more spam, sorry

What can I say. The Muses love me.

skulk gyrate eureka baboon!
umpire crake fairy.

a short post about Jewish shouting

Hey. My friend James Marcus in New York has hit the big time! Woohoo!*

Some people have just got it. This precis from Moby Lives - the blog of Melville House Publishing in NYC – gives you the full flava:

The reviews are in. James Marcus’ dance track featuring the “Jewish shouting” of Philip Roth, which debuted last Thursday on MobyLives, is a hit, not to mention a viral sensation. While the New York Times said it “won’t be hitting the Top 40 chart any time soon,” they added that it’s already “playing in perpetuity at the hippest dance club our college-aged selves could imagine.” MediaBistro predicted that it’s “destined to be the ringtone of choice among hip literary types this summer.” (Though Gawker corrects this post, reminding us that “there are no ‘hip literary types.’ “) While in The Guardian, critic Alison Flood admits that she dreams of “getting New York’s clubbers to shake their stuff to a 76-year-old novelist’s yodelling.”

Click on their link, or here, to download the sound file. It’s the ring tone de nos j0urs! I’m going to get it. It’s the closest I’m ever likely to get to Philip Roth: my mate’s tape recorder.

Here’s James’ account of the historic moment:

And what about Ernest Lehman’s version of Portnoy’s Complaint, which brought back Richard Benjamin for a second turn as the author’s cinematic proxy? “Unspeakable,” Roth declares. “It’s a movie about shouting. Jewish shouting.” (He proceeds to give a brief, comical example, which strikes me as a specimen of literary history, like Thoreau demonstrating how to peel the bark off a birch tree.)

As for James himself? I think he’s a pretty hip literary type. But then, I would say that. And he’s a very funny writer. All he needs is someone to publish his novel.

* This exclamation comes from an old Blur song, and just goes to show you, post-Glasto, how totally up with it all, and down with it all, I really am. Oh yeah baby. I’m thinking of making a ringtone where I remix TS Eliot to sound like a pirate. Or Damon Albarn.

and then there’s taking things too seriously

What is it with these writers? All of a sudden there’s a vat of vitriol spilled in the public square, and a load of otherwise quite successful people thrashing around in it when they get a review they don’t like.

Is it the heat?

Alain de Botton may be Mr Brainy, Mr Optimism, our chirpiest Philosopher of Now, but there’s one element of Life Today that he seems fatally to have failed to grasp (aside from the fact that vitriol is a corrosive acid), and that’s the internet.

“I will hate you until the day I die.” This is what he wrote to a reviewer who had said mean things  about his book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, in the New York Times. I admit I haven’t read the book, but Caleb Crain’s review mainly addresses the questions I was asking myself after I read an extract in the paper. They related to the seemliness of a guy who has only ever really done what he wants to do, the scion of a Swiss banking family, talking to ordinary people about finding meaning in their jobs.

Most of the piece is about Crain’s perceptions of de Botton’s attitudes towards the people he writes about. Giving him credit, Crain never even mentions de Botton’s background – though it might seem relevant to the subject of the book. He identifies an inherent contradiction in de Botton’s idea that people should find interest and meaning in their work, and – faced with how stupendously random and banal that work actually is – his alarm when he finds that they already have. Crain seems to think it’s not really fair for someone who has never had to do it to sneer at other people for getting interested in something boring, and there are a couple of rather telling quotes about class consciousness. One in particular disparages a career counsellor’s home office for having a smell of cabbage in it. For all the world as if de Botton were Patrick Hamilton.*

But the thing is, without compromising their human dignity, people are quite capable of getting very interested indeed in very inconsequential – and even mind-numbingly boring – things, because that behaviour is what will get them a place to live, something to eat, maybe a holiday, maybe a better life for their kids.

Unlike Alain de Botton, if they get a negative appraisal for their pains they can’t have a complete public hissy fit, unless they also want to be without the next month’s mortgage money. Most of us just have to suck it up and deal with it professionally.

