Are you English?
I used to claim that nationality was an accident not a definition.
Yes, but are you English?
When I first came to Australia I was surprised by the culturally institutionalised racism an answer to that question invoked.
It’s there in the jokes I didn’t understand:
Where does an English man keep his money?
Under the soap?
How can you tell a plane has come from England?
The whining continues after the engines are shut off.
It’s there in the assumption that any criticism however well informed or essential is “whinging” and the product of being English rather than being concerned or frustrated with an obvious problem.
I never liked that: My country right or wrong. Love it or leave it alone.
One of the things I loved about home was the willingness to be critical, to scrutinise; what I probably romanticise as a European habit of talk, of willingness to indulge in argument as currency of friendship. The things you cared about were the things you talked about. As Heaney says: what use the held line that cannot be assailed for reassurance?
Yes, but Are you English?
It’s the baggage that comes with “yes” I don’t like. To be a Welsh or Scottish nationalist is cool, radical, acceptable. To be an English nationalist is to feel the terrifying drag of the black hole of the national front, skinheads, racist bigotry, mindless intolerance: To find oneself in the company of the brutal, the stupid and the braindead.
Are you English?
So do you want me to apologise for what some of my ancestors did to yours? Well, do you mind if I point out that the English half of the family were rural poor, or in service, and if they ever went abroad to fight it was because they were press ganged or fleeing from poverty or rejoicing in the choice between the gallows and the uniform. If my ancestors fought yours they were flogged to it, probably shitting themselves in a steamy red tunic.
Infact, it’s quite probable mum’s ancestors were taking pot shots of one sort or another at dad’s, who were doing their best to carve, cut, shoot or flay them, not realising of course that one day their genes would be combined in me.
Are you English?
I’m not proud of British Imperialism. The thought of men flogged into battle so some rich twerp could get richer doesn’t appeal to me at all. And for the dwellers in the slums, for the industrial poor, for the rural workers, I don’t see much to sing about. The arrogant assumption that there was some type of “civilising mission” involved is even less appealing.
But show me a country that didn’t try and expand its borders? Show me a tribe that didn’t fight for extra space? Do Dutch people have these problems?
Are you English?
My Mum would say yes. But when I addressed a letter to her and put West Midlands, England on the envelope the man in the post office said there was no such address. Every time I give him a package and say: England..he says Uk as he puts it on the scales. According to the Concise Britannica England does not exist as a political or administrative unit. There ain’t no such place.
We all know that’s what “Utopia” means so “England” is a Utopian ideal…a place of the mind…but who’s mind?
I like the idea of being Mercian. A people of the marches, of the borders, liminal interstitial. Penda’s folk. The middle kingdom. The middle ground. But that’s always been the most dangerous place to stand.
(And then I suppose I had better feel guilty about Haethfelth, but I am free to resent those imperialistic buggers from Wessex who conquered my country????)
Are you English?
No, like the badge says: Made in Coventry.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Who else but?
One of my favourite Joyce stories, well known but worth repeating with a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of red:
And what have you been doing all day, asks a friend.
Writing a sentence says Joyce.
Ah, says the friend, looking for the 'Mot juste'.
No says Joyce, the words I had. It was their order I was working on.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
set questions on poetry based on months 1-6
A) General:
1) How often do you recognise your own life in the fictive texts you use: the poetry, fiction or literary theory? (Ignore historical fiction and fantasy).
B) Poetry
2) In all the poetry you've read recently, putting aside your admiration for the occasional pyrotechnics: how many poems changed anything for you? How many would you have felt that had you not read them you would have missed out on something important? (Do not refer to dead poets or at least only those dead in recent years. We do not want another essay on Wulf and Eadwacer)
3) How many did you want to copy out in longhand to the anthology you keep of poems you admire?
4) How many said something to you other than:"Look at me, admire my cleverness", like a guitar player doing scales faster than anyone else? For how many did you feel that if you were to step outside the rules of the game and ask:"so what?" there would be no answer?
A tiny Australian chapbook, Carson's collected, The Midnight Court, much of the Herbert complete, Kairos, Troy town? Enough for six months?
1) How often do you recognise your own life in the fictive texts you use: the poetry, fiction or literary theory? (Ignore historical fiction and fantasy).
