this time I asked Jackie (teacher) if I could try pastels (chalky ones... I had a go with oil ones a couple of weeks ago – the thistles back here). I really only intend to do the ten classes right now so I'd like to try as many different ways of making marks as I can while I'm there (next stop watercolours!). Maybe it seems odd to only want the ten classes at this point... but I am odd... and who knows... I may have some other classes in the future.

Anyway the pastels turned up two pictures this week. One was h on a beach (and I posted that on facebook yesterday). The other (above) is working from a photo of my Mum and little h taken in 2006 (one of my very favourite photos of them – a picture of total love and devotion and being relaxed with another person). This is very much a first stage picture I suppose and I'm sure I could do a lot more to it (apparently you spray with some kind of hairspray stuff and then keep adding the layers). The problem is I quite like it as it is... so what to do? It's not like with poetry where you can keep a copy of the first draft and go back to it if you want. I guess I'll just have to start from scratch if I want to keep this individual picture at all. And maybe no-one will like it much but me.

In some ways I had/have this problem a lot with poetry too. I quite like early drafts, rough edges, unfinished business and I'm not sure it helps with how my (writing) work is... received at times. I'm pretty sure that when I've sent poems to magazines and competitions in the past often the response from the readers/editors/committees must have been “why hasn't this person finished their work?” or “what are we supposed to do with this?” Other reactions may have been “did this person go to school?” or “what were they thinking?” It's a bit frustrating because obviously I did go to school and usually I've put quite a lot of thought into what may seem an unfinished piece. It feels to me like somehow I'm not really a big fan of perfection (at least when it comes to arts like these... obviously if I'm getting into any form of transport I'd quite like the designer and manufacturer to have quite high standards when it comes to perfection...). I don't necessarily want to produce something (in a poem or a picture) that has been tweaked and retweaked to within an inch of its life... but I am aware this is not necessarily a popular view. Certainly not amongst poets. I once read another poet talking about "instinctive" writing and I suppose I fall into that camp. Maybe. I'm not really keen on camps either.

Speaking of writing I am sure that many of you read the tips for writing fiction printed in the Guardian newspaper last weekend (here and here). They got a great range of writers to contribute and below are some of my favourites points from the list.

From Margaret Atwood (ever practical):

“Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.”

A smashing one from Elmore Leonard:

“My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

From Roddy Doyle (though his whole list is great):

“Do not search amazon.co.uk for the book you haven't written yet.”

A couple from Geoff Dyer:

“Have regrets. They are fuel. On the page they flare into desire.”

and

“Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don't follow it.”

I have to admit I had to look Dyer up (I'd never heard of him before). Can anyone recommend which of his books to try first?

From Anne Enright:

“The first 12 years are the worst.”

A timely one from David Hare (considering the whole Booker prize readability/quality business this year... again...):

“The two most depressing words in the English language are 'literary fiction'.”

From A.L.Kennedy:

“Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.”

A lovely one from Joyce Carol Oates:

“Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.”

Someone had to say it – here's Philip Pullman:
 
“My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.”

A twist on the old feminist line from Ian Rankin:

“Don't give up.”

A few choice ones from the marvellous wordman that is Will Self:

“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.”

“You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.”

“The writing life is essentially one of solitary confinement – if you can't deal with this you needn't apply.”

From one of my favourites Zadie Smith:

“Avoid cliques, gangs, groups. The presence of a crowd won't make your writing any better than it is.”

And finally a corker from Colm Tóibín that we could probably all keep in mind:

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

OK. OK. Over and out.

x

Bridges and bones

2011-10-17T10:34:00.011+01:00

Montrose bridges, yesterday, as we set off for walks and friend-visits mid-morning.

The schools are back today after a two week break so once again I have a few hours in the day to... well...work. I have a couple of little projects in what I suppose must be a pipeline but mostly just now I'm working... writing... thinking... in a fairly free and wandering way. I'm not getting a whole lot done... but I don't always mind that.

I'm still reading the book about writing that I mentioned a few posts back ("Writing down the Bones" by Natalie Goldberg, publ. 1986). It is, I am sure, the kind of... hippy nonsense that would drive many poets (especially British ones...) to distraction but that's OK with me (I think I live in a different universe to many of them anyway - I've tried reading some of the books other poets recommend about writing and I never seem to get very far with them). Goldberg's book is mainly about making writing central in your life... about speaking from within... about digging really deep... whilst at the same time still noticing all that's around you. And whilst it's true that you could work that all out for yourself... and in a way many of us do... still, much of what she says is powerful and incisive. The book has sold many copies... and it is very readable (now, now... let's not get involved in the Booker prize readability debate) but mostly I am finding it pretty helpful and interesting at this odd stage of life (mother just gone, daughter on brink of adolescence, self a bit vague). I have also, in between reading the "Bones", read Goldberg's coming-to-zen book "Long Quiet Highway" (1993). A lot of it is her life story and that was interesting for many reasons - one of them being that she has spent a lot of time in Taos, New Mexico (and we were there too earlier this year - beautiful place). This book's subtitle is "Waking up in America" and I really enjoyed it. We can be calm. We can be good. It's nice to know.

Here's a quote from "Writing down the Bones":

"Suzuki Roshi says in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind that 'The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in its wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.' You need a large field in writing too. Don't pull in the reins too quickly. Give yourself tremendous space to wander in, to be utterly lost with no name, and then come back and speak."

See. Not bad. Now try this from earlier in the book:

"Every minute we change. It is a great opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin fresh. That is how writing is. Instead of freezing us, it frees us."

And now another photo:

Another Montrose bridge we passed yesterday (this time on the way home again in the evening). This one is the train viaduct by the Basin.

x

The sea, the sky

2011-10-10T15:31:00.009+01:00

Several things to share this week. Some have already been on facebook but I know some of you don't go there...

