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Minority of One

There have been times when I have been really pissed off with campaigns on behalf of ‘minority’ writers, unable to see why any writer, their happening to be in a ‘minority,’ that that alone should see work of theirs in print.

During my writing lifetime there have been many minority campaigns – for Women writers, Black and Queer writers; with special editions given over to Northern, Welsh, immigrant, ex-pat and disabled writers.

Then there were the sub-divisions. For instance not all Women writers – this is their identifier, not mine – have belonged to the same grouping. Western women poets, no longer bound about by religious considerations or ethnicity, can and do write on any subject. Many Women writers however continue to protest their right to be heard, fulminate against the patriarchy, citing historical and cultural injustices as if suffering them now. Eastern women poets on the other hand, continuing to write from within their confining religions, slyly contemplate their life’s absurdities and lament love’s brevity.

Never having seen myself belonging to any grouping, of all classes and none, like Groucho as soon as someone sees me as an eligible candidate I do my damnedest to render myself undesirable. There is no class, no club, no movement I aspire to belong to. (Commentators can define movements: artists should not be confined by them.)

Candour has me admit that I have only myself to blame for my being in a minority of one. That is if I am looking for a culprit.

Candour also has me admit that there have been times when I have longed to belong to something worthwhile, and thus make me in my belonging a worthy individual. Never happened, always a membership clause too extreme or a fellow member too odious.

Old now I have lost the sense of who I am, who I might be, have been. In any crowd now I feel invisible, seen through/beyond. What I’ve done, where I’ve been, what I’ve seen of no importance to anyone, even to myself.

Happy to be just one? Resigned to being just one?

There is no intrinsic value being in a minority of one, no value or virtue in solitude.

Isolated in a barren landscape can grant an importance to one’s every action, to one’s every thought; or the same solitude can render oneself minute and one’s every thought trivial and futile.

While a city crowd can make one just like everyone around one; and being less certain of one’s self can also render one insignificant, isolated in another shoulder-bumped, toe-trodden way.

This is not self-pity, more self-resignation.

In the final analysis I am my art. As an artist – I alone have named myself such – but as an artist I have come to learn that we who call ourselves artists do support one another in our various and often ridiculous struggles. We leave it to critics to creep and criticise and even condemn. Because as artists we all know that art is process as well as product. Art is never certain where it is going or when it has arrived. Unless it is self-adornment, then it stays where it is.

Here I am.

Beyond ‘Death With Dignity’

I call myself a humanist, but find myself out of step with Humanist UK in their campaigning for a change in the law to allow for ‘Death With Dignity,’ which I feel will have too few safeguards. Or that it will have too many to make it workable, and thus send those thinking it offers them or their loved ones an easeful end but instead gets them lost in bureaucracy.

Let me start simply.

As a mental health nurse I spent many hours attempting to talk patients out of their suicidal ideation. ‘Better for everyone,’ many said, ‘if I wasn’t here.’ ‘What has life to offer me but more pain?’

If any of those patients were eventually reconciled to an unsatisfactory life it had probably been due more to prescribed medication/treatments than to any earnest words of mine. I did however convince myself.

Put simply the job of doctors and nurses is to delay death. That is what society expects of them, to extend life. Which brings us to the nub, what kind of life? What quality of life? And, most importantly, who decides?

I have known multiple amputees crying out for death. I have known other amputees eager to embrace any new contraption that enabled them to make more of the life left to them. I have known survivors of suicide reconciled to their hurtful past and wanting to begin anew their life. And when my father, in the latter stages of vascular dementia, was in agony from an unmendable broken pelvis and was being kept going in a morphine trance, I asked his clinician not to, if possible, prolong his pain. Next morning he was gone.

So I do get it: how a terminal illness/condition can make what is left of life so intolerable that you, or those with responsibility for close family members, in all humanity want to see that life brought quickly to a close. But to make a business of it? To go abroad to buy a quick death?

Or remain here and endeavour to persuade clumsy, right/wrong legislators to define whose life is worth living? And then to leave the actual decision up to an unimaginative jobsworth getting all their boxes ticked prior to them administering the fatal dose? Or, even worse, leaving the fatal decision to someone in thrall to the ideology of Death With Dignity that they administer it with near religious fervour, disregarding any possible doubts the applicant[s] might have had.

There will always be, for a variety of circumstances, people in pain and suffering; and there will always be, I hope, doctors and nurses doing their best to alleviate that pain. And, because there are rightly checks on doctors and nurses, I hope and believe that any permanent alleviation of that pain will not be undertaken lightly.

That said ‘helping’ someone to die, removing their one life, must always be considered a crime. Or we ease the door open to more pathological killers like Harold Shipman or to nurses with a weird life/death outlook. If euthanasia is to be decided upon I want that decision to be made bravely, by that decision to have been thought through by someone at risk of losing their career and while believing that it still is, for the person before them, in all humanity the right thing to do.

Life and death is all chance, who met, how conceived, where/when/how born, how diseased, how dying. I’d rather trust to luck/chance that at my end, if in pain, a doctor will look on my death throes with a kindly eye and ease my going.

Assisted dying, euthanasia, does not require the blessing of simplistic legislation. We need to go beyond propaganda and prejudice, beyond hard cases, beyond both cold-eyed logic and sentimentality.

Politicians are not philosophers: would that they were. Politicians are, as has been amply demonstrated recently, the paid representatives of specialist interests. Or for the sake of votes politicians will take up the latest worthy cause. Let it not be Death With Dignity. Politicians are not too be trusted. Doctors are.

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While several thousand Palestinians, Israelis, Ukrainians, Russians, Sudanese and Syrians were/are being killed…

I mouse-clicked on one sign petition after another, so many petitions against so many killings. And the latest, having been signed and shared, this being my way of life, I wondered what next to write.

I did talk to friends and family about how awful were/are our current set of politicians in their support of the killings. In our Western democracies however most of the populace are without power. O we are allowed to organise marches, sit-ins, can sign petitions and make our opposition to these mass killings known. We also know that we will be, as we were in 2003, disregarded. Our politicians, paid for by interested parties, will continue to support the killings; and they will imprison those like Julian Assange who expose their war killings, their war industries and machinations.

And while the killings went on/go on I wondered/wonder what next to write.

The killings went on as we left British Summer Time and returned to Greenwich Mean Time. My old body clock was slow to adjust to the new waking times, meal times… The politicians continued to support the various slaughters; and I wondered what next to write.

While young men and women, draft-dodgers, refusers, went to prison or crossed borders; and the politicians wondered where to draw new lines in their ‘solution,’ all putting aside the knowledge that where previous lines have been drawn they have led to nothing but more trouble. Not only for Palestinians, but in Ireland, Kashmir, for the Maasai, the Kurds, Armenians, and in Myanmar, Korea…

I wondered what next to write as the killings went on/go on. As we left Greenwich Mean Time and returned to British Summer Time my old body clock was slow to adjust to the new waking times, meal times. I learnt though that Fabian means, literally, an evader of battle. Which has me wish that there were more true Fabians, and not only in our Parliament’s official opposition.

I expect that I’ll go on wondering what next to write while thousands more are being slaughtered to appease a general’s vanity and increase the profits of war manufacturers. And right now I’m wondering what next to cook for dinner, what next to write; and I fervently wish luck, lots of luck, to all the draft-dodgers, refusers, and those rare souls, the seekers of peace.