B) Poetry
2) In all the poetry you've read recently, putting aside your admiration for the occasional pyrotechnics: how many poems changed anything for you? How many would you have felt that had you not read them you would have missed out on something important? (Do not refer to dead poets or at least only those dead in recent years. We do not want another essay on Wulf and Eadwacer)
3) How many did you want to copy out in longhand to the anthology you keep of poems you admire?
4) How many said something to you other than:"Look at me, admire my cleverness", like a guitar player doing scales faster than anyone else? For how many did you feel that if you were to step outside the rules of the game and ask:"so what?" there would be no answer?
A tiny Australian chapbook, Carson's collected, The Midnight Court, much of the Herbert complete, Kairos, Troy town? Enough for six months?
Thursday, June 11, 2009
I.M Martin Bochenek.
He deserves a better poem than this...and the end of it falls into banality.
Rambling Boy
I.M Martin Bochenek.
I remember why the full moon tastes of Pernod.
Birds on the Wire both, the day talked through,
and the long walk back to camp:
wine, stories, songs, so many stars.
My Rambling Boy, there’s always one more river.
One more wave. One more bend to turn
and then the long drive home, for talk and laughter.
If not for you or me, then for the ones who will inherit.
We are custodians of the song.
Apprenticed to this art of being
Human:
in a bar, Bourg St Moritz,
the full moon peering from behind the hill
to catch a juke box playing Leonard Cohen;
on a winter’s night in Birmingham
eating ice cream in the snow
drafting letters in my head
to match the ones you wrote;
on the long drive to Saint Anthony
while the thunder hammered bass lines for your truck.
It is my privilege and my pleasure
To have shared some time with you
I’ll take that with me, Rambling Boy.
And nothing, nothing, nothing
takes it away.
Rambling Boy
I.M Martin Bochenek.
I remember why the full moon tastes of Pernod.
Birds on the Wire both, the day talked through,
and the long walk back to camp:
wine, stories, songs, so many stars.
My Rambling Boy, there’s always one more river.
One more wave. One more bend to turn
and then the long drive home, for talk and laughter.
If not for you or me, then for the ones who will inherit.
We are custodians of the song.
Apprenticed to this art of being
Human:
in a bar, Bourg St Moritz,
the full moon peering from behind the hill
to catch a juke box playing Leonard Cohen;
on a winter’s night in Birmingham
eating ice cream in the snow
drafting letters in my head
to match the ones you wrote;
on the long drive to Saint Anthony
while the thunder hammered bass lines for your truck.
It is my privilege and my pleasure
To have shared some time with you
I’ll take that with me, Rambling Boy.
And nothing, nothing, nothing
takes it away.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
the truth about the goblins
Goblins are hard working and happiest when working. They themselves would deny this because work and happiness are not terms goblins understand. To be happy you have to be able to unhappy, and to work you have to have a state of non work and goblins have neither. They derive immense personal satisfaction from doing things and doing things exactly. Their only experience of discomfort is when they discover their work has been nergled.
In humans Goblin attention to detail would require a word that combined “fastidious” with “anal retentive”, “exuberant” and “merry”. To them Olympic timing is unbearably inaccurate. Atomic clocks are worse than useless as for them the femtosecond is too crude to be useful.
Goblin work gangs sing while putting up and taking down the scenery. They sing “The world is what you make it” with the foreman singing the line and the crew doing the nah nah nahnahnahnah nah chorus as a shanty.
Goblin singers can sing 124 perfectly divided steps between A and Bflat and regard with a certain disdain the human inability to hear more then three or four shades in a chromatic step. It is a source of goblin work gang pride that if there are twenty four members in the crew the nah nah nah chorus will have twenty four perfectly adjusted harmonies.
Goblins of course don’t play guitar; they have a legend of their greatest singer trying to learn. But Goblin precision was driven crazy by its attempt to tune the thing to goblin standards of accuracy, so they have dispensed with the experiment.
Goblin work gangs are occasionally infiltrated by Nergles. If the goblins are the mathematicians of the universe, the Nergles are the equivalent of a verbal virus. Nergles float freely at the edges of connotations, where they are happiest exploring what a human might describe as outrageously tenuous links between words.