Firstly... the photos above... a young seal we saw on the beach last week (a grey seal, we think). We kept our dog on the lead and at a distance... Apparently it's normal for the young seals to hang about on the beach like this at this time of year.

Secondly a slideshow of local sights from our trip to the same nearby beach yesterday (tide a bit further in this time). At the end of our North America trip someone, Dana, suggested we did a slideshow of our home town to complement all the travel slideshows (that were over there). So we got to it finally Dana - sorry about the delay! The skies here can be just amazing and this week there has been every kind of cloud on show (I wrote a wee poem about Montrose skies ages ago - back here). The skies still amaze me and whilst these photos might seem a bit repetitive... they're not really. Take a look.

And then a few links...

The Cerys Matthews show on BBC 6 Music this week featured a poem by Sue Boyle called "A leisure centre is also a temple of learning". Cerys found the poem in an anthology called "Poems of the Decade" (and you can too - here). The radio show is here and the poetry slot comes in at about 1hr 24mins.

Want to find out more about how the "Occupy Wall Street" protest is spreading around the world? Try here. Day of protests coming up on 15th October, it seems.

Another radio show about a very good author and a regular protestor... Arundhati Roy on BBC Radio 4 is here.

So that was kind of a messy post but it was packed full of good things. And it's school holidays here too... no time for concentration! Look where the yoga mat ended up...

except of course that isn't mine. Mine's stuffed behind a bookshelf right now (where else would it be..?).

Testing paint

2011-10-06T11:17:00.004+01:00

This is the painting I managed in art class number four last week. I'm really just testing this to see how it looks online... and being a bit naughty by posting paint instead of poem on National Poetry Day... Still, someone else (Judith Taylor) posted a link to a humdinger of a poem (this one). And from it this:

"Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved."

Hard business, this creative lark. But fun. Sometimes.

x

Poetry days, radio days...

2011-10-03T08:49:00.003+01:00

Our garden, on Friday

So this week in the UK it's National Poetry Day (it's on Thursday - events and info here). However after a few years of my own events and activity for NPD this year I plan to do nothing special whatsoever for it (yay). It's school holidays here at this time of year and we're all at home so we're having a quiet family kind of a week instead. I'm feeling very laid-back... it's great.

Yesterday, for example, I spent a crazy amount of time sorting out one of the rooms upstairs (so many papers, so many boxes of stuff/old photos/birthday cards, so much dust!) but the best bit of it was listening to the radio all day (I don't seem to have done that for ages). It was great too - on BBC 6 Music they were doing specials for National Poetry Day/Week so we got an interview with the founder of said annual poetry celebration (William Sieghart) on the Cerys Matthews show in the morning (quite interesting - listen here). But then, even better, there was an absolute giant of a poetry segment on the Jarvis Cocker show at 4pm. Jarvis interviewed poet/former Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, and though I've never been a Motion fan (or, to be honest a Cocker fan... I like him but not any of his music particularly to date... though I guess things can always change) it was a really interesting interview (listen here). It's more about poetry in general than Motion's own work and a lot of it concentrates on his involvement in the Poetry Archive (which is a fabulous resource).

So much culture content... and the room is tidy too (at last). Win win.

The return of the fridge magnet...

2011-09-29T17:17:00.007+01:00

Above - Edmonton, Alberta, back in July. How I love my crazy North American roadside signs...

So, I am back at the coalface of poetry-work of late (bang bang, scrape, scrape)... and it feels good, it must be said. I've been writing quite a bit... and reading heaps. I wrote a new poem this week that reminded me of an old one (one of the ones people have actually said was good - hah!) and I realised that I've never posted that old one on a blog (though it is in mah book, still available here). I did post it online ages ago but that was on myspace (and heavens, who could even find myspace these days!). So here it is (with audio here - from a while back... my voice sounds young!). Maybe the new poem next week.

Let me be your fridge magnet

Let me slip into your home
Like a leaflet for a loan
Hidden in a free newspaper
Or supermarket circular
I'm not proud

Oh how I'd love to be your Baby on Board
Suckered on to your smoothness
I'd feel every bump in your road
Know exactly how much air was in your tyres
If you let me

I could stick faster still
If you'd let me be your fridge magnet
I'd hang on to your cool place
So perky, so keen
I wouldn't let you down

I'd be superficial for you, gladly
Cling to any surface - as long as it was yours
Then I'd ask softly 'do you understand now?
Do you get the message?
Do you read me at all?'

RF 2006

And whilst some people reference Greek myths and what-not this one (as, of course, the erudite amongst you will already know) refers back to the great Baby D hit of the early 1990s "Let me be your fantasy". Happy days, dancing on the bar nights. Oh go on then, here it is (and look - you can even sing along):

More radio poetry

2011-09-25T13:14:00.003+01:00

Well, much as I don't want to overshadow that lengthy Poetry Bus review-thing I did last post I must just tell you that this week on her BBC 6 Music show Cerys Matthews is reading a Helena Nelson poem. You can hear the show here until next Sunday. The poem is "The Book of the Night" from Helena's 2010 book "Plot and Counter-Plot" (Shoestring Press) and I wrote a bit about that book here (it is a very good book). The poem slot on Cerys' show ("poetry in motion") is at about 1 hour 15 mins or so this week (it's a 2 hour show) but do listen to the whole two hours if you can because there's some lovely music and a real mix of styles. Radio at its very best.

Photo above is from on the road in Tennessee back in April. Gotta love that road...

x

Points of interest on the Bus route

2011-09-23T13:27:00.006+01:00

So, the new Poetry Bus magazine (issue 2).... getting it out nearly killed its editor, it's twice the area of the last one and this time it has a CD of poets reading their work and some music included too (hooray for music). I've only had my copy a few days but here are some early thoughts (starting near the back... I often read from the back...).

