Sunday Night is...

Ann Miller, Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra...



from On the Town. High-spirits. Ann Miller is ace. Note the Victor Mature look-alike prehistoric man.

One day I will write a deeply theoretical essay on the use of dinosaur and skeleton imagery (Bringing up Baby, Jurassic Park) in Hollywood.

On the other hand...

Horizon Review and the future of poetry

From Salt, edited by Jane Holland comes the first issue of Horizon Review. A proper e-magazine with articles, reviews, stories and poems. Solid. It could almost be made of paper! And the contents are good. It will go in the left-hand links bar from now on.

I suspect e-publishing will become an ever more important part of writers' lives - particularly poets' lives. It is not commercial and is therefore under less pressure to be big-name populist. The ideal will remain to publish and be reviewed in book form, but reputations can be built in this more fluid but still selective environment.

In so far as Salt is concerned - like Bloodaxe and Carcanet before (and still) - it is a force for good in that it prises poetry from the grip of those who regard themselves as its narrow brotherhood of custodians. Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery at Salt have realised that the prising can take place on two levels - the free domain of the web that won't pay you directly for your labour, and the book domain where the difference in price between a handsomely produced object and a cheap paperback is not so great as to put off those who actually think of buying poetry in book form.

On the one hand, free floating text as idea and song, on the other the tactile beauty of the solidly crafted book.

People, particularly institutional and institutionally-funded people, whose chief concern is an accountably-representative ledger of bums on seats, worry about the future of poetry. I have never ever worried about an activity so deeply inscribed in human instinct, intuition, intelligence, desire, need and practice. Specific publishers, specific books, specific magazines come and go as they have always done but they are not poetry.

True poetry is always underground, always the samizdat-bloodstream bubbling up through language. Publishers, magazines, media slots are the temporal vehicles through which poetry is disseminated. I want them all to survive and prosper, of course, and, if they are intelligent and open-minded, they will - for as long as their cycle of energy lasts.

Credo for a sunny Sunday morning.

A little more Márai

More passages from Márai's The Real Thing or Real... still haven't decided on a title...


I slept deeply that night. I was like a burned-out element. The current runs through something and burns the resistance away. The soul darkens. When I woke and went into the garden – it was early spring and the mornings were warm with a touch of the sirocco so some days I had breakfast set in the garden – my husband had already gone. I breakfasted alone, sipping bitter tea, not feeling hungry.

There were newspapers lying on the table. For lack of anything else to do I read one of the headlines. A small state had just disappeared off the map. I tried to imagine how the people in that foreign country might feel, waking up at dawn to discover that their lives, their customs, everything they believed or had sworn by, had disappeared from one day to the next, had ceased to matter, and that they were now on the threshold of something entirely new – maybe better, maybe worse, but something that at any rate was utterly different from the country they knew, which might just as well have sunk beneath the waves, and that was where they had to live thenceforth, under entirely new conditions, underwater… I thought about it. And also about myself and what I wanted...

...Do you know the feeling you get when you are beyond pain and despair, beyond the most tragic events, and suddenly become very sober, indifferent, almost cheerful? For example when the person you loved best is being buried, and you suddenly remember that you have left the refrigerator door open back home and the dog is probably eating the cold meat you had saved for the wake?.. And the very moment when everyone is singing and standing around the coffin, you start arranging things, whispering, as calm as you like, something about the refrigerator?... Because we are quite capable of that, we live between such infinitely divided shores, in a world of such vast distances. I sat in the sunlight and it was as if I were contemplating someone else’s bad luck, thinking quite coldly and rationally about all that had happened...


Tomorrow I am reading and talking at a small place near Stoke-by-Nailand in Suffolk...

CSI

Stairs leading down to scene of crime.