They are both noun and verb, and so you can be Nergled by a Nergle.
Hating goblin accuracy with passion, Nergles are born subversives, mischievous, delightful, but rarely malicious, who love nothing better than to subvert whatever paradigm they can identify. If you’ve ever had the odd feeling that the thing you’ve seen every day for the past week has suddenly changed colour, or that the crack on the pavement went from the bottom left to the upper right and not the other way round, you’ve been nergled.
On the other hand, you cannot blame Nergles for lost keys or glasses. That is your own doddery memory at fault.
(Of course, the conspiracy theorist says there are no Nergles. Merely rogue goblins who have been driven mad by the endless precision of their race. No one dare interview the Nergles for their opinion. Rumour has that once upon a time, a very long time ago, a human spoke to a nergle. He was last heard saying:
Yes, G O’logical, harmed with prick and stammers, is evacuating my fallacious period, hoping to find dinner saucers. Back then I was on the royal road to the sub-constable, running from the veryneesy, anal trickcyclist, Siggy, who was arrested for a fraudulent slit. G.O, I says, says I, while nostalgicating alcofrolickally over a few leers in the pubelick louse:
q) Cans’t shell me eggs acterly what eventumanated?
a) Whilst imprisonyated by the sub-constabule, under section fifty spew, parachute 3 sub selection hive of the indecency fact, inside the sub-vestibule he did endite a tome, height, in the vernacular, “The interpolation of creams” exonerating his fraudamunt slit. And fleeced us all for gold.
q) Ah G.O me dear, have some cold cheese, slurp your grin bionic and tell to me in words spain and dimple of the subconstabo hoo buouillion. Where id ego?
a) Whack his folderol he diddled his dildo on the rocky road to bubbling, from galway’s bay to the swine dark tea
q) You can’t pig snore ham, canoe? But doing what, tell me tell me. Give me the goss.
A) well, as I’ve heard it said, he was hunting burning hairs all the way.
q) That and that alone?
a) Nah, he wanted to arrestimacate a deviant old fish Herman, Aengus his mythical moniker. Clammed to have cast his line and caught a dish, a silvery stout! When he laid his crutch upon the tyre, it burned into a simmering churl, with apple blossom round her fair, who flashed her bits at him and ran, into the dark king’s lair. singing “maids, when you’re young, never bed a cold ham
q) Anne Heeded?
a) No no, that was not her nam. Some think she was a fig meant for his imagined nation. He Followed up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen, with his blackthorn stick on the gravel walk, along the mountain road, past dowd’s 1-9, with his fol derriddle dum de.
(Sly G.O made junior crehan saddle the pony to see that O’neills had the key but not to Cooley’s.)
Q) Your mystical musical jigging code leaves me reeling… but tell me, tell me…by the lord Harry Doodlums…the porpoise he proposed, to himself if to no other, not his father or his mother or his sister or his brother, assuming off coarse, his parents had frequently fornicated, for the purpose of reproducing soft things for the purpling of holy iron land? Holey brother of rod! Spray for our dinners now and the flowers on our breath. Hymen. The desired, to him, termination of his endless vagabondation, of his up goings and down comings, on his hay down treaders across ridges and cwms, his wadings through streams, his weddings through corn, his windings through sheds and beds and streets and sheets, his lookings and his lostings, his hopings and gropings , his endless leavings and arrivings?
a) Merely to osculate. Repeatedly, when he finally came to hour down..smearing his post prandial greasy south, after a dinner of the good roast beef, against her ruby slips, and to fondle her digitals with his phone.
Jay son I’d not walk all the way to fork for that I’d be interpolating creams to be sure eye wood I’d want to see her very dinner saucers at the very least and fondle her blooms day after day.
Time said the barmanminder, time to go.
Yes, To G.O says I, Yes.
so yo can see, talking to the Nergles is a dangerous enterprise.
In humans Goblin attention to detail would require a word that combined “fastidious” with “anal retentive”, “exuberant” and “merry”. To them Olympic timing is unbearably inaccurate. Atomic clocks are worse than useless as for them the femtosecond is too crude to be useful.
