The Tree and Me

When the ground moved loss of balance had me reach out – to cling onto something, anything. Closest thing was a large fir tree at the side of the forest track. Next thing I knew was that me and the tree were dropping down through a sinkhole, earth and rocks shooting up past us.

Somehow, as tree and I plummeted ever deeper, mossy ground and yellow roots going first, I found myself a little further up the trunk and protected by the spread out roots and lower branches, their ends bent upwards by the sinkhole’s sides.

Did I take a breath as we fell? And fell. The fall seemed to take a subjective age. Maybe in objective time not that long, my face flinching from flicked back grit and pine needles.

Then we stopped; and gravity grabbed at my feet. My arms though had wrapped themselves around the bough beside me. So I found myself swinging, but protected by the bough and branches above from stones and showers of loosened earth falling after us. A couple of stones did bounce off my forearms. Caused no damage though: my thick walking jacket absorbed both thud and patter.

I waited, still swinging, for the shower of earth crumbs and stones to cease. Then I looked down beyond my walking boots. I wasn’t sure if we had reached bottom or we had become stuck part way down the sinkhole and there was further yet to go. So far as I could make out though, through what little light was reaching us, the loosened earth and stones were stopping with us.

The fir tree had bark like large brown fish scales. I used these, fingertip and toe-holds only, to ease myself to the floor. Floor yes, I swore then to never again use the expression ‘solid ground.’

Certain we had stopped falling it was then that I let out a huge sigh and again became conscious of breathing.

“This,” I told myself and the tree, “is what happens when you come to live in an old mining community.”

Quaint the valleys might now be, cleaned and greened up, but we had lately suffered a series of earth tremors. Geologists disagreed regards the cause, whether due solely to old mine shafts collapsing, or ‘natural’ tectonic shifts resulting in old mine workings falling in on themselves.

Forestry had long replaced the mines and the smaller uneconomic farms, and it was my wont fine weather to roam the plantation tracks. Not all were, by the time I arrived, spruce dark and gloomy. Toxic subsoils and tree diseases had left parts of these new forests a collection of white and black sticks. Although silver birch and willow had now started growing up between the sticks.

“So much for natural regeneration,” I said; and peered up through a gap in the squashed together pine boughs to a small roundish smudge of white sky.

“How very Murakami,” I decided. “All I need now is a talking tree. Say ‘Pardon’,” I told the tree.

Not so very Murakami the tree kept its own woody counsel.

Naturally occurring sinkholes are mostly caused by water undermining weak spots in the Earth’s lower strata. Complicated here by mines having been dug under and through various of the strata and further weakening Earth’s structure. Many of the deep mines had had to be pumped out and were left to flood when abandoned. Here that ‘new’ subterranean flow of water sooner or later caused the sinkholes.

Where tree and I were however seemed dry, the sides of the hole if possibly damp certainly not leaking wet.

“Further investigation required,” I told the tree.

I worked my way crouched, then crawling, around the trunk. The sides of the hole seemed solid except where a lower bough had penetrated.. I went, wriggling on green needles, into the narrow gap and the dark.

Now my youngest daughter is a worrier, a conjuror-up of worst-case scenarios. One of which is that, on my lonesome hill walks, I might break a leg, have a heart attack, be assaulted by a rampaging squirrel or an out-of-sorts deer. So she has supplied me with a rescue kit. I refuse to take the mobile phone as I don’t want it going off and frightening the wildlife. Which happened the first time I had it with me, a call from the service provider asking what I thought of their service.

Ever since I have left the phone, uncharged, at home. But I do take with me in my small backpack the compass, foil blanket (folds down to wallet size), Swiss army penknife, flint fire-starter, Kendal cake (in tin), whistle and – of importance here – a wind-up torch.

Unclipping its handle, I wound up the torch.

In the torch’s white light the opening, mostly dry soil, sloped away from me and into deeper darkness.

I lied there on the green needles – smell of pine as invigorating down there as above – looked down that miniature hill of soil and stones and tried to work out what to do. There was no way I could climb the sheer sides of the sinkhole. And it was too big, sides too far apart, too unchimney-like for me to push feet-and-back up through to the top. I could blow my whistle for days and no-one would hear. Maybe when the Coal Board came to cap off the sinkhole the workers might stop their engines long enough to hear. But that could be weeks away. Often walking the paths and tracks I could be a month or more not seeing any other walker.

Seemed I had no option. Twisting onto my side I gave the torch handle a few extra turns, then began belly-slithering down the slope. Which turned out not to be as deep as my torch beam had thought. I had arrived on level ground, in an old mining gallery. Disappearing off into the dark it didn’t give me quite room enough to stand erect.

I rewound the torch and shuffled a little further on, glancing back – for comfort as much as orientation – to the diminishing grey-green light of the tree.

I came upon some wooden pit props. Their being wooden made this a very old gallery. Later mines had used pre-stressed concrete and metal sheeting. Here though, because it was so dry, neither props nor lintels had rotted.

A gallery this old would have been dug into the side of the hill. I’d come across more than few collapsed exploratory diggings in my wanderings. No openings though that hadn’t collapsed. Although this one could now easily come out into one of the denser fir plantations. A cavity overlooked?

Before I went any further I decided to go back to the sinkhole, check that there wasn’t any way past all the debris that had come down with me and the tree. There wasn’t.

Rewinding the torch, backpack clutched to my chest, neck bent, I shuffled further along the gallery. The shuffling, not stepping, was because I no longer had any faith in the reliability, the solidity of ground.

I came to some more wooden pit props. Not even surface softening. Then a candle stub on a rock ledge. That meant this mine predated even the Davy lamp. I had no matches, only the flint fire-starter and, unlike those ancient miners, I didn’t want to risk a methane explosion. That said all that I could smell still was pine sap.

On I shuffling went, trying to work out where I might be in relation to the remembered topography above me. Or was I dreaming? Had I fallen asleep under the tree, and was this all a dream? I recalled some advice on a social media thread: ‘Never fall asleep reading Murakami, you’ll wake up as something else.’

Or was I already dead? The fall seemed impossible, my surviving unscathed unreal.

I scratched for reassurance at my trousered left leg. So unlikely was this, “All so very Pincher Martin.”

As you may have guessed I am of a literary bent. Very bent at that time, due to the height of the gallery. Old-fashioned mining favoured folk of a smaller stature, children even.

The sound of running water, and an increasing dampness in the air had me concerned. Although the pit props were still unrotted this water was maybe how the sinkhole had been created. Water coming in at a distant juncture having created sufficient suction along the gallery, that suction finding the weakest point and bringing down the tree and me.

My yellow-white torchlight got reflected off the damp air first, mini-droplets thrown up from the splashing stream, which had already gouged a path through the mine floor, coming in from the right side and leaving through a large hole in the left. Beyond the stream the mine roof had collapsed.

As I stood trying to figure out what next to do sides of the stream were crumbling away and being shot off to the left.

There are streams throughout the forest. All have to emerge somewhere. And that decided me.

My intention had been to step into the stream, to carefully sit myself down, then bottom-shuffle my way along it. What happened was that no sooner had I stepped into the stream than I slipped and was shot down, clutching my torch and backpack, at one time underwater, then into whirling air, rolled over again, and finally shot out into daylight. I found myself stumbling down a small waterfall and trying not to trip.

And that’s how I came to be walking home soaking wet on one of our rare dry days here. I met no-one that day to disbelieve where I’d been.

Nowadays locals disinterestedly say, when I tell them of the tree and me, “Oh yea,” or “Right.” They had relatives who had worked down the mines. Some had even died down there. No-one it seems wants to believe me. They say, “Lot of old mine workings here,” and they go about their business.

If machines do all the work what will become of us?

Somewhere between labour and product, investment and reward, business and service, human beings have in the past been involved in some capacity. The gap between human input and machine output though has been ever widening, to such an extent that it has become barely bridgeable. Machines now make machines that make the machines that make the machines that make machines….

With the human element increasingly removed what role, other than as delivery driver (sorry, no, robots are being designed to that), other than as end-consumer, does a human being have to fill? And whereby to get the withal to become a consumer if the machines are doing all the work?

No longer based on need, nor active ownership, will the world’s become a truly fake (artificial) economy?

Look how a city, or pretty much any place, could up to now capture you. Job, home, social life; all in the one place, a seemingly permanent round. And that was it. Where though human endeavour? Was it only to be those small circles?

I’ve asked the circular stay-at-homes that. And what the circular-stay-at-homes seem to want, and want to perpetuate, is the myth of this-is-how-it-has-always-been-and-will-continue-to-be. And many of them are already in made-up jobs, jobs for the sake of jobs, jobs for the sake of politicians’ quotable statistics.

If climate change and the pandemic has served to teach them and us anything it is that within all social systems there is dissolution, entropy, changing demands, and whole communities will move and disperse. Shortly after online shopping became popular the High Street stores closed and the no-longer-required sandwich shops and coffee houses also disappeared. Fear of contagion has had public transport avoided and insular car use increase. Governments have subsidised stay-at-home workers, their homes dependant on technology. While those without jobs/functions have watched the world go by without them.

To every action a reaction, feedbacks multiplied.

If machines do all the work, with human beings becoming increasingly redundant, is our function, is our ending to be one long festival of consumerism? Is this to be our end, to be caught up solely in the capitalist/consumer rush – cars, house, food – to extinction?

Despite the evidence of all that we have lived through, are living through, many remain weirdly complacent. The majority of our electorates will continue passive, taking their secondhand identities from TV programs and films they have watched, from the t-shirts they have bought. Their concern will continue to be for themselves, producing little that’s original, producing little save effluence.

Does it have to be consumerism only? Self-eating consumerism? One final step on the road to planetary destruction? The end of our failure-to-learn species? Or will it be just the end of our once-again-getting-it-wrong democracies?

Prime States

A prime state, my definition, is where someone feels themselves to be who they really are. For instance M’s prime state is in having someone, usually a member of her extended family, to hate. She will find detestable any and every thing about them, from their behaviour to hair colour, their ‘silly’ accent to the shoes they choose to wear. She will relay these found detestables to other selected members of the extended family and/or to friends. Although, and understandably, she has never had that many friends.

S’s prime state on the other hand is in her having someone to be concerned about. It will be either the social mess they have got themselves into or, and more likely, their physical health; and S will go out of her prime state way to offer help.

Whereas G’s prime state is in having something wrong with him/her and in soldiering on. While K’s prime state, where she feels she really is K, is in being miserable, is in having something – personal, public or political – to be miserable about.

D’s prime state is in having a glass in his hand and, with a sideways smile, entertaining close company. C’s is in the enthusiastic pursuit of a sport. While N’s prime state is in giving instruction, a delight taken in telling of the how and why of something. While in his prime state H enters any company closed, suspicious of what may be asked of him, be it cash or expressions of pleasure.

Close to that of any hobbyist, my own prime state, where I feel that I am most my own self, is in the act of writing, be that by pen or keyboard. And despite all these decades of my writing not having produced the rewards first anticipated, even when I am not happy that moment with what I may be putting to paper, still the act of writing, of pen-in-hand entering a mental construct, remains my prime state.

As a magazine editor

As a magazine editor of only a few years standing I used to believe that I could tell when a poem had come out of a writing course/workshop, particularly when the submission had arrived as a set. Even when not a set some poems came with the sense of having been written to win their tutor’s approval (in the tutor’s style/manner of telling). This wasn’t solely blind prejudice of mine, an accompanying letter may have mentioned courses attended; and often there was a chummy feel to the poem, all sharing in the joke, the allusion. Inclusive there, excluding here.

Rejection was the easy part: I simply said No Thanks. Because, and already then, often when I had suggested making a change to a poem I had been told that their /tutor/professor/poet – much better known than my humble editorial self – had praised the work as was. How dare I presume to know better.

I don’t believe any poem is finished until it is in print. Even then there can come new editions of a work. For instance with each edition of ‘Leaves of Grass’ Walt Whitman made changes to almost all of his poems. There is still no definitive version of ‘Leaves of Grass.’

One has also to bear in mind that course tutors, leaders of workshops, even professors of poetry depend on writers coming back to their courses, rely on graduates recommending the course to others. All course leaders are therefore to an extent tactful, are encouraging ahead of critical. So when they might say to one of their class, still fiddling about with a word here and there, “Leave as is.” They may only mean, “For now,” and might have other reasons – class management? – for so saying.

As editor the temptation, with those poets who refused to even countenance making a change to their tutor-praised poem, was to tell tell them to in that case get the praising tutor to publish the poem. I never did, simply withdrew the offer to publish, unless changes were made.

I have long since ceased speculating on the origins of poems, motivations for their having been written. And while I used to like a fight, a physical fight – one-on-one has its own intimacies, fellow feeling – I have always hated arguments, quarrels. So generally, and even when I can see that a simple alteration will lead to a better poem, fearing that any suggestion of mine will only lead to fruitless argument, I do not respond other than with a No Thanks.

As a magazine editor I have no problem with those who choose to write poems as a hobby; and who, as with other hobbies, join groups and clubs where they can compare their works to their mutual satisfaction. All very supportive. Publication, remote readership, is altogether another thing. There we are seeking the eyes of sympathetic, never-to-be-met strangers.

As writer I am as guilty as any other – in fallow times – of writing for the sake of writing. The intention of all my written work however is that ultimately it will be read. Therefore all of my writing will be rendered, draft by draft, into a state fit to be read; and, I hope, made attractive to readers.

I am aware that other editors of poetry magazines often include their own poems in their magazines. For me to publish my own poems in The Journal however would have me questioning their validity. So I risk sending my own poems out to other magazines; my poems bereft children all trying to win acceptance somewhere, with every acceptance an affirmation; and should an editor suggest a change here and there, then I will gladly consider making those changes. Maybe not agree, but certainly give consideration to the suggestions.

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My Fellow World Citizens

While I may be fascinated by political/sociological/psychological processes I have little patience with the almost transparent duplicity that today’s politicians practise.

I’m talking about those party politicians who have perfected the courtier’s art of saying a lot without saying anything very much. Along with those despicable others who, for the simple sake of power, employ gender or class-based prejudices, knowing that as soon as a Them has been created there also has to be an US; and that such fascism always has a working class base. And that is before the unscrupulous politician looks beyond his/her country’s own borders.

And it is just so easy for our politicians to do now. Mass consumerism has trained their publics in gullibility. Histories forgotten, their publics are primed and ready to march, mass consumerist societies having been encouraged in mass pursuits. “Off to the match? The march?”

Sentimentality has become a key weapon in advertising and political speechifying. This sentimentality is always the other side of the coin that has brutality on the face. It means that We can kill Their men, Their women and Their children; but that We will go dewy-eyed over the wives and children of Our own fighting men. See Our surviving soldiers and sailors at airports and docksides reuniting with girlfriends and family. Always a close-up of a uniform cradling a child.

Enough.

Today I want to say to my fellow world citizens, “See! You’ve done it again. You’ve voted in, you’ve let in the killers. You’ve voted for the mass murderers. And the victims, one way or another, one side or another, will be your own sons and daughters. And you will thank, you will honour those self-appointed statesmen and women who again took you to war.”

The consequence, of your thoughtless voting my fellow world citizens, will be that generations from now thoughtful youth will again be puzzling over the row upon collapsed row of grave markers, and they will take themselves off to again research what could have led to the mass killing of these new long-forgotten dead.

Writers & writing, plus a theory of readers

Having worked in isolation for years – 23 years to be exact, 23 years of not telling neighbours, workmates, new-met acquaintances that I wrote – it wasn’t until I was finally published that I began to meet others who called themselves writers. It was then that I became aware that there existed levels to writing other than total commitment.

After 23 years of rejection it took me a while to come to terms with those levels of commitment, certainly to accept that all levels did have the right to also see themselves as writers.

Now though, when my identity is not wholly, and defensively wrapped up in my daring to call myself a writer, I can accept the many levels, the degrees of endeavour at which others wish to participate. For some it will be an evening hobby, occasionally showing their pages to a local writing group. For wealthier others it will be the more formal, weekend away, writing courses/workshops run by someone semi-famous. While for obsessive privacy-lovers like me any participation with others at all will be at a rarely seen distance.

If contact with others I must have I’d still it rather be with readers than with other writers. Even then, and bearing in mind that readers can be inordinately pleased when they find books that speak for them, or that they think they themselves could have written, the downside for any author is that readers can be disproportionately disappointed when that exalted author fails to live up to their estimation of their reader selves. How many like me were put off Anthony Burgess’s books, for instance, by his many fag-rolling and pontificating appearances on telly chat-shows?

That also has to be set against my writerly need to be an outsider. Outsiders have no loyalties, to people or to ideas. Only by remaining outside can we be the gleefully irreverent tellers of Chekovian truths. This is based on my lifetime belief that, while any artist might desire fame for the work created, he or she as author should remain obscure. I want to be as brave as Colette yet remain unknown, a commonly-named rumour behind my art.

Howsoever one measures success, by acclaim or by bestsellerdom, wanting to be a successful author is by no means straightforward. Especially as having been a lifetime’s outsider there remains for me this two-way tug. To make even a poor living I need to have my work accepted, and subsequently have myself accepted as a writer. At the same time I fear such acceptance by the establishment – however small a part of the establishment – and the accompanying expectations placed upon me, not just of public appearances, but of more work the same. That kind of acceptance can mean artistic nullity.

And while I do believe that writing is important, that truths need to be told, conveyed, explained; is why I still feel compelled to daily pick up my pen; at the same time I find that doing so day after day for the last fifty-plus years a highly ridiculous thing to have done. Yet, the very definition of imbecility, I continue doing it.

Plus ça change – again

David Byrne recently said this – History is not what happened, but it is what we agree happened – shaped to our biases and self-serving interests. This chimed with much that has been bothering me of late, especially the convenient political reinterpretations of history, or the glib references by TV pundits and advertisers to whole periods of time, as if one aspect could sum up all that happened and the reasons why it happened.

This is not a new frustration: I wrote this back in the late 1980s in response to a Philip Larkin poem. Mine was first published in Weyfarers Magazine, sadly no longer with us. Larkin’s was in his Faber collection, High Windows.

Plus ça change

Was Larkin watching me in 1963?

I didn’t, however, wank over Chatterley,

and I had no designs on a Beatles’ LP.

My idea of musical heaven

would have been tea

with the Temperance Seven.

To be fair to old Larkin, in his high window,

it may have seemed that we new mortals below

stood a much better chance.

Many of my girls wore tight sweaters

over their enticingly rounded busts,

and they did alluringly swing their hips;

but all I’d end up with,

after a two hour embrace,

was a hot face, swollen lips,

and a quivering hard-on

stuck to the roof of my pants.

Because in the year 1963,

although they may have appeared sexually bold,

most girls continued to obey their betters

and behaviouristically controlled

our base and rampant lusts.

Sure we may have publicly caressed,

and no-one openly confessed

their virginity. Especially me.

But before anyone got laid

deals still had to be made.

And the game today remains the same

— whoever plays must pay

and pay

and pay.

Yes, whoever Larkin was watching in 1963,

somewhere between the trial of Chatterley

and the Beatles’ first LP,

safe to say it wasn’t me.

Olden Times

I intend no historical disrespect. No more say than when playing Nelson’s Eye.

Nelson’s Eye, for those of you who don’t know, was a nineteenth century childhood game where a group took turns being blindfolded and, when blindfolded, had to say what their hand was touching. To begin with the hands of the blindfolded were guided towards easy to identify objects – a small jug, a hairbrush, a kitchen knife, et cetera. But then the one blindfolded, and this being the child who had not played the game before, had their finger pressed into a pre-warmed tomato. Unable to say what it was, the other children gleefully informed them that their finger was inside Nelson’s eye.

Here however we have Vincent van Gogh’s ear, and no blindfolds.

While in Arles, and daily teased by Paul Gaugin, Vincent became obsessed by a local girl. Tabloids today would probably have her labelled a cynical sex worker. But let’s not be quite so didactic and let us call her instead a good-time girl.

To the ex-trainee priest this girl appeared, leastwise in looks, Madonna-like. (Church statues and icons that is, not the raunchy songstress.) Once the object of his desires opened her mouth however all spirituality fled, her diction being as crude and vulgar as that of most other country girls.

Beset by sexual and artistic demons, his self-worth not improved by being dependent for financial support on his brother Theo, and unable to reconcile his spiritual adoration of the girl with her materialistic outlook, nor her laughing dismissal of his impoverished artist’s lifestyle, and his still being teased daily by Gaugin… In an act of self-anger, and still believing in the efficacy of Christian sacrifice, in dire self-abasement Vincent clumsily cut off part of his ear. (I wonder was Vincent also inspired to this act by Tolstoy’s short story about the repentant monk who took an axe to the finger of his that had touched a woman? Their dates overlap: Vincent 1853-1890, Leo Tolstoy 1828-1910. Also at about the same time Karl Marx noted that, and here I paraphrase, physical pain can be an antidote to mental anguish.)

The ear once detached Vincent carefully wrapped the ragged lump in layer after layer of tissue paper. The same tissue paper in which he used to wrap his finished canvasses before sending them off to his brother. This very different package Vincent tied with a yellow ribbon and had delivered to what passed as the local bordello.

Delighted by the unexpected parcel the girl, giving off little squeals of consumerist pleasure, unpicked the layer upon layer of crackling tissue paper. Arriving with a frown at the bloody lump of gristle she uttered, in the local patois, the immortal words (later adopted by the British Bobby), “Allo Allo, what have we ear?”

The Inevitability of Invisibility

The law of invisibility has it that we will disappear into old age, become unseen. Until all that we are is an empty wheelchair or an unoccupied bed, symbols of a life done.

Somewhere between the ages of 30 and 40 is when most men become aware of the onset of invisibility. Before then, even when pushing a pram, women your age and younger will still have seen you, might even have taken the pram as evidence of your virility.

Not that you were ever visible wholly for yourself. Even without the pram as token of your semen output, women with breeding in mind looked through you, through the moment, to what lay beyond – marriage, children, double garage….

Such was probably many men’s first experience of transparency. And probably the same for women that age, their not always being seen for their present state/shape but for the version of their mothers that they will become.

Neither though is invisibility. Before 30 one is still seen; and a man can cling on to that visibility, even without a full head of hair, well into his 40s. True, teenagers and students may by then start to pass you by, may step around flesh-and-blood you as if static street furniture. They will not have given you a first, let alone a second glance.

Between 30 and 40 however there may be occasions when women one’s own age, gay men too, still give one a quick look up and down, down and up. From the thickening 40s onwards though – when the face in the mirror is suddenly no longer the face in all the photos – is when you become aware that you have started to become transparent. So transparent that sometimes pedestrians receive a shock for having walked straight into you as if you weren’t there. If British and invisible you will of course apologise for having been walked into.

If you do manage to attain your 80s there will come a brief interval of returned visibility, when your gnarled and wizened visage will get remarked upon. Will nonetheless depend on one of two outcomes. Either you will have shrunken to the semi-comic status of gnome or, if lucky, your creased and sagging envelope will have come to briefly resemble one of those old-salt ceramic figures.

Expectations of Justice

Formulaic novels and popular films have led us to believe that justice will be done, that lovers will find one another and that decent folk will win out over wrong ‘uns. In our everyday lives we expect the law to make this happen, while also asking of ‘natural justice’ to bring it about. And this despite experience telling us that neither law nor ‘natural justice’ can be relied upon.

The law of course relies upon the administrative priorities of the state, whether the current administration values property or people the more. The execution of justice will also depend on the resources given over by the administration to the prosecution of the law. Will also depend on how corrupt the state, and of late here in the UK we have seen just how corrupt is this state.

If there exists little possibility of justice likely to be done by the state, then – where any institution, here in the money-laundering capital of the world, can be bought – natural justice is far less likely.

If there was any natural justice, for instance, Tony Blair and George Bush Jnr would long ago have both been incarcerated for war crimes, would be paying somehow for the carnage unnecessarily caused by their deceitful invasion of Iraq, subsequent deaths calculated in the hundred thousand around the world.

If there was any natural justice Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning would never have seen the inside of a prison cell. While those who committed the actual war crimes – that Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning exposed – even had their targets been a military mistake, the perpetrators would at least have been held to account for their lethal actions.

If there was any natural justice Palestinians farmers would not be forced from their houses and from their lands by thuggish Zionist settlers; and the Israeli apartheid state would not be uncritically supported by Western powers.

With all such flagrant injustices we may hope that one day justice will be done, and that the jailer will replace the jailed. But in whose lifetime?

Cooperation versus Competition

In a competitive environment is insecurity. Even if one manages to win, happens to stand atop the podium, one knows that it is only a matter of time before one is toppled.

In a cooperative environment is security. And I say that solely out of my experience as a small press publisher.

Having been repeatedly told that competition is what leads to excellence, as a small press publisher I very soon discovered that any small press that is overly competitive, and being competitive descrying, even sneering at other publishers’ books, gloating over their own glossy productions and seeking only to do better in terms of sales… Having misread the breadth of the market, they often don’t last very long. Whereas those small presses who seek to help their fellow publishers in some way – if only by offering to carry their boxes into a book fair, or offering tips on where to find cheap printers, alternative software – they continue to potter happily on and on.

With a cooperative mindset the principal concern of most small presses seems to be to promote their own authors, own ethos; their motives to put their kind of literature/art into print, to make good books, and to take satisfaction from a job well done. Having arrived at that job-well-done they then have no fear of a rival. Secure in that confidence they are open to suggestion; and, if invited, are prepared to offer advice.

True competition is a myth. There exists no equality of opportunity. Our competitive ancestors have seen to that. The winners back there set the starting stagger, loaded the handicap. Nor is my calling out this unrepresentative competition in any way sour grapes, just simple reality.

Competition persists, and as concept is promoted with the citing of top ten this, bestseller that; winner of this prize, shortlisted for that. So easy for writers to get lost in this measurement of success, and to see their ignored selves as excluded from the mainstream’s ever-recycled few; and in believing themselves forever losers kill themselves. Colin Mackay did just that.

Edinburgh-based Colin told me that he was sick of seeing writers with less talent being celebrated every year at the festival, and that if his works continued to be ignored he would kill himself. (The subtext being, “That’ll show them.” Whoever he imagined ‘Them’ were.) And that is what he stupidly did. Took him a whole day of black comedy, where he fused the lights by dropping a toaster in his bath, pulled the ceiling down when he tried to hang himself from a light fitting. A sense of urgency on him because he had emailed several of us that morning to tell us that today was the day he was going to kill himself. Gulping back a bottle of whiskey he then tried to cut his throat with a bread knife. Didn’t work. He took an overdose. And finally – wet, covered in blood and plaster dust – he stumbled out of his flat, tripped over a neighbour and fell headlong down the stone stairs, killing himself.

By his own reckoning Colin was a loser. I really don’t know why he was friends with me. His autobiographical work having been offered me – I was editor then for another publisher – I had called out his lies about an affair he claimed to have had with a Srebrenica victim. His vicarious descriptions of sex with her before her rape had been so patently false, teenage fantastical, and the fatal rape had been made deliberately gory for ‘bestseller’ effect, rather than his telling of an awkward truth. And of course, not being credible, his story failed to get published.

Competition creates more losers than winners. Cooperation on the other hand, where one can view oneself as an ongoing part of all literary endeavour – past, present and future – everyone here is a worthwhile equal.

pots calling kettles

Has to go almost without saying that Putin’s Russia is wrong, simply wrong, to have brutally and destructively invaded Ukraine. But for Western leaders to call for Putin to be charged with war crimes…?