Firstly on individual poems:

The poem about a Francis Bacon painting by Sarah Maria Griffin is outstanding. I like her "electric picnic" poem (in two parts) too – 'selectively claustrophobic' and all.

Liam Ryan's “Homings” is that simple-in-a-good-way kind of a poem. Me like.

The poem about 'dyke and bike' by Kit Fryatt is very sophisticated and entertaining and most definitely, unique.

Jessie Lendennie's “4th August, 2011” is a current affairs poem that shouldn't work... but really does.

Liz Gallagher's “Stuffing Our Faces with Gods” seems to be the poem where the version in the magazine least matches the version on the CD. I would be interested to know which version Liz prefers at this point. I specially like the line “my god is more lucid than your god” but there are lots of other good lines too (some of them involving pies).

Kevin Higgins' “Blue” is a welcome flash of grotesque comedy in a sometimes sombre collection of poems (mine, for example, couldn't be gloomier if it tried... damn that bereavement).

Noel King's “When Fairies Gather” has a good play with the muse.

In “Drumcondra April 2010” David Murphy rhymes 'sarong' with 'pong' (and other things). Joy.

Richard Epstein's “News Break” contains some nifty lines/phrases. I like “Dress for adversity” and “More on this if there is more”. TV news has gone mad and he gets it just so in this poem.

Benjamin Robinson's “Have You Seen My trousers Anywhere?” has some cracking rhyming going on (and I'm just glad to see some rhyming poems in a poetry magazine at all, to be honest... it's been so long... and they're good too – even better).

Colm Scully's “Like a hat” is intriguing.

Michèle Vassal's “Under the Dog star” might just win the “best last line” award for this issue.

Richard Halperin's “Circus” is an interesting trip.

Padhraig Nolan is one of the old online Bus poets. I enjoyed his “Stella” in the magazine very much and remembered it from one of the original Bus prompts (the Stella Artois one, for those of us who were there... good memories). I also like his “an orange block/of what we buy as cheese” in “Noon”.

Miriam Needham's “In Need” is a corker. Dress to impress, indeed. And teamed up with matching artwork on the opposite page (by Una Gildea) – it's this season's must-have.

Brenda Cusack's “The unnameable” is, for me, a grower. First listen I wasn't struck on it (can't be doing with Beckett, so shoot me) but by second listen I was warming to the old corpse and its story nicely.

Colm Keegan's “Fridays” is a heartbreaker with some perfect details. I like “in the time before phones” (just minimal enough) and the mood is very well-painted in a simple but effective way.

And then some other thoughts:

It's good to have some poems in the mag about buses and being on buses. Adrian Mitchell would be pleased (“a bus says 'us' while a car says 'me'”, from his poem “Yes”).

There are not so many poets featured who used to ride the old online bus (someone else has written about that here). Who knows why this is... maybe some didn't submit, maybe some submitted poems that the editor didn't like... whatever it is I'm sure editor Peadar O'Donoghue will have some trouble ahead along this avenue (but I'm sure all editors do...and the more successful the mag the more the trouble will come... but good things will come too). For me, I do have a poem in this one but if he doesn't choose one of mine for issue 3 or 4 or 5 will I hate him? Oh yes... for at least a few hours... and then I'll hate someone else. In actual fact I don't much like the poem of mine that he did pick in the end for this issue. But maybe that's a good sign... I don't know.

Both of the music tracks on the CD are lovely, really enjoyable. Maybe next time there could be even more music sprinkled amongst the poems..? I love the vocals in The Souterrain's track and Martin Egan's “The Tune” is really gorgeous – unusual too.

The readings on the CD are very varied. Some are from live shows, others done on phones, some very clear, some a bit muffled. Some are done at breakneck speed (Sarah Clancy must breathe through her ears!) whilst others are damned slow (that'll be me... I'm getting a bit Pinter with the pauses, there). Anne Tannam, Miriam Needham, Sarah Maria Griffin and Stephen James Smith read well, for my taste, get the right mood (not too natural, not too stage school)... and I like Kat Mortensen's reading too (very crisp). I love all the different accents...and I suppose I never realised before that for an Irish poet, like Karl Parkinson in “In Rios Nightclub Drinking On My Own”, 'poem' can rhyme with 'alone' (that wouldn't work in my accent!). And I heard his 'birds' as 'boards' (which would completely change the tone...) so it's a good job I had the text to check... One or two poems are not on the CD which is a shame as it'd be nice to have the full set. Though saying that in places you can hear how some poems lose a little (for me) as audio. I like Kerrie O'Brien's “Drifting” much more on the page than on the CD, for example. It's a subtle poem and hard to do it justice in a reading perhaps (I like the poem very much).

The artwork is all really well-done and well-chosen. The cover artwork by Adam Neate, as shown at the top of the post, is fantastic (the centrefold too) and I have a soft spot for “Clouds” on page 39 by the Project Twins as well.

There are a couple of typos in the text (though not many). Our man needs a ham with the poofreading maybee.

There are some poems and poets that I haven't mentioned here and that is no criticism of them. This is only early thoughts and, in all honesty, there is nothing I don't like or think is rubbish in this new Poetry Bus (plus what do I know..?). It is a big old Bus with a lot packed into it so well done, that driver, I say. I find a lot of poetry magazines really, really boring/uninspiring/po-faced/predictable and you certainly can't say that about this one!

x

Two songs

2011-09-21T08:44:00.004+01:00

What was that about fewer posts..? Here are two songs new to me that I really like... the first one is from a Scottish band:

and the second one from a more English source:

Back soon to talk about the new Poetry Bus magazine (which is fab-u-lous!).
The music on the Bus CD is great too.

x

Swiss radio?