Goblin work gangs sing while putting up and taking down the scenery. They sing “The world is what you make it” with the foreman singing the line and the crew doing the nah nah nahnahnahnah nah chorus as a shanty.
Goblin singers can sing 124 perfectly divided steps between A and Bflat and regard with a certain disdain the human inability to hear more then three or four shades in a chromatic step. It is a source of goblin work gang pride that if there are twenty four members in the crew the nah nah nah chorus will have twenty four perfectly adjusted harmonies.
Goblins of course don’t play guitar; they have a legend of their greatest singer trying to learn. But Goblin precision was driven crazy by its attempt to tune the thing to goblin standards of accuracy, so they have dispensed with the experiment.
Goblin work gangs are occasionally infiltrated by Nergles. If the goblins are the mathematicians of the universe, the Nergles are the equivalent of a verbal virus. Nergles float freely at the edges of connotations, where they are happiest exploring what a human might describe as outrageously tenuous links between words.
They are both noun and verb, and so you can be Nergled by a Nergle.
Hating goblin accuracy with passion, Nergles are born subversives, mischievous, delightful, but rarely malicious, who love nothing better than to subvert whatever paradigm they can identify. If you’ve ever had the odd feeling that the thing you’ve seen every day for the past week has suddenly changed colour, or that the crack on the pavement went from the bottom left to the upper right and not the other way round, you’ve been nergled.
On the other hand, you cannot blame Nergles for lost keys or glasses. That is your own doddery memory at fault.
(Of course, the conspiracy theorist says there are no Nergles. Merely rogue goblins who have been driven mad by the endless precision of their race. No one dare interview the Nergles for their opinion. Rumour has that once upon a time, a very long time ago, a human spoke to a nergle. He was last heard saying:
Yes, G O’logical, harmed with prick and stammers, is evacuating my fallacious period, hoping to find dinner saucers. Back then I was on the royal road to the sub-constable, running from the veryneesy, anal trickcyclist, Siggy, who was arrested for a fraudulent slit. G.O, I says, says I, while nostalgicating alcofrolickally over a few leers in the pubelick louse:
q) Cans’t shell me eggs acterly what eventumanated?
a) Whilst imprisonyated by the sub-constabule, under section fifty spew, parachute 3 sub selection hive of the indecency fact, inside the sub-vestibule he did endite a tome, height, in the vernacular, “The interpolation of creams” exonerating his fraudamunt slit. And fleeced us all for gold.
q) Ah G.O me dear, have some cold cheese, slurp your grin bionic and tell to me in words spain and dimple of the subconstabo hoo buouillion. Where id ego?
a) Whack his folderol he diddled his dildo on the rocky road to bubbling, from galway’s bay to the swine dark tea
q) You can’t pig snore ham, canoe? But doing what, tell me tell me. Give me the goss.
A) well, as I’ve heard it said, he was hunting burning hairs all the way.
q) That and that alone?
a) Nah, he wanted to arrestimacate a deviant old fish Herman, Aengus his mythical moniker. Clammed to have cast his line and caught a dish, a silvery stout! When he laid his crutch upon the tyre, it burned into a simmering churl, with apple blossom round her fair, who flashed her bits at him and ran, into the dark king’s lair. singing “maids, when you’re young, never bed a cold ham
q) Anne Heeded?
a) No no, that was not her nam. Some think she was a fig meant for his imagined nation. He Followed up the airy mountain and down the rushy glen, with his blackthorn stick on the gravel walk, along the mountain road, past dowd’s 1-9, with his fol derriddle dum de.
(Sly G.O made junior crehan saddle the pony to see that O’neills had the key but not to Cooley’s.)
Q) Your mystical musical jigging code leaves me reeling… but tell me, tell me…by the lord Harry Doodlums…the porpoise he proposed, to himself if to no other, not his father or his mother or his sister or his brother, assuming off coarse, his parents had frequently fornicated, for the purpose of reproducing soft things for the purpling of holy iron land? Holey brother of rod! Spray for our dinners now and the flowers on our breath. Hymen. The desired, to him, termination of his endless vagabondation, of his up goings and down comings, on his hay down treaders across ridges and cwms, his wadings through streams, his weddings through corn, his windings through sheds and beds and streets and sheets, his lookings and his lostings, his hopings and gropings , his endless leavings and arrivings?
a) Merely to osculate. Repeatedly, when he finally came to hour down..smearing his post prandial greasy south, after a dinner of the good roast beef, against her ruby slips, and to fondle her digitals with his phone.