Jovial Witnesses

Granted not all life is performance. But still I laugh. A lot. Hens eating leftover spaghetti – always good for a laugh. I laughed reading Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition, at what is still being taken seriously in this ridiculous world. How we go from Fay Weldon’s one murky confusion into another. Herman Hesse thought that eternity was just long enough for a joke and Henry Miller that men are the laughing stock of creation. Kjell Espmark sold everything for twenty laughs. Stephen Vizinczey believed that sex, like death, gives us our deepest experience of the Absurd. Gore Vidal once gave himself up to experience. John Updike thought no act so private it did not seek applause. Guillame Apollinaire got drunk drinking the whole universe. Albert Camus might have been a stranger to himself, but for John Clare the place he occupied seemed all the world, while Kyorai slept like a traveller in his own town. On the other hand Sidse Babette Knudsen believed that there was something healthy about being a foreigner. Carlo Rovelli said that you don’t get to new places by following established tracks. (Fanatics are usually guided by rascals, Voltaire told me.) Albert Camus hated violence less than the institutions of violence. Umberto Eco met someone who wanted to make a revolution, but with police permission. Günter Grasse held that a citizen’s first duty is not to keep quiet. Holderlin saw himself as a child with grey hair and Edward Thomas found himself content with his discontent. T S Eliot’s beginnings never knew his ends. Phillip K Dick wondered where the past goes when it goes. Henry Miller didn’t live in the moment, sometimes a little behind, sometimes a little ahead; and every time that Colin Wilson did anything he committed himself to the future. E M Forster thought it better to be fooled than to be suspicious. Francois Sagan said that you can despise what you love. Brian Aldiss’s mind was like a rat in a maze, being both rat and maze. Judith Rossner’s ambition in life was to have one unmixed feeling. Violette LeDuc thought that literature led to love, and love to literature. Marianne Moore said that languages are the supertadpoles of expression. Margaret Attwood said that wanting to meet a writer because you like their books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. Nikos Kazantzakis thought that women, fruit and ideas were some of the many joys of this world. Sex is the one subject, according to Robert A Heinlein, that everybody lies about. Poor Vicki Baum found life a lonely affair. Nicholas Lezard found some fine-sounding nonsense. Graham Farnel came up against the present state of well-informed perplexity. Martin Amis claimed that every life must have its holidays. Every hypochondriac is his own prophet, said Robert Lowell. Kurt Vonnegut once lost himself in the magic of capillary attraction. H H Kirst was firmly of the opinion that novels are governed by their own laws. Brian Aldiss believed that truth can arrive in as many forms as lies, Pablo Picasso that Art is a lie that makes us see the Truth, and Erica Jong that everything human is imperfect and ultimately absurd. Truth is only to be had, Virginia Woolf believed, by laying together many varieties of error. Carl Jung was of the firm belief that all great truths must end in paradox. Soren Kierkegaard wanted to exist in the truths he found. Wislawa Szymborska claimed that the unthinkable is thinkable. Meanwhile the rest of the world, Percy Grainger said, is dying of good taste. Margaret Drabble concurred, approving of everything new that was not monstrous. Ray Bradbury said that life is questions, not answers. John Fowles always found his own faults more interesting than other people’s virtues. Tom Robbins held that a book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. Catherine Drinker Bowen said that happiness has no story. John Steinbeck said that any story has as many versions as it has readers. Margaret Drabble failed to get hers into a fit state for anecdote. M John Harrison inferred reality. Paul Theroux believed that one of his characters wouldn’t say shit if he stepped in it. A megrim is both a headache and a scald-fish. Colette’s very last word was “Regarde!”

8^th April 2024

The Journal: State of Play

Now that #70 The Journal has been posted out I am going to place The Journal on hold. I’m hoping that, once outgoings and income return to some sort of balance, I can open The Journal to submissions again. I don’t however have a huge amount of hope.

The foremost reason for my closing The Journal to submissions has been the cost of postage. How the privatised Royal Mail can justify the increases is beyond me. Print costs have also gone up, but only in line with inflation. The excessive Royal Mail increases – 30% in a year – if not the result of chronic mismanagement, have to be profiteering; and it is the Royal Mail increases, one after the other within a year, that have brought The Journal to this halt.

I could of course raise The Journal’s price to cover costs. But I feel that within a cost of living crisis £6.00 is already the limit that people are prepared to pay. And I know that raising the price again would cost me subscribers and send The Journal further into debt.

Having been run always on a not-for-profit basis I have never received any public money for The Journal. That is not to say that I haven’t applied to arts bodies for grants. Unsuccessfully. Arts bodies during The Journal’s lifetime have seemed to link grants either to the anticipated audience for a performance or to ‘community’ endeavours, or to a flavour-of-the-month social grouping. As The Journal has been avowedly international, non-parochial, from the off, no local money has found its way to us.

Privately some individuals have donated a few pounds here and there to help with running costs, for which I have been both surprised and grateful. Was not money enough however to now help keep The Journal afloat; and I can no longer afford to subsidise it out of my state pension and from the small amounts that I nowadays earn from my own writings.

Friends have suggested converting The Journal into an online version. While I have had my own work published in online magazines, and have been pleased to see my work there, grateful to the editors, I do so much prefer my writing to be on the printed page.

Through books, through print, was how I came to poetry. Through print is how I have been introduced to poets from around the world and from other times. Poets first spoke to me from the page, and on the page is where I try to make my poems come alive.

Although I am grateful to those online magazines that have used my work I am much happier when a print magazine takes a poem or two. Not only do I find reading poems on screens difficult – the size of print, background glare, altered format – online is so of-the-moment, hard to refer back up to a line, to study at leisure. Unlike books or magazines which are so easy to pick up again, mark a page, the very nature of screen reading doesn’t let me tarry, drift off, look away, come back to a phrase… By the time I’ve absorbed the poem the screen has switched to ‘safe mode’, is showing old photos, is taking my mind elsewhere.

Print is how I came to poetry. If The Journal is to continue it has to be in print.

And here is where I confess that it is not only rising costs and my getting old that is making me take a break from tri-annual publication. Over the past couple of decades I have become aware of a disenchantment growing within me over trends in the general poetry scene.

Although I have organised festivals, have been happy to wait my turn at open mikes, have helped run poetry cruises, I have never myself enjoyed giving readings, have done so always only in the hope of selling a book/magazine or two.

When I was first published by Odyssey magazine editor Derrick Woolf pressed me for a year or more to read at the events he organised in Coleridge Cottage. I refused, said that I didn’t see the point as I had no collection to sell. Having listened there to others reading I was acutely aware of how the person, how they spoke, interfered with my reception of the poem. The anonymity of print was what I wanted for my work.

Derrick however got a poem of mine accepted for that year’s Forward Prize and I was invited to read it on Radio 3. A nerve-jelly experience that in itself was no encouragement. But having read in public I could no longer justify my refusing to read at Derrick’s soirées. Then once I had a collection – To Be Like John Clare (Salzburg University Press, 1996) – I could promote that at readings anywhere and everywhere.

Print has always been my objective, is what has mattered to me. I want people like me, private people, people I am never likely to meet, to read my words. In like manner I was so pleased when David Gettman belatedly made my novel Sister Blister (Online Originals, 1996) available in hardback as as well as eBook.

I am by no means alone in this preference. Cixin Liu recently said, ‘Paper lasts longer than a computer.’ Just think how much work now resides on out-of-date electronic equipment, unlikely to be ever retrieved. Or only with great effort. A book on the other hand can at any time be pulled off a shelf.

The emphasis in the current poetry scene however seems to be on performance alone. Performance for performance sake. Performance is now where arts funds, if any, go.

There are now fewer and fewer unfunded print magazines. Especially compared to the 1990s when there were so many, the fruits of desktop publishing, more than a few getting printed and put together at home. In those days one could readily find an editor who shared one’s outlook, favoured a style, an approach, a subject matter. But that was pre-privatisation of the UK postal service, when such as Geoff Stevens’ Purple Patch could get mailed out every month. And there were so many as productive – Martin Holroyd’s Poetry Monthly, Eric Ratcliffe’s Ore, Gerald England’s New Hope International, Talitha Clare and Robin Brooks’ Moonstone… and so on and so many more. The SF author and poet John Light even posted out an annual Light’s List of magazines.