2011-09-18T18:26:00.006+01:00

My return-home resolution was to blog a little less (one good post a week rather than heaps of little ones...) but I just have to pass this bit of news on today. Photo above by Mark Stephenson, by the way.

One of the first things I did when we got back to Scotland at the end of July was listen to some radio. There's not a huge amount I like on UK radio these days but I have a few favourites still - shows like Mike Harding's hugely enthusiastic folk show on BBC Radio 2 and there are a few highlights on BBC's 6 Music too (like Lauren Laverne's show and the Cerys Matthews Sunday morning 10am spectacular). On the first one of the Cerys' shows that I listened to since our return she was talking about how hard it was to get permissions for poems to read aloud on the show for its weekly poem slot ("weekly poem slot", I know, just for that it's fabulous). She was talking about poems by famous poets like Dylan Thomas but I thought how crazy this was - people in the world of poetry are often to be heard wondering (aloud) how to get a wider audience for the bleedin' poems and here's a national radio show wanting to read poems to folk and not being allowed to (on occasion). So I thought 'I know a whole lot of brilliant poems by less well-known but equally good poets... and I know a lot of small publishers who would love the chance to get their poets more widely heard'... so I sent her a suggestion (this poem by Morgan Downie, or blogger Swiss to some of us). And I didn't hear back right away so I thought 'oh dear, there's another mad email I've sent into the vast vat of mad emails in the world...' (a lot of them mine).

Then this week she read Morgan's poem out... and so beautifully too (hear the show here - if you're in a place where i-player works that is). I can only hope Morgan was suitably delighted to hear his poem "the stone bible" read aloud by the delectable Ms Matthews (I am quite a fan of her singing and music, never mind the radio show). I know Colin Will was pleased to get a mention for his Calder Wood Press too. The show always blends the poems with music and it was a great combination this week (full details at the show's site). There's a wee interview with folk singer/songwriter Ralph McTell on this week too... if you like that sort of thing... and McTell singing a kids song he wrote that I'd only ever heard before on our girl's Singing Kettle CD (don't know the Singing Kettle? It's a Scottish thing...).

I was pleased to hear the reading for many reasons but partly because, as regular visitors will know, I am a HUGE fan of the SOUND of poetry. I've almost got to a place where I've stopped reading it in my head altogether... I want to hear a poem so much more than I want to, what is the word... absorb it (which reminds me... I've added a rather more hurried and rather less gorgeous audio version of my recent first-in-a-while poem in the last post today). But never mind that, rejoice and celebrate in the power of the Downie words and the whole 'hearing good poems on the radio' business... and while you're at it maybe send Cerys a poetry suggestion (especially if you know the show will easily be able to get permission from the poem's publishers for it). The email is this simple:

cerys.6music@bbc.co.uk

x

Coming clean

2011-09-16T11:10:00.010+01:00

So my Wednesday trips to Arbroath... no secret mission for the government... just my first ever art classes (once a week for ten weeks). Of course, like most people I did get some art classes in school but I don't remember ever being taught anything back then... apart from that I wasn't very good at art. I remember us being given painting tasks to do and always being disappointed with what I produced. I also remember that awful task that everyone seems to get in high school art (and that very few people can do anything with) - "draw/paint the person sitting opposite you". I remember making a picture of my friend where she looked like a horse with a painful staring problem and thinking "well, best keep to the stuff I'm better at" (pretty much anything besides art back then).

Anyway, I wanted to do some art classes last year (to do something new with my brain partly) but the ones I chose then didn't happen due to lack of numbers. And then we came back this summer and there was a poster in Arbroath library advertising some classes with local artist Jackie Gardiner. So now, here I am, once a week, trying lots of different things like painting and pastelling and drawing and what-not. Two classes so far and I am having a ball - it feels so good to not be working with words and wordy ideas for a change. And maybe soon I will start to understand what my artist friends are talking about now and again. It's a win-win.

In the meantime I did manage a poem this week too. One of the reasons I've been off poetry for a while is that I got tired of endlessly writing about my Mum and the lack of her. I felt like I was just upsetting myself, boring everyone else and, worst of all, that she would hate it (she was a doing person, not a whining person...). Still, I've been reading a book recently called "Writing Down the Bones" by Natalie Goldberg (1986) and it's all for getting everything out and just keeping on writing so maybe that's what has helped this poem along. I found the Bones book via the website of the writer involved in the book of adoption stories I wrote about a couple of posts ago (Ann Angel - I'm guessing not her real name). "Writing Down the Bones" is totally not my kind of thing (I dislike books about writing most of the time and even the subtitle of this one makes me wince - "freeing the writer within"...) but sometimes it's good to face things that are not one's kind of thing, I think. Hence the art classes also I suppose. Anyway, the poem:

Everywhere

You're in that lonely coffee pot
The tiny size of it
The way it pours

And in that rose tree
The clusters of its buds
That choice was yours

You are the empty chairs
The quiet on the stairs
The wisps of light

And though in heavy plastic urn
You take a very peaceful turn
You still burn bright

RF 2011

There is a hint of Python in the urn I know (or Morecambe and Wise...)... yet, still I leave it. Hard to explain why. Maybe it's masochism (so not what anyone sensible in modern poetry would do... and it rhymes too). I am beyond help.

p.s. quick audio version of the above here

Local colour

2011-09-12T10:29:00.007+01:00

Still, not many words from me. It seems I am in an unusually wordless phase at the moment... and in some ways I am really enjoying it (maybe others are too...). So instead some pictures.

Above is a bit of colour from our dogwalk on Friday. Below are some shots from a damp drive down to Dundee on Saturday to visit friends. It would be easy to just post sunny beach pictures of Angus (I have plenty of those) but there is more to the great county than that...