Jay son I’d not walk all the way to fork for that I’d be interpolating creams to be sure eye wood I’d want to see her very dinner saucers at the very least and fondle her blooms day after day.
Time said the barmanminder, time to go.
Yes, To G.O says I, Yes.
so yo can see, talking to the Nergles is a dangerous enterprise.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Me and the letterbox designers
At home the mail arrived in an acoustic series: the gate, postie’s footsteps, then the flap, the fall, the soft sound of displaced air, the flap clicking shut again and the delightful sound of mail hitting the mat…
Here there is only the sound of the postie’s bike. For here we live in the land of the Mail Box.
Mail boxes fascinate me. Because once you get over the idea that there are some that are obviously home made, most are manufactured.
And that means there are people who not only make them for a living, but there must be, somewhere, someone who designs them. And probably runs customer surveys to test the waters about shape and colour and size.
Imagine; a science of mailbox design. A culture of designers. There must be famous mavericks, and outstanding practitioners talked about with hushed reverence or envy whenever two MBD gather. There must be radical designs and clichéd designs, designs that push the envelope so to speak: impractical ones, safe ones, offensive ones…a whole aesthetic of serious concerns wrapped in contingent values for a small group of dedicated professionals whose work and care might appear slightly lunatic to the outside world if it ever stopped to bother about them.
When was the last time you heard a mailbox designer interviewed about his or her views on politics, the economy, the state of the swine flu? Do they have conferences with key note speakers? Do they discuss the implications of new technologies and Globalization. Do they demonize their enemies; fear email and txt messages? Look with evil longing at the computer and imagine sticking one of their uprights though its smug shiney email carrying screen
When they go at home at night what do they talk about to their partners? How did they meet them in the first place, what strange opening lines were used to instigate conversations at parties?
Why I have never talked to one? Or met one? Where do they hide?
And what do they dream about? Letterboxes with no angles. No lines curved straight or otherwise…the impossible letter box with no entry and no exit which denies function but retains form? The letter box that creates its own mail? Do they dream of being post, mailed in a box, waiting for the hand of God to read their destinations and send them on their way?
I don’t ask these questions because sometimes Letterbox design seems far more mainstream than the things I do…..but because someone should speculate about them.
Here there is only the sound of the postie’s bike. For here we live in the land of the Mail Box.
Mail boxes fascinate me. Because once you get over the idea that there are some that are obviously home made, most are manufactured.
And that means there are people who not only make them for a living, but there must be, somewhere, someone who designs them. And probably runs customer surveys to test the waters about shape and colour and size.
Imagine; a science of mailbox design. A culture of designers. There must be famous mavericks, and outstanding practitioners talked about with hushed reverence or envy whenever two MBD gather. There must be radical designs and clichéd designs, designs that push the envelope so to speak: impractical ones, safe ones, offensive ones…a whole aesthetic of serious concerns wrapped in contingent values for a small group of dedicated professionals whose work and care might appear slightly lunatic to the outside world if it ever stopped to bother about them.
When was the last time you heard a mailbox designer interviewed about his or her views on politics, the economy, the state of the swine flu? Do they have conferences with key note speakers? Do they discuss the implications of new technologies and Globalization. Do they demonize their enemies; fear email and txt messages? Look with evil longing at the computer and imagine sticking one of their uprights though its smug shiney email carrying screen
When they go at home at night what do they talk about to their partners? How did they meet them in the first place, what strange opening lines were used to instigate conversations at parties?
Why I have never talked to one? Or met one? Where do they hide?
And what do they dream about? Letterboxes with no angles. No lines curved straight or otherwise…the impossible letter box with no entry and no exit which denies function but retains form? The letter box that creates its own mail? Do they dream of being post, mailed in a box, waiting for the hand of God to read their destinations and send them on their way?
I don’t ask these questions because sometimes Letterbox design seems far more mainstream than the things I do…..but because someone should speculate about them.
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