The hypocrisy required for them to make that charge is near dumbfounding. Talk about double, nay triple standards.

Take the UK government selling bombs to Saudi Arabia so that the Saudis can obliterate Yemeni hospitals. This being the same UK government that encourages British companies to sell sniper rifles and ammunition to the Israelis so that the Israeli militia can shoot medics and journalists, and take pleasure in deliberately maiming Palestinian children.

Or take the US government who ‘illegally’ invaded Iraq (along with the UK), resulting in the destabilisation and the still ongoing carnage across the Middle East. This is the same US government that has kept Julian Assange in a UK prison for having helped expose the war crimes of US troops in Iraq. And this is the same US who veto every United Nations sanction against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. While this US President is the same man who, when vice president, supported drone assassinations, that is extra-judicial killings, of suspected terrorists. And, hypocrisy piled upon hypocrisy, he calls for Putin to be charged with war crimes when the US itself is not a signatory to the International Court of Human Rights in the Hague.

There is one other rank hypocrisy at work here, that of the Ukrainian leader. He calls for help in stopping the takeover of Ukrainian land by the Russians while wholeheartedly supporting Israel’s Zionist, and illegal, appropriation of Palestinian lands.

I’m not the least biblical but methinks that it’s best here that we let he who is without sin cast the first stone. And when – this I do believe – war itself is the crime, how then to define the criminal? Tell me what ‘great cause’ can justify the destruction, even the disruption of another life?

All in all decision on war crimes is probably best left to those in Den Hague.

Invisible Authors of Invisible Books

I am going to have to generalise here, but what I have found is that what the majority of writers enjoy most about writing is the act of writing itself. Even if their notepad, electronic or paper, is on the kitchen table, or they have isolated themselves behind a coffee in a café, what most prefer is to be on their own, undistracted, with unforeseen concepts, connections, opening before them on the page.

I think it’s safe to say that the natural state of most writers is reclusive. And their being naturally reclusive, at ease in each their paper universes, what many fear most is having to appear in public in person.

Of course there have to be some who write with performance in mind. Some poets certainly do, and playwrights have to. Although even some of the latter like to keep behind the scenes.

For me the perfect world would be where I could preface every one of my books with, ‘Here I am reader, alone in a private space like you. These words, these pages, unite us.’

That working concept gave me licence to make my private public. So that others, in their private, could learn that, although alone, they were not alone?

But to the Invisible Authors. The Invisible Authors I have in mind are those that their publishers have to browbeat into going to book-signings, giving TV appearances, who hate having to promote their own work, would much prefer letting the book speak for itself. Except that, without the promotion, the book will gain no readership and never get a chance to speak for itself.

Having given in to their publisher’s blandishments and having become a Semi-Visible Author, but still finding self-promotion uncomfortable if not downright distasteful, that discomfort and distaste often transmits itself to the audience, who leave not won over.

I have been a disappointment to so many publishers.

Not that self-promotion of itself works. I am straight away sceptical, for instance, of any writer who is good at talking. If they can communicate so well by talking, why write? That scepticism is often borne out by the writing turning out to be as undisciplined as their easy chatter. Clichés that passed unremarked in conversation/performance – especially if poets – leap from the page when presented as print.

With literary agents and publishers doubting their commercial prospects, Invisible Authors are left with no option other than self-publishing. Easy enough to do these days, and inexpensive too, with eBooks and Print-On-Demand. The problems begin when the Invisible Author has to become their own bookseller. Distribution to bookshops, with their 40% mark up and sale-or-return, being beyond most independent authors’ budgets, for point-of-sale they are left with the internet. Unfortunately on social media we have all become weary of those repeated postings of new book covers, and have as quickly scrolled/swiped past them.

Added to which there is something intrinsically unbecoming about self-promotion. It can so easily come across as bragging. Not that the Invisible Author is, but self-promotion unfortunately carries that vibe. Because, and even if the Invisible Book is not vanity-published, self-promotion for it can still come across as a vulgar exercise in vanity, and as such is off-putting.

Self-promotion is so often self-defeating. Take a recent TV ancestry programme where Richard Osman, already a celebrity, while conducting that research into his family history at every opportunity, and so often that it became comical, told us that he was the author of detective novels, that he wrote about crime, that research such as this required detection… Such transparent self-promotion didn’t encourage me to investigate any of his books.

To be fair, even Richard Osman, with his existing TV platform, knows that without promotion his detective books will soon disappear from public sight. And he is one of the few with a mainstream publisher who will endeavour, little effort required on his part, to see that his books go into bookshop windows.

At another angle it took me years to overcome my distaste for the affectations of chat-show guest Anthony Burgess before I could get around to reading his books. Visibility thus being a two-edged weapon.

Third party endorsement is so much more effective. But where-o-where to get the Invisible Book reviewed?

Meanwhile the self-published Invisible Authors are left with no option but to self-promote, while still hoping to remain Invisible behind their book. But with so very many books being self-published, and sock-puppetry having undermined third party endorsement, how is a reader – the dilemma of the Invisible Reader matching that of the Invisible Author – to decide – at a glance – what is worth reading? How now to tell if someone is a good writer or simply someone good at self-promotion?

On 28^th March 1993, with regard to my own literary efforts, I wrote: ‘On a hiding to nothing – I want to reach the people who don’t read poetry with poetry; and I want to reach the people who don’t read novels with novels.’ That realisation, another of life’s paradoxes, didn’t stop me writing.

Asylum Humour

Not wanting to add to the horrors all around – if we’re not idiots we know that species us are in serious trouble – I thought that for distraction, some levity, for this blog I’d put up Asylum Humours 1 & 2 from Mirror, Mirror

Asylum Humour (1)

During a civic visit to the local asylum a councillor became separated from his group. Worried by the noise he hurried after them, went through an unmarked door and found himself in the quiet of the asylum grounds. Nearby a man was hoeing some rosebeds. The councillor explained what had happened and asked where he should go. The gardener said that when the visiting group realised that he was missing then a search would be instituted. Easier to find him, therefore, if he stayed in the one place. The councillor agreed with this strategy and sat on a bench among the rosebeds. The gardener returned to his hoeing. The two men started to talk of roses, progressed by stages to world affairs, found themselves in agreement on a variety of topics. Discovering, by a chance remark, that the gardener was a patient and not, as he had assumed, a hospital; employee, the councillor asked what he had done that he should have been put into an asylum. The gardener shrugged, said that he had been in the asylum for so many years he doubted that anyone could now remember the original reason for his incarceration.

“This isn’t right.” The councillor became indignant. “An intelligent man like you should have a home and a garden of your own.” The gardener agreed. Whereupon the councillor promised to do all in his power to help the gardener. At that moment the civic group appeared, saw the councillor and beckoned him. The councillor made a note of the gardener’s name, said his goodbyes and began walking towards the group, who seemed to be shouting warnings at him. A blow to the back of his head buckled his knees. From the ground he looked up to the gardener, still holding the hoe.

“You won’t forget?” he said.

Asylum Humour (2)

The tyre blew in a rainstorm. The driver didn’t have a coat, was drenched by the time he got the jack out of the boot. The road was running with water. Removing the hubcap he wiped some water from his eyes, saw a man sat on a low wall watching him. The man was wearing a woollen dressing gown. The realisation that he had broken down outside the local asylum made the driver nervous. Fumbling he put the wheelnuts in the hubcap, took the wheel to the boot and returned with the spare. Only to find that the hubcap had floated off down the road. He immediately ran after it; but it and the wheelnuts had been washed into a large drain. The driver screamed, shouted, and came stamping and cursing back up the road.

“This car is still capable of being driven,” the man in the saturated dressing gown said.

“With three wheels? Get real.”

“If you take one nut from each of the remaining wheels,” the man calmly continued, “that will give you the same amount of nuts to secure the fourth wheel.”

“Brilliant!” the driver shouted. “Absolutely brilliant.”

“Mad I may be,” the man got off the wall, “Stupid I’m not.”

https://erbacce-press.co.uk/blank-page

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HUH (Help Us Humans)

HUH is the atheistic equivalent of SOS, save our souls, where a soul equals a human life. A soul could also be self-esteem. To save one’s soul in that sense to save one’s self esteem.

But let’s stick to soul here as the saving of a human life.

To the nub.

Capitalism exploits. Exploits everything. Natural resources, human beings, the environment. Capitalism is a mindless beast, one driven by profit and growth. Capitalism needs more, ever more.

Capitalism is what has driven colonisation. Resources depleted one place capitalism must needs move to another, and exploit.

Those bare bones make capitalism sound nasty, best-avoided. But capitalism is the inevitable outcome of any money-based civilisation. Regardless what name that civilisation chooses to call itself – democratic, communist, oligarchy, monarchy – all will end up, because money-based, as capitalist. Even socialist[?] Scandinavia.

Civilisations by their definition host specialisations. Traders and manufacturers will make profits and amass wealth. This wealth they will seek to invest in new or in other industries. A route well-trodden

What the rest of us human beings must do is to create laws that hold that wealth-power in check. But only enough not to discourage manufacturers and traders, because we all need entrepreneurial traders and manufacturers, as they need doctors and nurses, plumbers and carpenters… What we don’t need is those with more money assuming superiority over the rest of us human beings, and their believing that their having made money has given them the right to take more, that different laws, because of their wealth, apply to them.

We should all – within each our own lives – have learnt that capitalism has no conscience. It follows therefore that those who advocate ‘free-market’ capitalism, that is unrestricted capitalism must also have little regard for those who suffer from its exploitation. This disregard applies even to their own selves, to their extended selves, to the planet on which they too depend.

This attitude we have been recent witness to, here in the UK and the USA, with the arch-capitalists Johnson and Trump, their careless abandonment of hundreds and thousands of lives to Covid, their continuing insistence on the use of fossil fuels not caring what happens to the planet…

HUH

Finally [almost], the ageing process

Our bodies, once a source of mystery and delight, have become with age a subject of coarse ridicule. At first we took to joking about each our uncontrollable farts – farting as we got up out of a chair, farting as we reached across the table for a dish, farting as we climbed the stairs… Those farts though have now become so much a matter of course that they often pass – like an incontinent horse on a posh parade – without comment.

Aside from my loosened anal sphincter, elsewhere on my body white hairs have sprouted around my nipples, there are tiny persistent forests in my ears and nostrils, and my toenails have become as thick as sheep hooves. The backs of my hands have turned to slack chicken skin, brown-splodge freckles have appeared in almost every wrinkle, and every so often black subcutaneous blotches grow like ink-blots on my forearms, with no memory of any bump to cause such dark bruising. Weirdest of is looking in the mirror as I get older and older: it is like a slow motion horror film, watching my face collapse in front of me.

I had already learned, mostly through work, how much longer the older one gets it takes to recover from both physical and emotional shock. Beyond the physical, beyond increasing forgetfulness/absentmindedness and the temporary blocking of word/name retrieval, and beyond the sudden and unbalancing joint twinges, disregarding too all the medical procedures inflicted on me – sarcomas cut out, broken teeth extracted – there are the social frustrations. The largest being how the next, and the subsequent generation cannot be told by us, their once rebellious, risk-taking [grand]parents what they must do in order to survive. We, the generation that liberated drug use, for sure we learned that too late.

Nor is ageing, from within, a wholly gradual process. Steph and I for instance arrived in Ilfracombe in 2000, in our late middle age, and with myself not then having quite then come to terms with the suddenness of middle age. Five years later we left for Cumbria as a grey-haired old couple.

Sixteen years later still, here in Wales, the present remains crowded with that lifetime’s mind baggage.

Mind you Steph and I have been lucky in that we have shared so much of this life, have watched one another learn and grow [I hesitate to say ‘expand’], and neither of us despises the naiveties of our shared past.

One positive aspect of ageing is that fear of what dreams might mean ceases the older one gets. The strangeness of a mind-concocted image does not now presage some unadmitted desire on my part, doesn’t signify some potential perversion… They are just strange dream images the result of my strangely lived life. Still capable of haunting me the next day, but can be happily returned come evening to the unconscious.

The past is fortunately still with me. I see now, in a gesture, an accent, a tilt of the head, long gone friends; and which brings to mind moments an age ago. Sadnesses, but no regrets.

For all that I still see myself as a supplicant at the altar of literature. Albeit that consideration of both success and failure are long behind me. Having a commonplace name informs one’s aspirations. Now, looking back, I know how to improve past performance and how to win prizes, prizes that I no longer desire. For anyone, this life, literary success continues to be measured in sales and readership; and as I have little talent for salesmanship and/or self-promotion, all that remains for me now is to plough on with the writing. The part I enjoy most.

Now… No, not this Now. The many Nows, the many presents back then, all were concerned with the future, their many futures. Most of those futures were a black pit opening before me. Or, when young, were a looking to escape careers that the world wanted to chain me to. Now, this Now, my having been living in those futures, of late my sole consideration, regards any future, is death. How it will, unavoidably, be to die. To be no more.

That said, thoughts on death seem to have been always with me. I wrote this in January 1993, when I had been recently working with psycho-geriatrics. ‘What mean little spirit is that says I alone must survive? Although it is only in my dotage that that spiteful egotism will become apparent. It will however not be the real me, just a motor running on.’

I doubt now, once upon a time maybe, that my death will be violent. So much has happened throughout my life that I don’t now so much wait for wars to come to me as expect the news to tell me of another atrocity; and all these new wars, new atrocities, bombings and shootings will be distant from this Welsh valley. My own death will most likely be internally created, the motor running down.

Levity (7): kinds of ice

Last winter, when it was minus six degrees centigrade in the Arctic, a female polar bear and her cub were on a tricky journey across a moving ice floe.

“Mummy,” the cub said when they paused, “I’ve been thinking. Could I be a honey bear?”

The mother was heading north in the hope of finding firmer ice.

“’Course not,” the mother distractedly said, “you’re a polar bear.” She gave a low growl: “The most fearsome predator on planet Earth.”

“Oh,” the cub said, careful to follow his mother’s pawsteps as she negotiated the cracks of black water, “Not a honey bear?”

“See any bees here?”

They proceeded across the floe not talking. When they arrived at a wide, if slightly wobbly, ice sheet the cub cheerfully asked, “You don’t think I could be a grizzly?”

“’Course not. What would a grizzly bear be doing here?”

A snow flurry came across the whitescape towards them. The mother ignored it. The cub shook himself free of ice dust, almost fell over. Did it twice, got annoyed with himself, and ran to catch up.

They had to cross a wider crack of black water. The mother’s leap easily cleared the crack. But the cub had to scrabble up the ice-blue side of what proved to be a small berg.

Although slightly uneven it was firmer walking on the berg, and mother and cub could briefly proceed side by side.

“I couldn’t be a black bear?” the cub said.

“Now you’re being really ridiculous,” the mother voiced her exasperation. “You are a polar bear, the most fearsome…”

“Yes yes,” the cub dared interrupt. “OK then. Not a black bear. What though if I’m a Russian brown bear? I could’ve…”

“You’re white. White!” she snarled at him. “And you are white for a reason. We are hunters. We are the most fearsome predators…”

“Yes yes…”

“No ‘yes yes’.” she growled. “We are white because we have to cunningly conceal ourselves from our prey. You are a polar bear. A polar bear!” she roared into his ear. “Understand?!”

“No,” he cried. “No, I don’t understand. I don’t understand.,” he was squeaking now. “If I am, as you say, a polar bear, if I truly am a polar bear, tell me why, why I am so coooold?”

We are all now subject peoples

We are all now subject peoples, subject to governments that we have little or no control over. What we do have are various kinds of pretend democracies where we are allowed to elect the same kind of people, usually with the same kind of personality disorders, to run our countries for us.

A question, and one I want to keep asking, Is how persuadable are people to principled action?

Let us look here at the UK – ignoring for the moment its unrepresentative first-past-the-post electoral system, as unrepresentative as the ‘electoral college’ system in that self-appointed ‘defender of democracy’ the USA – and cast an eye over the UK’s 2005 election which returned a known corrupt UK government power.

A UK government that had lied about weapons of mass destruction in order to justify its invasion of Iraq. An invasion that led to thousand upon thousands of deaths all across the Middle East and contributed to the establishment of Isis/Daesh as a terrorist power.

(Can it be that terrorists are the only one’s persuadable to principled, that is selfless, action? Do all democracies rely first on the electorate’s self-interest?)

Let us look at just two members of that 2005 newly-elected UK government. The crown-making, intrigue-loving Mandelson, who has turned out to be a friend of the US paedophile/trafficker Epstein. And then there’s Brown, who said he was ‘relaxed’ about capitalism.

When at the next election in came Cameron’s Tory government they turned out to be even more relaxed about financial shenanigans. The two governments taken together has led to London becoming known as, not only the obscene sump that has sucked its own country’s wealth into its maw, but as the world’s money-laundering capital.

Now, several elections and a referendum later, we have our own present day state of affairs, the electorate throughout the intervening years having chosen to disregard the blatant lies told by the political parties, so many of our MPs – of all parties – now being in the pay of foreign governments.

Is the populace entire persuadable to principled action?

Or is that the votes cast were, and will be, wholly irrelevant? Governments now being allied to governments, which have been bought by multi-national corporations, and what we people do, or say, being of little consequence? Here, and elsewhere, the world’s governments are being elected by those who believe the corporate-owned tabloids, the populist TV channels and podcasts.

Can the world’s people be persuadable to principled action? In order to save the world?

The Refusal

This is the statement that Nave Shabtay Levin gave when he refused Israeli military service. (Taken from an RSN – Refuser Solidarity Network – email.)

“I held a gun in my hands before I was 10 years old.

You could say I was raised in the Israeli army, or at least in the spirit of the Israeli Army. My father, who was a military officer during most of my childhood, took my sister and me to his military base on weekends. There I held a gun, entered tanks, and collected gun bullets lying on the ground. As a child, that was cool! I also grew up without a grandfather. From very early on, on every national Memorial Day, I would skip the school ceremony to attend the grave of my grandfather who was killed in the 1973 war (The Yom Kippur War). I was nurtured on the glory of the army and on war-related bereavement.

Although I was raised in a militaristic family, where the army was a sacred cow, and although I was told in school that soldiers are heroes, I never wanted to enlist in the army. My unwillingness to enlist, was transformed over the years to the act of active refusal of the draft and the more I realized what soldiers really do. I realized that there is an entire system, military, economic and ideological, whose task is to preserve the occupation and the oppression of the Palestinians.

This year, during the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, tens of masked settlers went to Masafer Yatta, threw stones at the Palestinian residents, at their children and at their houses. Windshields were smashed, and many people injured, including a three-year-old child who was injured in his head. This event was not unique. It was just one more day in the violent reality that the population in Masafer Yatta endure, where attacks by settlers are a daily occurrence.

And where is the army in this story? The same one I was expected to enlist in? Where are the heroic soldiers that we hear of? In almost every violent incident perpetrated by settlers the army, under the best of circumstances, does nothing. More frequently, however, it enables, supports and even provides weapons and backup to the settlers. This is the occupation – this violence is not a bug, it is a feature. The state, the army, and the settlers have the same purpose – in Masaffer Yatta and throughout the rest of the occupied Palestinian territories: the creation of territorial continuity in Israeli control that cuts the West Bank into pieces. These aims – territorial control and the removal of the Palestinians – has led to the biggest population transfer since 1967, taking place as we speak in Masafer Yatta. The army and the settlers are equal partners in this project.

The occupation and the oppression of the Palestinians are closely linked to Israeli capitalism. For the Israeli elites, the occupation is profitable. Israeli Weapon companies make millions from selling weapons to regimes such as Yemen and the United Arabs Emirates. Weapons that are sold after they were tried on Gaza and the West Bank – and are promoted by the misery, the poverty, and the death that it had created. As well, the occupation is profitable – as a device to abuse Palestinian workers. Israeli corporations and wealthy people employ Palestinians both, in the occupied territories and inside Israel, and abuse them with long working hours and low salaries, taking advantage of the fact that the Palestinians have no way to secure their rights. In that way the rich profit directly from the oppression of the Palestinians people.

The narrative of the country perpetuated through the educational system provides a narrow colonialist view on history and on the reality in the state of Israel. It tells us that the country was built by heroic pioneers, without ever discussing what and who was here before. It tells us about villages and cities that were built, but not how Palestinian lands were bought and their inhabitants banished. It creates a false unity of Jewish interests with the Jewish rich, rather than with the Palestinians. It tries to make us think that the occupation benefits us, the Jewish workers, in order to eliminate any possibility of true solidarity with the Palestinians or bringing an end to the occupation – all of which stands to hurt in their pocket.

We live in a country that call itself self enlightened and liberal, “the only democracy in the middle east”, but at the same time, runs a murderous apartheid regime and commits war crimes regularly and systematically. Israel implements policies of house demolitions, journalists’ killings, of breaking into homes, mass arrests, the arrest of children, collective punishments; illegal settlements, a siege on Gaza and much more on a daily basis. This country exploits our personal loss and pain over the people we loved and who died because of this cruel reality, to further its propaganda.

As humans we must resist this reality. As humans we must refuse to demolish homes, arrest children, and refuse the destructive reality that Palestinians live in. As humans we must make amends for the wrongs of the past of the occupation and the Nakba.
As workers we must show solidarity and cooperation with Palestinian workers, and fight against the rich that profit from our exploitation.

As potential army inductees, this is our opportunity not only to serve the country and the army. It is our opportunity to support the fight for justice, peace, and equality. Whether through psychological disqualification, by appealing to the army’s conscientious objection’s committee or through serving jail sentences, we refuse to serve in the occupation army. We must fight for a better future. It will not be easy. Our opponents are strong. However, where there is oppression, there is also brotherhood and solidarity, and that no one can take from us.

In solidarity

Nave”

30th September 2022

Back in the 1970s

Back in the 1970s I wrote a novel called Undeclared War. I hadn’t expected these 50 years later to be told about an undeclared war and to be still banging on about undeclared wars.

I can understand if readers of this blog are fed up with me going on about the Israelis’ maltreatment of the Palestinian people. What most galls me though, especially at the moment with the attention given to the Ukraine undeclared war, is the double standard the Western governments and media have to what is, no more no less, the same thing that has been happening in Palestine these last 50 years, their land being stolen by the Israelis.

The information below I have reproduced from an email sent me today by the JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace).

‘As the Israeli government escalates its attacks on Palestinians, with levels of violence in the West Bank not seen since 2014, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: This is an undeclared war.

In the past week alone, the Israeli military has:

Killed at least five children and teenagers
Laid siege to 120,000 Palestinians in refugee camps in East Jerusalem and prevented them from receiving urgently needed healthcare or basic medical supplies
Invaded towns and cities all across the West Bank every night, especially Nablus, Jenin, and Ramallah
Enabled settlers to ambush Palestinian olive harvests
Continued to force Palestinians off their land in Masafer Yatta and the South Hebron Hills

But very little news about this is penetrating mainstream media, which is much more focused on the killing of two Israeli soldiers. It’s key to remember the context of what’s happening:

800 Palestinian political prisoners are currently held without charge, with at least 20 on hunger strike
Over 165 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military this year in the West Bank and East Jerusalem
Two months ago, Israeli airstrikes killed 50 people in Gaza, including 17 children
Last May, Israeli snipers killed revered Palestinian reporter Shireen Abu Akleh

During all of this, the U.S. government has continued its one-sided support of the Israeli government.

This is a war, happening in front of our very eyes. The conditions on the ground cannot remain this way forever, and it’s only a matter of time before they escalate. Our voices will be needed. We should be prepared to use them.’

Where NATO countries are lining up to give arms to the Ukrainians in the defence of their land the very opposite is happening with the Palestinians, Western governments are queueing to give arms to the Israelis.

Sam Smith 13^th October 2022

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/545469

Fitting

As a boy, wanting to see if this latest newcomer to the village could fit into my version of the world, I showed strangers the places that knew me. Even as a teenager, and later when home on visits, I made new girlfriends walk out, across fields, climbing hedges, or along the slippery tide-out shore to Ham Point on the Dart estuary.

The river in its tides circled out around the beech trees there with, on the opposite shore, the blue and white boat house, rarely occupied, that belonged to Sharpham House. The paddle steamers’ tannoys called it Calendar House; but that big house with its twelve doors and 365 windows was up above the trees and out of sight of Ham Point.

As a boy I spent so many hours just sitting on the moss bank among the beeches, on my own or with my dog, watching the brown-grey tide creep in or slide out over the long mud bank. Sometimes I pretended to fish. And in my flopping-about idleness my name got carved onto a couple of the pewter-smooth beech trunks there.

Rarely used paths deeper in the wood led – towards Totnes – on to a secret, if damp, ferny dell in a steep part of the woods. Late every summer, in the big field above the dell, were always mushrooms.

If friend or girlfriend weren’t impressed by the place for itself, compatibility became an issue.

When I no longer had ready access to Ham Point the test[s] for fitting into my world became less easy to define. A shared sense of humour was I suppose the ultimate test, my own humour tending towards the ridiculous and irreverent.

At some point testing would arrive at ‘taste’, particularly taste in art. But art is tricky, my having often been introduced to new art by new friends. My daughters for instance – not that I was testing my relationship with them – have led me to music and artists new.

Maybe though what it is that I seek out in a new friend is less their taste in art, but their attitude to, the importance that they place on art. A shared enthusiasm for authors will seal any friendship.

That said, although in a friendship I might want people to like me I don’t want them to be like me. Vive la difference first and foremost. Therefore within my friendships there are tolerable levels in all things – consumerism, life style, even politics: all can be fitted into the frame of friendship. Unless the friend proves too reactionary, too right wing, too self-centred, too intolerant, too unforgiving. Like myself most of my friends have had, what are lightly called, chequered pasts and/or peculiar personal arrangements.

Levity (2)

Don’t know who I have to thank for this shaggy dog story. Possibly Frank Muir – I seem to remember his slight lisp – on BBC’s Radio Four. Whoever was first with the tale it’s definitely one for big band enthusiasts.

-*-

Those big band fans will know that songwriters Mack Gordon and Hal Warren often worked together. What those fans might not know is that in November 1941 Glen Miller had a prestigious gig coming up in New York’s Grand Central Station. He asked the songwriting duo Mack Gordon and Hal Warren to come up with a new tune. Glen said that he wanted it to be ‘startlingly new.’

“As far out of left field as can be,” Glen told them. “And I need it in three days.” And he left the pair to it in their Sun Valley hotel. Glen was paying.

So far as record sales went the European war had thus far been kind to Glen. Mack and Hal consequently had a suite that took up a whole floor, paid for in advance, unlimited room service, reams of blank score sheets, plus a baby grand.

Soon as the suite door had closed behind Glen, Hal and Mack tried to settle to composing. They tinkered for a bit, but nothing felt worth developing. Hal decided he’d benefit from a change of air. Mack had had a heavy session the night before, laid himself on one of the chaise-longues for a snooze.

He was woken by Hal excitedly showing him a brand new pair of brown and white spats.

“Not much of a town,” Hal told Mack, “but one helluva shoe shop. Old-fashioned, and quality leather. Top quality.”

Hal had sat on the chaise-longue opposite to try on the spats.

“New shoes.” He went dancing and sliding across the hotel carpet. “Leather stitched soles.” He lifted his left foot to show Mack, who smiling took himself over to the baby grand, converted ‘leather soles’ to four chords, tried two for ‘new shoes.’