So de Botton has written this spiteful, nasty thing to this reviewer, and he is now embarrassed – not because he wrote it, but because we know about it! He told the Telegraph: “It was a private communication to his website, to him as a blogger. It’s appalling that it seems that I’m telling the world.”

By the way, he wrote it in the comments thread.

In other news, you have to wonder if he’s read either Polly Toynbee or Barbara Ehrenreich. Or Studs Terkel. Terkel would never have remarked on the smell of someone’s dinner.

Oh, and I have now read the deliciousness that is Caleb Crain’s blog thread, so I can tell you more of what de Botton said. It’s as if he’d been hanging around with Giles Coren:

“I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

Eh!! Now, another commenter on that thread asks: “It’s interesting, however, how christian the blogosphere basically is about bad reviews: people like randall (see above) basically feel that authors should turn the other cheek and not reply. I wonder why that should be, in an interactive age?”

The answer would appear to be self-evident.

Schadenfreude? I won’t say a thing. It’s just not cricket.

 

*Okay, that is my own editorialising. It’s such an English trope, though, for all he’s Swiss: the isn’t-it-sordid sniff.

while we were sleeping: July 1, 2009

When words are all we have

And here’s another guy who’s brave. Braver than us? He does this every night.

But wait. I will also give you, below, the opening paragraph of an article in the new issue of Poetry (Chicago). Flarf. I think that technically my poem Richard Price is flarf. I’m trying to get to grips with the definition of this thing the Americans seem to taken by, and whether I think it sounds like it has any meaning. I realise that meaning is supposed to be a bit recherché nowadays, in its primary mode at any rate, but here is the paragraph:

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry. Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

Fun; cute; funny; engaging; it makes poetry sound fun! And the author is kind of cute! And it’s even sort of true, when you think about it, applying it to some kinds of experience. Or is it ways of experiencing? Isn’t this kind of talk sort of… once-removed? Doesn’t it rely almost totally on bathos for its effects? Rendering it the same, in terms of how its parts move, as the early Woody Allen?

But what if something were really – you know – important? What if you wanted depth? What if it were urgent? What if the whole point of your linguistic endeavour was to immerse yourself and your readers in the primary meaning of its subject? What if you wanted to shout from the rooftops?

I ask all this only because there seem to be camps, and they seem split, and people are talking about this as a definition of what it is to be contemporary in one’s poetic practice. Now, I love kitsch. I find the above really engaging and fun. And, as I said, I think I have unwittingly written flarf. But within that, there is a time for the velvet Elvis painting, and there is a time for direct observation.

Don’t you think this line of nothing’s-that-vital reasoning, feel-good as it is, if you applied it as a tenet would ultimately cheapen – well – life? and our miraculous ability to write about it?

daily caudle nitwit and the Fusty twins

I swear this is really my completely unedited spam from today, line breaks and all. There is artistry at work.

I very much admire the depth of its wit, exemplified in its subtle use of word repetition to both break down, and enhance, the meanings of several otherwise unremarkable words. This technique is particularly resonant to me so soon after reading, as I was last week, Cyril Connolly’s assessment of Gertrude Stein and her influence on Hemingway, as a reaction against the over-finessed aestheticism of Strachey. What we see below is a counter-method built on the use of short, seemingly mundane yet in fact increasingly recherché, words, operating on a flatline of simplicity – but in reality quite taxing.

I think the finest line here is the engimatic “awhile fusty fusty;” this seems to anchor the whole piece, both structurally and morally, from its modest position somewhere in the middle. But the final line is absolutely riveting, too; its caustic reference to both recent media news and the weather (always an issue during Wimbledon) contains within it a cunning gender-political hint that culminates in what seems to be a veiled allusion to the power of the printed word over the (literal) fabric of our lives. (Though this critic is at a loss to explain the basketball reference in the final line; the stark signifier of masculinity, and to a completely different sport, seems a bit transgressive in this context, if not actually anarchic.)