So much for the heyday of small press print and cheap postage. Nowadays it seems that performance alone is how most perceive and promote their poetry. And my own experience has me believe that a good performance/reading rarely equates to a good poem. Whereas a good poem can be let down by a poor reading.

Of the poems themselves so many seem to be in the first person singular; and while there can be artistry in performance, the vogue now being for self-expression, even of those poems making it into print, where are the poems that aspire to being a small work of art?

There is always that buzz after a reading, the applause, the bonhomie, a sense of camaraderie, an evening spent among like-minded folk; but nine times out of ten what was politely applauded were their own projected selves having been brave enough to stand out front and read. Thee will have been no real assessment of the poems themselves, no reviews, analysis as in a magazine. No rejection. At open mikes people can get up and say whatever they like, call that bunch of words a poem. None will get rejected, and rejection is a great teacher. As is a bad review, will certainly get you looking again at the work. And that reading, that performance will have been it, a poem’s one and only outing, save possibly on a scrolled-by social media.

A poem’s publication in a small press magazine like The Journal was once considered ephemeral. How much more ephemeral will have been its being read to a small audience?

The Labour Party’s failure to bring about substantive change

What follows is Chapter Fifteen of my novel Everyday Objects Repurposed As Art

Chapter Fifteen

Laptop, closed, is on the far right corner of the of-white camping table. His spectacle case, also black, is on the left-hand corner with, alongside, two spare push-button black biros. Directly in front of him is an A4 pad, unlined, with a third black biro placed diagonally thwart.

Preparations complete he perches on the front edge of the slanting forward camping chair. Reaching to open the spectacle case he is made aware of the large and small muscles in his back and shoulder. Even though he went to the sports centre and trained Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on the rowing machine still his back and shoulders ache.

Spine held straight he unfolds the half-moon spectacles from their square of felt, hooks the spectacle arms behind his ears, clicks shut the case and returns it to the left-hand corner. The case came from an optician, the half-moon glasses from a cheap shop.

He places both hands on the edge of the table, looks at the concrete wall in front of him.

Now that he is about to start writing he is more nervous than when he woke yesterday morning. Is as nervous as when he paid cash for the verge-parked car. There was no going back then.

As now. No going back to before this moment. What he is about to write can later be altered, amended, thrown out and rewritten; but this act of beginning will exist, cannot be repeated.

“Title first,” he instructs himself.

Across the top of the page he writes, ‘Towards the Cataclysm,’ carefully underlines it twice and brackets a 1 into the top right hand corner of the page.

Sitting slightly back he looks at the title, says, “Bit off-putting,” and he writes after it, not underlined, ‘working title’.

“Let’s begin with generalities,” he tells himself.

Any instructions aloud to himself, comments on what he may have written, are not often complimentary. But for the moment, here at the start, he wants to be encouraging to his writer self.

“Details in due course,” he says to get himself moving, and doesn’t move.

Usually he pens an outline and introduction first in the hope and expectation that it will give him some feeling for the tone of the piece entire. Reverent? Critical? Sarcastic even? Ironic? The amount of research this time though seems to render an initial handwritten outline unnecessary. He feels that he should jump straight in.

“All,” he reminds himself, “can be undone later.”

This small table will suffer much scratching out before the final version of even the initial approach is decided. Does he have time for such an indulgence? When he knows that halfway into the telling of the tale, everything being so much simpler when broken down into its component parts, when laid out in a comprehensible structure, he can go back, often has, and changed everything.

“This won’t work.” he clicks off the biro. “Write then type. A nonsense. Duplication of effort.” He places the biro alongside its two companions, folds the A4 pad closed and, laying it atop the laptop, pulls the laptop to him. The A4 pad then takes the place of the laptop, which he opens and switches on. His hands are trembling.

“Need no plan,” he reassures himself. “Already thinking in terms of script.”

And he knows that the script he is about to write will be but another beginning, the beginning of a process, that it will get worked over by producer, director and actors. If any. With more work, most of the real work, being done in the editing suite. First though he has to have a script as evidence, and it has to be an entire script. A script, a ‘concept’, indisputably his.

“We’ll jump straight in.” He has to wait for the laptop to fire up. Soon as he can he opens a new file. “So,” he places his fingers to start typing, “first things first. What’s best known about Aveling?”

[Picture of black-bearded GBS twinned with the one portrait extant of Aveling. Voice over]

George Bernard Shaw said of Edward Bibbins Aveling [running text], ‘The best way to treat with Aveling is to grasp him by the hand and throw him out the window.’

No love was lost between Aveling and Shaw. Although they did between them share more than one lover. Which in itself was remarkable as neither could have been called goodlooking. [slow pan over portraits]. Aveling in fact has been described as downright ugly.

[photo/caricature of Aveling?] Nevertheless both had their successes with women, due in large part to their literary and political connections. Both, for instance, had carnal knowledge of Annie Besant [pictures], which – no offence to the lady – probably wasn’t that difficult. Come the end though, in this lovers’ rivalry, it was Aveling who managed to set up house with the sought-after daughter of Karl Marx, Eleanor [picture].

“No no no. Gossipy, and nowhere near punchy enough.”

He is stalled.

“The suicide here? This early?”

Sitting back on the slanting picnic chair he digs his fingers into his beard. This is not quite, isn’t even close to one of the many forms he imagined the opening. As usual what had been complete in various versions in his mind as soon as the words start appearing on the screen the whole structure starts to change.

He dots a line under what he has typed, tries again.

Version 2

[Portrait of Aveling. Voice over]

There is a man largely overlooked by mainstream history. A man who in his time tried to persuade survival-of-the-fittest Darwin [portrait from the pound note] to admit to his atheism. A man who first brought Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’ [picture of a stage production] to an English audience. And a man who ended up the beneficiary of all royalties from Das Kapital. A man of whom George Bernard Shaw [blackbearded portrait] said….

“Nope.”

Another line is dotted under.

“Must, has to be, compared to the present. The present,” he instructs himself; and he unhappily sits back with his beard screwed up under his nose.

Edward Bibbins Aveling is but one strand of his preoccupation with turn-of-the-century, end 19th/early 20th century figures. What he wants, has wanted for some time now, is to show how that period formed our present.

Other characters of that period who have attracted him, who he has researched and written profiles of – Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Frank Harris, Leon Trotsky, Jack London – were themselves often at odds with and reviled by their fellow campaigners, were often mavericks even to their own causes. Like Aveling.

Like Aveling, he believes, they were reviled not because they held values ahead of their time, which they did, but because they lived their lives ahead of their time. And it is that which has got their names, like Aveling’s, held in such rank odour. The histories that they helped create judged them and found them notorious.

All of his characters have made mistakes, gone up blind alleys. What continues to make them attractive to him however is that they couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, owned. Not by party, not by person, not by corporation, and certainly not by their status quo. All were in pursuit of something other, be that to do justice to their chosen art form or in the promotion of social justice.

Mavericks, awkward sods, disreputable bastards, which has to include even the fickle Annie Besant. Mental mention of her as usual giving him pause. Should he next go beyond the reputation he has given her and take another look? Or let her be?

In search of awkward sods he has considered going beyond his period. He started an outline sketch of Henry Miller. But the further he got into his reading he felt it best to let Henry speak for himself, Henry already having done it so much better.

Closer still to the present he has looked at John Lennon’s life and work. But so have others, others who have probably been better placed to make sense of his life. Yukio Mishima’s too.