No, you see, officer, I finally lost it while I was watching a television programme, Behind Closed Doors, about the insides of buildings you rarely get to see. I like architecture, officer. I can tell a Tuscan from a Doric, what is more I can tell a Corinthian from a Composite. I am a semi-educated man of good character. But I could tell something was wrong when a crack appeared in my forehead and my underpants caught fire. Normal middle-aged grumpiness, you think? But I murdered him, officer, that's the difference. The body? I'll tell you where it is in a moment.

There is a kind of disease suffered only by presenters on television, a version of St Vitus dance. They are seized by it the moment they appear. It is like convulsions, officer, but it goes with a voice. The hands make jerky movements, the chest heaves forward, the whole body buckles. The head lurches towards camera and the mouth opens to such a grotesque extent that you can see the tonsils dancing somewhere at the back of the throat. That is disturbing enough for persons of delicate sensibility such as myself. But then the voice. It cannot speak a sentence without exploding at least twice, with words like FANTASTIC! STUPENDOUS! JUST LOOK AT THAT! BRILLIANT! No, it doesn't matter what order the words come out or what the subject is. It is an earnest of enthusiasm.

The young man - Charlie Luxton I think his name was, though it hardly matters now - wore a sky blue pullover that changed into a red pullover then into a yellow pullover. I thought I recognised him from CRACKERJACK! but realised I had murdered the whole cast of that programme several years ago. First he enthused about the inside of a Dollis Hill bunker. He was in paroxysms about something. Was it the damp? The dark? Let it pass, I thought. Down, thou climbing sorrow, hysterico passio, down!

Next he was in the Queensway Tunnel under the Mersey, rapturous about the extraction system, about wheels going round (I believe that is the general character of wheels, officer) and pistons pumping (they do, in fact, pump).

EXTRAORDINARY! THREE MILLION QUINQUAGEMS PER MICROSECOND! REMARKABLE!

From there he proceeded to a Thirties building, also about some mechanical business. It's all becoming a fog, officer. I'll spare you the details.

But what did for me was the Joseph Bazalgette building, the sewage treatment plant at Crossness in London. Magnificent, of course. I say it myself. A Victorian engine room in full technicolour, pumping away at the heart of empire, processing shit at the time of cholera and the great stink. It was a genuine item of steam punk, a cross between The Great Western, a Byzantine temple and a perfectly upholstered Gentlemen's Club. It had been tenderly restored. It was in full working order. A man like Mr Luxton shouldn't have been let loose in it. He was not a fit person.

If he had been delirious so far he was now utterly transfigured. St Vitus possessed him completely. The trouble with this form of possession, from my point of view, is that there is something quite exceptional to look at in the background but there is an afflicted idiot in front of it, constantly dancing, enthusing and bellowing, so you see nothing, hear nothing, except him.

Mr Luxton was allowed to pull a string that looked remarkably like the flush of an old fashioned toilet. A simple thing. On pulling it, a faint whistling sound was heard. I think it was this that finally unhinged him, as he did me. EXTRAORDINARY! he cried. UNSURPASSABLE! BLERIOT! STOPGAP!! CRUMHORN!!!

From there his attention passed to the number of flywheels, the number of stairs, and, lastly, to the sheer gallonage of excrement the thing could handle at one go.

WONDERFUL! STUPENDOUS!! BLOCKBUSTER!! STRAPPADO!!! TERRAPIN!!!! he exploded. THINK OF ALL THE TOILETS FLUSHING!!! MILLIONS OF THEM!!! ALL HERE!!!!!.

I did.

It was at this point I followed him down the stairs into - if you'll pardon the expression - the bowels of the building, my brow cracked wide open, my lower body wreathed in flames.

I killed him, I confess. I think I beat him to a pulp. I have a vague memory of flushing him away. That is where you will find him, officer, though, possibly, not in one piece.

I'll go quietly now. Here are the underpants. You may need them as evidence.

Sarah Palin - The Norfolk Connection

Never mind the false scandals. Here is a real one. According to the Norwich Evening News...

Historians have today claimed that presidential race hopeful Sarah Palin has family links to Norwich.