This is the work of the reclusive and little-known American spam poet Tufty Muldoon, döppelgänger to the whiskery English variety performer of the same name, but I really want to borrow its structure and write a companion piece – a sort of mirroring response – for my next book. It would be all my own work… The poet vanished without a trace in July 2005 in the middle of the Mojave desert. All that was found of him was his car, embedded in a sand dune, the keys fusty but still dangling from the ignition, and a thesaurus with shredded pages on the front passenger-side seat. It is a clue to the secret method underlying his supposed gospel of randomness. He was 36 – a coincidence that makes the date of the discovery of this poem – the thirtieth of the sixth – truly remarkable.

daily caudle nitwit.
viol cloudy.
loath gamin grama.
boo boo.
scurfy begone giber tux?
swear fibril giber gamin.
gee tux tatter radish.
embody shirt embody shandy?
cloudy dyeing awhile taxing!
lance tux unlay.
handy fusty.
slush zither swan loft!
swan droll.
guslar resole hick tyke?
fancy gamin.
zibet plague unison swear?
testae reach prize nitwit?
grama cloudy cloudy spacer?
awhile blest cosset liaise!
dee coatee infix oldage!
slush sung unison bubs!
lance lieu nature.
biting racer pouch resole?
bipod graver.
plague unison spot spacer!
spot fusion.
swear scurfy plague.
spin awhile cosset.
egress primer cancan fibril.
ionic gag swan career!
swear droll forty bubs!
lance fibril guslar.
wade taxing scurfy.
pleach egress blest cloudy?
tatter ebon gag tut?
zibet dee basher plague?
ionic zibet.
awhile lieu.
loft handy handy giber?
lieu zither waffle.
hick shandy ebon treaty!
devise liaise gamin tyke.
gee lactic lactic bipod?
nature anger.
devise forty nature cadre.
treaty gelt loath testae?
bubs egress scurfy.
cosset testae tatter grama!
awhile fusty fusty.
ionic shirt lance spin?
testae gag spacer.
sadist enrobe spin fancy?
ionic zither resole boo?
racer slush zither.
plague anger tatter bias?
creasy caudle tux spacer?
boo slush devise nab?
graver tux hick prize!
withal ionic enrobe coatee?
plague cadre egress radish.
creasy sadist.
sadist awhile daily bias?
biting nature handy cosset?
lieu infix ionic anger.
gelt reach pouch sadist.
career embody tut waffle.
hick caudle.
graver unison nature.
guilt primer zither tyke.
cosset wade nature oldage!
nitwit unison taxing scurfy!
wade ahull coatee withal.
awhile caudle treaty slush.
daily boo.
dyeing dee devise.
radish blest egress slush!
pleach racer grama.
awhile lactic guslar begone.
withal boo graver dee!
guslar shandy.
treaty fancy infix guile!
ahull cloudy resole sadist!
swear resole dyeing cosset!
tux caudle dee swan!
dyeing forty ebon ionic?
resole zither bubs viol.
caudle caudle tatter.
radish tatter swan shandy?
nature withal giber liaise!
begone scurfy lance basher.
cosset dee swear wade!
sleek fancy tone.
bipod devise shirt infix?
lance withal plague lieu!
primer zibet pleach oldage?
wade wilt swear daily!

“some mover,” part II

So, apparently as well as Michael Jackson, a reader informs me that Fred Astaire also admired our slithery Scientologist friend. I have a whole line of kitsch reasons to love John Travolta: his decommissioned Qantas airliner, for a start; I saw photographs of how they redecorated it inside, absolutely delightful, in wall-&-ceiling leopard-print… and when he took his family on their round-the-world flight, the way his wife beamingly told the press all she needed to pack was bikinis? Charming!

And very sad about his boy.

But for now, this is what I have promised. This clip illustrates both Travolta’s relation to, and the immense achievement of, Michael Jackson. If you get my drift.

And yes, this is a poetry blog. It’s called the Poetry of Life.

i gotback home

** NEWSFLASH**

Rapid proliferation of posts! (Leading up to tonight’s rapid proliferation of poets, perhaps.)