Finally a shot of Arbroath's Signal Tower Museum from last Wednesday. I will be in Arbroath regularly for the next few weeks. Ah, but what will I be doing..?

x

Adoption Stories

2011-09-07T21:55:00.005+01:00

When we were in California in June we stayed with blogger/writer/poet Chris Alba of Enchanted Oak (that part of our trip is here). We stayed two nights with Chris (and entourage) and were made very, very welcome. Then as we were leaving we did some book swapping – Chris got a copy of my now-getting-on-a-bit poetry book and I got a few things from her, one of which was “Silent Embrace” (its cover is above and it was published by California's Catalyst Book Press). Chris has an essay in “Silent Embrace” (towards the end) called “The Long Road Home”.

I think Chris asked me something like “are you interested in reading about adoption?” when she showed me the book and my answer was “yes” for many reasons. “Yes” because I have one adopted sibling (the closest in age to me of all our sprawl and therefore the closest in experience in many ways). “Yes” because there are other adopted children in the family, some of whom are quite new acquaintances. “Yes” because I'm interested in parenthood and how children grow up in general. And finally “yes”, because I guess I'm just interested in people (and my Mum used to say that about herself all the time...). So, yes, yes and again yes. And then another yes.

I got round to reading the book this week and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the subject of adoption (and indeed anyone interested in families at all). The blurb on the back tells you what you're going to find within the pages pretty accurately: “Birth mothers are often the forgotten or ignored part of the adoption triad. This collection of literary essays seeks to correct the imbalance by publishing personal stories by birth mothers, adoptive mothers, and adoptees. The stories cover a range of topics about adoption, open adoption, birth parent connections, and unification with children after closed adoption, focusing on the relationship with birth mothers. An anthology of essays by, for and about birth parents.”

And then here's a few notes from me about the book:

“Silent Embrace” was edited by Ann Angel and her (adopted) daughter Amanda. Amanda's essay is one of the pieces I really respected – it's a brutally honest and very well written account of a very difficult series of events. Ann's essay is about her very different experience of adoption (she and her husband adopted four children – all from different situations/families). Ann also writes books for teenagers by the way (including a biography of Janis Joplin aimed at the young reader – sounds great!).

There is a very wide range of emotional responses on show in these essays. By the end of the book you feel like you have met a lot of different people, heard a lot of different stories and, as the subtitle would have it, read many different “perspectives on birth and adoption”. You may cry more than once... and in some places you may be warmed by the goodness of human nature at its best. It covers a lot of ground.

Most of the essays were written by women living in the US (which is OK - the themes are fairly universal) . However there didn't seem to be a huge range of what we call diversity these days. And that did seem a bit of shame... a lacking in the book somehow.

All of the essays are by women. I'd be interested to know whether this was an editorial decision or just a dearth of men wanting to write about the subject (one of the essays does mention, for example, how rarely adopted boys want to meet birth parents compared to adopted girls who very often do). It does make the book seem a little old-fashioned though (this lack of male perspectives) but that's not to say it stops “Silent Embrace” being an interesting read (because it doesn't).

I must add finally that Chris' essay in this book is, as regular readers of hers would expect, an exercise in how to tell the truth using clear, sharp strokes and pulling few punches. Chris has the best of the journalist and the poet at work in a piece like this – no clichés, no waffle, just really good communicating.

p.s. Anyone who enjoyed the Arvo Pärt piece "Spiegel im Spiegel" a few posts ago might be interested in this radio programme about it from BBC recently.

x

Angus, thrills and snowing

2011-09-02T15:04:00.005+01:00

Photo taken from the car in Ontario, February 2011. Taken by me, I imagine.

Nothing much to report here - had visitors, been reading, walking, learning how to cook again... and for me cooking always means listening to music so here are a few musical things you might like (nothing brand new or anything).

First here's a British band that Mark plays a lot called The Leisure Society with a track we especially liked whilst travelling called "The Last of the Melting Snow" (hence photo above):

Next, a visiting friend played me some music by a woman from Philadelphia called Melody Gardot . Here's "My One and Only Thrill" (and it is gorgeous!):

Finally, on a more local note (and I put this on facebook this week too) here's a local singer/songwriter with a song he made from some words of mine. The singer is Gary Anderson and the song is "The Angus Adoption Song". Gary is on at the Montrose Folk Club at the Links Hotel this Tuesday evening (6th Sept). Also appearing are the Coaltown Daisies from Fife.

I've even been singing today. That's either a very good or a very bad sign...

x

Good lines

2011-08-28T09:12:00.010+01:00

h and I adding our names to the wall at Ground Zero Blues Club, Clarksdale, Mississippi in April this year (that bit of trip here)

In this post I offer you a few quotations – from things I've read recently.

1. Via Chatwin

Whilst travelling I did read a book or two and one was “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin (1940-1989). I'd heard Chatwin's name for years but never got round to reading anything by him so I picked up a couple of his books in a second hand shop in Washington state. It was hard not to find “The Songlines” interesting as it covers a lot of my favourite subjects (walking, singing, trying to understand the world...) but it wouldn't be to everyone's taste (it just... stops here and there... not your average book, for sure). I was pretty interested in all the information about Australia and its Aboriginal people but I found Chatwin's style a bit repetitive and, now and again, even tiresome. Still, he was the erudite type and he does use some great quotations. Here's one from Robert Burton's “The Anatomy of Melancholy” (first publ. 1621):

The heavens themselves run continually round, the sun riseth and sets, the moon increaseth, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air is still tossed by the winds, the waters ebb and flow, to their conservation no doubt, to teach us that we should ever be in motion.

And here's one from Kierkegaard (letter to Jette – 1847). I may have seen this quotation on another, more energetic, walker's blog too:

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it... but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill... Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.

And now a bit of Chatwin's own text:

'I know this may sound far-fetched,' I said to Elizabeth Vrba, 'but if I were asked, “What is the big brain for”?, I would be tempted to say, “For singing our way through the wilderness.” '

I like that one.