Then there are the mavericks still alive – Yoko Ono, Tariq Ali, Naom Chomsky, Michael Moore… Their being alive however makes a definitive treatment difficult. Should they end up ingratiating themselves with a corrupting establishment the work that he bases upon them will be completely undone.

He has asked himself why he should be drawn to misfits like these. He, for instance, often defends George Galloway’s latest indiscretion – if only to see from what angle his critics so despise George, their reasons usually saying more about them than about George.

What he has concluded is that he is attracted to these out-of-step characters because he is, like his characters, angry. Angry at the deceits practised by their, by his own, likeminded peers. Angry at the deceits those peers practise upon themselves. As with his bullish Frank Harris, more the radical newspaperman than the give-it-a-go cowboy. Now Aveling, a contemporary to Frank Harris, had journalism in his quiver too. So far as he is aware though Aveling entertained no ambitions to be a cowboy. Nor does he, though he identifies with them both.

Both men were as confounded by contemporary values and social constraints as he is by his. But how to demonstrate that? The periods will resist comparison. And he has been attracted to that period, peopled with influential personalities, because it has been largely overlooked by writers of historical fictions, be those fictions TV dramas or novelettes. Yet it is still this period, he believes, that is most responsible for the creation of today’s world.

It was Aveling’s successes, for instance, that led to the formation of the Labour Party. As it was Aveling’s failures that led to the Labour Party becoming closer to Machiavelli than to Marx.

Version 3

[Voice over. Footage of rough sleepers]

To us today what is important about Aveling is not his few successes but the consequences of his failures. If his international socialism had succeeded would we now be suffering free market boom-and-bust cycles, with the poorest among us getting ever poorer? Had his atheism succeeded [footage of bomb aftermaths] in creating a secular world would we now have this plethora of ongoing wars?

“Right. No assessment of Aveling. No pre-judgement. Has to be what follows from him.”

He has 75 pages in which to see that that happens. Edits, rewrites, can all come later. “Let’s see how this evolves.” He dots another line under.

“Time enough,” he says to the wall and future collaborators. “Time enough.”

The opening can be, and probably will be, changed later. When it comes to the production stages his won’t be the only hands moulding Aveling’s tale. And beginnings and endings are always the most open to discussion. The 70 pages of the body though, the core concept, will be his. Mangled as no doubt that body will be.

He wonders of this expectation of later editing is what has led to his slapdash approach to life, has resulted in an attitude, an assumption that everything can be corrected, can be made right later.

“Not this time,” he dismisses such thoughts, tucks his still bare feet up off the concrete floor, “Now… to that body.”

https://rb.gy/m1j82

Authors Unseen

I have an innate distrust of larger than life personalities, prefer artists and authors to remain unseen behind their work. I even find small author photos a distraction. I don’t want to know what they look like: danger being that they may remind me of someone I dislike and prejudice me against their writing.

When I come upon a big personality, like say Yorkshire Hockney, my first assumption is that his success has to be due to his being a sociable and well-connected type, at ease before a camera, an articulate showman. I consequently bend a critical eye to the actual work. And so far I haven’t found anything of his to get excited over.

This prejudice can work the other way. Grayson Perry for instance: his being dressed like some weird doll I didn’t bother listening to a thing he said. Got to be surprised therefore when I came upon one of his large pots and it did speak to me. I subsequently became more tolerant of his public persona. Although I would have preferred to chance upon his pots and not have had to reconcile the maker with his product.

Of contemporary artists I much prefer Damien Hirst’s approach, his letting the works speak for themselves.

Same applies to authors.

Film and TV celebrities of course can’t help but be on show. As I can’t help, as a competing author, resenting their easy route to publication and sales. I would have had greater respect for their work had it first been published under a nom de plume. Can’t though see a publisher being prepared to forfeit the sales that the celebrity’s name alone would have guaranteed.

Most authors prefer, I believe, to work at a remove, aren’t show-people.

I for instance have never liked pop concerts, their working the crowd with big singalong screens and pyrotechnics. When I used to venture out small jazz venues were more my scene – there I could become involved with the music as it was being made. For the musical rest, classical and occasional pop, I have made do with records and CDs.

For several decades I followed the advice of small press publishers and other poets and – despite my never feeling comfortable there – I went along to readings. In the belief that it helped to sell books I even founded the Taunton Deane festival, ran a 6 week series of Brewhouse readings. I also helped run some poetry cruises down the River Dart, a mini-festival in Ilfracombe… The highlight of all that activity was reading several times with a jazz band in Nunney. Thereafter, moving around the country, and against my better judgement I carried on going to open mikes here and there.

The pandemic lockdown stopped all those open mikes, gave me time to reassess.

Looking back over the open mike years I had to concede that few books had been sold at readings, even when I had been the guest poet. So why do it? I had had to overcome a stutter to read. I am no performer, could get into a nervous state days beforehand. So why do it?

At open mikes the better readers are those who have perfected their performance. Performance of itself however is the very thing that I have always distrusted.

Those collections I was inspired to buy at readings, when I looked at them at home I often found them flat on the page, didn’t come close to the author’s reading of the poem. So did I learn that good/likeable performance doesn’t equal good poetry; lively on the stage, dead on the page.

Back in the nineties and noughties, with desktop publishing seeing a new magazine or small press seeming to arrive every week, that was when print was dominant. Since the pandemic though the poetry scene seems to have become almost all performance, even online readings, and with fewer and fewer print outlets.

The lockdown brought home to me that I didn’t miss going to readings. I did miss the chats with fellow writers, but not the readings themselves. The lockdown also reinforced for me that I have never wanted to pull faces and play tricks to please an audience. What I have always craved, in poetry and in fiction, is a readership. I write on my own for someone reading alone, private writing for private perusal, the page our meeting place.

Obvious to me why so many magazines and small presses have disappeared since the lockdown and Brexit – cost and difficulty of postage and, as said before, the few collections and magazines getting sold. Has become almost axiomatic to say that if a small press poet doesn’t press their collection onto family and friends the collection doesn’t sell and another not-grant-aided small press will go broke.

So where now? For us authors unseen?

Partial truths aggressively delivered

For a goodly while I believed that we had entered, that we were living through, the state that precedes revolution, the pre-revolutionary state of the pamphleteer.

Look back over any of history’s uprisings and to what went before – in Russia, China, France, Cuba, or in any number of other unthinkingly cruel states. What went before was the growth of, often handwritten or covertly printed, pamphlets. From the left and from the right each promoted their own peculiar alternatives to the current corrupt authorities. Some of their ideas were ridiculous, were unworldly; but a very few did capture the public mood and did present a practicable alternative to the smug elite then in control.

Sound familiar?

I believed – I no longer do – blogs to be our present day version of those samizdat pamphlets. Blogs aren’t.

Blogs are how some of us are now being allowed to let off steam. Governments may now complain of their lack of control, but throughout all of social media we are being allowed to shout at one another in threads that unwind to nowhere. Members of the corrupt elite still own the platforms which let those who would promote their cause, or themselves, with podcasts and the like, grimace and gawk out of our screens. The ineffectual rendered even more ineffectual? But didn’t it feel good shouting into the darkness?

Come daylight we are presented with the same unassailable overpowering and warmongering nonsense as in all the days before. And while so many of these bloggers, these latter-day protestors, trained as consumers, seek only to clothes themselves in a readily recognisable identity, asking us to fork out for today’s tee-shirt, there will be no revolutions.

Quotidian

If as author one has simply and accurately described or conveyed the ordinary then one has succeeded in one of art’s precepts – that a work of art should induce a sense of wonder when contemplating the ordinary, the everyday.