“Again,” Hal said, leaning in beside Mack. He added two more chords.

“OK,” Mack took up a sharpened pencil, scribbled on a blank score sheet.

For the next couple of hours the pair built up a tune, put in repeats, until Mack called a halt.

“Let it settle,” he said. Both knew from long practice that the musical subconscious (recently discovered by an Austrian cove) often emerged with a subtle development. “I’m going to order us up a celebratory feast.” Mack reached for the hotel phone: “ Glen’s paying. What you fancy?”

Hal held up his hand, said that he’d like to get out from four walls again, would try the diner he’d passed on his walk.

“Never seen a town with so many cats,” Hal said as he retied his laces. “Cats on windowsills. Cats in doorways. Everywhere I looked a cat.”

“Won’t see many now.” Mack pointed out the window at the rain. “You sure about the diner?”

Hal however was uncomfortable with foreign-sounding hotel food. He preferred run-of-the-mill cafeterias where he knew from the pictures he’d get what he asked for.

Mack was still cheerfully lifting covers and sampling dishes when Hal, drenched, got back.

“Look at my new shoes.” Hal held out his right foot to show Mack. The front of both spats were covered in greasy grey mud.

“Ran back across the green,” Hal said. “Was squelchy all the way.”

Mack, his mouth full, told Hal to put the spats outside the suite door: “Boot boy’ll clean ’em.”

Hal changed into dry trousers and jacket, and – letting their different dinners settle – they ordered up coffee and listened to the news from Europe.

When the chambermaid came to turn down the bedsheets she seemed a little afraid of the two men who had gone back to working at the piano.

“Anything the matter?” Mack asked her.

“Your shoes,” the maid said. “I had to chase a cat away from them. They get in sometimes. Can’t blame them. They’re so hungry, and its so wet out.”

Hal had gone to the door, came back with a ripped and torn apart spat.

“Looks like,” he examined the torn upper, “a tooth must have got stuck in one of the perforations and the cat had to claw its self free. Shame though,” he tried to be philosophical – the chambermaid was actually trembling and he didn’t want to add to her worries – “was the last pair my size in the shop. Still, easy come easy go.” He ceremonially dropped both spats in among crumpled score sheets in the wastebasket.

With the apologetic chambermaid gone Mack and Hal returned to the tune, tweaked a chord here, added a pause there. Glen would have to complete the arrangement for his band.

“All we need now,” Mack decided before they took themselves to bed, “are lyrics and a title.”

“Let us consult the Austrian,” Hal yawned.

The rain had stopped by the morning, and Mack accompanied Hal to the diner for what he called a ‘Good ‘ol American breakfast.’ Neither had known what to order from the hotel menu.

With the early sun glinting on last night’s raindrops Mack also kept noticing the cats that Hal had mentioned; and he got to saying at sight of every new cat – in a porch, on a windowsill – “Hey Hal, think that’s the cat who clawed your new shoes?” Mack even kept it up when they left the diner. Until Hal excitedly grabbed his arm: “That’s it Mack! That’s our title.” And he sang it, “Pardon me Hal, is that the cat who chewed your new shoes? Left field or what?”

The duo hurried back to their hotel suite, where they scribbled cat and shoe lyrics over the score. Took them a giddy hour.

They phoned Glen to sing and whistle it to him.

“Love the tune,” Glen said. “But the gig’s on the station concourse. A train theme’d be better.”

A New and Necessary Empiricism

Empiricism – the system which, rejecting all a priori knowledge, rests solely on experience and induction.

Empiricist – one whose knowledge is got from experience only.

-*-

The time has come to forego and forfeit all other fond isms whereby the human world has been governed. Capitalism, communism, socialism; the totalitarianism of religions; all have led us to this sorry state, to the climate collapsing about ourselves and with another new pestilence at every turn.

Fifteen year old Greta Thunberg was right, continues to be right, we should now be governed only by science, by research, by examination. By what works. Realism, provable fact, has to be the basis of our every new policy, every new law.

Decades of open-minded, speculative science fiction, of rise-and-fall historical narratives, have taught us that the collapse of any civilisation can come about very easily. Easter Island’s deforestation and depopulation usually cited here.

Also consider modern warfare: one consequence always cholera.

Bombs destroy sewage systems and rupture water supplies. Cholera ensues. And once that disease has weakened the population other infectious diseases more easily take hold, and work back towards the ‘victors’, whose spending on health care was curtailed by their spending on war. Ergo: peace is essential for any civilisation here to endure.

A post-apocalyptic book of mine, Once Were Windows Once Were Doors, is sitting at Wordcatcher Publishing waiting for the UK economy to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and Brexit. Once Were Windows Once Were Doors tells of a life long after climate change and pestilence. (The first 10 pages of Once Were Windows Once Were Doors can be read here – http://samsmithbooks.weebly.com/first-10-pages.html )

The present pestilence, Covid-19, was caused not by war, but certainly by a lack of empiricism. Sars, ebola, bird-flu, and possibly other flu-like and coronavirus contagions, have likely been caused by viruses crossing over from animal to human; and while we continue to eat animals there exists the likelihood of yet more cross-overs. Or BSE-type diseases, resulting from our meddling with the food chain.

Will this cause us to stop using known-to-be-dangerous pesticides? Will we stop growing food to feed to hormone-enhanced animals and then feed those animals to humans? No, we will not stop. Not while the world’s impoverished are made to depend on factory-farmed meat, be it beef, pig or chicken. Empiricism is telling us that the time has come to reverse that dependence.

On the bright side (despair tells me that there has to be a bright side) could all these global crises mean an end at last to the nation state? From an historical perspective the nation state has to already be a brief phenomena. Will ongoing international commerce, shared concerns and cross-border communication see a de facto end to the 20^th Century’s petty divisions? Will a new empiricism create a sense of belonging to this our one planet, our one people?

-*-

NB. A cautionary note.

In many dictionaries an alternative meaning for empiricism is given as quackery. This is because in the 19^th Century new scientists, calling themselves empiricists, began questioning what had then passed for medical practice, which was based on traditional methods and followed time-honoured practice, whether their treatments effected a cure or not.

The empiricists held that new medical practice should be based on provable outcomes. Established doctors though had made a good living from wealthy patients who still expected to be bled or have hot cups stuck to their backs. So those doctors, turning the meaning on its head, called the new empiricists ‘quacks’, accusing them and their new-fangled provable outcomes ‘quackery.’ Which has become these days a common political ploy – accuse your opponents of the practice that you yourself are guilty of.

In their campaign against wasteful medicine the empiricists often cited the Rockefellers calling their ‘Nujol’ a cure for cancer. ‘Nujol’ didn’t provably cure cancer. What ‘Nujol’ did was give the patient diarrhoea, was supposed therefore to be purging them of the disease.

Despite this twisted mirror-version of Empiricism the joint definition still persists in many dictionaries and lexicons. Please disregard.

Levity (3)

Jack the Lad

Forgive frequent flyer me, I’m wont to boast. But what I’m about to tell you did happen. Honest.

I’m in my prime, an international salesman, and I was again US bound, had managed to get a last minute seat on a double-decker flight. Albeit that the seat was in the unpopular middle set of seats. I consoled myself that I had the seat next to me empty. Must have been a cancellation – my one being half a pair? Whatever the reason it allowed me some space.

Space that I was already making the most of when a flustered woman arrived on the deck and was being directed to that one spare seat by a steward.

Flustered maybe, but what a woman. Imagine a young Naomi Campbell merged with an equally young Charlize Theron. Being hurried along her poise mind you was a little off, but that was hardly a detraction. Whispering sorry after sorry – for making the fat family of holidaying Americans get ungraciously to their fat feet (white socks!) – this vision of earthly delights squeezed her way, apology by apology, towards little ol’ me.

Have to confess I was struggling to disguise my increased heart-rate, didn’t want to appear gauche. Moving my jacket off her seat to the floor and quickly kicking it back under my seat, super-cool me smiled a casual hello and said, “Just made it then?”

“Hate flying,” she chattily responded. “Try to delay it long as I can. Actually,” she wriggled what looked to be a compact backside into the seat, “it’s only the take-off that has me in pieces. Every single time I think we’re not,” she dropped her voice to a whisper, “we’re never going to make it. Then, once we’re up, then I can relax. God I hate this.”

She buckled her seat-belt across her luscious lap.

“Tell you what,” I said, “talk to me. While we take off. Tell me about yourself. You’re going to the US, what for?”

I assumed business. Not shopping. If wealthy enough for that she’d have gone on a less cramped flight.

“I’m to speak at a conference,” she said. “Principal speaker. In Houston. They’re paying.” She indicated her crowded surroundings as if in explanation.

My own connection wasn’t to Houston. I cursed my luck, but the conversation once begun I kept it up by asking, “What’s the conference?”

“Annual INC.”

“INC? What’s that?”

“International Nymphomania Conference.”

“Really?” I so very casually said. (Be still my beating heart.) “There is such a thing?”

“Most certainly.” She turned on me two of the most candid eyes in the world. I felt my heart do a flip. “It is vitally necessary,” she so seriously told me, “for us to know all that we can about our own urges and about the men who can best satisfy them.”

“Well… yes… you would.” Held by those eyes I was, for one of the few times in my life, almost at a loss for words. “And you’re one of the speakers?”

“Keynote even.” The eyes still held me. “As you can imagine there are at the conference the usual talks and tips. On all the things that you would expect for a grouping such as ours. Talks on sexual health, on contraception, how to keep ourselves safe. How to make ourselves attractive.”

“You’ve done well.”

“Thank you.”

I liked that non-coy acknowledgement. “So what’s your talk on? Specifically?” I asked.

“As keynote speaker I’m to,” she has put on a posh voice, “address conference on stereotypes. Which,” she looked worriedly around the deck at the other passengers, “ has me as nervous as now.”

“Stereotypes?” I said. The eyes came back to me.

“Yes. Stereotypes.” She picked up her thread, “Many of our members get themselves into all kinds of muddles and scrapes following stereotypes. Stereotypes that are frankly incorrect.”

“Incorrect how?” This actually had salesman me interested.

“For instance,” she said, voice lowered and as she leant towards me the bulge of her breast almost touching my upper arm, “the stereotype of the indigenous African penis being the weightiest and the longest. It is emphatically not so. That physical peculiarity belongs to the Native Americans.”

“Really?” I said. “The Native Americans, that is a surprise. What other stereotypes?”

“The best lovers for instance aren’t French. Not by a long shot. The very best lovers, those most attentive to their partner’s needs, are Greek.”

At that point the sign came on telling us that we could undo our seat belts.

“We’re up.” I told her.

“So we are.” She relaxed back into her seat away from me, but turned to smile gratefully at me: “Thank you so much. You got me chattering on and I really never noticed our taking off. Letting you in on all those trade secrets, and I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Tonto.” I held out my hand: “Tonto Popadopalous.”

How to make money writing

If your most earnest wish is to make money out of writing you will first have to have a large print headline saying How To Make Money Writing. This will advertise the subsequent book or course that will tell your customers How To Make Money Writing. Both book and course will ultimately direct the would-be authors to those publishers and periodicals in need of formulaic writing.

The book, or the advertising for the course, will carry testimonials from those who bought the book, or completed the course, telling how by following your instructions they made lots of money from formulaic writing and/or greeting card verses.

There will be no comments from those writers who didn’t want to expend their time or talent on formulaic writing or greeting card verses, and so didn’t make any money. Should any writers complain to your course organisers that what they wanted was to sell their own original writing they will be told, in a sad and sympathetic voice, that their lack of success in placing their work has probably been down to their not understanding the [formulaic] market and/or their own lack of talent and/or lack of enterprise.

What no course advertising How To Make Money Writing will tell the writer ambitious to make money from writing is that of all published writers only about 0.002% of authors make enough to support the average household. That 0.002% will invariably have their books with one of the mainstream publishers as well as, probably, a literary agent actively seeking out and selling rights. Because, and unless an author has a serious stroke of luck and their one title goes viral, to make money the author needs the mainstream publisher’s seed money. Not just the contacts but the money required to get the title into the bestseller listings.

The author needs the mainstream publisher’s salespeople to go to the bookshops and to get each bookshop to stock the book. Those publishers may well pay, or agree a further discount, to have a title featured on the bookshop’s ‘table’, or in the bookshop’s window. All of which is after the publisher has calculated sufficient funds to agree to the basic 40% bookshop take, and with cash reserves enough to be able to pulp those unsold, shop-soiled books returned under the sale-or-return contract with the bookshops.

Small independent publishers don’t have funds enough for any of the above. Their new authors however often begin with exactly those expectations – a copy in every bookshop, copies sent for review, et cetera. Ergo: if you want to feel unappreciated become a small press publisher; and, if you want to make serious money from writing, title your next book, How To Make Money Writing.

Levity (4): Chicken and the….

Returning from an early morning walk I was approaching the branch library in Maryport when I noticed a red hen waiting for the library’s door sensor to register her presence. The hen had to jump up a couple times to get the door’s electric eye to notice her. When finally the glass door did slide back the red hen, with a stately pace at odds with her flapping jumps, crossed the rubber mat onto the mottled blue carpet and up to the counter.

Maryport branch library, a low grey building, has a large plate glass window beside the door. I saw the library assistant lean forward over the counter and appear to ask the hen what she wanted. The assistant listened, nodded, reached down behind the desk and, bending from the waist over the counter, awkwardly helped the red hen to tuck a single book securely under each wing. Thus laden the hen turned about and left through the library’s automatic door. She came down the wheelchair slope, and turned left.

I have to confess that I was so astonished by all that I had just witnessed that, the hen having left, I first looked back through the plate glass window to the library assistant for possible explanation. But the assistant had wandered away to another task; and, by the time I roused myself to wonder just where the hen might have gone and I hastened up to the corner by the riverside allotments, the red hen and her two books was nowhere to be seen.

Returning to the library I found the female assistant with a trolley of returned books slotting them back into their alphabetical – by author – shelf homes.

“I saw you give two books to a chicken,” I whispered. Though why I whispered, and in such an accusatory manner, I know not. That early there was but the two of us in the library.

“Yes,” she said, searching alphabetically along the S section. “Comes in first thing. Always asks for two books.”

“Really?” I said disbelievingly, while also accepting what mine own eyes had witnessed but moments before. “Every day?”

“Not every day.” The assistant slipped a copy of Marraton home. “Once or twice a week.”

While the assistant wheeled her trolley along to the Ws I stood transfixed, endeavouring to absorb this information. When I did rouse myself to catch up with the assistant I again couldn’t seem to help whispering. Came from being in a library I suppose.

“I didn’t,” I said, again accusingly (a cross-examining lawyer doubting her testimony?), “see the hen bring any books back.”

“Never brings them back. I keep a stack just for her below the counter. Those that’ve been damaged, that’ll be sent for recycling.”

Despite the evidence of mine own eyes I still found it hard to believe that I was having this conversation.

“Once or twice a week?” I said.

“Usually,” she said; and she was called away by a recently arrived ragged-looking man wanting to use one of the computer terminals.

-*-

Two mornings later found me loitering on the corner opposite the library. Yesterday night and morning it had been raining and I had figured that even a bibliophile hen wouldn’t have ventured out in such a Cumbrian downpour.

This grey but dry morning the red hen arrived just before opening and, as when I had first seen her, she stood waiting for the door sensor to register her presence. This mor

ning she only had to do her flapping jump once.

I scurried into the library hot on her heels – if hens can be said to have heels. I didn’t though follow her up to the counter. Once through the sliding door I stepped aside and stayed waiting, hoping to witness the transaction entire.

The hen, as before, approached the counter. As before she waited for the library assistant to notice her. Then she said simply, “Buk Buk.”

The library assistant, as before, reached down to her – I now knew – stack of dog-eared and about-to-be recycled books, leant over the counter and tucked one of those books securely under each of the red hen’s wings.

I slipped out the same open door as the hen, but held back a few steps as I followed her up to the riverside allotments. I had assumed that one of those allotment sheds would be her destination. The allotments were a drop down from the terrace row. But no, the hen – at her stately pace – went along to the main road and, keeping to the near pavement, she proceeded over the river bridge.

I nearly lost sight of her when, head down, she suddenly dashed between the traffic. I caught a glimpse of her however as she went under the iron gate into the woods on the opposite side.

Worried that I would lose sight of her in the brambly undergrowth of the woods I ran to catch up, was relieved to find her keeping to the well-trodden path.

The River Ellen curves through this wood before going under the road bridge. The path, more or less straight, took me through the trees and between massed Himalayan balsam before turning to run alongside the river.

The hen suddenly disappeared from view. Again I ran to catch up, arrived breathless above a slant path going down the muddy riverbank.

We were at that part of the river where there used to be an old weir. Like many of Maryport’s other industrial remains hard to find an actual explanation for the weir’s having once been.

On this side of the river were some part submerged slabs of rock. An extremely large frog was crouched on one of those slant-submerged rocks; and the red hen w

as picking her way from rock to rock towards the frog. When she arrived on his rock the frog grabbed, I thought rudely, the books from under the hen’s wings. Saying “Reddit Reddit,” the frog then carelessly cast each book into the river.

Hypergraphia

We all to some extent suffer from this, a thought failing to fully exist for us unless we have written it down. It is what happens after that that concerns me here. Because hypergraphia, the deep desire to write, has led – courtesy of the latest technology – to a proliferation of self-published books.

Hypergraphia in and of itself doesn’t mean unfortunately that the author has anything original to say, nor that they are burning to put into words their life experience. No, they simply want to lose themselves in the act of writing.

Like weekend watercolourists hypergraphics want only to produce a kind of writing, writing that’s in the style of, writing that’s like their favourite/trendy author… Nothing new being said, considered; writing solely for the sake of writing it emerges like the diluted clay that dribbles out of old mine workings, reasons for long gone.

Fortunately some hypergraphics don’t seek publication. Oh they may have once, and have been so upset by an off-hand rejection (not one fantasy of adoring readership fulfilled) that they have never risked rejection again, preferring the mild endorsements of their drop-in writing group.

The writing of the self-absorbed hypergraphic is meant to be looked at and admired, not critiqued. Their outrage at negative comments in an Amazon review: “So unfair,” they cry. I’m supposing therefore that a hypergraphic’s writing is not intended to have an impact, is not meant to elicit a reaction, even possibly – perish the thought! – cause offence. A hypergraphic’s is writing with no ping or zing to it. And there is a digital mountain of it.

So very easy now for serious writers to find their work lost in this fog of verbiage, while at the same time being excluded from the mainstream’s ever-recycled few. But still we, being ourselves hypergraphics, write.

So be it.

Levity (5): The Golden Screw (as told by grandmothers generations past)

I once hand-wrote a version of this in an old exercise book for my daughter, with drawings. No drawings here.

-*-

Once upon a time, but not so very long ago, a young mother was undressing her toddler daughter at bath-time. When she pulled her daughter’s vest up the mother was shocked to discover a golden screw where her daughter’s belly button should have been. The mother’s first instinct was to try to pull it out. But her daughter cried, “Stop! Stop! You’re hurting me! Hurting me!”

This was in the older old days. The bath was a tin bath in front of a coal fire. And it was before the NHS, before X-rays even, when you had to pay just to be seen by a doctor. Fortunately, aside from when the mother occasionally tried to pull/squeeze/tug/grease the golden screw out of her daughter’s belly button, her having it there didn’t bother the little girl at all. Indeed she liked to wear it sometimes exposed like a jewel.

The father worked extra shifts in the factory, the mother took in more sewing, and after several months they had saved enough money to pay for a visit to the doctor. Who said that he had never seen anything like it. “But definitely gold,” he said. “Fortunately an inert metal.”

The doctor seemed more interested in the gold than in their daughter. Unable himself to remove the golden screw the doctor recommended the parents take their daughter to a belly-button specialist. The doctor wrote a letter for them to take. He charged extra for writing the letter.

other, father and daughter talked over what to do next. The ‘specialist’ fees were four times what the doctor’s had been. The daughter didn’t want to go: the doctor’s prodding and pulling at the golden screw had hurt her. And the letter to the ‘specialist’ said that the doctor’s own medical library contained ‘not the least reference to…’ ‘…such a peculiar affliction.’

“So what’s the point?” the father tiredly said.

Years passed. The girl’s seventh year had in its middle a long hot summer. The girl and her two younger brothers had the tin bath outside and were taking turns to jump in and out of the cold water. They were wearing only their underpants.

A tinker’s handcart came rattling along the road, the tinker shouting out that he’d mend pots and pans. Wondering at the shouting the girl’s mother came to her door. When the clinking and clattering tinker came abreast her door he gestured to her daughter splashing in and out of the tin bath.

“Seen that before,” he said loudly. “Want to know how to get rid?”

“You know how?”

“Not easy,” he said. “Timing’s everything. On the full moon you have to be in Wicklow’s eight turret castle. And you have to lay your daughter to sleep in the top room of the seventh turret. That’s the turret right on the cliff’s edge. Only on the full moon mind. In the morning the screw’ll be gone.”

The mother didn’t know where Wicklow was. The tinker explained.

“Can’t afford the fare there,” the mother started to turn back indoors.

“Go the tinker ways,” he told her. “We travel cheap.”

“How so?” she eyed him doubtfully.

“A fair bit of walking, and a wee bit of sneakage.” And he proceeded to tell her how and where to go.

A week or so before the full moon mother and daughter set off following the tinker’s instructions. Father was left at home looking after the two boys.

Tramping back lanes and by-ways, and cadging more than a few lifts from lonely carters, mother and daughter reached Holyhead after four days and slipped unseen aboard a ferry. Next day they sneaked ashore in Dublin. Two days of walking later they reached Wicklow and found the castle with eight turrets.

The castle though was in a sorry state of repair. What was left of it however was vast when compared to their tiny terrace house.

Exploring it room by empty room there didn’t seem to be anyone living there, until on the evening of the sixth day they chanced upon an old man in a dark room in the basement of the seventh turret.

“What you a’doing here?” He squinted through wrinkles and whiskers at them. The mother explained to him about the tinker and her daughter’s ‘condition.’

“Oh,” the old man said to the daughter, “you’m one of them. Best hurry then. Moon rises early tonight.”

“Where do we go?” the mother asked.

“Only her. Won’t work if you’re both there. Shy, you see. She has to sleep alone.”

It was almost dusk by the time mother and daughter had climbed all the stone stairs to the very top of the turret. The single room there, as they’d been told, had a stone bench for a bed.

“They said you’re to sleep here,” the mother told her daughter. “You can have my coat to lie on. I’ll be on the landing below. If you need me, just cry out.”

The daughter, a kind girl, was concerned that her mother would be cold without her coat. They had shivered together nights on their journey there. She gave her mother her small coat. “Will at least keep your legs warm,” she said.

“You’re a good girl,” the mother tearfully said; and whispering endearments to one another they reluctantly parted.

On the below-landing the mother couldn’t find anywhere even semi-comfortable where she could go to sleep. All was cold grey stone. Worried for her daughter she spent the night sitting on the cold stone steps, or she walked in small circles on the small circular landing, rubbing her arms to keep warm.

The daughter meanwhile – it had been a tiring week for an eight year old who had never left home before – carefully did as she had been instructed. With her mother’s coat under her she laid herself down on the stone bench and she pulled up her top so that her bare belly was exposed. Almost straight away she fell into the deepest of deep sleeps.

As the whiskery old man had said the moon rose almost as dusk fell. A moon beam, coming through the turret’s narrow window, began to travel around the daughter’s bedchamber. When the silver moonbeam reached the girl’s knees a miniature man with curly golden hair squeezed himself sideways through the narrow window and came walking down the moonbeam. He was carrying, for him, a huge golden screwdriver. (For us, a moderately large screwdriver.)

The little man with the curly golden hair smiled to see the young girl’s dreaming smile, and he whistled a quiet tune while waiting for the silver moonbeam to reach her belly. As soon as it did he set to work, struggling to turn the huge, for him, screwdriver.

His solid gold screwdriver had no ratchet like modern screwdrivers, and was almost the same size as himself. And he had to hurry. According to the tinker the screw could only be got out when lit by the moonbeam.

Struggle furiously though the little man did, and the golden screw came out. He tucked it inside his bodice and, pausing just the once to smile down on the still dream-smiling girl, the little man walked up the narrow moonbeam and squeezed out the narrow turret window.

When the grey dawn came it woke three raucous seagulls. The three raucous seagulls woke the girl. Sleepily she felt down her tummy.

“Mum!” she shouted. “It’s gone!”

Her mother, also part-woken by the three raucous seagulls, came up the stairs as quickly as her cold-stiffened legs would allow. Staggering into the room she saw her daughter’s completely bare belly. Giving a cry of joy she gathered her girl-child up into her arms. And her bum fell off.

Individualism

Although all my life I have been an uneasy part of any grouping, uncomfortable belonging, I have had an equal distrust of individualism, of belief and pride in the self.

The fundamental falsity of individualism is that it ignores our reliance on so many others. Whatever our civilisation, whatever our society or class, within that civilisation we rely on unknown others to provide us with foodstuffs, clothing, housing, even coherent transport systems. As individuals we cannot escape that intricate interdependence. When ill some unknown other will nurse us. When dead some anonymous other will dispose of our carcass.

Yet the myth of the lone individual persists, is even celebrated. But can any individual be truly self-reliant? Even a hermit has to rely on the rest of us keeping our distance. Not only that the would-be hermit in his or her remote mountain cave still cannot remain unaffected by the rest of humanity. Nowadays for instance they will have to cope with the changes in climate caused by the rest of us.

Every generation some more are led to believe that they are uniquely themselves, wholly independent of all around them. Such delusion, such false belief, will lie at the root of their future dissonance, and will have them, when they try to impose their myth onto others, at odds with all about them and – sadly – their own self.

One encounters this false individualism these days mostly in the prolonged adolescence of middle-class USA, their emphasis on identity, their similar celebrations of individuality. Bosses particularly suffer from this myth, usually men who have made themselves, who have found themselves important, that is those men who have given themselves a greater importance than those around them. Which brings us to patriarchy and even within age-old patriarchy the inability of some men to control those around them, inevitably leading to domestic abuse.

Once one of those individual and self-important men achieves political power, Trump for instance, their myth of individualism becomes a dissonance that gets inflicted on the rest of us. Or here in the UK one ‘individual’ – both men with affected hairstyles – but this one ambitious for a prime ministerial title, imposes his incompetence on the rest of us. To our misfortune during a pandemic.

Levity (6): The Squaw in Attendance

What with Custer’s Last Stand, the nymphomaniac’s preference and now this, I might seem to have an obsession with native Americans. Not so. It’s just the way the tales fell into my joke lexicon, and that unfortunately some kinds of humour are reliant on tropes and stereotypes.

-*-

In this tale we have the Chief of a Northern people, who are on their annual migration North to South. The Chief is slowly walking around their temporary encampment with his four year old son.

“Dad,” the boy says, “tell me again how we get our names.”

“I’ve told you this before son. Several times now.”

“Tell me again Dad. I’ve forgotten.”

His father sighs, but accepts that children learn by repetition.

“OK son,” he says. “The moment a child is born the squaw in attendance – not the mother, she’d be too exhausted. No, the squaw in attendance lifts the flap of the wigwam.”

“A flap like that Dad?” They are passing a tepee painted with buffaloes and crescent moons.