2. Martin Bloody Amis?

There was a piece by Martin Amis in the Financial Times recently about one of my very favourite poets Philip Larkin. It contained this:

Literary criticism, throughout its long history (starting with Aristotle), has restlessly searched for the Holy Grail of a value system – a way of separating the excellent from the less excellent. But it turns out that this is a fool’s errand.

Guess I've met a few fools then (I knew it...). I'm certainly no Mamis fan but it's a really good article. Interesting too how he calls Larkin “the novelist's poet” (and very much not the poet's poet...).

3. Dawn French (popular culture alert!)

How about this from comedian/actor (or is that comedienne/actress?) Dawn French in her autobiography (of sorts) “Dear Fatty” (2008)?

I personally like the adventure of difference

and a longer excerpt (about her year in New York when she was 18/19):

For the first time ever, I was alone in a different country. I was nervous about how I was going to cope in this big bustling city and so I employed a technique which still serves me well today. I imagined myself as someone who relished new exciting opportunities, who was utterly unafraid and perpetually optimistic. It was a kind of reinvention. Everyone I met was new. These people didn't know me, there was no shared history, so I could be anything or anyone I wanted to be. My theory was that if I behaved like a confident, cheerful person, eventually I would buy it myself, and become that. I always had traces of strength somewhere inside me, it wasn't fake, it was just a way of summoning my courage to the fore and not letting any self-doubt hinder my adventures. This method worked then, and it works now. I tell myself that I am the sort of person who can open a one-woman play in the West End, so I do. I am the sort of person who has several companies, so I do. I am the sort of person who WRITES A BOOK! So I do. It's a process of having faith in the self you don't quite know yet, if you see what I mean. Believing that you will find the strength, the means somehow, and trusting in that, although your legs are like jelly. You can still walk on them and you will find the bones as you walk. Yes, that's it. The further I walk, the stronger I become. So unlike real lived life, where the further you walk the more your hips hurt.

I'm not normally a big reader of celebrity stories but (a) it's one of my Mum's books (and there are plenty of those still around the house), (b) I'm always fascinated by people who manage to make a living out of comedy and (c ) French's Dad killed himself... and I'm always fascinated by people who have been in this same, very peculiar boat too. It's not a great book (I have skimmed at times...) but it has its good moments. And I like her overall (there's an interview with her here on of all things 'This Morning'... why the hell not..?)

4. Dundee's finest

From songwriter and musician Michael Marra (talking on BBC Radio Scotland) about his ambition as a young man:

I didn't want my name in lights - I wanted it in brackets

I've written about Dundee's Marra on the old blog loads of times... in fact I even wrote him a poem (back here). And here he is singing some Rabbie Burns:

I've never thought of it before but I suppose to those of you not in Scotland green 'rashes' might seem odd... but I'm sure you can work it out.

5. Krishnamurti

And finally a line from Krishnamurti – via a young relative of mine on the evil facebook:

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society

Some food for thought I think.

x

The Reading Promise

2011-08-22T11:26:00.005+01:00

On our recent can-we-escape-normal-life-please trip to the US and Canada we spent a certain amount of time in bookshops. All three of us (man, woman, child) are fairly keen readers and we all feel comfortable and relaxed, I think it's fair to say, in a bookshop (though we like music and DVD shops too...). In our time overseas we went to little second hand bookshops, giant book megastores and pretty much everything in between (and indeed one of my favourite places in North America is undoubtedly Powell's marvellous bookstore in Portland, Oregon - our Oregon visit is back here).

Despite these bookstore visits in fact I did very little reading during those six months on the road – mainly I had my nose in guidebooks and maps, leaflets and more maps. I read a few books along with h – though currently she prefers to read to me rather than the other way round – but mainly I planned to catch up with reading again when we got home. It was a bit weird reading so little for six whole months (usually I read quite a lot, I suppose) but it made it more like a holiday (as in different from the norm) and it seemed the right thing to do at the time.

One book that was top of my list to read when we got back was this one:

“The Reading Promise – 3,218 nights of reading with my father” by Alice Ozma (2011). I'd seen a copy in a Chapters store in British Columbia in June but had not bought it then due to our ever-increasing amount of luggage-to-get-home-somehow. Instead I bought it when we got home (it's originally a US book but I got the UK edition – published by Hodder & Stoughton, their page for the book is here). Then I got to reading it pretty much as soon as I could.

I suppose I found this book tempting mainly because it is about a parent and child reading together and reading is one of the things that h and I have done together most often. h has always loved books with a kind of crazy passion (this is the child that, as young as maybe not even 2 years old, woke us up in the middle of the night regularly with “read me the ducky book, read me the ducky book!”) and now, at 11, the passion shows no sign of dying out either. She doesn't only read books it should be said - she plays with them like they are toys, talks to them, wanders around the house with them, almost climbs inside them. She also much prefers to read aloud (or listen) rather than read quietly and again this preference shows no sign of disappearing. I find it interesting for many reasons but partly because “More about the song” for me was always at least partly about sound in poetry (rather than what seem to me drier, more intellectual concerns) and so I suppose maybe she and I have the preference for sound in common.

In “The Reading Promise” Alice Ozma tells her and her father's reading story – how left together at home for most of her formative years reading was one of their mutual passions to the extent that they agreed to read together every night (without fail) until she left home for college at 18. It started as a read-for-a-hundred-nights, turned into read-for-a-thousand nights and then it just kept going and they came to call it their “Reading Streak” (or “the Streak” for short). Ozma's father was a primary school librarian (not something we ever have in the UK to my knowledge) and he was something of a professional reader so in their case it was always him reading to Alice, rather than the other way around.