Yesterday I joined – or at least passed on the news of – the City Daily Photo blog action for their missing blogger in Tehran, Amir of TehranLive.org. He had gone missing, arrested, since June 17th. I felt personally connected to this one, in that weird global way we have now, because my wonderful internet friend Laurie Allee is in that network. And I’ve been using Tehran Live.org a lot in recent weeks so I felt invested in the risks the blogger had taken.

Well guess what! Babooshka, the Isle of Man member of the network, comments on my post to say that Amir was freed YESTERDAY and is now with his family. And even more excitingly, here is Amir, telling us himself:

I gotback home.
I am Amir…
I am FREE.

Thank you All friends around the world for your prayers, activities and helps. LOVE you ALL.

Well, as Andrew Sullivan keeps telling us: know hope. The photographs of yesterday’s protests looked like a war zone, which is what it is. But I’m posting up that picture I loved, after all.

Now for the other hundreds and hundreds… where to start…

passing the baton

Apparently they did meet; why did that surprise me?

I heard a really sweet anecdote the other day. It was told me by a Young Person who got it from Michael Jackson’s 1988 autobiography, Moonwalk (currently £50 on Amazon: “From start to finish i could not put this book down. Each page had it’s own little tale to tell”).

Apparently Fred Astaire was at Motown 25 – famous, for those of you who don’t know, for being the scene of the world’s first-ever Moonwalk. After the historic show, Fred stopped Michael, shook him by the hand and said, “Hey, you’re some mover!” Drawing his fingers in a backwards walking motion on MJ’s palm.

And by the way, here is a long and intensely interesting article; via Andrew Sullivan.

the power of old people

I’ve always secretly looked forward to being able to do that stuff. Well, maybe not so secret.

where is our blogger?

My internet friend Laurie Allee in California is part of a worldwide network of photobloggers. At City Daily Photo, they each post up a picture taken in their city – well, daily. I love Laurie’s colour-drenched photographs of South Pasadena; she has a great eye for some of the things I like to look at – architecture, anachronistic detail and surprising mise-en-scene – as well as composition and light. She writes about being part of this network: “I’ve had the privilege of being part of a huge neighborhood that spans not just city blocks but entire oceans and continents. This experience has been invaluable to me…”

Well, today Laurie has more serious things on her mind than showing us her local neighbourhood. There is big trouble in her blog neighbourhood:

One of my fellow bloggers has been missing in Iran since June 17th. He is believed to be in prison after taking part in the post-election protests. His photographs of Tehran in the days immediately following the election offered the world a view of the madness — one that Western journalists were banned from capturing. His bravery in the face of such grave danger has been an inspiration.

You’ve seen the pictures taken by her missing blog-companion: he was running the site TehranLive.org, which posted up some of the best pictures of the early days of the uprising. They were everywhere, so you – whoever you are – are the direct beneficiary of his work. The problem is that he has not posted since June 17th. Four days earlier, in addition to an enormous number of now-iconic images, he had posted a quiet little postscript:

P.S 1: Thank you so much for warm and kind comments from arround the world. Unfortunately i can’t answer all comments and kindness, but i want all people support us in Iran to reach the right of Iranian people.
Thank you all again.

P.S 2: This website is banned in Iran by goverment since 3 hours ago.

I’d love to have used on of Amir’s pictures in this post, but the news that the regime is now using specific photographs of the protests to encourage ordinary people to identify protesters they know makes me not want to make them any more prevalent for now. Silly of me, I know: they’ve got their own pictures. And there is a photograph of a girl that I’ve actually had on my desktop for a week, wanting to hang it on the walls of Baroque. She is so beautiful, so sweet, so almost humorous in her hopefulness, and knowing it. But the time never seemed right, because the hope gave way to that terrible urgency and horror. So instead, the picture above comes from the blog Fresh Eyes on London. It was taken outside the Iranian embassy on Friday, and has a direct bearing on the reason for this post. I think it’s also absolutely lovely.