“Yes, like that. The squaw in attendance lifts the flap, and the very first thing that she sees is how the child gets his name. Or her name. That is how your uncle, born in the cold north, got his name, Standing Bear. Your cousin got called Running Elk. While your graceful elder sister became Starlight on Water. She was born when we were beside that lake. Remember the lake?”

“Yes. From shore to shore.”

“Do you understand now?”

“Yes. Thank you Dad.”

“Good. Now go and join Fleeing Wolf and the others at the stream.”

Two days later the people have made camp near an expanse of sage brush. The father and son again take an evening stroll around the temporary encampment. And again the four year old boy asks to be told how their people get their names.

Unhappy with the camp’s closeness to the whispering sage brush, and with a lingering displeasure at the ancient squaw who attended his son’s birth, and now exasperated with his son asking again how their people get their names, he kneels before his son and, grabbing him by both shoulders, he speaks angrily straight into his face: “You are not a stupid boy.”

“I forgot what you said,” the boy begins, trying to squirm out of his father’s grip.

“You are not forgetful in other ways.” The father’s grip tightens. “I will not go to the bother of telling you again.”

“Please Dad. Please. One last time.” He staggers backwards on being released as his father stands. “Please Dad. Please. How do we get our names? How?”

“No.” His father turns away. “Enough is enough, Two Dogs Fucking.”

Torture

As noted by Charles Dickens the last government to officially reintroduce torture was that of Italy’s Francis IV, 1779-1846. Now, here in 2021, we have had Boris Johnson and his Tory gang trying to do the same, regardless of the UK being a signatory to the Geneva Convention, which holds torture to be illegal.

Simple minds seek simple (and quick) solutions. The belief that torture might work also accords with Johnson’s laziness: if it’s too much bother to obey an international law, ignore it, while also blithely dismissing as irrelevant electoral law, parliamentary procedures or the recent customs protocols agreed with the European Union, and casually waving aside the Geneva Convention itself as of little consequence.

Neither torture nor capital punishment work. A person being tortured will ultimately confess to anything. Frantz Fanon’s work on torture should be required reading for all seeking political office. Or they should at least take a look at how not to get lumbered with a Guantanamo full of prisoners kept there on the strength of torture-induced, and therefore legally dubious, confessions.

As torture is no route to the truth likewise capital punishment has been proved to be no deterrent to crime. Here I am in agreement with Dostoyevsky’s ‘Idiot’, in that capital punishment is of itself the premeditated and therefore the greater crime. Yet US states and right wing politicians here, and the several kinds of idiot who make up so many of the world’s governments, still attempt to seduce their simpleminded electorates by calling for the ‘death penalty,’ regardless of the wider consequences. (One consequence being that those US states with the death penalty have the highest per capita murder rates.)

Thankfully when the bill approving torture – retrospectively – came before Parliament here, there were sufficient law-abiding and conscience stricken Tory MPs that doubted the wisdom, and legality of it, that even if they didn’t vote against the bill, they abstained.

The torture bill failed.

Phew!

Becoming

Is every ending but a beginning, all a process of becoming, every resolution but a part of becoming?

A box of new books arrives from the printer. The author lays them out for a social media photo boast, carries around a smile for a couple of hours. That smile fades as public appearances are considered, arranged.

A bridge is built. A worthy cuts the ribbon to allow the first traffic to cross. Already rust has found a spot on one of the girders. Maintenance is being arranged and will be ongoing.

A love is schemed and fought for, and won. Cohabitation follows. And follows. What was briefly sublime becomes ordinary. If a heterosexual pair he might later hanker after firmer, younger female flesh. While she might hold in feminist contempt the man-child she struggles to remain with.

The war refugee finds sanctuary, seeks and is granted citizenship. Only to discover that during the process of settlement the government of his new country has changed and these new politicians are looking for a war to fight, unite their populace. The popular press now has the once-refugee seen as the enemy.

After the explosion at Chernobyl the surrounding land became a radioactive no-go area for human beings. That contaminated land became a wildlife sanctuary for European bison.

That is not to say that every other disaster/inundation/firestorm results in at least one beneficial side-effect. Because of what we human beings have done, are doing to the planet, some species – having taken thousands of years to evolve – will never return. In many cases what we have created is a terminal wasteland.

Unforeseen Outcome of a Collaboration

One aspect of my collaboration with Mal Earl that took me by surprise was how the placement of a poem could pretty much dictate its format.

First allow me to explain how the collaboration came about.

Ever since I lived in Cumbria – Mal still lives there, near Whitehaven – we have been considering how we might put a collection together. After much intermittent back and forth we agreed a title, Map. But then couldn’t come up with a visual theme/character to carry it through. Mal had moments of inspiration. But nothing stuck.

Meanwhile I’d moved to Wales and Mal had put together his – long time in consideration – homage to Edward Thomas. The full colour pamphlet, Dark Pastoral – https://malearl.com – had a select few of Edward Thomas’s poems along with Mal’s artwork. His blackbird for Adlestrop is truly a thing of beauty.

Mal’s drawing of birds there in Dark Pastoral had him look again at the few bird poems I had sent him in Map. He asked if I could send more.

He selected a few, we agreed a title, in the hand; and he ran with them. Images first. The sketch of the raven prior to its being coloured for the Edward Thomas pamphlet, then a wren. Which, for me, was the clincher.

Here’s the wren poem as I sent it to Mal.

Every Day Begins Bravely

When daybreak’s cold light

lies behind trees and hedges

behind houses

and roadside verges are dewsilvered

a wren flies up to a thin ridge of roof

or topmost cable

and in his hard little voice

shouts his defiance at all predators

calls alive

the colours of the day

Rumpled

floating above the gravity of sleep

I tell myself to get up

try again

And here is the poem with Mal’s first drawing of the wren.

You will notice, as I immediately did, that he has centre-spaced the poem.

Now when as editor I receive centre-spaced poems for The Journal I pretty much know, just by virtue of their being centre-spaced, that I am likely to reject them. For little other reason than that over the years I have come to recognise centre-spacing and ornate fonts as the mark of the poet novice. Being unsure how to format the poem the novice sticks it in the middle of the page.

Yet here, with the layout of the drawing, my poem – now centre-spaced – filled the space perfectly and doesn’t affect the rhythm. I consequently became happy to let Mal, with his design eye, decide the formatting of the poems.

To begin with some stayed left-justified, and some became centred. The prose poems were of course easiest and stayed as blocks of print. Mal’s most impressive initial change though came with the poem accompanying the peregrine. It went from left to right-justified, and damn me for my prejudices, it still worked.

Of course it didn’t end there…

Copies of in the hand are available from me here –

http://sites.google.com/site/samsmiththejournal/sam-smith-poetry

and here –https://samsmithbooks.weebly.com/poetry-chapbooks.html

Unhappy Returns

Time and again I come back, keep coming back, to how so very easy is the creation of more concentration camps. How easy it still is for politicians, unchallenged, to define other human beings as worthless, as impediments to be removed. Or their being of a ‘lesser race’ or a ‘lower class’ their only use as slaves (paid or unpaid); and once their usefulness ceases, rather than become a drain on the public purse, best they be disposed of.

In We Need Madmen – https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/9284 – I told of life after Soper, a UK politician who followed the same path as Hitler. Told just how easy it was for him and his fellow politicians to recruit an army of followers. I invented various sources to relate their history.

‘In the Boer War they were christened concentration camps. Hitler kept the name. Stalin called them Labour camps. The British renamed them Internment camps. The Israelis referred to theirs as Refugee camps. Elsewhere they were known as Transit, Displacement, Detainee, Re-education, Migrant, et cetera. Their fences were all topped with barbed wire. By the time Soper arrived there were no euphemisms left. They have become simply Camps.’ Joseph Tsolke Daily News.

‘Soper set out to “purify and strengthen” Europe, to rid it of its dross — welfare spongers, social benefit scroungers, the good-for-nothings, the slackers — in other words, the weakest. Soper’s spartan philosophy, like Hitler’s, had a genetic base: the sickly and the weak infect the strong. . .

‘Now it was a generally accepted myth in each of the European countries that the minority migrant workers formed the bulk of the so-called spongers. In Britain it was the Asians and the Blacks, in France the Algerians, in Germany the Turks, in Holland the Surinams and Chinese, in Denmark the Cypriots. . . All went to the Camps.’ Frieda G, UNESCO, Contemporary History Lectures, Series 2

This was written way before what Donald Trump so very nearly achieved, before what Mohdi and Bolsonaro have been attempting, before it has become readily apparent that the Israelis really do define the Palestinian people as lesser beings and treat them accordingly.

While here in the UK Johnson and his crew already hold some people as worthless, of no account. So his government cuts foreign aid, welfare benefits, finds clever ways to stop asylum seekers… All the beginnings that can lead to another unhappy return. Johnson has already managed to convince the voting majority to act against their own best interest with Brexit. Next he will have them turn on their actual neighbours.

You could justifiably ask why this morbid preoccupation with possible disaster. Let me give my bleak obsession some historical context. I was born at the very end of WW2, grew up with newsreel images of the Belsen pits, survivors’ tales of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then came Biafra, Vietnam, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Srebrenica, the Uyghurs, Guantanamo… The list is too long, too repetitive.

When I went on to write pieces – https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1096975 – I had in mind a nameless mid-European country, somewhere on the edge of the Union. Contemporary, but of no great international influence. The type of place Johnson and his self-congratulatory like will sell their arms to.

Beak yellow as hawthorne leaves in autumn, a watched

blackbird runs across the guardhouse lawn. Stops.

Even here, a man can be the tankard of his own being;

but, always, on the edge of the small sensible calm

each man makes for himself, there are barbarians.

A guard, his face a mask of intent, makes

one man kneel, bend his head, shoots him

in the hollow of the neck. On hut roofs

wagtails bounce along, pause with a Parkinsonian

tremble. The prisoners do not know the man’s

offence, nor how he may have appeared offensive.

So the men look down: eye contact could

initiate the fever of slaughter. And most

men here have trembled on the edge of other

trenches. Old bubbled varnish freckles

odd planks and snail trails tinsel

the huts’ sides. Beyond the fence, on yellow

grass tufts, spiders have spun grey candyfloss.

Come the pandemic “Let the bodies pile high” is what Dominic Cummings reported Johnson as saying.

Reviving John Clare

In 1996 James Hogg, of University Salzburg, published my first collection, To Be Like John Clare.

I was working then in Tone Vale Hospital [see previous postings]. Because of the subject matter – the asylum and my relationship with the surrounding Somerset countryside – and because of my continuing to work in an almost fully staffed 32 ward hospital, plus the local radio and newspapers taking an interest, that first collection sold surprisingly well.

I moved on to other collections, in 2000 to other jobs, and shortly after to other places.

In 2004 Boho Press, an imprint of Anthony Delgrado’s Bluechrome, published Problems & Polemics, a follow-up collection to To Be Like John Clare. The poems in Problems & Polemics covered the move from Tone Vale to my working in a small acute unit and they concentrated solely on psychiatric matters.

When planning a launch for Problems & Polemics I thought, given that I was living in a new place with a new audience, it might be a good idea to have some copies of To Be Like John Clare to hand – for those with a wider interest in mental health.

I contacted Salzburg, now being run by Wolfgang Görtschacher, James Hogg having died shortly after To Be Like John Clare had been released. Wolfgang said that To Be Like John Clare was out of print, but that if I cared to pay – he named a sum way beyond my day-job wages (a cashier then in an Ilfracombe amusement arcade) – he’d do another print run.

Problems & Polemics on its own went on to get some good reviews, and some sales, but by the time I had settled in Cumbria Anthony’s Boho and Bluechrome were on their way to going bust. In the years following I played around with making some of Problems & Polemics into a chapbook; and then I moved to Wales. Where, in 2018, Wordcatcher of Cardiff proposed a brand new edition of Problems and Polemics. (David Norrington, owner of Wordcatcher and married to a mental health professional, has a dislike of ampersands).

By then it being almost two decades since I’d left nursing I thought a better idea might be to amalgamate the two mental health books and call the joined pair, Asylum Poems. So I contacted Wolfgang Görtschacher again, asked if he would release To Be Like John Clare from contract. He said that he’d much prefer putting out a new edition of To Be Like John Clare, this time with a poem per page, unlike the first edition where I had insisted on poems going over the page. The whole collection being a narrative I had wanted people to keep on reading. And from what doctors and nurses later told me they had found it unputdownable. Not that I’d recommend poems going over the page for every collection. With a poem a page the new Salzburg edition would therefore be larger, have a new cover and sell for a higher price.

For production costs of this bigger book, Wolfgang said, my share would cost me ….gulp.…. another sum, in Euros, way beyond my sterling bank balance.

So Wordcatcher brought out as solo the new edition of Problems and Polemics – https://www.amazon.com/Problems-Polemics-Discourse-Mental-Ill-Health-ebook/dp/B07L8H6PT9/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=Problems+%26+Polemics&qid=1629020116&s=books&sr=1-3 Those who have come by a copy have found the poems to be still sadly relevant.

Tired though of the poems in To Be Like John Clare having been locked out of sight in Salzburg these last twenty years I have now decided to give them – a couple at a time: fair usage – an occasional airing in this blog. Here are the first two.

Now, Here

In the asylum on a winter’s night

pale crickets cheep

among the heating pipes.

Now is the slow time of stones,

their hot creation and cold erosion,

where a beetle can plod on

indiscreetly

through dry leaf litter

under dry cracking trees.

Along squeaking asylum corridors

endlessly curving,

in boxed ceiling conduits,

among looped, colour-coded cables,

unseen crickets cheep.

The echoes are quick and sibilant,

without focus.

As if here there wasn’t,

already,

confusion enough.

Self-Contained

Distantly the sound comes

through doors and echoing up walls

a man giving a bark like a big dog.

Phlegm bubbles and the bark rasps out

through a throat already inflamed,

a mind caught up on the petulant production

of phlegm and the explosion of cough.

A bent man in disorganised clothes

begs cigarettes in the entrance foyer.

A dribbling woman too drips her fingertips

on passing sleeves. Along the corridor,

singing and marching, comes a thin woman.

And goes. Another arrives in a rush and

sobbing histrionically.

She is ignored

by shutdown selves in shop and canteen.

Another mind on another ward

has magnified or misremembered her pain

and she yelps – yow yow yow yow – starting

even at the prospect of being moved. She

sounds like a seagull calling. Also distantly.

Should you be so wealthy or so unwise, first edition copies of To Be Like John Clare are available at outrageous prices in the outer reaches of the internet and Amazon.

Where to succeed is also to fail

Corruption on the scale that we now have here in the UK would historically, and usually elsewhere, have preceded a revolution.

Let us look at just how, here in the UK, we are corrupted.

We have a self-sustaining ruling class, whose mock opposition draws from the selfsame university debating societies. Their joint sense of entitlement will have them time and again awarding themselves pay rises and extra expenses while asking the general population to take sacrificial pay cuts.

I have long lacked confidence in the 4^th Estate here, its ‘independence’ from those it claims to ‘objectively’ report upon. The UK’s ‘independent’ press depends for its existence on advertisers who, if they dislike what a newspaper or broadcaster does, they withdraw their advertising. If the newspapers’ owners are individuals then they are multi-millionaires with investments to protect. If the media’s owners are corporate then they are already embedded in the system – and if not already corrupt they can be pressured, can be bought.

This corruption is taken-for-granted, a snake eating its own tail. Just look how many media moguls also end up in the House of Lords, where they sit alongside Bishops, those past masters of the cover-up. Pet paedophile priest anyone?

So how are we to strive here? Within this society, this system? And towards what? How seek the admiration of, acceptance by one’s contemporaries? You too crave a knighthood? An Order of the British Empire? But to want to succeed on their terms you have to believe that the UK’s is an establishment worth belonging to. Or is to succeed here in the UK evidence that you have failed as a member of the human race?

Once corruption becomes accepted then how that country functions will be below par. No-one is trusted, nothing is believed. Only those closest to one are trusted, each smaller unit operating independently of the whole. So it is with corruption that taxes don’t get paid, laws get disobeyed. No-one believes.

So how to strive upwards now in this faux meritocracy, the corrupt UK? You must choose one of the two main political parties. You could try the self-named ‘party of business,’ the Tories, a.k.a The Mean Graspers. Or putting on an earnest face you could join the Liberals or Labour, the parties now of Petty Bourgeois Respectability; and which will also lead you eventually to your own seat in the House of Lords. Budge up Lord Mandelspew.

The already elite, or those forelock-tuggers who identify with the elite, can dismiss all that I’m saying here as a loser’s diatribe. They will do so at their peril. There are only so many times in the striving lives of those not-connected when they can discover, again too late, that the fix was in and all their efforts were of no consequence. Or rather the one consequence of their failure is to make them angrier with each realisation. So does every unfair, every corrupt society, sit upon a bubbling lava bed of irrational anger.

To see just how corrupt the UK has become we don’t have to look much further back than the Liars’ Referendum that gave us Brexit. Now we have to tolerate a known liar as Prime Minister, while the drone-killing-crew remain in charge over in the equally corrupt USA. Both of our electorates will be led, by our ‘independent’ media, to vote for them or their lying like again.

Corruption on the scale that we now have would historically have preceded a revolution.

Further excerpts from To Be Like John Clare

I had thought to let this pair speak for themselves, but found that a brief explanation is needed for the second.

To Be Right, To Do Right

He was a big man, no neck.

Roaring

he began to kick out the ward windows.

I grabbed him away, shouted his name into his face,

asked him what he thought he was doing.

All over him muscles pulled one against the other.

“I’m a good man Sam.” he said, “Whole of my life

I have done as God and the voices told me.”

Then he let us inject him.

John Clare

I have seen men sat on wards

crouching over their pockets’ contents,

organising an identity around

bottle tops, tobacco wrappers, an important form.

I have seen men on wards with,

in their pockets,

whole toilet rolls, flattened,

and scribbled over

end to end in slanted code.

Corners of magazines,

the porous insides of packages,

have been invested with tiny calligraphy

and words so profound that,

taken all together,

they become banal.

I have sat with men on wards

and we have looked out together

through small squared panes

at grounds enclosed by trees,

a view curtailed by summer haze.

I have sat with men

in their massive suicidal silence,

and to mark the passing of my time

I have talked,

pointing out a spotted flycatcher,

“Look, tied by elastic to its perch.”

Fluttering out and back again.

“See.

Out and back again.”

“See.

Out and back again.”

Where the events related in the first poem, To Be Right…, took place on my own ward, those in the second happened throughout the hospital.

A chronic staff shortage had me initially taken on as an untrained nursing assistant. Although based on one of the acute wards, as one of the few ‘extra’ males I would get sent to other wards to ‘special’ those patients there thought to be a danger to themselves or to others. ‘Specialling’ meant that I had to keep the person being ‘specialled’ within arm’s reach at all times. For a break sometimes, especially on a 13 hour shift, I’d be sent to another ward to ‘special’ someone else. For a while there at Tone Vale I apparently became known as ‘Specialling Sam.’

Too many of us

Too many of us. That we can readily agree on. Far far too many of us using up the planet’s resources.

What we can’t agree on is what’s to be done. How do we stop this ever-expanding mass?

The right believe that our being too many is the fault of the fecund poor. They are correct; but they look no further than apportioning blame. Although they might go as far as fantasising on ways of adding bromide to slum dwellers’ water supply. Or consider, but dismiss as eugenically impractical, the forced sterilisation of poor women.

Why is it that the unschooled poor have so many more children than the educated middle class? And we’re talking populations here, whole countries, not individuals. A country’s religion is often readily blamed. But religious belief only goes so deep into any population, is often just a way of being as lipservice respectable, as orthodox as your neighbour.

Take Roman Catholic opposition to contraception and abortion. Roman Catholic couples turn out to be only against contraception when they can’t afford it. As soon as couples can, as soon as contraceptive devices become readily available, Roman Catholic populations start to decline.

This has held true throughout Europe. And it’s not only Catholics, holds as true for any prohibitive religion, any wealthy country, Japan for instance. The population falls. Given the option wealthy societies, when children are no longer viewed as pensionable insurance, those societies stop reproducing their population.

So how do we stop the world’s poor from, generation rapidly succeeding generation, reproducing their populations? The answer has to be by increasing their share of the planet’s wealth, by education, by the availability of contraceptive devices.

However, having been forced lately to acknowledge that there are limits to the planet’s wealth, for any poorer population to become less poor will require a wealthier population to become less wealthy.

Can humanity do this? Unlikely, when the gap between rich and poor has been widening within many Western countries these last few years. Unlikely therefore that the leaders of those countries will even attempt to increase the wealth of poorer countries. Given their exploitive mindset they are more likely to cynically rely on climate catastrophes (‘Let the bodies pile high’) wiping out huge portions of the world’s population, while naively believing themselves inviolable.

How does a rabbit know where to dig a hole, and other considerations

I listen to groups of thirty-somethings, those with job titles like Content Manager, gathered together in a bubble of talk within which they get excited over friends’ news; and I wonder how that came to be.

I wonder too if our longevity is causing us to lose customs. Because we ourselves expect to still be here to see the 7 year repeat do we not now see the need to pass on our knowledge? Be that craft technique or agrarian know-how?

Does the comely ingénue only keep innocently asking supposedly candid questions because she can’t remember the answers?

The ongoing puzzle too of the circles some choose to inhabit. The mixed messages for instance that some young women send out when, in the macho company they sought, they both flaunt and deny their sex. Responses to their own confusion getting sprayed angrily at those men equally bewildered by her signals.

It has to be part of our humanity to recognise parts of ourselves in others. But when those others are socially defined as insane we have to wonder if that definition might also apply – in those parts – to ourselves. Especially when the behaviours, the thoughts given words, have been our own but had been best kept private…

On the other hand, and keeping one’s distance, one can behold someone’s self-inflicted self-agonising, and wonder why they just don’t get on with living?

But then do you too want to be one of those men or women who endeavour always to show themselves to be superior to their surroundings? Regardless?

I listen again to a group of thirty-somethings. This time without a sneer. Is a measure of maturity how one’s ego responds to praise of another?

Recommendations

I am supposing that any who come here are also likely to visit other blogs. These recommendations however aren’t for other blogs, but for a couple of regular newsletters.

The first is by Maria Popova. It used to be called ‘Brian Pickings‘, recently changed to ‘Marginalia‘. So far as I can make out the email address remains the same – newsletter@brainpickings.org (I can’t remember how I first signed up, but I assume that if one emails and asks how, one will be told.)

Marginalia‘s first outing – to my author of ‘Trees‘ delight – concentrated on Ursula K Le Guin’s fellow kinship with trees. Further content however has continued in much the same vein as ‘Brain Pickings‘, every issue being an education, a provocation even. In that they have stimulated me to write or to go off in search of titles previously unmet.

Bulgarian by birth Maria Popova will take a subject, an aspect of art or literature, and she will explore it through the lens of her wide reading. Recurring, favourite lens being James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, Rilke, Kahil Gibran, Zadie Smith…She draws from many sources, hers an international take on what it is to be alive now. Also included in every newsletter is a variety of artistic reproductions – some William Blake, Japanese prints, illos from a recent edition of ‘Leaves of Grass’…

While Maria Popova concerns herself with matters philosophical and artistic, Amanda Stern’s newsletter specialises in matters psychological.

Amanda Stern – amandastern.bulletin.com / amandastern@bulletin.com – declares herself to be ‘neither a therapist nor a medical professional’ simply someone who has had an ‘anxiety disorder’ and who has subsequently developed an interest in the possible causes and various therapies for that and associated disorders. Each newsletter explores a particular theory or therapy. Not all however is speculation and theory, she also offers up a variety of practical suggestions.

Both of these newsletters demonstrate the wealth of knowledge available via, the very positive side of the internet. Which I fear could be lost, falling foul of clumsy politicians seeking to take control of social media, become an unfortunate side effect of their attempting to close down idiots’ use of technology name-calling across the ether. So, before they do that, do take take advantage of these two regular newsletters.

Mind Life (life of the mind)

For those of us who have lived so much of our lives within our imaginations, within our minds, the concept of having no busy brain, no active thoughts when applied to ourselves can seem, not only impossible, but can fill us with horror. Can seem equally impossible and horrific when applied to friends and colleagues. For instance I was shocked to my boots when I was first told that Anne Born had Alzheimer’s.

Some history. When I began The Journal, its initial incarnation of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry, Anne had been an enthusiastic, if at times critical, supporter. And after the first couple of years I found that I was relying almost entirely on the translations of Anne and Robin Fulton.

Anne, living closer, became my guide to the breadth of Scandinavian poetry, her knowledge matched only by her humour and her enthusiasm. We attended many of the same readings – on a River Dart ferry, in a Salcombe pub garden, in Coleridge Cottage… to name but a few. My favourite reading memory of Anne however is when I organised a Poetry Cabaret in Taunton’s Brewhouse theatre.

Anne, being more used to reading to a scattering of occupied chairs in well-lit rooms, found herself blinded by the Brewhouse theatre’s stage lights. Unable to gauge the audience’s reactions threw her. Trying to at least make eye contact with the front row of the audience – their feet and laps dimly visible from the stage – as she progressed through her reading Anne crouched lower and lower until she was almost kneeling.

Anne was old then, dressed old, had white hair. But she still swam regularly. Even after the sudden death of her husband. And, once recovered from that blow, Anne remained learned and fun. Even though we no longer met that often.

I had of necessity decided to change The Journal‘s format, had moved away by the time I learned of Anne’s illness, of her having been admitted to a Nursing Home. Bear in mind that, although I had moved, it hadn’t been so long before that I had been working on psycho-geriatric wards, which had basically been a day-round of feeding and toileting, dressing and undressing. To imagine Anne’s bright intelligence in such a setting, with her wealth of knowledge, all those languages, that talent lost to herself… For Anne it had seemed a cruelly long ending.

Now I am of the age that Anne was at when she crouched lower and lower to see under the stage lights, and I am beginning to suspect my own mind. What do these pre-sleep hallucinations augur? How much is brain decay responsible for the manufacturing of voices and the unsettling images that I can carry through some days?

On an acute ward there was a patient who had not one but three PhDs, and who had zilch insight into the voices he had started to hear. He was simply unable to accept that the brain that he had relied on was now malfunctioning and throwing up these bizarre instruction that he, as an inventor, felt compelled to follow. Within his profession he had gone against accepted notions and beliefs, had followed the suspicions of an idea and had been rewarded, in that his peers had later acknowledged his breakthroughs. How then to now deny the rightness of that superlative mind? So he sought ways devious to not take his medication, medication which had dulled all of his thoughts.

The question that I now find myself asking of myself, is how do I know that my preoccupation with this is not being manufactured by my getting-to-be ancient and ailing brain. I do not have the vast literary and linguistic knowledge that Anne had, nor the innate genius of that scientist, but mine is the only window I look out of; and these days what I see from that window are friends and old lovers either newly dead or in stages of incomprehension on their way to dying.

Unpatriotic

I was so sorry that the UK voted to leave the European Union. Even sorrier when our Brexit government straight away began wrapping itself in the Union Jack.

That said, as flag-waggers this government is by no means alone. Biden, having unseated flag-wagger Trump, still found it necessary to call for patriotism. As does this present and peculiar leader of the UK’s Labour Party, Sir [?] Kier Starmer. And as ever the last few decades has seen an even more extreme version of patriotism taking place vis-a-vis Israel/Palestine.