In trying to explain, or just to describe the taken-for-granted, can lead one to make the most extraordinary discoveries. What can compel anyone, for instance, to go queue in Oxford Street for the Boxing Day sales? What state of mind, of denial even, knowing that there very rarely is a genuine consumerist bargain to be had, and – if challenged – readily accepting that likelihood, yet still they make sure they arrive early to claim their place in the queue. Can it be that they simply enjoy queuing? Are thrilled to be but one of the stampeding crowd?

Not extraordinary by any means. Just one more digression. Which can happen when one considers the unremarkable.

More importantly the ordinary can be confused with that other workshop precept, Write of what you know. At face value that is reasonably good advice, even though it would seem to negate imagination. As one must be aware of one’s limitations at the same time one shouldn’t limit one’s aspirations. Where then fancy and fantasy?

When authors don’t write of what they know but have picked it up second-hand, via films or other fictions, one very soon espies the falsity in their descriptions of the day-to-day lives of different people. I gave up reading JK Rowling’s Galbraith novels when it came to her version of the inner life of an ex-soldier. The same old tropes.

Writing poorly of other than what they know, or even writing of what they know in the accepted fashion, takes new writing nowhere, having it become obvious very quickly that the author has nothing new to say. And by its dictionary definition a novel should be novel.

Why does some writing appear false? Poor research possibly, or an unquestioned acceptance of cultural tropes, prejudices even.

A downside of basing your fiction on what you know could be that your writing will only be appreciated by those who have shared your experiences. My having worked with the mentally ill I, for instance, very quickly despair of inaccurate, usually exoticised, descriptions of what used to be referred to as lunacy. Even should an author not have first-hand experience of a subject they should at the very least have looked beyond others’ possibly faulty imaginations, past filmic versions, and have consulted non-fictional accounts.

The same applies to comfortable middle class authors writing of what they assume to be working class life and attitudes. Their galactic distance from us has their ignorance ring out with the cracked bell falsity of career politicians pretending to support a football team.

Sense & Society

We inhabit a society, a world culture, where so much is designed to mislead, be that to the worth of a product, actual goods or software, or political parties. We learn to, we are taught by experience, to distrust.

With such a peculiar state of mind, wrought by this world culture, by corporate hypocrisies, by slogan-slinging political parties, small wonder that some individuals feel that the only clear-cut solution can be to pick up an assault rifle and eradicate some of their fellow consumerists.

In our cosmopolitan societies people struggle to both understand and to make themselves understood. While in corners of monoculture way too much is taken for granted, see Zionism. Everywhere a disappointment. Even those you have some sympathy with do themselves a disservice by overstating their cases.

Art offers no sanctuary. Especially not here in elitist UK.

Up until the twentieth century, save for a few notable exceptions, the British art world was populated – going by their utterances – by spiteful homosexuals, back then the detritus of a sadistic public school system. (‘Public’ in this British context means expensively private.) In London’s 1950s art circles this homosexual predominance became known as the pink union. And this wasn’t homophobia as such from heterosexual artist[e]s, rather the resentment born of being shut out of any closed shop, private club, clique.

Any art made elsewhere, by the excluded, became but expressions of burdened perplexity. Take one of my heroes, James Baldwin. He was doubly, if not trebly excluded – by his homosexuality from his family, by his colour from white American society; and he further estranged himself by detailing the processes whereby he became persona no grata. His writings however still made some/more sense of this world for me.

Knowing that my confusion means that I am a thinking animal, still I long for certainty, to know that this or that opinion is incontrovertible. Yet I hesitate, as I articulate that longing, knowing that any such certainty must lead to bigotry. And who wants to be a bigot?

I Never Found My Madame von Meck

In my head are many theories of existence, quite a few still at odds with the stuff and doings of my day-to-day life. Ghost of a past self has me on a diet nursing my hunger. Others, and many a time, have me attempting to reconcile my duplicitous body/mind. One regret still is that when young I was never fully occupied with the present. Always a role to be embraced, or a sideways suspicion that another scene was playing itself out on the background of now. My growing up, driven at times by an internalised machismo, turned out to be one long process of corruption. Learning from some mistakes yes, but then making different ones. And always finding out too late, after the decisions had been made. The late Michael Hamburger and I once fell out over my insisting that dissonance could be an integral part of a poem. Only wish that I had back then been able to quote Franz Marc: ‘a so-called dissonance is simply a consonance apart.’ How many learning mistakes can one make in a life? Is writing this another? How to know? Now? Every one of day’s events, as before, seem to make sense. Although, taken all together, not where they have been leading. Has mine now become the self-seen theatrical life of a shut-away writer? Including this reflecting on other unwise escapades? Habit of a lifetime still has me waiting for my fortune to come through the letterbox. Soon I will have been an old man for far longer than I was a young man. Here I am in my young old age; and I never did find my Madame von Meck.

Things Lost

Lost – a wind-up watch that I had bought from China. I have elasticated sleeves on one of my macs and it must have caught the strap buckle and the watch fell off my wrist somewhere on the hills around here. I had bought the watch because like so many other clockwork devices wind-up wristwatches have been replaced by digital, all powered by polluting batteries. And hardly labour-saving: such small effort to wind them up – toys and timepieces – keep them running.

It was losing the watch that got me to thinking on all else lost.

Pubs for instance that I once believed were a fixture of British life. Gone. (No-one, life has taught me, goes broke faster than a pub licensee or a jobbing builder.)

Has to go without saying that most of the hair on the top of my head has long gone. Given my paternal ancestry that loss I had anticipated. But who stole my eyebrows?

Lost – independent publishers. Either gone bust or been absorbed into conglomerates.

Lost – so many green fields, scraps of woodland. Disappeared under concrete, housing estates of detached box-houses, their streets named after the meadows, orchards and the wildlife that used to live there.

Lost – this year, two peregrine chicks to the forest fire here.

Lost – local shops. Since Margaret Thatcher’s encouragement of US-type car culture most shops have moved to out-of-town retail parks.

Lost – the local bobby. Which wasn’t always necessarily a good thing, especially if you got on the wrong side of him. Was still better though than the impotent and overweight Community Support Officers, and the police car that occasionally pays a visit.

Lost – a free press. Not only is the national press now owned by off-shore wealthy individuals and corporations, but even their freedom of expression is curtailed as they seek to avoid being sued, lawyers now their in-house censors.

Lost – a belief in justice. British courts were always weighted towards the establishment, but have become even more unbalanced: justice now depends on who can afford to go to law. Has become a bit like football’s Premier League, the deeper the pockets of the owners the more likely their team is to win.

Lost – faith in Herbert Marcuse, 1898-1979, author of One-Dimensional Man which became a bestseller in the 1970s, and allowed us authors, who had failed to achieve at an early age, hope. We could believe that ours, like his, was going to be a long hard road but that come our seventies we too… But here I am in my late seventies, my youthful genius having failed to be recognised, struggling on still, and now with grief for the self that I never was and now will never become.

Lost – mature elm trees. Soon to be followed by the ash and larch.

Lost – cheap jazz clubs and cafes. In 1963 there were jazz clubs all along Oxford Street. Come 1966 all had gone.

Lost – a dependable postal service that went worldwide.

Lost – paths. So many rights of way have been fenced off. ‘Private Property’ notices abound.

Lost – ease of travel all over Europe.

Lost – public lavatories, resulting in piss-stink alleyways, human crap behind park bushes.

Lost – some teeth. Lost – many dentists.

Lost – those politicians who had at least pretended to tell the truth.

Lost – sounds from outside, double-glazing having sealed us in front of our screens.

Lost – species, of flora and fauna by the million.