"The Reading Promise" isn't hugely about the books they read (something she covers in a blog post here) and like many readers I found this a bit offputting at first. However I stuck with it and I'm glad I did because it is a charming account of a very dedicated and loving father/single parent and the passion for books and stories that he nurtures in his daughters and his students. It is also, I suppose, about the place of books in our lives as computers advance in schools and homes (though this is mostly in the final chapters) and it is also about eccentricity, in many ways, in children and in their parents. Maybe all families are eccentric (thus making a nonsense of the word...) but I think that single parent families, in particular, can't help but be a bit eccentric (I know the one I grew up in was...) and that at times, as a child, you feel the lacks more than the gains. Ozma, however, seems to have learned (a bit earlier than I did perhaps...) to appreciate that devoted single parent and to celebrate their efforts and achievements. For that (and for getting a good book published before the age of 25) congratulations to Alice Ozma – job well done on both counts.

Alice's father, Jim Brozina, has written the foreword to the book and here's an excerpt from it that I know my Mum would have approved of:

“A parent who has proven time and time again that the growth and happiness of his or her children is priority number one does not have to worry about where those children are heading in life. They will be sensitive and productive members of society for as long as they live.”

I'm not sure it's always as straightforward as that... but it's not a bad idea to try it anyway.

x

Alice Ozma's website is here.

An old blog post of mine about reading to the small one is here

The pic at top of post is an old one of my Mum reading to h (aforementioned “ducky book” I think). It must be from about 2001.

And poetry - part 2

2011-08-19T13:54:00.003+01:00

I listened to the Radio 4 'Great Lives' about Emily Dickinson today (it's here if listening to the BBC is something your location allows you to do). Programmes about Emily D are always heartening for those of us not succeeding too hugely as writers in our own lifetimes (even more so for those of us who are female and odd and who use... individual punctuation). The programme threw up a theory or two about her and featured this poem of hers at its very start:

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us—don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.
How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Emily Dickinson

Interesting.... and I'm guessing she wouldn't have been in the queue for Celebrity Big Brother (had it existed in 19th century Massachusetts). By the way, I've laid the poem out as I found it in my "Selected Poems" (Borders Classics 2006). I say this because I am aware there are different schools of Emily lay-out, as it were, but I am not nearly academic enough to remember the differences or to be, in all honesty, that bothered about them (though mess with my weird layout and punctuation at your peril... shameless double standards, I know). Here is the same poem read aloud:

And now I will get back to doing anything else but writing any poems. Ribbit.

x

And poetry?

2011-08-17T19:35:00.004+01:00

Misty Montrose, last week

I mentioned when I started this new blog just recently that I wasn't sure whether it would have any poetry content at all... and especially if it would feature any poetry by little old me. In the old blog I posted quite a lot of poems, took part in poetry projects, wrote about poetry matters and such like so it would be quite a change for me and my online life if this were all to change. Some of you were good enough to protest a little about this suggestion and your comments were much appreciated (we take what we can, eh, crumbs of praise, crumbs of self-respect...) but in all honesty I really have no idea, at this point, if I will ever write another poem again. I mean, who cares, really, especially when there is so much else to think about (social unrest, social decay, settling back in at home, not settling back in at home, going out, staying in, family life etc.). And it's weird because I'm not upset or even particularly confused or anything - I just feel a bit 'dunno' about the whole thing. And people keep saying “you must have got so much material while you were travelling!” and I'm like “yeh, maybe, s'pose so” (in all those six months I read very little poetry and wrote even less). These inarticulate responses seem very teenage, don't they? Maybe it's some stage of bereavement or something.

I do know that, even in simpler times, I never feel about poetry the way some of you others do. I don't bathe in it, revel in it, wrap myself in it and float away and all that (maybe that's my problem – it has always been music with actual tunes that has done those kind of things for me). And, for example, when I listened to the radio documentary about poet Rosemary Tonks last year or so and they got to the bit about her withdrawing from the world of poetry the commentators (and poetry lovers) on the programme were all “how could she do that?” and “why would she do that?” and I was like “well, duh, why wouldn't you?” Her departure may have had something to do with religion but I could imagine many other reasons why a person might want to abandon poetry (or at least goings-on to do with it). For me (so far) the poetry world has never worked much magic (though I know that for others it is a wondrous place to be, likeminded souls and all that). In my case I've been to poetry festivals and felt time and time again like a fish out of water, a fish without a bicycle and pretty much a fish out on a slab with my head cut off (not so magical). And I know I miss Adrian Mitchell...

So will there be any poems as the posts roll out over the coming months? I dunno, I dunno and, again, I dunno. Sorry to be so adolescent.

And now back to the social unrest... and some music... borrowed from Dick Jones.

Anarchy in the UK?

2011-08-14T20:08:00.004+01:00

It's two weeks now since our return to these beautiful shores (and quite beautiful they are too - we walked on the beach near Montrose today so I know that for sure). Over the past week however, like most people, my thoughts have been on subjects other than beauty as I have written one and read many articles prompted by last week's events in English cities. Sometimes the articles I've found interesting have been in unlikely journals – say this one in the “Daily Telegraph” - but one of the best things I've encountered was this article by Boff Whalley of the band Chumbawamba that found a home in the “Independent”. In it Boff reclaims the word 'anarchy' from the tabloids and that is such an important job (reclaiming our lives and ideas from the filth-spreaders). In the comments to my last post here I found myself doing it too, I think, when I wrote the words “we've all been calling each other 'scum' for so long we can hardly remember how to do anything else”. I wrote that as a quick response to something and then afterwards realised how true it probably is. This is always better than writing something, publishing it and only then realising you've got it completely wrong - though of course in this instance I'd rather it wasn't true at all.