Let’s be clear: I don’t like nation states. If there were no nation states would we ever go to war again? Which was why I so enjoyed being in the European Union, all those borderless countries, different cultures and languages accommodated into a singular whole.

Following on from that preference one might suppose that I would also approve of the four British nations being united. Except that here – especially when viewed from a Welsh valley, or even from the Cumbrian and North Devon coast – this union doesn’t feel voluntarily entered into, but having been imposed from London.

Now I love being in Wales, even to the extent of adding the Welsh dragon to copies of The Journal. But am I patriotic? I don’t think so.

When I arrived in Wales, impressed by its then leader, Leanne Wood, I joined the nationalist party of Wales, Plaid Cymru. Not because of its nationalism, but because Plaid’s politics were then further to the left of Welsh Labour. That’s no longer the case. With changes of leadership the social policies of the two parties are now near identical. To the extent that just this week they agreed a joint approach to various areas, especially in education and health. Which can only be to the good for the people of Wales.

My overriding concerns now however are more for the planet. With the UK Labour Party’s ecological and electoral policies stuck somewhere pre-WW2, I’m considering returning my support to the Greens.

Although I continue to enjoy living in Wales I also owe loyalty, in the shape of affectionate memories, to too many other places. And I do understand the love of a place and its people, but not to the extent of then having to despise other peoples elsewhere.

The kind of patriotism I ascribe to is one I came across in the north of Skye.

When conscription began in the 1940s a young Skye crofter didn’t want to kill anyone on the say-so of a politician. So to avoid the military police he rowed out to an uninhabited island and, with older crofters on the main island keeping him supplied with life’s essential, he remained undiscovered there for the duration of the war.

The care that the older people took of their young man, regardless of a world at war, that’s the stubborn love of a place and people that I find myself admiring. While any nation state that finds itself having to kill in defence of the state has to be a total failure, of diplomacy, of governance, of politics.

Nothing happens singly

Always something else going on, even if of no direct influence. Although at the moment here in chilly Wales, with butterflies flapping in warmer climes, everything everywhere seems to be having a global impact on me.

Unusually for me I have finished one novel without already having begun another. Time was when I used to have two or three novels in various stages of production. And while I do have several ideas for a new novel, not one has yet taken me over.

Could be because neither of the last two novels I have finished have been accepted for publication; while I am also wondering what will become of the 11 titles I have at Wordcatcher when it ceases – 31^st December 2021 – as a general publisher. Wordcatcher’s coming to a close is a direct result of the pandemic.

One-man bands like Wordcatcher, run by David Norrington, must need have momentum to survive. They subsist as much on dreams and hope as on commercial expertise. Always it is the next book, the latest author, new project, possibility of a grant, prospect of a prize, that will finally carry them into healthy profit.

For individual authors it’s the same. I had such hope for Trees. It had been such a struggle to get it into paperback. The pandemic put paid to all those hopes. Because Trees finally made it into paperbackjust as the pandemic’s restrictions began.

And as lockdown took hold not only did David have to prioritise his family, home-schooling his children; but everything else stopped. No gatherings where a poetry book or two might be sold. No book fairs. Even bookshops closed for the duration.

When the one man of a one-man business is otherwise occupied one-man bands very quickly unravel. Took only a month or two of the pandemic for David to realise – on his own trying to fulfil orders, edit works, design covers, answer emails – the hopelessness of his situation. A shame: I had had such hopes for our continuing working together. Such terrific covers he had designed, especially for my 5-book SF series, the unMaking of Heaven.

I have consequently gone from a self-confident 2019 to a bewildering uncertainty now. An uncertainty that has me stumbling over the start of every possibly new venture.

That said I have managed, during this pandemic, to distantly collaborate with comic-book artist Mal Earl on a pamphlet of bird poems and drawings, in the hand. And Alan Corkish, of the erbacce co-operative, is championing the publication of my asylum poems, bringing them out in 2022 in a big collection provisionally titled Mirror, Mirror. If all goes well Mirror, Mirror should appear with a fabulous cover by the Belgian artist and poet, Pascale Gouverner.

So although this my 75^th year does tend to feel desperate, there have been good things happening between the pandemic lockdowns. My grandtwins, near neighbours now, come to lunch at least 3 times a week; and I have managed to spend some time with all my daughters, been blessed with the happy-making presence of my older grandchildren. My family not a present cause for concern.

My uncertainty comes from once again having to consider what best to do for my novels. The state of child care in Britain, for instance, I’d love for The Care Vortex to somehow, and if only for hard-boiled reference, remain in print. For my never-been-published novels however I am again having to scroll through agents’ and publishers’ listings. Knowing as I do that little ‘ol unconnected me is just one of hundreds, if not thousands, on the hunt.

Ask anyone who has done the rounds of submitting, auditioning, and they will tell you that the process is one of the most disheartening. And it’s not just being given the brush-off, as dispiriting as that can be. What I find worse is those agents and publishers who don’t tell you that they are closed to submissions until you have assiduously followed all their stipulations regards submitting, have amended synopsis and covering letter to suit. May even have altered the layout of the entire manuscript. Only then, in their submitting directions, do they let you know that they are not considering new work.

An hour gone, and one has to start all over again. Less hopefully. Even so, having once succeeded in submitting, one settles back to wait. And wait. And after three or four months of not having heard back, one tentatively assumes rejection, and one reluctantly consults the listings again.

That’s not all. Because, swapping hats, I am also the one dealing with submissions to The Journal, as well as writing reviews. I endeavour to be as quick and as kind as can be.

When not doing either I have actually embarked on a couple of novel themes. However, and with no trust in this UK government, my income and expenditures uncertain, I am still unsure where/what next. The butterfly has taken flight and chaos continues.

Do good debaters make good administrators?

Just because one is capable, in debate, of winning an argument does that mean that one is right? One’s opponent could have been incapable of thinking on his or her feet, or simply not have been one’s intellectual or articulate equivalent. The argument was won that day is all.

Most of our Westminster politicians are graduates of university debating societies; or they are barristers looking for an easier life than scouting for winnable briefs. Same rules for them apply in Westminster as in court: win the argument, win the case.

Does that then mean that these debaters – the objective being to win the case regardless of the evidence – because they can regualrly win an argument that they are as capable of running an economy, organising an army, treating with other nations, seeing that their populace is housed, fed, clothed, kept occupied and the sick treated?

To emerge victorious debaters often rely more on emotion and myth, legend and prejudice, than on in-depth research, whose findings often contradict the much relied-upon-in-debate ‘commonsense’, a.k.a. myth and prejudice. Such serious research though rarely leads to good speech fodder.

Despairing of the waffle and if-you’ll-allow-me-to-finish debaters, business folk can often be found advocating running the country as if a profit and loss business. Except that a country is not a business with a bottom line or with shareholders to be kept happy and in pocket.

Nor is a country a supposedly self-contained household, to be managed as such. Although in either case good management is required.

Nor can a country be run like an armed force. Strict discipline will lead only to democratic revolt: more lassitude has to be allowed than would be in the ranks. No-one is recruited to a country; and allowances have to be made for those incapable of contributing, along with strategies evolved for how to manage malcontents. Manage being the operative word here.

Ask yourselves what improvements to human lives have been brought about through debate chamber politics, what through external campaigning, what through science and technology? Washing machines have freed more European women from drudgery than ever did parliamentary point-scoring. It has been medicine, diet, and social campaigns that have led to most people living beyond their thirties.

The argument here? Look to serious research, scientific and sociological, not to orotund speechifying.

Discuss. Supplying evidence to support your every single contention.© Sam Smith 4^th January 2020

More a Response than a Review

Andrew Taylor – Adrian Henri: a critical reading Greenwich Exhange, London. www.greenex.co.uk ISBN 978-1-910996-28-7 234 pages £19.99

I left school at 16, am no academic. It was therefore with some trepidation that I dared even consider a review of this ‘critical reading.’ Because I have to say that Adrian Henri was by no means as influential on my life as he has been on Liverpool-born Andrew Taylor’s. When Adrian Henri was in his anti-war prime, creating Liverpool happenings and events, I was already getting beaten up by the London police while protesting the US war in Vietnam. I hadn’t needed Adrian Henri’s affirmation.

Andrew Taylor though is not of that generation, has grown up in Adrian Henri’s shadow. Was this book, I asked myself, his way of letting some light through?

No body of work can be separated from the life lived, and inevitably this study is as much biography as critique. Being biography, and given my age, the Introduction was enough to get the memory cells working.

First we are given a short history of Liverpool itself, the city with which Adrian Henri will forever be associated. Henri was the oldest of the band, The Liverpool Scene: Henri was born 1932, Roger McGough 1937 and Brian Patten 1946. Putting age differences aside they coalesced within the poetry, art and music scene of ‘60s Liverpool.

Ginsberg is often credited with ‘discovering’ that Liverpool, of the Beatles et al, albeit that he didn’t arrive until ’65. Ginsberg’s though was more of an ordination. Nor had Liverpool been isolated prior to Ginsberg’s arrival: counter-culture influence had come internationally from the likes of Warhol, the Beats and European surrealists. Much as Henri’s own Dadaist ‘events’ would influence John Lennon’s later happy bedroom shenanigans with Yoko Ono. Indeed no matter what sixties city you had then been in those influences had seemed to come out of the air.

This is not to deny Liverpool’s unique contribution. Events there, for instance, focussed on ‘…audience enjoyment over individual gratification…’ and not silent appreciation. Participation there was expected. What this book had me realise was the influence those sixties ‘events’ had on me. Even though at the time they just were, a part of every bohemian scene. And for ‘bohemian’ read ‘poor area’, cheap housing/bedsits, squats maybe, with a fair sprinkling of [grant-aided] art student dropouts. Places for anyone drawn to the arts or to the counter culture, and like Henri few of us then considered separating out one strand of art from another: regardless of talent we all piled in, be it in London, Liverpool, Amsterdam, New York or Dublin.

Dadaism was in the air then. One night in London for instance Liverpudlian Martin and I, both writers manqué, both contentedly spliffed, tried to humanise the basement IBM 7090 by stuffing daffodils into its every crack and corner. So needy were Imperial College of our new computer expertise that neither of us got the sack.

This typifies the problem I had with the book, I kept getting sent off into my own experiences of that time, my own memories of artists and movements mentioned; and then pausing over some aspect of Andrew Taylor’s analysis which had me review some of my own work. Especially the differences. Because what became readily apparent from those analyses was the realisation that Henri’s poems were, by and large, written to be performed, mine for the page.

Fascinating as references to pop culture and poetry movements were, subtitle of the book has Andrew Taylor painstakingly taking apart Henri’s poems. Antecedents are sought, influence of topography given, recent relationships noted and all are thoroughly referenced. Confident of his subject, Taylor allows criticisms of Henri to get included along with plaudits.

For any poet seeking inspiration I’d recommend a study of pages 82 to 84, where Henri’s approach to poetry gets analysed.

A couple things I hadn’t realised – just how much Henri had been influenced by US pop and counter-culture, and how involved Henri had been in the visual arts, even to it being his actual profession. And here I think was where I started to lose sympathy. Not that I grew a dislike of Henri, just that our experiences diverged and differences grew.

Common cause could of course still be found. A recounting of 1970s’s eco-concerns had it come to me for just how very long we have been fighting this same battle. I did however find the period before these Liverpudlian Dadaists had become acceptable, and damn near respectable, the more interesting. Once they began to occupy establishment positions, less so.

While Henri was being president of this, invited to speak at, perform at that, I was out of work in Somerset and having novels returned from publishers as uncommercial. I can recall not being impressed then by people who were getting thousand pound grants while I was having to find cash-work on the black. And while for Henri and other insiders Thatcher might have been an outrage, for us counting pennies and paying for school milk she was our bitterest enemy. Even so schadenfreude had me pleased to read here of some Henri projects begun and come to nought.

Sorry, I’ve done it again. The book is not about me.

The absurdism created by Henri’s list juxtapositions, and his using skipping rope rhythms and rhymes, however near nonsensical these might have been, pretty much guaranteed their general acceptability. Fun does it every time. Who am I to grouch?

In the book it is Liverpool, and the district of Liverpool 8 at that, that takes centre-stage. Anyone who knows Liverpool will find this book opening new doors for them. While for those who may have known Liverpool only through newspaper headlines, this will tell of another place, one that gave artistic life to Henri among many others. Henri’s however turns out to have been by no means a parochial, nor a monogamous, nor a wholly city life. The influence of his friendships and his artistic partners, continuing after their going their separate ways, for me spoke well of all concerned.

The personal has to influence the artistic. So all here, Henri’s paintings, his musical adventures, their overlap, all get thoroughly analysed. Given Andrew Taylor’s profession the poetry most of all. That analysis including likely inspirations, right down to where in the world each poem was written, who it was written to/about, and the season, including the political weather.

Catherine Marcangeli, Henri’s last partner, said, ‘For Adrian… the city is the everyday and the country is the eternal.’

Henri himself said, ‘…how personal content can go into a work of art and not violate its universal validity.’ Which would seem to validate every single-strand confessional poem sent me. It doesn’t. As Andrew Taylor’s critique demonstrates Henri was a total artist, he made art.

Finally I must emphasise that my trepidation was unwarranted. Even if this falls far short as a review, I have to say that as a layperson I really enjoyed this forensic examination of Adrian Henri’s life and work.

Not winning the World Cup and Brexit: last of the hangover

Which comes first, the nationalistic we-are-the-best outlook, or the British media’s capacity for over-hyping its national team’s prospects? Either way little thought will be given to our sporting opponents’ equal desire to win, we Brits believing that we will win simply because being Brits we are the best.

This national delusion is sustained by our media and political class. Thus does our every defeat come as a shock.

The same applies to our political dealings with other nations. Throughout the 3 years of Brexit, little thought was given to what the rest of Europe might want, how in truth they might react… Nor did any rational explanation come forth from the arch-brexiteers telling us what a ‘clean break’ might actually mean. Especially when our largest trading partner, because of its geographical closeness, would still be Europe.

I suppose that if Brexit achieved little else it confirmed my distrust of democracy – as practised here in the UK, ruled by self-interest and the magnate-owned media. First indoctrinate your electorate. This Brit brand of democratic government, via pressure groups and paid lobbyists, add in an unelected second chamber jampacked with cronies, and it has proved a recipe for corruption. Public discussion, such as it was for Brexit, only proceeded to demonstrate how British democracy is weighted in favour of the lowest common denominator, whose headline slogans could be shouted the loudest.

Regardless Brits will still believe that their team will win. Could this in itself be a hangover of Empire? When we were the mother country dictating terms to the colonies? And in sport patronising them? Congratulating them when they put up a ‘good show’ against one of the mother country’s teams?

Was that how, towards the end of Empire, we allowed the evacuation of Dunkirk to become a ‘triumph’? Rather than examining the very foolishness of sending an ill-equipped British Expeditionary Force against the then mechanised might of the Third Reich. Had the Brits expected the BEF to win simply because they’d been British?

With the UK about to become reliant on World Trade rules expect many more such triumphs.

History of a Book

This is not intended as a sales pitch, more a need to tell of what it has taken for a book, in this case Trees, to finally make it into printed book form.

There is no moment I can pin down for when the book started. I was playing around with various ideas – attitudes to adoption, death – and the tale took off. In that early experimentation I mentioned a couple of trees visible from a doctor’s waiting room. Re-reading the piece I decided to also tell of the two trees. And that was the real start of the book.

What the telling of those two trees told me however was how little I knew of either of them, sending me off to find out more. So did different trees, wherever mentioned, also become characters in the novel. Not in an anthropomorphic sense, but as their woody selves.

Now I have always felt at home among trees – we are an arboreal species – and I was devastated, took it personally, when dutch-elm disease destroyed all those stately elms. I had grown up climbing elms; and at the top of our road a stand of elms had housed a rookery, from where the morning and evening raucous chorus had become a part of my childhood.

I had a country boy’s knowledge of trees: for the book though I needed to know more. So I bought books on trees, attended lectures on forestry, talks given by woodland campaigners… A lot of that information never found its way into the novel; the need for reforestation though being a given throughout.

What also didn’t ultimately find its way into the printed book were my illustrations. I had thought at first of using straightforward photos. But being b&w they would have sat darkly on the page. So I began outlining those photos I had already taken of various trees; and I very soon found that to do that the tree had to be isolated. Separating an already photographed tree from its background, be it forest or building, became such a muddle. So I found myself cycling to remembered trees – on a hilltop, a bend in the a road – and arranging myself so that only the sky was behind each of the trees. Then I’d work on the photos at home, condensing each to a simple image while keeping, I hoped, the tree’s essence.

The writing, research, rewriting, searching out types of tree – wherever I happened to be in the country – took years. But finally I had an MS ready to submit.

Only to find that a novel called Trees didn’t then readily fit any category. Most big publishers shied away from the very concept. Which left me with the small independents. I found one in Germany, who agreed to publish Trees as an e-book. But it would go out with only two or three of my illustrations. I had made enough illustrations to go with all of Trees‘ sixty six chapters.

Waiting for an available copy editor and a publishing slot took a further few months, but in October that year Trees became available online. Only for, in May the following year, the German publisher to cease trading.

Regardless of nationality this happens a lot with small independents, one-man bands or – with hindsight in the German case – a college project which ran out of funds and steam. (College-born poetry magazines likewise often disappear after a couple of issues.)

Not wanting to go the submission route again, time it takes waiting for a response, I decided to self-publish Trees as a free-to-publish kindle. I couldn’t afford to self-publish Amazon’s associated paperback. And with minimal publicity the kindle Trees picked up a few readers and a 5 star review.

It was shortly after that, at that year’s Carmarthen Book Fair – I was there pushing Original Plus publications and The Journal as well as other of my own novels – that I met David Norrington of Wordcatcher Publishing. He looked over my stall, we chatted, and he expressed an interest in my backlist. He wanted to increase the range of his virtual store. I told him of the trouble I’d had getting Trees into print. He said to send him an MS of Trees.

The MS was sent, and David agreed to publish. First though he would like us to meet in his garden office. I was told to bring along some previous novels of mine.

It was a good meeting. David said that he was going to republish one of my out-of-print titles a month, then take on some others of mine under his imprint. David talked so much that, driving home, I wasn’t sure what had just happened, just what I’d agreed to.

The first two to be republished were poetry collections. And they were really nice productions. Meanwhile I had been contacting previous publishers and making sure that copyrights were available and that they didn’t mind their title[s] being re-issued. I also took as many of their entries down from Amazon as Amazon would let me, including the kindle of Trees.

So did the title-a-month drive arrive at the previously published novels. Again each updated version appeared with good thought-through covers. But as Wordcatcher continued to republish a title a month I came by the sense from David of some disappointment regards their sales and my promotion of them. I’d been doing what I could online, and although the response from previous readers was generally positive, sales were few. My difficulty was that I’d already pushed those titles on their first appearances; and their now appearing one after the other made promotion problematic.

Nevertheless with all five of the Sci-Fi series published Trees was next. David said that it’d be out before Christmas. That, I thought, took care of that year’s Chistmas presents. But the proofs didn’t appear. David had been having trouble with his website and was having to devote most of his time to getting that sorted. Then in the new year it transpired that he was unsure to which genre Trees belonged. Eco-fiction is new and not every bookseller has space allotted to that genre. (Check out the many categorisations for H is for Hawk.)

David’s reluctance apparent I found myself having to push for proofs, send reminders… almost to the point of causing offence.

But the paperbacks did finally arrive, and Trees is now available pretty much worldwide. Albeit minus my illustrations. (A sample sheet of them below.) As to why I have gone to all this trouble explaining the history of this one book, it is because if any book of mine is The Book then Trees has to be it.

PS As I said in the beginning I did mean this as a history of the book and not as a sales pitch. David however would be tearing his hair out if I didn’t at the very least say where Trees could be bought. So here is the link – https://wordcatcher.com/product/trees/

Rejection League Table

The lesson I am about to deliver here is that one should never believe any publisher, or publisher’s representative, or literary agent who gives the impression of speaking on behalf of all publishers, all booksellers, all readers even, when they authoritatively tell you that your work is unpublishable. Unless we have paid for publication, or been fortunate enough to attend (paying) one of those workshops where one is introduced to a literary agent at the course’s end, we as writers have all known outright rejection.

Philip K Dick easily heads the Rejection League Table by his returning home once to 48 individual rejections on his doormat. Closely followed by Samuel Becket whose novel Murphy was rejected 42 times. Not quite sure what qualifies one for inclusion in this League Table, nor whereabouts I would be placed in it; but, from my first submission to a work in print, I built up 23 years of rejections.

Nor does it happen that rejections cease with the one acceptance. Take Somerset Maughan: he had his first novel published, then proceeded to suffer 11 years of rejection until his second novel found a publisher.

I’d best be clear. In my 23 years of not getting published it was not all straightforward rejections. I received a lot of encouragement from publisher’s editors and readers, even got taken on by agents and publishers; but, for one reason or another, nothing of mine then managed to find its way into print. Like Boswell, ‘wearied with waiting’, I used to dream of finding myself a patroness like Tchaikovsky’s Madame Von Beck, or like Balzac’s patron, someone who would believe in my talent regardless of publication; and save me finding yet another day job.

Most of those novels written during my 23 year years of struggle have since found publishers. Some of their ‘unpublishable’ number even going on to win or to get shortlisted for prizes. So it goes….

Compared to J S Bach however we are all us mere beginners in our waiting for recognition. Oh J S Bach did get fêted for his organ playing during his lifetime, received some acknowledgement too for those of his compositions that he included in his organ playing repertoire. But in the 200 years following his death there were few, if any, performances of his work. He had to wait to be ‘re-discovered’. As did John Clare have to wait for Edmund Blunden and EP Thompson to rediscover him. And poor John Clare had spent a large part of his last years locked away in an asylum believing he’d been forgotten.

Those 23 years of mine don’t now seem quite so bad.

Respectability

I stopped being respectable a long time ago. Probably because it was simply too difficult. Especially growing up in a small Devon village where everyone thought they knew everyone else’s scandalous family history; and where the rules seemed to change at every social gathering, making at least one new faux pasinevitable.

I early realised that that kind of village-touted respectability was conformity with the added ingredient of self-righteousness. “Respectable folk round here.” Followed by, later when I first had long hair, “Your sort aren’t welcome here.”

Mention of respectability usually has the smallmindedness of wanting-to-be-inoffensive suburbia come to mind. In my experience though this respectability, this right-on thinking, extends to any grouping. And in any grouping I seem to have managed at one time or another to have stepped ‘over the line’.

Consequently beyond childhood I have never sought to subsume myself in any grouping. Certainly I have joined groups, but in the knowledge that sooner or later, and possibly unwittingly, I will break one of their rules, cause offence, and all within that group will righteously attack or turn away from me. Respectable I cannot be.

No-one with an eye and ear for the ridiculous, for the self-evidently illogical, can hope to remain respectable. And when it comes to writing any attempt to appear respectable has to be a non-starter. On the page truth must out or authenticity is forfeited. While truth itself, any kind of truth, is the very enemy of respectability.

Art, any art, must question; and once asked the answers will probably be incompatible with respectability. Here the difference between academics and artists becomes evident. Biographers so want their subjects to belong, make the supposition that their subjects wanted to be respectable. O no they didn’t. Would have been the very death of their creativity.

There was recently a fuss made by certain feminists over gender recognition. One of those feminists was claiming wrongful dismissal for having said that the law on gender recognition was wrong, This brought into conflict two sets of belonging – adherence to the law passed by society while at the same time espousing the exclusivity of womanhood.

Writer me, always uneasy about censorship, had no problem with the publication of her views. But the law, right or wrong, is the law: break it and suffer the consequences. Her having broken the law on hate speech it seemed odd to then to seek the protection of the law for wrongful dismissal.

I doubt either side of this dispute will find my views amenable. Nevertheless here I go treading this still contentious ground of reassigned gender.

As a nurse I met with those who had changed gender; and my nursing heart had gone out to them. Theirs had not been an easy decision, nor had their transition from the one to whichever was the other. While my own lapses from the socially acceptable have all been of my own making, they had been driven to theirs, had wanted only to be let back into the fold on their own terms. Something that the feminist excluders didn’t seem to be even considering, the very real agony, social and physical, involved in sexual transition.

All that aside, having once decided that any kind of respectability was not for me, the sight of someone doing their utmost to ingratiate themselves back into the fold – after some indiscretion or drunken escapade, or they had dared once to be outrageous or disagreeable – would either sicken or amuse me. Whereas those who had no choice but to be different, for whatever reason, and who just wanted to belong somewhere… they have, despite seeming contradictions on my part, my sympathy.

Not that my sympathy makes me better or worse than anyone else. Once committed to being disreputable one has to abandon all hope of ever being holier-than-thou. There is no going back ever. One has to get used to, be amused by, one’s own failures, learn to keep one’s own company.

On Reading and Writing

Writer-to-Reader, the act of writing and the act of reading are two private acts joined publicly.

They are private in the sense that, although the physical act of writing may be being performed publicly, in a café say, the space the writer will have created about themselves, their concentration on the page/screen, the dwelling within their thoughts, the writer may as well be in a monastic cell.

While, book open before them, whether on a train or a park bench, or four tables away in the café and scrolling down their phone e-book, the reader too, absorbed as they are in the text, might as well be sitting alone in a forest glade.

Wherever either are such has to be the purest writer-reader connection.

There are intruders here however. Generally those publishers and booksellers with other motives and misleading blurbs. And reviewers who write as they read. Critics and interpreters of the text too. Then there are the reluctant students with their required reading…

Not forgetting those readers who want to join together in adulation of a book. And while such reverence for their work might initially be gratifying to the author, fandom on such a scale can very soon become psychologically restrictive. When a book becomes a bible, the words in print beyond question, its author has to defy every expectation placed upon their future work, which can skew the writing, it no longer being private.

Within fandom so too can a reader find themselves unable to express any criticism of such a work – not without calling outrage and charges of disloyalty down upon themselves. Thus do two private acts become public.

Fandom is why, often, I wait until the hype around a book has evaporated, and I can let the author, alive or long dead, speak privately into my private ear.

Law

Law is self-evidently man-made. Can be changed.

Lydford law was one that saw a man hung in the morning and judged guilty in the afternoon. Which act would have been typical of most North Devon Tories not that long ago. Providing they could spend half a day punishing someone and the other half tearing a fox or deer to pieces, North Devon Tories would have been pretty near content with their lot.

The really odd thing about laws and law-makers though is that it is the law-makers themselves who often have the least respect for the law. Take assassination and torture, illegal in most countries. There are exceptions of course, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel, to name but four neighbours. Most other countries though, those who regard themselves as 21^st Century civilised, within their own borders assassination and torture are against their own laws.

Doesn’t of course stop the agents of those ‘civilised’ countries practising assassination outside of their borders. Most obvious examples here would be Russia and Israel, and again Saudi Arabia. Although I can’t think of any militaristic country that doesn’t indulge in extra-judicial killings. Agents of the USA even kidnap a person in one country and secretly transport them to another country in order to torture them. Torture in their case getting called all kinds of euphemisms – dark arts, water-boarding….

While assassination, extra-judicial killing, may be considered bad enough, what is most appalling about torture is that it serves no purpose. Any confession obtained under torture is worthless. Victims of torture will in the end say whatever it is they think the torturers want to hear. Frantz Fanon’s writings on tortureshould be required reading in all military and police academies.