Lost – chances. I never did astound my offspring with my expertise at conkers or with my uncanny knack for finding mushrooms. Unfulfilled boyhood fantasies. I did though sail 3 of the 7 seas. That said I have no affection for my past selves.

Lost – a sense of purpose, hope. Kept – grief for the many worlds of my imagining.

Lost – in editing, every refinement removing spontaneity.

Vote Green

No matter what your allegiance to current political parties, whether it is to the right or to the left, a vote for either now is a wasted vote. Both ends of the political spectrum ultimately serve self-interest, profit or jobs; a self-interest that continues to contribute to the end of all humanity. Vote Green.

On the right the monied look only to where best to invest their money to make more money. Such tightly focused short-termism will see them investing in more fossil fuel extraction or in the manufacture of arms. The manufacture of arms will see the need for more wars. The unmonied right meanwhile will be fiercely protective of their bit of the planet. When it is now the whole of the planet that we need to protect, to invest in. Vote Green.

Voting left will see jobs protected, even if those jobs are part of an industry that is contributing to the destruction of life on the planet. On whichever continent we work and live we are all Earthlings now. Vote Green.

We have to save the planet to save ourselves. Vote Green.

Vote Green regardless of your country or your politics. Our priority now, at this late stage, has to be to save the planet. Vote Green.

No planet means no countries and no politics. Vote Green.

Any war will only contribute to the ongoing catastrophe. Negotiate a truce, strive for peace. Vote Green.

If where you live on planet Earth and you have no vote, nevertheless, and if safe to do so, campaign for Green outcomes.

We are, every single person, a viable part of this planet. That is how we must see ourselves now, as part of. Not part of a society, not part of a nation, not of a people; but as part of the place we are, as part of the landscape, as part of all the living things around us, all the creatures and all the plants. We are now no more no less than all things together here. Vote Green.

This planet is the only one we have. If we carry on destroying it we destroy ourselves. Vote Green.

It is in all our interests to save the planet. Vote Green.

For planet Earth’s sake, vote Green.

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Self-seens

Self-seens are not selfies. A selfie may be incorporated into a self-seen, but a self-seen it is not.

Selfies are actual, are taken to show to others. Self-seens can exist only within the individual mind.

Self-seens can be what motivates people to act as they do, imagining themselves being seen. In a poem I once described a boy doing handstands in a park, ‘acting within the theatre of himself.’

What got me to again thinking on this was, while on holiday, sitting at the top of a beach of black rocks and watching a young mother with her two children. She had brought cane-handled nets and was trying to get them interested in rock pool fishing. Neither the boy, the eldest, about four or five, nor the girl paid any attention to her scraping the nets through the shallow pools. The mother also had a dog barking at her to have its ball thrown. She irritably threw it. The boy wandered away picking over stones. The girl turned in a slow swaying circle singing to herself.

Wasn’t difficult to read the mother’s disappointment in the weary sag of her shoulders. This was not how she had self-seen her day on the beach. This should have been her in a 1930s train poster on the edge of a sandy cove, the children wide-eyed with excitement examining the nets, the dog sitting patiently by.

Watching her had me wondering how much of our lives are controlled by self-seens; and just who we are seeing ourselves as? Film scenes? How many unfit middle-aged men have run up a set of wide steps seeing themselves as Rocky? Not even whole films: how prey are self-seeers to advertising images? Bikini-sleek in an infinity pool; the blonde in the open-top car, hand languidly over the door, hair blowing in the wind; sashaying by as if on a catwalk…

This is our life in a time of self-seens. Even when [especially when?] there is no-one to see us. Pulling heroic faces in the bathroom mirror? I look too at the small dramas people invent for themselves. So very often these scenes could have been scripted [badly] by [copied from?] any one of a number of soaps.

On a jolly evening out find yourself being that moment the preoccupied one not smiling. The party person most occupied with his/her self-seen will be the one demanding to know why you are not ‘happy’. You are spoiling their self-seen.

Politicians too, acutely self-aware, transparently play to the self-seen. One sees himself as Winston Churchill rallying the country against its enemies, another as Charles de Gaulle stubbornly saying, “Non.” Martin Luther King having a dream, Davy Crocket at the Alamo, a defiant Rosa Luxemburg, as cool as poster boy Che Guevara… All such self-seeers mortified when the image disintegrates and their delusion gets laughed at.

So do we arrive at actual selfies. They too lead to where characters can also be self-seeers. Here am I typically with friends at dinner, pushing a child’s swing, lying among an advertiser’s wild flowers… Self-seen.

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Scenery

Some scenery is like walking around inside a glossy photograph: it is beautiful, grand, and where it is supposed to be. But it doesn’t bite into us, shape us.

Our experience of such splendid scenery is, for most of us I expect, when we are on holiday. Picturesque, scenic, panoramic if high, pretty even; all as the brochures predicted. Then we go home – to our undramatic streets, our as-expected houses. And there is the day to day scenery that does shape us.

For John Clare, and I suspect for most of us, it is what we grow up among that truly moulds us. For John Clare it was the flat lands around Helpstone village, the marshes and meadows all coming with their own history and local lore. And when the enclosures came and took away the common lands he came undone.

Like John Clare, and it has become a cliché this age of overpopulation, many of us sadly say of our childhood’s natural playgrounds, “Knew this when it was all fields.”

Ted Hughes, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth fared better by their being shaped by Yorkshire rocks, their contours and solidity. As did Herman Melville and CS Forrester with their being bitten by the globe-encircling sea. Monet got bitten later in life, and twofold, by the garden that he himself made and then obsessively painted.

When a child steps outdoors the child becomes more than his/her mother’s stories – that accident, that illness, that pet/obsession – the street, the lane, the locality has claimed them. The cornershop group, the scaled hill, a tree [gone now], an always frightening alley, the few wild acres of a park, a long neglected building plot beyond…

An intensity of feeling belongs to childhood, be it happiness or despair; can be only of a sunshine-splashed moment, but associated forever with the place where it happened. That was/is the one time we feel with such strength, such attachment to place.

As we grow older we use these once-felt moments to measure adult instances of happiness or despair.

And this will not have been the scenery of inescapable trauma – the equivalent say of Great War trenches, or of finding oneself like Mervyn Peake at the liberation of Belsen – unthinkable agonies that require revisiting. This will not be the trauma of abuse, the room, the furniture among which it occurred. No, this is simply the scenery of everyday life that while living there we stopped seeing, that as a child we even once took as fixed, as unchanging.

Grown the child will say that this is/was his/her town, their territory. When in fact they knew but a few streets of it, or if a village John Clare’s few acres. Grown they will be both shocked and resentful of a recent newcomer’s more extensive knowledge of the town, their ‘own’ streets and more. They, the newcomer, though has not yet been bitten by the topography. Their knowledge is of a different order, a superficial order, a researched second-hand history, the many bits threaded together to form an almost unrecognisable whole. Somewhere other.

Before we become engrossed in our own histories let us bear in mind Freud’s definition of neurosis, ‘an abnormal attachment to the past.’

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Democracy and Governance

Is this democracy? And if it is democracy does it lead to good governance?

Not on recent evidence.

What can one sensibly say about the bizarre period we are living through? For instance in 2016 here in the UK the electorate were persuaded to elect a known liar as Prime Minister. Three years later he was kicked out for – guess what? – telling lies.

Only a few thousand Tory party members were then invited to elect his replacement. They chose a woman with an extreme right wing ideology and who was furthermore funded by the IEA, the Institute of Economic Affairs who are in turn funded by the oil and gas industries.

Her economic incompetence saw her last as Prime Minister for just over three weeks. To be replaced by the unelected runner-up in that tiny Tory party election. The millions in Britain’s greater electorate had no say in the choosing of either.