The vice-presidential candidate's great, great, great, great, great grandfather Robert Gower was baptised in our fine city back in 1723, according to researchers.

I mean, how great is that!

But Norfolk won't be voting for her.

Dr Ian Gibson, Labour MP for Norwich North today expressed surprise at the news. He added: “She has certainly set the cat among the pigeons in the US, but some of her views are really rather extreme and thankfully would not, I think, be the Norfolk way of thinking.”

Dr Gibson, a stout Scot, certainly knows his Norfolk. No one here holds extreme views and cats who show a keen awareness of which side their bread is buttered never even think of encroaching on pigeon territory.

There is a local saying applied to cases of obvious inbreeding: Normal for Norfolk. I am sure there'd be a welcome in the Norfolk hillsides for Sarah.


ps. Why is Nikita Khruschev standing behind Palin. He was not that kind of Republican.


*By the way, this is Oliver's link (see comments). Ach, might as well embed and save you the trouble.



Meet Sarah.

Apropos Georgia / Reginald Shepherd

I thought I'd put this link to Michael Totten on since Snoop points me to it. It's a long and fascinating read with accounts of events long before the recent outbreak of overt hostilities. A colleague at university is preparing an article on Georgia as I speak.

As Shuggy, not too long ago, correctly pointed out none of us bloggers ('I am a simple poet, ma'am, begging your pardon, and you know what terrible politicians poets tend to make, I mean fancy making a line walk on five feet!') is expert at this, though most of us know enough to be wary of partisan lines taken by newspapers who often rely on partisan sources. The noises made by Moscow, referring to the President of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili as a 'war criminal' sound very familiar to my cold-war ears. Regarding Totten's article I will take the Wittgenstein line - 'what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence' - but that's not to say I may not point to someone who probably does know what he is talking about.

I still remember a pre-1956 Hungarian cartoon (in Ludas Matyi, the Party's equivalent of Viz) that showed Dag Hammarskjöld, the then UN Secretary, leaving bloody footsteps wherever he went. Hammarskjöld's were not the footprints later discovered in Budapest.

*

I was very sad to hear of the death of the American poet Reginald Shepherd. He is on the sidebar to your left. Shepherd was a fine, extraordinarily intelligent and articulate poet, not only a genuine passionate, highly skilled writer but, going by the evidence of his blog, a good man. See for yourself.

More rain - nothing but the rain - and MARK GRANIER

I want to pinch a couple of pieces from the comments boxes and put them on display before they vanish. Some lovely things on rain, and I welcome more. Not so much the actual rain, of course, more the observations, notes and poems.

1.
from The Plump

Writing 100 lines is the perfect metaphor for English rain - the earth groans 'oh no not more. What am I going to do with it all'? But the severe schoolmasterly clouds insist on the relentlessness of the task. Everything is sodden, the plants are lush green through binge drinking.

I, too, like to stand outside in Greek rain, especially in the summer. There the earth sighs in gratitude and the plants have the perky, bright green of the moderate continental drinker. The only drawback is that the local electricity sub-stations are overcome with shock and plunge us into darkness at the hint of a storm.

2.
Tywydd Mawr

Mae'na sŵn o'm mewn i sydd i'w glywed
yn glawio'n dragywydd,
a lliw'r diawl ym mhyllau'r dydd,
lliw gwaed yr holl gawodydd.

(Dunno what it means or who it's from, do know it's in Welsh and that it's an englyn [All together now - "There'll always be an Englyn..."]. George Szirtes PLC is a culturally diverse site.)


3 & 4
Two from Mark Granier, of whom another in NOTES

Plain Song

An uncalled-for
refrain –
curtain-call –

the tall
windowpanes
swish rain.


Haiku

Only one figure
moves on the dark mountain, a
twist of rain-bright road.



from Three For the Road (The Sky Road, 2007)

http://www.salmonpoetry.com/theskyroad.html

Now turn to Notes...