While any country that seeks to call itself civilised should relinquish torture within and without its borders, as well as abandon extra-judicial killing whether by poison, drone, garotte, cleaver or ice pick, there’s nothing to be done about North Devon Tories.

The Continuing Gripes of a Poetry Magazine Editor

I can’t say this often enough, a successful poem is a work of art. Every poem therefore should at the very least aspire to be a work of art. Thus how the poem is presented, whether it be on screen or on paper, the finished look of the thing is necessarily important.

As editor I actually enjoy opening submissions, want to find work that I can accept for The Journal, can show off in The Journal. And, if told beforehand, I will make allowances for dyslexia in a submission. Also, if informed, or italicising makes obvious, local usages are equally acceptable. But I will dismiss out of hand any submission that contains typos or blatant misspellings. Why should I be bothered with a submission when the author couldn’t be bothered running their work through a spellcheck?

The most basic of all basic rules is that what cannot be misused in a poem is language. I don’t mean the toying with, the deliberately experimenting with language, but the so obviously using the wrong word, an incorrect spelling. There is a craft to be mastered here, and the first throw of the pot is not good enough. If you are going to present the work as a submission then correct it, rework it, make it presentable.

Bear in mind also that all art is a form of communication, and it is equally important to not have the art misunderstood; be as clear as you are able within each poem in what you seek to communicate or convey.

Along the same lines it follows that as a writer you have to be in control of the language, not the language in control of what you are trying to say. Cliché, unless parody, will not do. Poets also have to be in control of the form (rhyme, syllable count, whatever) and not the form dictating what words they use.

And having said all that what’s the betting that the next submission I open will not have even glanced at The Journal’s submission guidelines and will have a poem about God in dum-de-dum rhyme. Ah well… No-one said I had to become a poetry editor.

The 28th Day Advantageous Convesationalists (School of)

or a cursory examination of various tactics employed within social media threads.

Ad hominem is probably the primary tool there. No matter the topic under discussion, in dispute, no matter what belief you may espouse, it will be your right to hold it that will be questioned: “So a long-haired / balding lout like you thinks…” And should you claim to be neither long-haired, balding, or even a lout, that is now be what the argument will be about. So your interlocutor will already, in his or her mind, have won what they perceive as the disagreement; and winning would seem to be all that matters to the users of such tactics.

And should you attempt to justify your right to dispute, and persist with what led you onto the thread, then the original issue will this time be adroitly sidestepped with an, “And I suppose you also hold that…” putting you again on the defensive.

Other opinions/characters for you to defend will also be invented: “I suppose you want / believe / support….”

The trick is always, their aim being only to exit the argument triumphant, to find your weak spot, and then to – despite your every denial – sneer and mock.

Accusations of brainwashing (your brain, not theirs) will also be employed. And to further undermine any other argument you may put forward, a single word will be picked on and used to scorn, no matter how remote that word’s association with a scandalous character or creed. Apposite or erroneous, misquotes, factoids and part-quotes will be thrown at you, all in support of their opposite view. And should you take issue with any of the quotes then in all likelihood you will be met with, “So you think you know better than…?”

Lost again.

At this point you may find someone coming to your defence. These, with much to say, will be the mirror opposite of the nit-pickers. Their one argumentative weapon is flow. Adopting a YMCA Born Again debating mode, a practised and smiling tolerance of all views opposite to their own, they will launch into a bright-eyed and unstoppable outpouring.

Such argumentative tactics are of course not confined to social media, are just as likely to happen in real time. Parents, siblings, classmates, teachers… If you as a young person feel that you won’t become, can’t be bothered to become much of a conversationalist, but you still have much you need to say, then take up, not writing, but dentistry. You can then say whatever is on your mind and they, with their mouths clamped open, can only grunt difference by way of demur.

Unsociable Hours

Even when younger I always felt that I was recovering from an illness when I came off night-shift, would be careful with myself. Then, somewhat older but no better off, after a few weeks of night-shift I did actually become ill enough – sleep deprived and physically exhausted – to find myself hospitalised.

Mental Health Trusts were then trying to do away with permanent night-shift workers. Their given reason was that they feared the permanent night staff had become institutionalised and were slipping behind new practices by never being around for courses during the day. So all nursing staff were made to do rotational shifts, which meant my being on nights every third week.

Up until then I’d been more than happy covering the 0700-2000 days. On those shifts the weeks got broken into three day shifts, the first from 1300 to 2000, the next day the whole 13 hours, rounding off on the third day with the morning 0700 to 1400 shift. Followed by a day off, and every other weekend covered from late Friday through to early shift Monday.

With the two sets of regular night-shifts turn and turn about, this shift system had worked well in the old Victorian asylum. In the smaller ‘community’ units though, having fewer staff, the Trusts had decided that it was only fair to have every member of the nursing staff on 24 hour rotational shifts.

As I said when younger and working an occasional week of nights hadn’t been that much of an upset. Getting enough sleep during the day has always proved difficult, but I had managed. And I hadn’t then been nursing, but babysitting long programs on Imperial College computers. In fact once I’d moved departments, to Nuclear Physics, I actually used to look forward to my nights on the 9^th floor. Left to myself, and once I’d set the programs running, I could settle to work on my then novel.

Not so nights nursing on a psychiatric acute unit. Some of those nights I was lucky to snatch a break. Which eventually made me so ill that my GP got me signed off nights. And I was not the only one so aversely affected.

So it was that much of the latter part of my nursing career, as shop steward, was spent fighting cases to have other nurses excused night-shifts. And since then several studies have shown that for some of us this is now a medically accepted condition. While some individuals may prefer working just nights – suits their current situation, child care, hobbies, et cetera – for those like me our bodily rhythms will simply not adapt to the constant changing of day for night.

Despite that many NHS Trusts still advocate rotational shifts. With so few staff in the smaller units however a semi-formal swapping around of shifts has become accepted practice, leading again to de facto near permanent night-shifts.

Good to have been ahead of the game for once. Now let’s see if other of my ongoing campaigns will bear fruit, in that the NHS will bring back the in-between grade, the much-missed SENs, and Wales will at long last get its very own Poetry Library.

Not learning from experience: Arts funding

The time-consuming practice of art – preparation, draft by draft, rehearsal upon rehearsal – needs to be subsidised. And if not by the public purse, then by the individual artist earning a wage doing something other; or by the artist’s parents or partner’s support. Art though must always require subsidy, has to require patronage of one kind or another; and there are not that many Nadezhda von Mecks around.

For the purpose of this piece however let us define Arts funding as the grants given out by quasi-governmental arts bodies, and begin with those given to enable the publication of poetry.

An irrefutable law seems to have grown from Arts funding, especially when applied to poetry magazines as a ‘start-up’ grant. This law states that the grant-receiving magazine will last just as long as the grant lasts, plus one more issue. The final, that one more issue, will be the one that demonstrates to its editors/publishers (usually a team) that their ‘business model’ won’t now have them breaking even.

Had just one of that team chosen to start a magazine off their own bat and had looked at the economies of scale needed, at the chances of ever making a profit, and had set their sights accordingly, then the chances are that the magazine could have grown, issue by issue, from its humble stapled origins. Instead the grant-aided magazine opens with a full colour cover, perfect bound issue; and with its editors taking a fee, plus – as insisted upon by the grant-givers – offering a token payment to the contributors. Such largesse would seem designed to deceive.

One has to wonder at the reasoning behind the giving of Arts grants if all that they lead to, after issue four, is failure and disaffection.

What I don’t question is the quasi-governmental Arts bodies giving huge sums to national institutions such as opera, ballet, orchestras and galleries. All are so necessary to a country’s sense of itself. Which is what has me, yet again, question the glaring lack of a Welsh Poetry Library.

Another irrefutable law is that genuine artists will make their art no matter the obstacles put in their way. Which is not to say that they should never receive grants. I’d love to have had my writing life eased by an Arts grant. I’d also love to have had my magazine/small publishing life eased by an Arts grant. But I can see the Arts’ boards difficulties in deciding just who of us should receive even a small grant.

The result being that Arts’ boards play safe and end up giving grants only to those from their increasingly small pool of favoured artists, or to those proven deserving, that is successful, and who, being successful, don’t need the grant. Or being of the establishment they give to the well-connected. Which can also grant the well-connected recipients a false sense of their worth – their art, their talent, their endeavour being now Arts Council approved.

Those adept at form-filling occasionally do win a grant. Although no grants appear to have ever been available for the simple running costs of a well-established magazine. Because any magazine must, at times, encounter subscriber doldrums, when a cash injection could have had the magazine survive another year.

If all this is coming across as sour grapes, myself nor The Journal nor Original Plus ever having received a grant, then it probably is. I don’t have what I’m told is the knack for getting Arts Council grants. Although there are courses advertised on grant-applying. And a whole day’s course on grant-applying can cost anything above £35.00. Food and fare not included, nor a guarantee of an Arts grant. (No grants are available for getting on to a How-to-get-a-grant course.)

Sour grapes aside, it is the institutions that are the most important. Remember the Millennial grants? I helped Fred Clarke, Arthur C’s brother, fill out a 100 page grant application for the construction of of an observatory in Minehead, Somerset. As well as an observatory it was to have a science and conference centre attached, with links to NASA and to other observatories around the world. Yes, the Minehead observatory would have celebrated Arthur’s achievements in both sci-fi and space exploration, but the observatory would have principally been an educational centre; and as an institution it could have attracted similar enterprises to that corner of Somerset, have been of local and of national benefit.

Fred and I knew that the scheme was in competition for the grant with similar local and inventive schemes all over the country, and we tried to work out which of us had the most chance of success, might share in the grant. None of us did. All of the millennial grant went to the Greenwich Dome, now the O² Arena, with its life-expectancy of 25 years.

The South East gained again. What did the country gain?

Shock of the New

Shock of the new is an essential ingredient to any art form. Whether a painting, poem or symphony, it has to say Look at me! Listen! Pay heed!

Beethoven’s 5^th Symphony is probably the best known example. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade another that straight away commands we listen. Tchaikovsky’s 1^st Piano Concerto, Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man… The opening sentence of Melville’s Moby Dick, ‘Call me Ishmael.’ First line of Larkin’s This Be The Verse, Picasso’s Guernica…

But it can only work the once, when new to somebody new. How many of us regret not being able to hear again a piece for the first time, read a book again, stand in awe before a painting for the first time?

We’ve had our shock, recall it fondly. But what’s a new artist to do? How to now make that impact? Capture the attention?

Probably easier to say what won’t work, what no longer works.

The new work of old artists who haven’t left their time, and who can still think it’s shockingly new to bang on about sex in some form or other. That doesn’t work. Nowadays most explicit sex comes across as either poor soft porn or simply old hat. The literary/film world has absorbed that, and moved on. Configurations of the sex act can still intrigue of course, and age-old aspects of sexual activity will always be new to someone – de Sade’s writings for example – but not publicly, not shockingly new.

Anything shockingly new now usually comes out of an artist’s very personal obsession, one that they paradoxically may not have given thought to what the public might make of their outpouring – Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman say. Indeed such authors/artists can often be shocked themselves at the public’s outraged reaction. To Monet’s Dejeuner al Fresco for instance.

Pop musicians and promoters can occasionally come up with a concept that will cause public outrage. But such tabloid outrage is often as false and manufactured, and paid for, as the pop industry itself. Indeed innovations within commercialism rarely lead to the genuinely new. Commercialism, that mother of mediocrity, caters always and safely to existing markets. Easiest to see this phenomena at work in Hollywood, where sequel after sequel, or poor copy after poor copy will be made of one very good film, until the sequels and predictable copies become totally vapid and meaningless – the Star Wars and Marvel franchises for instance.

Because what the shockingly new must also have is authenticity. Should be recognisably real, and never before depicted – Leaves of Grass, Animal Farm, Frankenstein, Clockwork Orange,1984, La Peste, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Rings of Saturn… In literature this will be writing not to advertise the author’s cleverness, but to communicate, to convey a burdensome truth. The subject too will be new, will have dug down to humanity’s core, will have questioned not only what we currently hold sacred, but will have held it up to scorn. And it will have done all of that with a becoming innocence…

Get to it.

Not a lot new under the literary sun: a compilation

What got me started on this compilation was W. Somerset Maughan’s reasons for the writing of his Cakes & Ale, first published 1930 but worryingly familiar today. In part reproduced here…

‘…When I wanted to draw the portrait of a writer who used every means of advertisement possible to assist the diffusion of his works I had no need to fix my attention on any particular person. The practice is too common for that. Nor can one help feeling sympathy for it. Every year hundreds of books, many of considerable merit, pass unnoticed. Each one has taken the author months to write, he may have had it in his mind for years; he has put into it something of himself which is lost for ever, and it is heart-rending to think how great are the chances it will be disregarded in the press of matter that weigh down the critics’ tables and burdens the booksellers’ shelves. It is not unnatural that he should use what means he can to attract the attentions of the public. Experience has taught him what he must do. He must make himself a public figure. He must keep in the public eye. He must give interviews and get himself in the papers. He must write letters to The Times, address meetings and occupy himself with social questions; he must make after-dinner speeches; he must recommend books in the publishers’ advertisements; and he must be seen without fail at the proper laces at the proper times. He must never allow himself to be forgotten. It is hard and serious work, for a mistake may cost him dear; it would be brutal to look with anything but kindness at an author who takes so much trouble to persuade the world at large to read books that he honestly considers so well worth reading…’

W. Somerset Maughan was not alone.

‘…Odd, Claudine, the number of people one meets who are convinced that they aren’t like everyone else – and the need to put it into writing…’ Colette.

‘…you’ve at last proved to yourself that you really are a writer, and you must prove it to the world, at least once in your life, or you will go mad from believing it all by yourself…’ Henry Miller

‘…For many years to come the world is going to be full of people competing for attention with stories of what they have suffered. And those that have suffered the least will have the most to say. It will be extremely boring…’ Eric Linklater

‘…Soon it will matter nothing to a man and his work to know that he will probably die in a ditch – misunderstood. So long as he gets the work done…’ H G Wells

‘…I feel I am landed on my 45^th year as if washed up on a rock, not knowing how I got here or ever had a chance of being anywhere else… Of course my external surroundings have changed, but inside I’ve been the same, trying to hold everything off in order to “write.” Anyone wd[sic] think I was Tolstoy the value I put on it. It hasn’t amounted to much…’ Phillip Larkin (letter to Monica Jones)

‘There was one’s work to be done, and one shut oneself up in it; what else was there to do in a world that had gone mad, and was caught up in an iron grip that grew tighter by the day?’ Darius Milhaud

‘…the futility of art – a pompous legerdemain, a consumate charlatany that deceived not only its devotees but its practitioners…’ Jack London

‘Now the audience doesn’t know what it wants… and we don’t know what we want to say.’ Krysztof Kieslowski

‘I’m against government anywhere / And I show my bum to authors’ and artists’ circles.’ Kaneko Mitsudaru

So do we remain/continue writers and artists the most self-hating, self-flagellating of our species.

This Tory government means to kill me

It’s my age, 74 this year, that has me believe this Tory government means to kill me. Let’s look at the evidence.

This Tory government first used the pandemic to wipe out many of my more infirm coevals in Care Homes while, with their customary duplicity, claiming that they were doing their utmost to protect them.

Those several thousand premature deaths lessened the Tory government’s ‘Social Care’ expenditure. Nor are they, the economy alone being what matters to Tories, going to stop there. Accepting that many grandparents act as unpaid child-minders, delivering and collecting their grandchildren from school, the Prime Minister himself has said that it is a moral imperative that all children go back to school.

In the schools, as in the country, there will be limited testing. Tories don’t like statistics that contradict their policies and prejudices. Asymptomatic and untested children will therefore pass the virus throughout the schools while, thankfully, not suffering greatly themselves. The children will however infect us grandparents who, at our age, are fatally susceptible to the virus.

Living independently, being widespread and in isolation, our individual deaths will not be so noticeable as were the multiple deaths of those in Care Homes. Regardless, the consequence will be that the state pension bill will nonetheless be considerably reduced.

Even if we survive that ploy they can still save on the state pension. Tory ministers and Tory MPs have already suggested an end to the state pension’s ‘triple lock’, which for the last few years has seen the pension keep pace with inflation. Remove the lock, and with upcoming Brexit causing food shortages and therefore food inflation, our old selves now impoverished, more of us will succumb to starvation and die.

“Ah,” I can hear you say, “So many reactionary old folk being prematurely deceased will affect the Tory vote. Even this bunch of right-wingers can’t be that stupid? Get themselves voted out of office?”

That though these particular power-grabbing Tories will have taken into consideration. Their subsequent gerrymandering of the UK voting system will mean that, regardless of the votes cast, the Tories will remain in government for the foreseeable.

With my by then having prematurely died I thankfully won’t be around to further suffer the Tories’ selfish stupidity.

(Conspiracy theorists: have you noticed that although several Tory ministers and Tory MPs claim to have had Covid-19 not one has yet died? Is this statistically possible?)

Builders, Destroyers and Parasites

There are four kinds of people – builders, destroyers, those who have to live with them, and parasites. Parasites are probably the easiest to define.

The leech has some blood of its own, but never enough. The plagiarist leech needs to feed on other creatures, bloat itself to importance with their life-force. A sub-set of plagiarists, defined as fans, they too manufacture their own identity by feeding on someone famous.

Most artists are not plagiarists, are more likely thieves. Scholars only half-suspect what thieves artists are. Not plagiarists, but man o man can they come close. A re-ordering of words, a plot ‘inspired by…’ Formulaic writing? No, Let’s call this slipstream, ekphrastic, et cetera.

Has to be said however, and whether brand spanking new or not, all do end up making something.

Destroyers are those who take a delight in simple destruction, be it by fire, bomb, or kicking apart a bus shelter. There is little that can be said about them, except that they take importance from what they can destroy and not from what they can make.

Destroyers for creative folk are usually those who sneer at anything new and untested. The self-satisfied smug of their generation they use the intellectual equivalent of the dismissive, “Young people these days…” “Call that art….”

Faced with a bombed and arid landscape a builder will first dig down and, having found water, will brick up the sides, slow circle by slow circle. The destroyer on his rampage will throw a baby or a goat down to poison that well.

Roles can be interchangeable. Builders sometimes have to be destroyers in order to create. For stone a mason must first quarry away a hill, a carpenter cut down a tree.

Roles can also be timeline interchangeable. A people can escape religious/racial persecution, move to a new country/continent, where they in turn become brutish in their persecution of the indigenous peoples. In the creation of their new country, the building of it, wells will get poisoned. Israeli settlers are doing precisely that now to the Palestinians. As the European refugees from religious persecution did to the native Americans, are still doing. Ditto Australia, Myanmar, et cetera.

As to those not parasites, not builders nor destroyers, those who simply have to live alongside them…? Nothing much to do but join with them in a weary shake of the head: “What are they up to now?”

Frail & Fallible

Covid-19 has served to show us the frailty and fallibility of our medical staff. Not only their need for Personal Protection Equipment (PPE), and the limits of their physical and mental endurance, but also the limits of their knowledge and expertise regards any disease new to them, how limited their capability in dealing with its effects.

Prior to Covid-19 I knew doctors and nurses, from working with them, to be all too human in their variety. Yet too many off-the-cuff references to the practice of medicine persist in calling careers in medicine ‘vocational.’ The caring for the unwell however is also a profession, is a job done for wages, and for some doctors and nurses the wages figure more highly than any ‘vocational’ career. Life has given them other responsibilities, and if they can be paid more for doing something less stressful than working for the NHS then they will leap at the chance. And good luck to them.

Choosing to leave the profession doesn’t mean that they didn’t do their job well, nor take a pride in it. But, and as with any other profession, it is the wage that ultimately makes any job worth doing.

Oddly I found that it was the less well-paid for whom, nursing especially, was the more vocational. Nursing assistants, care workers: they it was who brought their whole selves to the job, who worried outside of work about their patient’s/charges, brought in small gifts for them. Some of that ‘caring’ counter-productive even.

I enjoyed working with all disciples while I was nursing, even the mechanics. Mechanics being those who took pride in their knowledge and skills, but had zilch human compassion. They became quickly impatient, for instance, with any colleague who fell ill, who took time off through illness or because of family commitments. These mechanics put aside the ‘unconditional positive regard’ mantra when it came to poorly colleagues who had left them short-staffed. I have heard them go so far as to blame those colleagues for their illness rather than the managers/politicians for the insufficient supply of bank staff.

Mechanics, it has to be said, are very good at their job. The one type I had real difficulty understanding, well – coming to terms with – were right-wing doctors, especially when they chose to enter politics.

In the UK the NHS is paid for by everyone and cares for everyone. Yet right wing doctors invariably join the one political party hell-bent on dismantling the NHS. Granted as doctors they will benefit financially from the privatisation of the NHS, but only if their practice proves successful. Even then it seems a short-term gain, because even while working for the NHS their contracts already allow them to treat patients privately.

And while I didn’t go so far as to approve some nurses setting up private care homes – sole customers the NHS/local council – I didn’t doubt those nurses’ professional dedication to the welfare of their clients. They were simply, and for their own betterment, taking advantage of the then Tories opening up the NHS and care system to ‘internal’ markets.

Vocational? Care, medicine, requires many disciplines, is complex and is staffed by individuals as complex.

Overlooked

Did this understanding-slash-comprehension come to me from my ten years in Cumbria?

We lived on the coast, in Maryport, one of a trio of post-industrial towns, the other two being Workington and Whitehaven. Further along that Cumbrian coast is Sellafield; and further south again the old iron town of Millom, before you arrive at shipbuilding Barrow. These towns and installations circle the Lake District’s kept pretty and pristine mountains and lakes, which are for most visitors the preferred Cumbria and often the only Cumbria that they see.

We in Maryport were on the coastal plain, working land, used, abused, and overlooked. It nonetheless had its own beauty. Fields and farms, tree-lined lonnings, old pits and pinnacled slag heaps, open-cast become ponds, woodland over spoil. I cycled its back roads and old railway tracks, walked its coastal path along the Solway.

That flat[ish] land had its own understated appeal; and far more wildlife than the nearby barren mountains and lakes. Every year up near Silloth was a winter field full of whooper swans. Mud flats had huge flocks of pink-footed geese, curlews lined up on the Roman ruins, while the beaches boasted lapwings and redshanks. Scrapes in wave-eroded slag was where oyster-catchers and ringed plovers layed their three eggs.

That sense of the sisterland , the coastal plain not being worthy of a visit, its being overlooked, not worthy of serious consideration, fed into my own sense of having always been overlooked. Beginning as village riff-raff, working class, my later having struggled as a writer, taking what menial jobs I could – milkman, labourer, van driver, scaffolder, background nurse – I got used to being overlooked. Identifying with the Peasant Poet, John Clare, I became overlooked even when I enthusiastically joined the John Clare Society. I could afford the annual membership fee, but not the cross-country visits to their annual Helpstone get-togethers.

Mind you by then that was what I had come to expect, that middle class assumption that, because I aspired to be a writer, that I had even set myself up as a small press publisher, had been taken on as an editor [freelance], then I too must be in some way salaried, or failing that be subsidised by a salaried partner, and I too could unthinkingly afford to come along to the annual get-togethers, afford the restaurant meal. The Poetry Society and Society of Authors likewise worked on those assumptions. Subsisting now on state pension I’ve had a lifetime of being overlooked.

This isn’t an appeal for pity. It’s the way things are, have been. All of life is an education and being everyday overlooked has turned out to be not such a bad thing. It has led me to note that the mass of any artist’s work will also become overlooked. Most artists will be remembered, if at all, by just one or two of their works; and then probably not what that artist considered to be their best.

Being overlooked allows one to put aside the illusion of posterity as even a consideration and to plough on producing the work. As a nurse ‘use of self in the therapeutic role’ was actively encouraged. I found subordination of the ego easy, knew already as a writer that I was the vehicle of my ambition, that all of me and mine was grist to the writing mill. Product took precedence.

What has proved frustrating in being overlooked has been my prophecies and predictions failing to be heeded. In the 1970s I wrote a novel called We Need Madmen. In it I told how easy it would be for another like Hitler to take over a Western democracy, any democracy. Although We Need Madmen later went on to win prizes, it was generally overlooked.

Likewise did my poetry collection pieces fail to have any great impact when it told of, when it predicted more prison camps. There is no satisfaction in having been proved right – by, and on all sides now, populist extreme right wing leaders each with their own version of prison/refugee/immigrant camps/centres.

Nor am I unique in having been ignored/overlooked. The warnings we’ve had regards global warming, the planet-destructive power of unbridled capitalism, the ever-present danger of nuclear wipe-out, yet more right-wing dictatorships… I console myself, poor consolation that it is, that going back a century or more I am by no means alone in having been overlooked.

Outsiders Within

In the sixties, like many another, I arrived in London happy to be other. Anonymous other. Cheap flat-shares, cheap bedsits, all kinds of jobs to be had; with the unselfconsciousness of a stranger, not knowing, not caring what any onlooker might think, I could be sharpsuited whizzkid one week, stoned hippy the next.

Where now the cheap city where an unbelonger like me could be left alone, be one more unremarked among the everyday mass? Where do the unfittable go now? Now that every sub-group everywhere has a categorisation?

For instance where now, when black is not my beef, gay is not my gripe, nor am I reactionary gammon, just where outside the city do I fit? Where now that we are all supposed to belong somewhere? Just because I’m classed as pensioned doesn’t mean I’m no longer alive, no longer striving. The only glib category I suppose I’d fit would be that of cantankerous old fucker. Which is not what I feel I am, which is what I have always been, a non-belonger, an outsider within.

Nor is it that I have not occasionally tried to belong. At one time or another I have, if not joined, supported most political causes of the left. And when I did join I sincerely attempted to subsume my differences in the mass. Despite that is being among those who, unselfconsciously, spoke the party line.

I never lasted that long.

It wasn’t only my sense of the ridiculous. It seems that in every political grouping there has to be at least one zealot eager to shout down, shut down, any voiced misgiving over policy or tactic. Even where it can be the slightest of misgivings, or an unfortunate choice of words maybe.

I have no high opinion of my own intellectual capabilities, but like so many faltering others I do have, I think, the right to question. In such radical company it became inevitable that I would be shouted down, and by those who can quickly turn a phrase, come up with a ready-made put-down, and who know how to appeal to an audience.

Effect of which has been to add to the pressure for me to speak my piece. Say it somewhere, even though what I have wanted to say has not always been that original, only this inner pressure to have it said. And having managed to say it, then what?

Nothing changed.

Usually though it has been my eye and ear for absurdity that has made me, insofar as political groupings go, persona non grata.

Party political members do have a sense of humour. Their laughter though is usually directed only at those not of their political grouping. If however, for one’s own amusement, one should start to pick apart, to turn into nonsense the party’s own policies – see if they can withstand the lens of humour – one’s loyalty to the party instantly comes under question.

Let us take for instance what has become the terrorist’s battle cry, God is great. Is he? She? How big is great? Could he be bigger, less than great? If He does exist how large does He have to be to be great? Et cetera.

Heresy will be the charge brought against the questioner there. Likewise for any others puzzling over a set of beliefs. How white, for instance, do white supremacists have to be before becoming supreme? Would The Supremes, on the strength of their name, be eligible for membership?

And so forth and so on.

Often with political activism of any kind came the realisation that I didn’t know what I was doing. Should I be going along with this? Campaigning against that? Ignoring some side issue? Which was usually when I decided to stick to what I knew. At least knew more of. Writing that is, and trying to find the words for my deep disquiet.