So much for democracy, so much for good governance.

The failure of UK’s democracy doesn’t end there. Beset now by the UK’s first-past-the-post unrepresentative democracy, its peculiar extremes, I really miss our being a part of the European Union, its remote, cautionary presence. I imagine their technocrats responding to the Tories’ latest preposterous policies with a “You want to do WHAT?!”

For so long now I have had doubts over democracy as a system of governance. Democracy was intended to replace tyranny by the few with a tyranny of the many. A neat turn of phrase which failed to take into account the self-interest of the wealthy, and how they can so easily influence and even undo democracies.

Those few have made sure that the majority of democracies, their tyranny of the many, hasn’t worked.

During the last few decades we have been sorry spectators to the money-grubbing of our parliamentarians. Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, from the then Prime Minster down, Russian money came flooding into Tory coffers. Nor were the Tories the only party taking money from dubious sources: the Israelis and the Saudis continue to fund several Westminster MPs, as do many multinational corporations via one shell company or another. The leader of the Labour Party for instance accepted £50,000 from an Israeli source.

Ours is a democracy bought, packaged and sold back to us.

Will proportional representation be an improvement? Will it lead to good governance? Possibly, depending on the method of PR chosen. Might get rid of bipartisan bickering. I doubt though that there will be any improvement while our parliamentarians continue to accept payment from external sources and the national media continues to serve the interests of the wealthy.

In the meantime national and supranational democracy is an illusion. Mass media – funded by the wealthy few – will all too easily sway that percentage of the population who do bother to vote. They elected a known liar here and voted against their own self-interest to leave the European Union. (Russian money funded the Brexit campaign.)

At times I have thought that it’d be better by far that, once a fair constitution has been agreed and established, to let technocrats run the country. For the government to be open, but responsive only to petition and appeals via the legal process. That being the only route whereby civil rights and responsibilities could be changed.

Anything rather than these paid-for democratic politicians trying to second-guess a nation’s mood. Note ‘mood’, an emotional rather than a rational state.

One has to bear in mind that, in a nation like the UK, more of its population will be tuned into pop music stations than to questioning stations like Radios 3 and 4, whose listeners one would hope decide who governs us.

That is those who listen to any radio station. The greater proportion of the international population watch ‘entertainment’ TV, and switch channels when the news comes on. Any new political opinion will be taken from newspaper headlines, courtesy of the wealthy few. Or, ensconced in their social media echo chambers, they will remain closed to arguments new.

Which is why, the European Union having been established with human rights at its core, I so miss – not only its open internal borders – but its oversight. I know that, had we still been members, the EU would not have allowed the UK’s now dangerous use of pesticides, its discharge of human sewage into our waterways, its madcap economics, its deliberate undoing of our national health service, its bonkers transport systems, its underfunding of the legal process….

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A Somerset Sideboard

Some background:- When my mother had moved to a smaller bungalow she had given Steph and I an oak sideboard. It was big and proved not as useful as we had first thought. We very soon came to realise that we had no place for it in our flat. This was in the 1980s.

In Wellington there used to be a secondhand furniture shop called Farthings. I went in and asked if they would buy the sideboard from us. They, man and woman, came in their van to our ground floor flat. The flat was in the kitchens of an old manor house. The deal the woman offered was that they would take the sideboard to the shop and when it was sold they would split the proceeds with us. I can’t recall the exact split, was mostly pleased to have got the bulky sideboard out of the way.

I didn’t expect a quick result, so gave it no more thought.

I can’t remember if it was Steph or I who later on passed Farthings when it was closed and couldn’t see the sideboard. I thought maybe – as we hadn’t heard from them – it had been moved to the back of the shop. Next time I passed the shop it was open.

I went in expecting no more than the sideboard had been moved or sold.

The woman was there, woollen-dressed, new age look. I asked about the sideboard; and the visit rapidly went weird.

First off she irritably pretended never to have seen or heard of an oak sideboard. I pointed out that she and her partner had come to our flat to collect it.

“Oh that thing,” she said. “It went to auction.”

I asked how much it had sold for.

“No idea,” she said.

I reminded her of our deal, asked for my share.

Up to this point I hadn’t really cared about the money, would have been a bonus had there been any. But she bridled up, became suddenly indignant and called her scruffy partner from somewhere out the back. He was told that I was demanding money for the sideboard.

“That fucking thing,” he said. (No more hippy-speak then.) “Count yourself lucky I don’t chuck you out after it.”

I don’t respond well to blustering threats. See Anti – https://rb.gy/6w0ge , and he was street-smart enough to see that if he came a step closer he’d get hit. He quickly shifted to a wheedling demeanour, took to whining about the weight of the sidebooard, how it had sat in the shop for ages, how they were having a hard time with money, had no record of the auction, couldn’t pay me…

She said something about my ‘attitude.’

I was itching for violence, but left. I cycled home angry at having been cheated, and believing at that point that I had no comeback other than putting a brick through Farthings‘ shop window. Which would bring no satisfaction: their insurance would pay for a replacement.

The sideboard had no sentimental value. My mother had been as pleased as I to no longer have it taking up space. Nor am I the least materialistic, have given away cars, am the world’s most indifferent consumer. If the Farthings couple had said, when they first came to collect the sideboard, that it wasn’t worth anything I’d have been happy for them to have just taken it away. It was the lies and bluster that had my adrenaline pumping every time the thought of them crossed my mind.

That anger had me moaning to a solicitor friend about UK justice. He told me to try the Small Claims Court, and how to go about it. That I did. Took months, but ended up with Farthings being ordered to pay me £50.00. They pleaded poverty, but told the court they’d pay me £10.00 a month.

My moaning to my solicitor friend about UK justice wasn’t only about the sideboard. During this period there was so much else in my life that had rankled.

Down the back of the manor house was a lake. When, between the wars, the manor house had been a girls school the lake had been used for boating and swimming.

At the further end of the lake was an old mill. A property developer had got hold of it and had converted it to a house. He had then built another alongside it, having bulldozed someof the woods to do so. The second house hadn’t had planning permission.

The new owners of the mill house and other house then stopped us manor house rentees using the lake footbridge to cross the fields to the village.

Aside from asking the council what they were going to do about the illegal second house, I was also campaigning for a roundabout to be made at the end of the manor house’s long drive, which ended in a 5-way junction.

This was on the main A-road between Wellington and Taunton. Every day the squeal of brakes. A French boy in one of the flats upstairs had recently been knocked over. A roundabout would have slowed the traffic, have made it safer for all our children to cross the road.

Somerset council decided that children’s safety wasn’t paramount, traffic flow was. My daughters already had to negotiated a pavement-less road to get to and from West Buckland primary school. Now a council spokesperson said that not only did the council not have enough money to create a roundabout, with the property developer being prepared to go to court to defend the illicity-built second house they didn’t have funds enough to fight that case either.

Farthings defaulted on the final payment.

I was advised – mostly by Steph – for my own peace of mind (and domestic harmony) not to further pursue them. Reminded myself, once again, that I was living in the UK which still has the best justice money can buy.

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The publishing of poems 2023

There is a new phenomena afoot: small press magazines having to ask for submissions.

I had worried that last issue The Journal might have been alone in receiving fewer submissions. Had me worried that The Journal might have given over too much space to reviews. Or that we had in some way caused general offence unbeknownst to me? Then in short order I came across several other, equally well-established poetry magazines here and in the US, asking for submissions.

Now it wasn’t so long ago that many magazines, to cut down on the load, put up barriers to submissions. So what has changed?

What immediately comes to mind is online publication. Not in online magazines, but poets putting up single poems on social media, on FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram et al; and thus forfeiting their First Serial Rights to magazine publication.

