Would have been down at the Booker tonight to celebrate or console Linda (celebrate whatever the result, I say), or rather at Groucho's afterwards, but a cold, plus a late 6.30 finish to my last class, meant arriving in London at about 10.00, a quick overnight stay before zooming back for a PhD annual review in the current state of exhaustion... Linda must forgive me. She will get a big bunch of flowers either way. Big and bigger.
C has just finished a picture for my 2009 book, The Burning of the Books and Other Poems. Looks very good. Books are, not to put too fine a point on it, burning. Soon there will be so much of me in book form there won't be any room for anyone else on the shelves of good bookshops. I shall rule in supreme, indeed splendid, isolation. I shall read myself, review myself, buy myself, remainder myself, immolate and bury myself. Farewell self.
Except for Cambridge University Library, who are putting on a show of my various literary extrusions and contusions. John W of the University Library has just sent me a list of exhibits with notes. The exhibition goes up on Thursday and opens on Friday. I can now make an exhibition of myself. Or, rather, the Library can. If anyone is interested there is a letter there from John Betjeman.'Come friendly bombs and fall on George...' Nobody, but nobody, could be famouser than that. I wear dark glasses even when looking in the bathroom mirror. I prefer to remain anonymous to myself.
Next week I'm off to solve the Middle East crisis. That's after I have loaned the Bank of England a few billion. They generally pay.
5 comments:
Dear mister Szirtes
Please can you fix it for me to become more famous than John B, but less famous than Ian MacMillan and for my first book
Ovid Yeats - Love Poems by Desmond Swords, to outsell the current 67% gaffer whose full throated whistle belting across the global lough, has been dominating the shelves since the late sixties, when s/he nicked my embryonic talent during a very traumatic birthing one's mama had delivering me at our domestic residence, in a bothy on the bog-plain of west lancs, whilst planting spuds for the Achill Mastersons, the Bohola Swords and English's and the Macroom branch of the ancient Deasmhuman Desmond's of south munster, where 800,000 acres where misappropriated from one's forebears in an appallingly insensitive display by s/he who must remain nameless, and as a direct result of which occassions me to write to you, the most famous person on the planet and whom i wish to serve as a loyal log roller and personal hod-carrier in residence donkeying for the quality GS brand of bespoke poetries it has been my very honoured privilege to read and learn from over the course of our very remote skate on the rink of bardic whoofs, where we share the very same S initial as our surnames, and only two letters apart in our forenames, Def, G, itself spookily, just two glyphs behind J, Def Jam poetry. it's nailed on, a sign from the alpha bet that
...if possible, please can you fix it for us to also gain possession - by fair means or fowl - of the Muldoon intelligence, the Don's moody brooding pull of God's gift Ms Ayres and mister MacMillan currently share as Englands premier intellectual custodian duo of skaldic knowing and the eloquence of TS himself, the recently relabeled Irish-Candian Salmon poet who has shared giggle time wiv uz online@work thinking deeply about all sorts of very pertinent issues, per se vis a vis what is central to our cause of total fame-domination at any price, including the selling of one's granny's ghost to an unamed tall man in a beret speaking Spanglish and wearing spandex last night in Crane's after the Ó Bhéal do in Cork where practicing doctor and poet Aideen Henry read and i recorded in my capacity as a wandering bore pathetically trying to ingratiate myself to those clearly more well known than i, for the purpose of being a fairly stable drinker just wanting to get on the shelf for the purpose of feeling good about you, me, Aideen and all those one hopes to serve as a transparently daft person.
(i have left the usual untraceable ten digit amount in a plain 4X6 ft manilla buffed envelope at the usual drop-zone in the underground cash-for-laughs bunker on Hampstead Heath)
ever yrs
currently unknown in a Kilmainham bedsit.
Please can you fix it for me to become more famous than John B, but less famous than Ian MacMillan and for my first book..
Consider it fixed, Desmond.
...including the selling of one's granny's ghost to an unamed tall man in a beret speaking Spanglish and wearing spandex last night in Crane's after the Ó Bhéal do in Cork...
Not a good time to be selling granny's ghosts what with the market being so low. But it seem to be recovering. There may be a real killing to be made out of grannies.
Dear Background Artist, I can fix it for you to have a copy of your book go up in flames outside Vienna University for a few spondulicks.
Send TWO signed copies, one bearing your moniker. Enclose 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. in Reichmarks or failing that the sum of €5 (the small pale blue one).
Looking at self in the mirror via dark glasses is rather a giveaway for mixing your drinks the last evening.
But yes, flowers...
Flowers sent, Snoop. Hope they have arrived OK. And a little chocolate too...
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