More possible beginnings

This could be apposite? A revenge killer tracking down a murderer during a plague. Pick your plague – past, present or future. The race being (motives and moralities examined) to kill the killer before the plague does.

Or an SF tale, POV way into the future, investigative research into a human-free Planet Earth. Undertaken for therapeutic reasons. Inconsolable loss?

A post-apocalyptic SF standard, but this new world society, its peculiar norms, seen through the accepting eyes of a child?

In a mild, possibly humorous SF, have every chapter end Vonnegutt-like with a question. Followed by, “Whatever.”

Another SF but with sentient objects/substances, one for each chapter. Thinking grass. A parasite brain. Absorbent thought sponge. Malachite’s hard surface reflecting back whatever is put before it – image or idea.

A telepathic society where telepathy-proof helmets are worn when out and about in public, and when working, driving. All entertainment is by telepathy. Have our hero wear his helmet to build himself a telepathy-proof room. Once isolated in his room he tries to determine when telepathy was first used. His research becoming ever more confused because, he initially assumes, of telepathic leakage and feed-back. There follows conflicting time lines. Until that point he was never in any doubt that telepathic democracy was absolute, the creators of the telepathic media controlled by their own invention. What the people think they want they get. With even the need to rebel being catered for, by telepathy-proof rooms being allowed to be built. Our hero briefly realising that, like old-fashioned TV, all that he managed to do with his telepathy-proof room was to change channels.

A novel with various strands – each to be written separately but sharing things in common. One an investigation into kidnaps, bogus ransom demands. Another about SF machines using people as communication devices. A communicant once used false memories get implanted. One communicant is in constant kidney pain. Whenever anaesthetized gets used as a communicant, gets left with more and more false memories. After several sessions acquires multiple personalities one of whom gets kidnapped.

Transparent thriller plot. Pick a crime and suspects. Then first false lead, second false lead; and so on until all suspects exhausted. Only then denouement, totally unrelated to all that has gone before, yet still valid.

Or a murder committed, the suspect obvious, the only question being what happened to make them kill. So, like the Watergate break in, with every new discovery the crime seems to increase in importance. More suspicions are voiced, something unrelated gets accidentally discovered. The crime appearing to have yet bigger causes and consequences, until the final discovery has the investigator saying, “Is that it? That’s all? Just that?”

Or could be about a ‘normal’ family life, but with a background war, maybe terrorist bombs. Nothing that specific. But during the family narrative a shop is bombed, a road blocked, a neighbour is ‘taken away,’ returning from the shops husband tells wife, “Old so-and-so’s copped it.”

If none of the above appeal could fall back on a mainstream plot where the powerful woman has intuitive knowledge of her competitor’s machinations, and the good woman has intuitive knowledge of the needs of others.

Failing all else how about yet another novel of middle class sensibilities?

Levity (1)

I have decided for the sake of some light relief to occasionally include in this blog one or two favourite jokes. For those who enjoy taking offence they will in all likelihood find something in these jokes, the kind of jokes that do word-of-mouth rounds, something to be offended by. And they will probably be right. It was their absurdity however that had me enjoy and remember them. Here’s the first.

The township residents of Little Big Horn agreed to celebrate the anniversary of the famous battle by commissioning a mural for the plain wood chapel that had been built on the battle site. The mayor approached a fashionable English painter. Despite being in fashion the English painter was in desperate need of money. Nevertheless he only agreed to take the commission with the proviso that no-one could see the work until it was finished. The mayor gave him the only key to the chapel. The painter put some drapes over its two windows and set to work.

After three weeks township council members expressed concern that the painting might not be finished in time for the anniversary. A particularly worried council member accosted the painter as he locked up one evening. The painter assured him that all would be ready and revealed on the very day of the anniversary.

Come the day crowds gathered around the chapel. The press were there, even a television crew and the local fireman’s brass band.

At the appointed hour the painter threw both doors open and the crowd tumbled into the chapel. To come to a shocked halt, only moving further in as more people tried to gain entry. Finally the mayor, wearing his awkward chain of office, squeezed in. And it was he who managed to voice the outrage of the slack-jawed crowd.

“Just what the… Just what is the meaning of this?”

From floor to ceiling the painting covered what had been the chapel’s one blank wall. In the painting’s foreground was a glittering river. Here and there some black and blue striped fish were leaping out of the water. Each leaping fish had a small golden halo.

On the riverbank beyond was a settlement of teepees. In and around the teepees, and on the riverbank, were several couples. All were naked except for a single feather in their headband; and all the couples were engaged in a variety of sexual acts.

The English painter seemed genuinely puzzled by the mayor’s question, by the crowd’s stunned reaction to the painting.

“Recalling the death of Nelson aboard the Victory,” the painter said in his public-speaking voice, “Kismet Hardy and all that. I opted for the death here of blonde-haired General Custer. I thoroughly researched the battle, and several historical sources confidently have it, and this is what I have depicted. General Custer’s last words: ‘Holy mackerel, fucking Indians.’”

Truly Great Romans

Antoninus Titus and his adopted son Antoninus Marcus Aurelius ruled the Roman Empire for a consecutive 42 years, its most peaceful period, both men detesting war as the ‘disgrace and calamity of humanity.’

We here in the UK now have a Latin-quoting Prime Minister, but one who counts his political successes in how large his sale of arms to warring countries, and who uses the bombastic rhetoric of war even when describing trade talks and advances in medicine.

He is not alone. Every November I find myself wishing that, just this once, the powers-that-be would no longer celebrate, with their solemn rituals and mawkish sentimentality, the twentieth century’s disgraceful and calamitous two world wars. Instead we get poppy-tyranny once again, where the wearing of the poppy has become a badge of respectability rather than of sad remembrance. The real result of those two wars, and all the wars before and since, have been the rag bundles in city doorways, old soldiers having served their purpose.

War lets cruel men and cruel women do what they most like doing, being cruel. While so far as civilians go war is the recourse of the stupid, a failure of governance, of diplomacy. Come the end of any and every war, the ripped and torn insides of exploded buildings behind them, any peace is only an act of consolidation and will perforce be temporary.

No matter the history, of how we might have arrived at a state of peace, the hard work, the really hard work, Antoninus Titus knew, is in keeping that peace. Ways and means, compromises and pacts, being found to keep the peace is so much harder than going to war.

Nor was Antoninus Titus the only Roman who knew the cost of war. Even fiction’s Roman generals knew war’s human cost. Take for instance the beginning of the film Gladiator, when parley is declined Maximus Decimus Meridius reluctantly gives the order to ‘unleash hell.’ An always unpredictable hell.

Before any war, in the lead up to war, when war looks to have become again stupidly inevitable, what one loses a belief in, an interest in, is politics. With positions and sides being taken, politics becomes a pointless shouting of war cries. War is coming, and while the war lasts we will all become savages again.

In this our still new 21^st century, already weary of war talk, where O where is our Antoninus Titus?

Beginnings – Bricolage

So much of art can start as a happy accident. Although for that accident of itself to be considered art could be a tad premature.

It is usually not enough to rely solely on assemblage, to gather together sounds for instance and to call that gathering music. Or to collect colours and textures together and call that assemblage visual art. Or to put words together on the same page and call that page poetry. No, these gatherings are but the beginnings.

Now, the gathering complete, is when the internal editor/critic/compiler takes over. If a composer one tries laying one sound partially over another, asks if that could make a viable chord. Does it respond to that click sound? Should it be repeated? Could the pairing become the motif for a larger piece? (See Neil Carter CDs.)

While for the colour splashes now is the time to consider the dynamism of any juxtaposition. Or what you may want the piece to become. Or, and more likely, what the piece may want to become. Are those large then small splodges creating an unwanted perspective? Do those four colours so close together look possibly representational? Could that hint of an image be put to use? Or will it then look too much like so-and-so’s work? Or could this smudged photo become art if…?

A red pen is required for the word-gatherers. With no preconceived narrative in mind it could be that there is a sense of something lurking in this wordy gathering, a possible otherness asking to be conveyed. A couple of words might be preventing that. Remove them. Change the order of some others? Make it present tense? Past? Now it is starting to become art… That is if Art should end/not end where wonderment/imagination begins.

More aspects of ageing – use of language?

What happens to certain people in their forties and onwards that their language changes and they become these pompous establishment types who trot out things like, “Your dad used to be a bit of ladies’ man.” Instead of, an expression appropriate to my generation say, “He was always after getting his end away.”

Let’s call them premature-previous-dotards, because these people my age can often also be seen wearing ever-pressed trousers and the women getting their white hair precociously permed.

Could it be that hormonal changes have these premature-previous-dotards feeling that they are now living the second, maybe even the third part of their lives – childhood, then their busy breeding age, and now their imminent dotage? – that they are now different people to what they were? So they have to adopt a new persona? Have to use other terms of reference? And the only models they have were their aged parents, uncles and aunts, and what they used to say: “In my day…”

All our physical components change, cells renew, die, some get replaced… Every 7 years apparently, and like Buddha’s ox-cart we become composed of different parts. Our thinking processes though, our emotional responses, remain largely the same. Could that be what these peculiarly old-fashioned responses are, an attempt to reconcile our extant emotional states with the wreckage that has become of our bodies and, because of our age and adult circumstances, our now limited opportunities? So do these premature-previous-dotards resort to archaic platitudes: “When I was your age…” “I’ll give you what for young…”

Could it be that, after all the uncertain fumblings and errors of youth, wrinkles and grey hair have bestowed upon them an unexpected and unlooked-for respectability, and they want to exploit this new role to the full: “Youngsters these days…” “Think life’s hard now…” “What they need is….”

Help!

On Heroes

I cannot afford heroes. Hero-worship is a static state and creativity demands a continually changing perspective. Which means that I am uneasy whenever anyone is made a hero, especially when they are made heroes by the media. One knows from experience that no sooner has the media conferred heroism on them than somebody else in the media, maybe even within the same periodical, is looking for the new hero’s clay feet. The story can then run and run.

For hero read celebrity, and given tabloid intrusion into the lives of celebrities I find it difficult to believe why anyone would even dream of becoming a celebrity, a media hero. Hence I do not allow myself even the fantasy of celebrity, of heroism. I am a common-named fool, have done and continue to do many foolish things. (Could these here, for instance, be the diary entries for another gross Nobody called Smith?)

Given awareness of my own clay feet what I also find difficult to understand is the near religious adulation offered up to singers/performers. For me the performance, the posturing gets in the way of the material. I prefer always a self-effacing interpretation to a virtuosic display. Unless of course the performer is the material, which is why I do so enjoy kitsch and camp.

I cannot likewise understand the loyalty given over to sports teams. I enjoy watching some soccer, some rugby; but I admire technique, skill and prowess, regardless of which side wins.

My distrust of the process of heroism, my own fallibility, is probably why so many of my own heroes have been damaged people, often failures by their own light – John Clare, Jack London, Edward Bibbins Aveling, Phillip de Marisco, Van Gogh, Bothwell… And why I am drawn now to those – not shock-jock controversialists being scandalous for its own sake, or to establishment pets like Fry and Perry, become parodies of themselves – but to those whose principles dare them to be different – Meredith Monk, Laura Riding, George Galloway, Tariq Ali, Caroline Lucas, Bjork… Equally poet friends like Paul Sutton, Alan Corkish, Jan Oscar Hansen: their obstinate outspoken existence I approve of, purely for the light they let into any exchange-of-clichés debate.

Lies

Sometimes it can seem that throughout the whole of my writing life I’ve been forced to undo lies. Some of my own, youth’s boasting, and those lies that seemed necessary at the time to get me into or out of love affairs. Into jobs as well. But like all readily-believed liars what I instead wanted was to impress with the truth. But lies were easy, the truth hard, and people seemed to prefer the familiar off-the-peg lie.

Most of my lifetime’s lies though have come from the lives surrounding mine, clothing mine.

Let’s take the ’68 anti-Vietnam war reporting – of the Vietnam war itself, and of those many who were campaigning to have that war stopped. Even now, harking back, there continue to be deliberate misrepresentations. In the USA the National Guard did shoot and kill several unarmed demonstrating students. While here in the UK, in Grovesnor Square, the police horses did come charging into us protestors before any horse ever got hit with a placard stick.

Sometimes it feels as if I should pitch into every FaceBook thread to say No, it wasn’t/isn’t exactly like that… Set the record straight, tell the young, “But it’s true. It wasn’t some game. The threat of World War Three and nuclear obliteration was real. Politicians believed it. Governments built bunkers to hide themselves in. Just themselves.”

Nor is it solely the young and new to life who get it wrong. I made this note to myself in 2010: ‘Live long enough and our own lives become a fiction. Which could be why old men talk so much – to try to recapture the reality of their lived life?’

Before that, in 1997: ‘Self-mythologies are the stories we come to believe about ourselves, stories that make our small lives more than pathetic.’

What I have always wanted, in writing, has been to accurately describe the real, the actual. Unequivocal accuracy though is difficult verging on the impossible. And it’s the totality of truth where I most often fail. A detail unconsidered, or deemed inessential, omitted, the context unexplained; and so I too add to the misrepresentations.

Plus all my writerly efforts are reliant on my readers’ knowledge/expectations/prejudices; and whether they have come to my work to have their views reinforced, or they came with the intention of pulling it apart. The latter happens especially when I have penned a piece where I have attempted to defy the direction of the words, to bring them back to what I actually wanted to describe, shake them out of the mould the words had made for themselves.

I believe that it is because we are alone when we write, just ourselves and the page, that we can achieve an honesty rarely found elsewhere in our lives. Try for instance criticising a book in the author’s presence. There can then be no pretence at objectivity because most people won’t want to be unkind, will possibly, sociably, even seek to make themselves well thought of by the author. Or, if they have taken a dislike to the author, they may find themselves being wantonly cruel. Alone with the page however they can, either way, caution themselves to be dispassionate.

Alone with the page is where I am myself.

1997

Going by these kept jottings 1997 must have been even more changing than I realised at the time. I was busy.

‘Odd that although I am happy to accept other people being different to me they are not happy to accept my being different to them. Christians refuse to believe that I’m not [being an English-born ex-choirboy] a patriotic Christian. Performance poets that I honestly do not enjoy performance poetry, etc.’ (3.3.1997)

‘Rimbaud in reverse: I did my living early, gave it up to write at 25.’ (29.4.1997)

Explanation for that last note to self:- From adolescence onwards I’d been eager to sample each and every aspect of life. But as a recipient, not an actor. So I took my curious self to strange places, into new situations, to see what would happen to me, how I would react. Which was how I’ve been both street-fighter and pacifist. Singularity, wholeness, was never my objective. And in all my doing, in action, had not been desperation, nor a frantic sadness, more a tempered exhilaration. What next? While at the same time I was wary of causing unnecessary offence and thus depriving myself of the possibility of yet another new experience. Small wonder that I left both lovers and acquaintances confused.

1997: when I was full of having had my first collection, ‘To Be Like John Clare,’ finally in print, my mentor and friend Derrick Woolf asked me, “What’s worse than a first collection by Salzburg?”

I face-shrugged a Don’t Know.

“A second collection by Salzburg.”

How soon are our bubbles pricked. Which probably led to this:- ‘Seeking now, not an impossible permanence, more a point of rest, a comfortable predictability.’ (8.7.1997)

That year however there were some beneficial changes to my psyche. This note to self was written years later:- ‘Never try to repair machines in a hurry or in anger.’ (13.6.2008), but was a cautionary reminder of my having read in 1997 Pirsig’s ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.’ That was the book that physically changed my life. Pre-Pirsig I had broken coffee tables that got in my way, had thrown malfunctioning telephones the length of hallways, and I had chucked unco-operative lawnmowers over garden hedges. Post-Pirsig offending tables got moved, phones put aside, and lawnmowers mended.

O the power of literature.

The knees of turkeys bend backwards to take them forwards

While many of us can give the appearance of belonging, of being in the know, of being at confident ease with ourselves and our surroundings, most of us know that it is an act, that it has and will only ever be appearances.

When young I knew who was bullshitting who, be it a lad’s lad priest, or disciplinarian teachers, or got-to-be-hard-like-me squadies. Nowadays it’s all down to guesswork.

Tattoos for instance used to be the province of Pop-Eye sailors and borstal boys, or pretend borstal boys. On any girl’s forearm the usually smudged self-tattoos were in among the self-harm scars. Nowadays however the arms of effete musicians are blue with intricate tattoos, body beautiful athletes have them on their calves upwards, and the smooth shoulders of plump young women sport roses or dragonflies.

It is though still all about belonging. Young people still seek ways to be accepted, go looking for what they have to do in order to belong. As I once did, knowing then the rules. But every part of that imperfect world contributed to its imperfection; and I also knew that I wanted a life larger than my parents’ home, than the village, larger than the county, than the country; a life larger than life itself.

What I can’t understand is why anyone young now doesn’t want that. Because even if one ends up old and lost in memories, in all that still not-knowing what precisely it was that I wanted, the seeking of it took me down so many roads, and I at least have the memory of those roads.

At odds with most people most of the time, there were of course occasions when, out of sorts, I had to decide whether everyone else was being honest, or it was me being deceitful – to myself if no-one else. But usually they wanted me to belong more than I wanted to belong to them, individual or group; and when to belong all too often required some form of denial. A truth pushed aside; and the insistence, unsaid, that I become like them. So when I questioned, possibly detailed their inconsistencies, they might indignantly and self-righteously deny them; or, with a shrug, they accepted; just the way of it.

It was that acceptance always that I questioned.

Chip-on-the-shoulder cynic I may have been. But back then I was also a fool. I once assumed that everything in print, because it was in print, had to be important – not knowing then the hit-and-miss process of publication. So back then I read everything, tried to both understand and identify with it. To belong somewhere. And I saw any failure to understand as mine.

But I did eventually learn. I know now to spot the code word/phrase, its hinterland of attitudes, and I will skim-read on, or discard. Be off on my own again.

Another Beginning (Earth cleaned)

It was the beginning of the world. Another beginning. There had been an end. Another end. But in this ending only the Northern hemisphere had been wholly destroyed – by a nuclear catastrophe centred on the UK. (Known possibly in parts of the Southern hemisphere as The Last Night of the Poms?)

By the beginning of this future history however the North has become by and large clean again. Temperate Europe has once again been colonised from Africa. Our hero though is not clean. He has unnameable memories polluting his everyday vision, pre-verbal mentalese, new primordial instincts….

Europe’s cities have disappeared, little evidence of their having been, even archaeological. Rather like the trillions of books published in the preceding millennia, all that remains of them will be in the indexes of electronic libraries, brief descriptions of some of them and of some of their contents.

In a renewed continent, inhabited by basic character types, will our hero go – Brian Aldiss-like – in search of a mystic land where, possibly, he believes he will be able to talk to the animals? This maybe because he was told that humanity and quadrupeds had once shared a common language? Could it be that he will discover the only word remaining to both is that which means ‘man’? When the crow uses the word it is ‘caw’. A harsh goat bleat sounds the same. Therefore, when introducing himself to boars and horses, might our hero place his palm flat to his chest and say, “Caw”?

On reviewing new poetry and poetry reviewers

Every author wants their book reviewed, reviewed positively that is, and is prepared to argue at length against a negative review and its every justification. One consequence being the haunted look that publishers and editors of those magazines that carry reviews get at book fairs and readings, expecting at any second to be assailed by offended egos, rejected egos, even neglected egos. [photo is of Idris and I at a long ago Purple Patch Poetry Festival. Idris was never an offended ego.]

Let us assume that those who appoint themselves reviewers are genuine lovers of poetry, that they truly want to discover the new, and let us discount the mean-spirited intelligence which results only in waspish pedantry. Let us discount also those who prefer to expand, at convoluted length, upon the new poetry (theories of) rather than comment directly on the book before them.

It must also stand to reason that the poetry a reviewer likes is closest to the poetry that he/she writes, or that she/he would like to write. Because, clumsy errors aside, there can be no such thing as an objective assessment of poetry. Every time-pressed reviewer will have their own idea of what poetry, the new poetry, should be; and if your work doesn’t fit with that idea they could well dismiss your sweated-over work as not worthy of consideration.

I believe however that most reviewers want to be fair, want to offer constructive criticism. And you can usually tell when they come upon content unfathomable to them – by their seeking out of slant rhymes, broken rhythms, architectural lay-outs, use of white space and hints of a form. These they can then pass comment on, possibly even congratulate him/herself on her/his insight. Behold a reviewer’s joy when they chance upon a piece of clever work they managed to understand, and forgive them their puzzlement for they truly know not what they are sometimes asked to review.

Self-analysis (after reading a Martin Stannard review…)

Self-analysis (after reading a Martin Stannard review… and angrily looking at a clutch of my own notes for a potential poem.)

Soft-skinned commuting workers

stand shoulder-to-shoulder, back-to-back,

not stepping on toes, not sniffing a rose. (A rose! Sniffing a rose! What the hell does that mean? This is where a dementing need for rhyme can lead one – to meaninglessness, or hoped-for portentousness. Jaysus!)

One pair of shoulders moves to platform’s end,

stands with his back to a rainbow

squinting at winter’s sun. (An attempt at ironical, and clumsy, observation here – always we’re missing something. Shakes bald head.)

All Shun

the self-engrossed and thick-haired young,

along with the sleepers-out in their

street-rancid clothes. (Description alone never enough for me, conscience says I must include some social observation, cliché and pathetic as that may be.)

With all of the need-to-earn-a-wage gone

pavements now are long patterns of stone. (Behold the slant rhyme sneaked into what was, by its appearance, claiming to be free verse, and has me ask how many more months – I’m hoping years – before brain decrease has me rocking and singing the same phrase over and over like a Dylan Thomas villanelle?)

Single old men emerge to take their small dogs

for the second of the day’s four walks, pause

to catch their breath and consider. (…how many more months for them? Or are these lone men also travelling inscapes seeking their own slipped-away names/memories?)

Gate-leaning they hope for someone to gasping pass,

know them well enough for a verbal exchange –

of weather, of health. (Gawd! I the observer am so very very superior.)

One old man has been left indoors

caring for his even older father, both with

mouths sealed shut. Next door’s sharp old woman,

also mute, treads carefully to not disturb

her parcel of pains. (So did I look to end with a poignant touch, and definitely rhymeless. With all that’s left being to crumple the paper and take aim at my best-friend bin. Or use it to self-lacerate…? The answer herein. Damn! Another accidental rhyme.)

Apposite? (Extract from ‘Everyday Objects Repurposed As Art)

The following has been taken from Chapter Twenty of my novel, Everyday Objects Repurposed As Art. Seemed apposite, especially after the collapse of the Labour Party’s vote yesterday – https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Everyday+Objects+Repurposed+As+Art&i=stripbooks&ref=nb_sb_noss

Chapter Twenty has the writer starting work on his proposed TV script….

[Actor beside or in front of photo of Aveling. Maybe we’ll need our own set, real or virtual, actor walking between hanging portraits/screens]

Aveling’s declared enemies were Ignorance, Ugliness and Poverty.

Unlike those self-righteous sober-minded socialists [sombre men in suits], unlike those who seek to make saints of themselves [add halos] by condemning the pleasures of those whose means enables them to partake of those pleasures [Victorian gentlemen carousing] – Aveling [actor signifies portrait] saw nothing wrong in enjoying himself, nor shame in showing his enjoyment. [clips of satirical programmes, stand-ups & laughing audiences] There is an innocence and an honesty in laughter – laughter being the enemy of all those with grandiose notions of their own importance. Aveling’s foremost criticism of Jesus in the New Testament was that, [running text]

“Nowhere in it does it say that He smiled.”

[actor]

As a people we have lost faith in socialism. [Tory 1980s poster – Britain not working]

“Or open with that? Or ‘Britain not laughing’?”

He sits silent, then grunts. “More impact.” He studies the screen. “Move it later,” he says, and bends again to the laptop.

[Actor at lectern]

We generally no longer believe that international socialism can be achieved, nor even if – as Aveling foresaw it – it is any longer desirable. But then we have seen its application [footage of marchpasts in Russia, China & North Korea], have several examples of its failure [stills of Russian and Chinese 20th century famines]. And not only the reactionary and restrictive communism of Russia and China; but the feeling, or rather the fact, that socialism was long ago sold out by the British Labour Party wanting to be seen as respectable. [footage of Mandelson, Hune, Brown & Blair] Could be argued here therefore that our disillusion is due to the failure of Aveling to make his socialism international.

[actor]

The only English group who now believe in international socialism are the Trotskyists of the Fourth International [their logos and any footage of their speakers, placards on demos, etc]. They can find but a few however who share their belief in international socialism.

[actor]

Since Aveling’s day socialism’s enemies have quintupled. Now genuine socialists not only have to fight capitalist establishments, but also those undemocratic establishments [clips of deposed dictators, Gadafi, Pol Pot, etc] who, to give their dictatorships a moral respectability, called themselves socialist.

Now not only do socialists have to deplore the crimes of capitalism [landscapes laid waste by corporate greed] but those of the terrorists [bomb aftermaths] who call themselves socialists. Socialism and nationalism have become so inextricably entangled that socialists now have to apologise for all kinds of government before they can even begin to espouse their cause.

[actor]

Of late we have witnessed wars that to Aveling would have been unthinkable – one ‘socialist’ country against another ‘socialist’ country. [b&w footage of artillery bombardments] Nor are our capitalistic enemies so obvious – in this country poverty is no longer raggedly offensive to the naked eye. Now it is a lower income limiting where one shops for one’s clothes. [High Street franchise shopfronts] And socialism’s philosophy being originally materialistic hard to say that there is no joy in wage-earning affluence, that most of those living in suburbia are deprived of joy [shots of one bleak suburban estate after another]. And should socialists here take up the cause of those in impoverished countries they inevitably find themselves again confounded by nationalism. [footage of flag-carrying nationalists on the march]

For 19th century Aveling it was simpler. [period footage/assemblage shots of slums] Aveling was a romantic socialist, saw himself with a straightforward battle to be fought and a solid victory to be gained. And it is because Aveling was defeated by his own, it is because Aveling’s [portrait] international socialism was diluted, that socialists today find themselves in this dilemma. Aveling had the courage of his convictions. While socialists today may have the courage, they certainly lack the convictions. Hesitating now to ally themselves to any one group, lest for expedience they choose to back what our armchair socialists [cartoons of armchair socialists] believe to be an unworthy or divergent cause, they do nothing; and doing nothing they change nothing.

[actor]

Do we have any right therefore to criticise those Labour Party founders who did by their compromises achieve something? I doubt many of us today could come close to matching even the sheer energy of their daily lives. We still have – just about – the welfare state, [NHS logo] we have (did have) a forty hour week, we have adult suffrage [voting slips]. Yet all those concessions from the system have cost us international socialism.