We listen to a fair bit of recent Chumbawamba in this house (they've been around for years but it's only with later albums like 2008's “The Boy Bands Have Won” that the three of us have become real fans) and this week we were trying out a couple of their other albums on Spotify. They always have good album titles (and good covers like the one at the top of this post) and on one album called “A Singsong and a Scrap” (2005) I heard this song that I'd never heard before. I really liked it and thought you might too. It's called “Fade away (I don't want to)”.

Much as I like this song it does make me sad too - mainly because I still can't hear phrases like 'fade away' without thinking about my Mum and her last weeks (back in Spring 2010). Still, she is not forgotten at least. Not at all, not at all.

x

Home again, home again

2011-08-11T09:01:00.005+01:00

This photo looted from the Hartlepool Mail online. Taken by Paul Duxfield.

So we are home... or at least back in our adopted home of Scotland (we've lived here since 2002 and we have a fair amount of Scottish links in our family too). And though it has rained almost continually since we returned we are still glad to be back, to see our friends, to be in our own house again, to walk our own dog. For now anyway.

And yet our other home, the country where we were both born and brought up, is in big trouble this week (if you haven't seen coverage of what's been happening in London and a few other English cities then you must have been having a no-news week or something). We don't really call England home much any more but it still is that, of course, in many ways. We still have family and many friends there, we still sound English, we still can't help but be interested in it. And London... big, crazy London... I lived there for a few years some quarter of a century ago (eek!) so I know a bit about London too.

Here are a few observations re the current English situation:

No-one ever really expected David Cameron to be any kind of good leader (even other Tories, I think) and indeed it seems he is keeping to his target. And I know the leader isn't everything... but it is meant to be something.

I suspect people who found Boris Johnson 'charming' and 'wacky' are feeling a bit different about that now.

The banks really ballsed up and people are still mad about that and they will be for a long time. We don't mind getting ripped off a bit (in fact we expect that) but we don't really want our faces rubbing in it over and over again. They did, as it were, write a blank cheque for daylight robbery.

Anyone who writes anything about all this explosion of violence and theft and uses the word 'surprise' has been avoiding some very obvious truths, it seems to me. Haven't they been in an English inner city area in the past, I dunno, fifty years? Haven't they been sworn at by a lawless (and loveless...) ten year old out there somewhere for heaven's sake? Haven't they seen all the gritty movies about alienation, poverty and feral youth and realised that our film makers are maybe taking those stories from real life..? But I guess some people don't ever see films like that... they can be really depressing (though not as depressing as getting your house burned down I'm guessing).

Also, for me, the London police cannot enjoy a good season of student-bashing and baiting and then expect too much sympathy when they get opponents with a bit more attitude and application (and that's without starting on the News International business). And yet I still feel sympathy, of course, for some of the police officers - for the ones who do do a good job and have to take the crap and the burning bottles anyway. It's never the worst arseholes who pay the price, unfortunately.

After a year when we have been bored to tears about the bloody royal family (and there was no escape from them overseas – there was possibly even more coverage of the stupid wedding in Canada and the US than here I think) the special ones have been conspicuously quiet during the recent riot season. Feel a bit embarrassed about all that wealth and all those lovely parties this week? Ever think you're part of the problem, princess? What nothing from you? Nothing?
(Added later, 19.8.11, there have since been a couple of royal visits to riot sites - Princes Charles and Harry, that I'm aware of so far. For balance I thought I should add this. Not that it makes me any less keen on the the end of our monarchy. Not at all).

And the great unsaid... London is just too big – too many people, too many poor areas contrasting so starkly with some of the most obscene wealth (all cities have that but London is kind of a leader in the field). When I lived there (so long ago) it was just after the '80s riots and the scars were deep and throbbing. This time there are so many young people with so much to prove that I don't see this clearing up any time soon. Some of them are genuinely angry and some are already fairly hardened criminals and more than happy for a chance to take a bonus or two. Some are too damaged to care, others are bored stupid and another bunch are, no doubt, just going along for the ride – but whatever their reasons or drives most of the hooded young out there will be having the time of their lives in some way or other this week (it may seem horrible to think that but if we ignore the pleasure element I think we will not understand what is happening). I've read a few times this week that it feels like war in parts of England just now (class war... sort of)... and it is a kind of war for sure. It seems that we cannot stop ourselves from making and getting into these war situations (both at home and away) because a lot of people knew this was coming and yet England, as a country, did nothing to stop it – in fact they brought, as the saying goes, it on (more for the rich, less for the poor, ra, ra, ra!). So, now it's here and right in our faces. And it's not pretty. Welcome home.

The route

2011-08-07T17:36:00.002+01:00

We have spent some of this, our first quiet Sunday at home, plotting the route that we took from February to July around the US and Canada. It is above (obviously) and we've also done a list with links to individual posts for anyone who might want to just go and visit a particular place of interest (that's all here).

x

Second post - looking and water

2011-08-03T22:03:00.006+01:00

So here's the first thing I offer you on this new blog. It's a painting by a Canadian artist called Alex Colville (born 1920) and it's called "To Prince Edward Island" (source - Library and Archives Canada). PEI is somewhere we didn't get to on our recent North American adventure as it happens but still I bought the card of this painting in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa back in February and when I was sorting through stuff this week it startled me somehow. For a start one thing I learned on our recent trip is that I LOVE boats and being on the water (we went on as many boats and ferries as we could whilst away). Plus we did a lot of looking during our six months on the road. I do like to look... in my own way.

I guess this is the kind of thing I'm going to be posting and looking at on this new, slower blog. I'm not even sure if there will be any poetry (of mine) at all this time. Come sail with me... see where we get to.

x

First post

2011-07-25T16:15:00.001+01:00

Ontario, July 2011

So this is the blog I'll be using when we get home after our lengthy travels. It will be a bit different to the old regular one, I think... it seemed like it was time for a change.

x