So do we dramatise Aveling’s life here? [image of stagey Victorian theatre] Do we make his life into a socialist soap opera? Call it An Amoral Moralist after Shaw’s An Unsociable Socialist? [book cover] Or do we further examine Aveling’s thoughts? [portrait]

[actor]

Aveling’s mental processes however are way beyond our scope. There are so many outdated signifiers meaningless to our latterday mindset. Aveling was a doctor – most of us do not have even his antiquated medical knowledge. [antique stethoscope?] Nor do we have his lifelong enthusiasm for the atheist Shelley. [portrait] As for Aveling’s attitude to women – free love is no longer an issue. The pill [usual blisterpack] has made promiscuity a commonplace, while AIDS and chlymidia have muddied those permissive waters. Aveling [portrait] had an aptitude for other languages – most of us speak only English. [Costa Brava English abroad] And not only did Aveling have a better understanding of Marxism he actually helped translate Das Kapital. [book cover]

[actor]

Could we make Aveling subject of a musical? Have song titles like ‘Socialism can be fun.’ [doctored clip of various Labour leaders appearing to dance] Should such a musical however become a commercial success, the popular music world being what it is, would make any message cynically self-defeating, would be to let profits exploit him, would offend more people than it persuaded. Like the trendy 1970s boutique that was called Che Guevara. [shot of Kensington High Street] The apolitical, that is the unthinkingly Tory owner couldn’t understand why he kept getting bomb threats.

[actor]

Let us instead get to the nitty gritty – the infighting of the various socialist camps [banners & logos galore] that were to prove Aveling’s undoing. Not that I want to give ammunition to the enemies of socialism, rather to present a man of ideas [portrait of Aveling] to anyone searching for hope.

[actor]

As we will be concentrating on 19^th century socialists, for the sake of balance assume that the one thing they all agreed on, then as now, was that Tories [footage of lounging parliamentarians] were gluttonous reactionaries. Then as now Tories were petty opportunists who vied only in respectability and its hypocrisies; unthinking, uncompassionate, unimaginative, intolerant, smug, vulgar, unforgiving, overbearing, overweening, warmongering dolts; their fragile self-confidence terrified of anything new. Unlike our latterday Labour Party the socialists of Aveling’s time looked upon the Tories as being like their queen [statue] – emotionally and intellectually deficient, short, stout, ugly and unamused.

[actor assertively to camera]

If you, viewer, have not yet learnt that needless drudgery, poverty and wars of patriotism are a stupid waste of human talents, then do not bother to watch the rest of this series. It will only offend you.

“What’s the betting they don’t keep that last bit in the script.”

He scrolls back up the screen. “Still needs to be punchier. At thirty quid a minute this is too wordy. Too wordy by far.”

He roots around in his beard.

“Needs images. Playlets.”

Taking his hand from his beard he decides to keep on spilling out his research. He can chop the prose later, rechunk parts, reassemble it; shove in repeats of the salient aspects for those slow on the uptake.

Bravery a Necessity

There are those who would seem not to know the crude mechanics of fame (connections, chance). I have heard them scoff at the attempts of those not yet famous. Their scoffing seemed to be saying, “How dare this person like us aspire to be different to us.”

For myself I’ve never craved pop-star type fame, that intrusive following/adoration of fans. What I’ve aimed for is the quiet kind of fame that would get my books read. The kind of indoors fame where people would chance upon a photo of me and say, “I thought he’d be much different.” That I’d be more in their image, or a mental image of one of my characters say.

For those writers for whom the very act of writing, of following ideas through the tips of their fingers, point of their pen[cil], is the primary attraction and not a necessary but tiresome step towards performance, even book-signings can be blushingly/stammeringly difficult, especially for us who are not at ease performing. But they have to be undergone, if only for the sake of our publishers, because even a quiet indoors fame requires us to occasionally venture out if we want to sustain our small renown.

As to ‘natural’ performers, I’ve been to readings with those circuit poets who have learnt their pieces by heart (including the introductory anecdotes); and every time I’ve heard them, even years apart, they trot out verbatim the same words/hestitations; and still they call themselves writers. Don’t they get tired, I can’t help but wonder, of pressing the same audience buttons, get a chuckle here, a sentimental aaaah there?

I have more affinity with those who, paper or book held to their face, stumble over their – not necessarily first time – delivery of their – not necessarily – latest work.

And it is here that we meet with the thin skin required to produce art, a skin sensitive to one’s surroundings; and the thick skin required to put one’s self – one’s work as much as one’s physical self – on public display. Here the necessity of bravery, steeling oneself to defy the sneers imaginary or real. Or worse still to behold the turning away indifference, that polite but reluctant putting together of hands… Would be a gross exaggeration to call such a brief clatter applause.

The Private[?] Lives of Authors & Painters

Shortly after the death of V.S.Naipaul I came across an article – b&w photos of a grumpy V.S.Naipaul – that appeared, as a sort of sideways defence of V.S.Naipaul, to query readers’ interest in the private lives of authors, all the while supporting his argument with yet more details of the private life of V.S.Naipaul. Headline gist of the article was that such interest was not only prurient but unnecessary, that the focus should be squarely on the author’s finished work. Obituaries and recent reminiscences had contained many unflattering disclosures regards V.S.Naipaul’s personality.

To a point I agreed with the main thrust of the article: such disclosures, concerning not only authors but actors and other celebrities, usually focus on the salacious aspects of their sexual activities. Poor Ted and Sylvia for instance. But so far as authors and other creative artists are concerned knowing something of their lives does enable one to appreciate their work the better.

Whenever this topic re-emerges Walt Whitman comes to mind. Knowing that he was a male nurse and a cruising homosexual does open up his work, lets one read so much more into his poems. Knowing of his life adds to the poems, doesn’t detract.

And for those of us especially who are attempting to follow in the footsteps of successful authors we can draw reassurance from their early trials and tribulations. A novel of Samuel Becket’s for instance got rejected 42 times. The 11 year self-doubting gap Somerset Maughan had between his first book being accepted and his second. The 48 rejections the postal services left for Philip K Dick. The neglect John Clare suffered after his being London-fêted as the ‘Peasant Poet’.

All I saw as relating to my own struggles. I wrote this on 14^th May 1995 in Somerset: ‘John Clare’s internal exile, displaced psyche. We too now live among farmers and landowners who abuse the land for profit.’

Of course some writers give you every detail of their lives seemingly uncensored. Henry Miller for one. Bethany Pope nowadays. While Jean Genet almost gives one too much. Of de Sade on the other hand I’d still like to know more, to get beyond the shock.

While I was working on my own [yet to be finished/published] autobiography I jotted this admonitory note to myself, and to possible readers: ‘I want to show you everything and, despite the everything, myself in the best possible light. You, however, will have brought your own candle.’ (17^th June 2003, Ilfracombe).

Although I believe myself reasonably self-aware, it’s still hard to see beyond my own time, how it will have constrained me. Here I look to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. My first reading had the narrator female. Once Baldwin was Out it made much more sense as male.

Likewise knowing of painters’ lives can add to our appreciation of their work. Caravaggio, El Greco, Francis Bacon, Goya, Gaugin – knowing just a little of their circumstances can have one consider their work anew. Biographies of Pablo Picasso opened my mind to so much beyond art. While their art brought unsought benefits. When first I found myself in Southern France I recognised it through the works of Van Gogh, then Italian cities through Canaletto. While the Lake District I met via fellow footslogger Wordsworth. And here in the valleys of south Wales I find myself resorting daily to childhood’s Book of Common Prayer and ‘…lifting mine eyes to the hills.’

If it aint broke….

The hardware’s fine, few moving parts, little wear and tear. How then to build in obsolescence, have us buy more? The answer of course has to be software upgrades. Upgrades that really aren’t upgrades, but are most often two steps sideways and rendering one or other pieces of your hardware inoperable.

My first disaster with upgrades came about through Microsoft adding another number to Windows. My PC was no longer having its operating system updated and was said to be ‘at risk…’ I contacted a local engineer to ask him to install the latest Windows. I thought I’d saved/backed-up onto disc and/or USBs most of my files and photos. The engineer assured me that he’d transfer them all anyway to the new Windows. He lost the lot. Plus all the current stuff I hadn’t thought to back-up, it not being anywhere near a finished state. Plus older files too that for some reason, some oversight long ago, I had failed to back up.

All gone.

Thank you Microsoft. With the new Windows being only marginally/visually different was hard to call it ‘improved.’

So it also goes with all those remote and background updates. The PC/laptop slows for a bit while a techie somewhere uploads their latest update. And suddenly, because of nothing one’s done oneself, one finds one needs a new driver for a printer say, or for a scanner, which was working perfectly well the day before. And when, this day re-attached to a non-updated PC/laptop, will continue to work. I suspect cynical manipulation of the market here.

What I don’t understand, and can see no gain for anyone, is when website hosts decide to update, and their websites don’t then work as well as before. Facilities that were useful get removed, or they get replaced with a less capable function. The arranging of images on a website often falls into this category.

Where before the update one could place the images where required, adjust size and shape in situ. Suddenly one has one option one size.

Why?

My guess is that some techie somewhere in the company’s employ, and for some reason best known to themselves, thought it a good idea to make a subtle change to a remote sub-program, with not a thought to the possible effect on the end-user.

This how, I’m convinced, ‘Buy Now’ buttons on websites cease working. Because it can be of no benefit to the web host, who loses traffic and therefore advertising; and it most certainly cannot be of benefit to the website owner. Who in panic quickly search out a new host.

I’m one of those who frantically searches for a new host having learnt that there is little point in trying to contact the web host and asking them to fix the ‘Buy Now’ buttons. Be that host Webs or Google. All queries and complaints will go unanswered. Even those chatty little surveys that spring up in one’s feed and which ask how satisfied you are with recent changes, they too will go unanswered. Even when one fills in, with details, the box that says ‘Any other comments’ and you tell how the ‘change’ has affected your sales, could be driving you to cease trading, sending you to an early grave… They too will go unanswered, unacknowledged.

I feel that I have spent the last few years pursued by upgrades and updates to no real purpose; technology tinkered with for its own sake, not for us end-users. Two steps forward, two steps…

To reach my latest website, presently with working buttons, go to https://samsmithbooks.weebly.com/the-journal.html

By way of a review

This blog is by way of a review of Bryn Fortey’s collection of stories and poems, ‘Compromising the Truth‘ (Alchemy Press https://alchemypress.wordpress.com/alchemy-publications/2018-publications/compromising-the-truth/ ISBN 978-1-911034-06-3 338 pages). Bryn recently sent the book to Steph and I. We’re old friends.

Daresay I’m not alone in having become friends with Bryn through writing, and then of course through our shared love of jazz. I’ve still got a CD of Bryn snapping out a rhythm on a snare drum; and he is the only man I know to have mimed poetry to a live jazz band. No surprise then that the very first story in ‘Compromising the Truth‘ concerns jazz, the blues to be accurate.

Bryn’s stories can start with the quotidian, with what you think you know, can draw you in; and before you know it you’re off-planet or navigating a dystopia. In between times we’re treated to Bryn’s sometimes soft, sometimes sideways whimsy, an occasional immersion in the bizarre.

Stories here told straight have endings often more unexpected than the standard double-twist. Bryn’s craft is in not so much raising expectations as hinting at them, and then taking us somewhere not just unexpected but off the map.

Mind you strange things do happen around Bryn. Or could be that’s just Newport. I was going to give him a lift one evening to a Bristol gig, but got lost and ended up in Chepstow, left Bryn waiting at his gate. Still not sure how that happened.

I keep wandering off into memories… don’t feel that I have yet given a good account of the quantity and quality of the stories here. There are stories concerning stag beetles, boxers, killer Blues, wormholes, mean-street parodies… Bryn even takes a fresh and personalised look at World War One. Was it Primo Levi said something about putting aside the numbers and to feel the effect of seeing just one person? Bryn does it so well.

The sign of a good writer Bryn had me both laughing and in tears, and a couple of times grimacing as I compulsively read on… So many lines to quote, a couple of them unbearably sad; but this has to be my favourite: –

‘…If things started to look really bad he might consider relocating to Cardiff.

Cardiff?

Well, only as a last resort…’

And then there’s the poems, some sci-fi, tributes to Blues men and other musicians, poems of love and bereavement: ‘…But these are days of darkness / Times beyond understanding // Sometimes love is not enough.’

Not just this book, I’m so proud to have had Bryn as a friend through all these thick and thin years.

A set of characters for a possible novel of social manners

Male A: He gets undeserved tellings-off from his boss, but needs the job, can’t afford to leave. He also stays with his grossly unfaithful wife for the sake of his children, which is why he needs the job. Doubly trapped he stays despite the way those who know of his wife’s infidelities look at him – with pity and/or contempt. Memories of his various humiliations recur unbidden, infest his dreams.

Female A: She is attractive, but in a blank, sheet metal kind of way, has no definable personality. She wants more, but doesn’t know what. Loud men become her brief consorts. Their opinions get bounced back at them. When the lack of contradiction confounds them, off they go. She stays.

Male B: In any event, conversation even, he finds himself sidelined, spectator not a participant. Seems to have no effect on anyone. He too wants more, owns fantasies of being Mr Popular.

Female B: She wonders what drives her brother to so cruelly treat his women, to even beating them. She and he both had the same parents, the same liberal upbringing. A self-declared feminist she agonises now over where her loyalties should lie. The women he ends up beating are far from perfect themselves.

Male C: Born rich, all creature comforts guaranteed, to anchor his otherwise aimless life in some form of framework he has devised rigid routines while at the same time taking risks with his wealth and his well-being. Physically gambling with dangerous and competitive sports; and, having the advantages of wealth, he inevitably wins. He also despises himself.

Female C: Pleasant rather than attractive; soft, sponge-like, she absorbs men into her domestic realm. She weeps alone and often.

Male D: His struggle to be free is complicated by his not wanting to cause her more hurt. In needing to be free however he has to dump her. This also leaves him despising himself.

Female D: A middle-class socialite, she is a people collector, her principal pleasure in introducing oddities and eccentrics to one another. She is so sophisticated, so caring, so acutely aware of every human foible and frailty it’s a wonder she can bear to be alive. If it wasn’t for her self-worth…

Nuclear War 21stC Style

We had a few decades where the threat of global annihilation drifted to the back of the mind. Lately however, with so many autocratic right-wing governments having access to nuclear weaponry, the fear of nuclear war has once again become front and centre.

The proliferation of nuclear weaponry, the inability to come up with a ‘balanced’ approach to disarmament, the covert possession of nuclear weapons – especially by a state such as Israel with its preparedness to kill – means that all previous efforts at ridding the world of nuclear weapons are no longer feasible.

Post WW2, when it was only two sides that held nuclear weapons, if just one of those sides had taken the gamble and disarmed – they could first have built up their conventional forces to deter invasion – it would not only have left the other side morally deficient but would have left their having of nuclear weapons pointless.

That is supposing that all conflict is over territorial possession. Because even had the nuclear-armed side used their weaponry then all that they would have won would have been a depopulated and contaminated land. So could one side’s nuclear disarmament have been taken as a sign of non-aggression if not peace.

No more.

Nor is it solely the latter spread of nuclear weaponry that has renewed the risk. It is the unstable nature of recent right-wing governments, their dependency on creating fear of others in order to win votes and so remain in power. That fear of itself can grow beyond their own power to control and can push those governments – the right-wing leaders are generally weak characters with a need to be liked/praised – into attacking whoever their ‘others’ are with their expensive and ‘ultimate’ weaponry.

Nor will this war be likely to end with the obliteration of just the one country. All of these recent right-wing, populist governments have sought to make allies of other right-wing gangster governments. Consequently once one nation is threatened alliances will be invoked and, with the launch of the first missiles, retaliations will be set in motion. Which retaliations, as with all gangster mind-sets, will lead to further retaliations.

Goodbye Planet Earth, we didn’t deserve you.

Some numbers:- On 9^th August 1945, when the second atom bomb was was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, 74,000 people died straight away. 20,000 more people died later from the after-effects. Unlike the comparatively small bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, when nuclear war becomes total there will be no escape, no recovery, no survival.

An Idiot’s Guide to Poetry

Regular readers of prose often claim to be ‘frightened’ of poetry, in that they are left uncertain how they should react to it, what the ‘proper’, the socially acceptable reaction should be to a poem. Those supposed acceptable responses made more difficult now by poetry overkill – there being so many poems of a similar standard being published or performed.

Unlike prose, which is what it describes and either does it well or fails so to do, a poem is a thing in itself. So when asked I have advised worried members of the reading public that they should look upon poems as cheeses. A Larkin poem say, a bit tart on the tongue, could be grated Parmesan. Quiet anecdotal poems, not designed to disturb, could be cottage cheese. In-yer-face poems, Paul Sutton’s say, could be a ripe goat’s cheese, not to everyone’s taste. For use of white space in a poem think Emmental or Gruyère. Wedges of blue cheese will of course be those poems part of a series, common threads running through them. A surrealist poem can be an unwrapped Camembert inside its wooden box; or a Saint Paulin, orange on the outside, rubbery white and tasteless within. My own, the better poems of those, I like to think of as brick-hard Cheddar, leave the palate tingling.

What of the wholly incomprehensible poem? With one of those what has to be borne in mind is that such could be the coded poetry of censored times/places and which require a historical/political/geographical context. A poem like that has difficulty being a thing itself and existing out of that time/place. Such a poem/cheese is therefore its packaging.

Alternatively the incomprehensible poem could be the work of an ‘experimental school’ or of a singular ‘poet as custodian of language’, the poet’s purpose there to explore the possibilities of language and to extend its range. Artisan cheese-makers obviously, and to be approached with a wary scepticism. These curds, this whey? Who’s fooling who?

Should any poem, after hours of open-minded study, remain uncategorized (cheese-wise), be still incomprehensible, then it has to be said that poems, like prose, like any other human artefact, can fail.

The U.S. State of Fellatio

My literary hero Henry Miller was also much given to pondering this – why the U.S. public, his fellow U.S. citizens, were so taken with cocksucking, even to using cocksucking as a default insult. Especially when in everyday converse little mention is made of connilingus, clit-licking, and when all that can be meant by cocksucking is the taking of an erect penis into the mouth.

Even so the present U.S. President has been reported as saying, words to the effect, that a vagina is a nest of viruses. While previous occupants of the White House also appear to have preferred oral sex. That is themselves the one-sided recipients of cocksucking, rather than their having been naked participants in pleasure. Little mutuality in the U.S. of A.

Which is probably because the practise of sex in the U.S. of A, alleged ‘Land of the Free,’ has more to do with status, with having power over another, subjugation of the woman or the rent boy on their knees, than of a democratically entwined pair of conspirators in pleasure. Same for cougars enticing six-pack pool boys into their boudoirs.

This one-sidedness extends to public displays of nudity, the pole/lapdancing clubs for instance. A most peculiar look-don’t-touch morality at play there, with the one article of female clothing being either a thong or a garter – for the tucking in of paper money. While the wriggle-dancing on laps results in the customer ejaculating into his pants.

The touring male strippers would seem to be as one-sided, but altogether less seedy, the female audiences more raucous than leering.

Post Henry Miller I’m given to wondering how much of present day U.S. sexual practise has been set by their film and TV sex, where the female, if in a covert workplace setting, is taken from behind (we can see both their faces); or if in a bedroom the female is practically always filmed on top and, if bra-less, her breasts swinging. Film-wise the missionary position is not attractive, the bedclothes go up and down, then a grunt and get off.

Another lasting curiosity of U.S. film and TV sex is that when a pair would seem, according to the narrative, to have had full-on sex, when they rise from the bedclothes both still have on all their underwear. Could this be a result of male lap-dancing experiences?

Readerly Expectations

It might seem at times that we, as readers, are being asked to witness only the sad lives of poets. While we, as readers, know that there must at one time have been at least one happy poet, and one moreover who elected to celebrate their joy in good verse, rather than in chirpy doggerel. Which, unfortunately, does seem to have been the main attempt at a happy poetry.

So why the prevalence of sad poetry?

Can’t be that sad poems are meant to console the bereaved. For anyone devastated by the recent death of another a few words on a piece of paper can seem an insulting irrelevance.

Or could the reason be that poems so often seem to dwell on the sad simply because they have been written by someone sitting alone? Were all poems to be written in the cheerful company of workshops they would probably verge towards the whimsical – affording some amusement to one’s neighbours on the day, and bewilderment to the rest of us.

The reading of poetry, for me, being such a unique experience, is why each poem deserves private contemplation, as opposed to a public, communally-received, performance. Written by someone sitting alone I believe that each poem is best read by someone sitting alone.

Generally, although possibly about death, poetry can be an affirmation of life, a belief in continuance. A reconciliation to death certainly, but telling us that we are alive now, that we too have our wee window in space/time, that we too can make our own experiences.

One definition of ‘poetic sensibility’ could be that it is to look at a subject and to see its birth and its death, its creation/destruction, and its not having been at all, and all at the same time. Even if, not on so grand a scale, the poem, indeed any work of art, does not seek to address the meaning of life, then it should at least seek to offer an understanding of some part of life. Possibly.

The End of All Property

There is no natural, no default human state so far as the concept of property goes. In most ‘primitive’ societies, the elements their enemy, their value systems grew from what was of benefit to the tribe. What was of value mutating into their morality.

So we find in a jungle tribe, where food is abundant, shelter unnecessary, but they are occasionally under threat from marauding beasts, little division of labour or regular sexual partnerships. All members look out for and after one another.

At the other extreme, a mountain people say, where for survival’s sake flocks have to be moved from winter to summer pastures, and the women remain with the children but take on an ‘extra’ husband to help with the water-carrying, etcetera. In time this arrangement will become formalised.

Nomadic desert peoples on the other hand, traipsing after their flocks have mostly evolved a tent-erecting patriarchy. Again one that has favoured the tribe’s survival.

Historically even here in Europe the concept of property was unknown to the medieval mind. Ordinary people owed loyalty – to clan or liege. Their land title was the gift of their monarch. But overall mutuality again: you support me and I’ll reward you being the overarching concept. That reward being use of a piece of land just so long as your leader remained in favour.

Only when trade and usury were made respectable did who-owns-what – on a personal and private level – come to the fore. Which brings us abruptly to present day capitalism and the making of money from money.

Self-evidently capitalism has ignored, is continuing to ignore, the Easter Island escapade and our self-eating capitalism is about to self-destruct. Unfortunately for us alive now it is not just the one Easter Island that is going to be rendered uninhabitable by the unrestricted exploitation of its resources, but the whole of planet Earth.

As with Easter Island’s bizarre beliefs growing out of its deforested death throes so too have the planet’s death throes resulted in Earth’s leaders becoming ever more extreme. Regardless of the social and environmental consequences notorious bankers and faceless CEOs continue to award themselves huge salaries and bizarre amounts as a ‘bonus’, while giving nothing back to the societies that allowed them to do this. Which has led to those, who are unable to participate in these extremes of selfishness, or despairing of it, to react mirror-wise in extreme fashion, seeking ways to destroy those societies.

But all too late to save a habitable planet Earth. As with the Easter Islanders we occupants will end up in the semi-ritualised killing of one another. Which has already begun… Who owns what becoming of increasingly less significance when what we ‘own’ gets so easily flooded or burnt down and there’s only people left. What is of importance now is not property but the very survival of the species homo-not-so-sapiens.

Good (writing) Intentions

Intention of writing has to result in its style. Academic writing it would seem sets out to name as many sources as its author is able. Such sources are intended to either validate her/his argument or to impress examiners, score points, even though in so doing they may very well make the writing otherwise inaccessible.

Writing that sets out to explain deliberately keeps itself simple. With no target readership in mind, other than the universal, and whether the writing is to explain the course of a convoluted love affair or how a minor political movement came to be, or even seeking to explain – and popularise – recent science, the writing must needs be simple, concepts readily understood.

So much for historical, for factual writing. Imaginative writing is not to so easy to categorise. Although again intention would seem to influence result.

Any imaginative writing, for instance, that sets out to seek universal acceptance is usually dead on the page, does not invite us onwards. New writing should be new; shockingly, abrasively, startingly new. Unless, another intention, the writing is meant solely for decoration. For self-decoration?

There is of course imaginative writing, poetry and/or prose, that can seem to have been made deliberately obscure. Usually it is writing that is intended to be admired, not dwelt in. But while motivations for such deliberate obfuscation may be manyfold, the reading of such depends on how cynical one’s mood.

When open and receptive one can delight in, say, the logic of a poetry that is purely linguistic, associative. If cynical one sees it as verbal doodling, saying nothing. When such linguistic poetry fails to excite it is often because the attempt was to engage the reader solely on an intellectual level. Such writing rarely has any emotional content; and once an intellectual lesson is learnt we move greedily on. While emotions/sensations are returned to, re-examined.

Or, in cynical mode, one can see linguistic poetry, post-modernism especially as but a clever way of borrowing from others’ work, not a white dissimilar from a DJ’s sampling. But let us rejoice and call it ekphrastic. Or, when not cynical, one might view such borrowings as an exciting reshaping of the past, extending it into the present and remaking it relevant.

As a magazine editor I often find myself divining the source of a poem. If it’s chummy and confidential, suggesting a shared experience, I suspect a workshop poem; and such poems often get no further than the workshop.

With tight and overworked poems I may look to the biographical note, and I will be unsurprised to find a recent MA graduate.

There is just so much writing for the sake of writing coming my way that it is always a pleasure to come across those who are bursting with something that has to be said. Maybe they don’t know quite how it is to be said. Maybe it is the form itself needs to be shaped around the appropriate words, and what I am looking at is their one attempt thus far. That is the intention I look for, hope for, behind any writing.

blog archive 2022-19

The Tree and Me

If machines do all the work what will become of us?

Prime States

As a magazine editor

My Fellow World Citizens

Writers & writing, plus a theory of readers

Plus ça change – again

Olden Times

The Inevitability of Invisibility

Expectations of Justice

Cooperation versus Competition

pots calling kettles

Invisible Authors of Invisible Books

Asylum Humour

HUH (Help Us Humans)

Finally [almost], the ageing process

Levity (7): kinds of ice

We are all now subject peoples

The Refusal

Back in the 1970s

Fitting

Levity (2)

A New and Necessary Empiricism

Levity (3)

How to make money writing

Levity (4): Chicken and the….

Hypergraphia

Levity (5): The Golden Screw (as told by grandmothers generations past)

Individualism

Levity (6): The Squaw in Attendance

Torture

Becoming

Unforeseen Outcome of a Collaboration

Unhappy Returns

Reviving John Clare

Where to succeed is also to fail

Further excerpts from To Be Like John Clare

Too many of us

How does a rabbit know where to dig a hole, and other considerations

Recommendations

Mind Life (life of the mind)

Unpatriotic

Nothing happens singly

Do good debaters make good administrators?

More a Response than a Review

Not winning the World Cup and Brexit: last of the hangover

History of a Book

Rejection League Table

Respectability

On Reading and Writing

Law

The Continuing Gripes of a Poetry Magazine Editor

The 28th Day Advantageous Convesationalists (School of)

Unsociable Hours

Not learning from experience: Arts funding

Shock of the New

Not a lot new under the literary sun: a compilation

What got me started on this compilation was W. Somerset Maughan’s reasons for the writing of his Cakes & Ale, first published 1930 but worryingly familiar today. In part reproduced here…

This Tory government means to kill me

Builders, Destroyers and Parasites

Frail & Fallible

Overlooked

Outsiders Within

More possible beginnings

Levity (1)

Truly Great Romans

Beginnings – Bricolage

More aspects of ageing – use of language?

On Heroes

Lies

1997

The knees of turkeys bend backwards to take them forwards

Another Beginning (Earth cleaned)

On reviewing new poetry and poetry reviewers

Self-analysis (after reading a Martin Stannard review…)

Apposite? (Extract from ‘Everyday Objects Repurposed As Art)

Bravery a Necessity

The Private[?] Lives of Authors & Painters

If it aint broke….