If that is so, as I strongly suspect it is, with magazine submission guidelines asking for previously unpublished work and stipulating that that includes online publication, it would certainly account for so few submissions. And possibly also for fewer print magazines. But more of them later.

First let me question the wisdom of posting single poems online. I don’t know about others’ reading habits, but I give poems on social media barely a first glance. I don’t go on social media to read poems, use it for news and to interact with distant friends, so I tend to scroll straight on past any poems. I might pause to read an article, rarely a poem. I like to be receptive to poems, to put myself into a poem-reading frame of mind, which is not when scrolling through the daily news feeds.

That’s me. So who does read poems online?

Not many, is my guess. A few poetry friends and dutiful family at best. The instant gratification of a few ‘Likes’, and that will be it, the poem’s readership. And that will be it until the poem is included in a collection. That is if a small press publisher will give a second glance to a collection of poems that have been published only on social media, that haven’t seen previous publication in any periodicals, that haven’t gone through a selection process let alone been edited

What I don’t understand is that if a poet wants feedback from a ‘safe’ group, why not go to local open mikes? The audience would be about the same size as on social media, and being writers themselves they tend to be not at all critical, and if asked might well comment. And just hearing the poem oneself can give one insight to where it might be improved. Plus the fact that at an open mike you never know who is going to be there. At a Birmingham open mike I got offered a collection on the basis of the 3 poems that I had just read. And reading a poem at an open mike, performance even, of itself doesn’t count as publication.

Granted submitting to magazines is a chore, especially to those that take a time-wasting age to reply, and then do so with a formatted rejection.

I’ve often thought that submitting poets should be as strict in their submitting policy as magazines are in theirs. If all poets gave a magazine 4 months to respond, 6 months tops, and then believed themselves free to submit elsewhere, I’m sure editors would up their game.

And I know rejections can be depressing – The Journal rejects 98% of the poems sent – but rejection of itself can be part of the creative process, can make one look again at the work, how it might be improved, be better presented… And one never knows: an editor if inspired might offer feedback for free.

As to the magazines themselves, especially print magazines, the rising cost of postage has hit them hard. Most magazines these days accept email submissions, so no extra expense for the poet there. Nor have print costs shot up that much. It has been the posting out of the magazines that has become so costly and is probably the main reason there are now so few print magazines, most of which are run on a voluntary/unpaid basis. To add now to their miseries with a lack of submissions could see an end to small press magazines altogether. Where then poetry publication?

At open mikes now many poets will have a chapbook, or collection, to wave at the audience. Quite a few of them will have been self-published. Sales will be few.

A question often asked now regards the ease of self-publication is where the gate-keepers, the quality control? In poetry especially if everyone is to have self-published chapbooks and collections, but few readers, and no print magazines – because what’s the point? – where do we go from here?

In case anyone has missed the point of this blog, submissions are welcome the year round at The Journal – here or http://samsmithbooks.weebly.com/the-journal.html A response will usually be within the month. And for the foreseeable there will be a change in The Journal submission policy.

Defeated by my own estimation of single poem readership on social media being no more than that at an open mike I can’t see that posting there amounts to ‘publication’. The Journal will now therefore consider those single poems previously ‘published’ online.

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Now look at what we’ve done!

Epicurus of Samos (242-270 BC) held that peace of mind comes through freedom from fear. I wonder how he would have looked upon our 21^st century scaremongering media. Beware terrorism, gangsters, scams, refugees, cancer, jellyfish…

Beware the next thing to be afraid of – grasshopper invasion. But not species extinction.

Too scary a tabloid headline?

For us as a species, because of us, planet Earth may very soon become uninhabitable. Every day another species becomes extinct. One a day gone forever.

The newspapers and the telly won’t tell us. So…. How now, at this late stage, do we save ourselves?

For a start we have to move beyond short-term democratic thinking, beyond governments with one eye always on the next election.

In order to save what’s left upon the planet, in order to save ourselves, do we therefore have to move beyond democracy?

Electorates have been trained in consumerism, conditioned by adverts. And by its very definition consumerism is destructive, its advertising reliant on catchphrases, rendering the public unthinking, evermore moronic and prey to politicians with their own catchphrases, sound-bites. Electorates are now ‘sold’ politicians, almost regardless of those politicians ability to govern.

To save ourselves shall we vote just the once more? Vote to abandon our destructive democracies?

Or should we rely on technology?

Will technology save us? Depends. Has species Us mastered technology or has technology mastered us?

Machines have taken over our most repetitive tasks. Machines now wash our clothes, clean our houses. Cars can drive themselves. The jobs that people are now forced to do – for wages – are mostly made up jobs, serve no real purpose.

Those who are forced into these purposeless jobs know this, detracting from their self-worth. With small incomes they are left with little to do other than be prey to mass media, advertising things and being shown ways of life that on their wages they can’t afford.

To save ourselves, to save what’s left of the planet, we need to move away from economic systems predicated on work. People need some sort of trade-able income certainly, but they don’t need invented jobs. What they need is occupations, to be gainfully occupied.

With fires and flood affecting us all we need to move away from ownership, need new ways of assessing self-worth. How we as individuals might contribute to the common good?

At the moment, and despite the fires and floods, the middle class here in the class-ridden UK (how out of date is that?) still dream of buying a bit of land and stopping the rest of us using it. Which just goes to show how saving ourselves is going to be difficult. We’re stuck – mindsets, attitudes, behavioural patterns – just when we most desperately need to change.

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Titles

This is just one of the many lessons it has taken me a long time to learn. To wit – to check that the title that I propose for my latest book has not already been used.

Technically it doesn’t matter if it has. A book title, unlike a trademark, Coca-Cola or Nike say, cannot be copyrighted. Would however be a risk to even include Coca-Cola or Nike within a title, so litigious are those corporations.

Apologies for the early digression.

This is what provoked me to this blog: I titled my latest novel, The Seventh Man. I knew that Graham Greene had his Third Man. And I had a suspicion that there had been books about the Oxbridge spy rings, each speculating on who might have been the fifth or sixth member. If memory serves the last of those spies to have been outed had been ‘The Keeper of the Royal Paintings.’

I thought seven was safe so didn’t bother to check if anyone had yet reached there.

Never assume.

Because when I did do an online search, post-publication, guess whose latest book popped up first in the listing? Only Haruki Murakami’s The Seventh Man.

Happy as I am to be associated with Haruki Murakami, and in a way delighted that we both came up near simultaneously with the same title, given that he is thousands of times more famous than I, our shared title has put my novel at something of a sales disadvantage.

The most annoying aspect is that my The Seventh Man was never its title during the writing. Its working title was Flow Chart, that being the process whereby I ordered the narrative. Only near the tale’s end did I come to see that the book’s focus was on what wasn’t there, The Seventh Man.

There are so many pitfalls with titles. Take my Trees novel. Where I did do pre-publication checks.

Within the story the group of foresters called themselves The Tree Prospectus. So that the novel didn’t get confused with the many text books titled Trees my original self-published title for the eBook was Trees: the Tree Prospectus. And I stuck with this even though an earlier search had shown that The Tree Prospectus itself had been the name chosen for a carbon offset scam, where no trees had been planted.

I thought that mine, being an obvious work of eco-fiction, the double title would avoid confusion with both text books and the then notorious scam. So far so good. People enjoyed the book. Except that the tradition (dare I say bookshop?) mindset of my Cardiff paperback publisher held that there was no such genre as eco-fiction, and he published Trees as a sort of mystery novel, with a tag line emphasising the death within the tale.

Ah well. Whoever said that getting a book into print was easy…. Getting a title should be.

I have found that the safest, the surest bet for an original title is one that emerges from the writing.

In my growing up we didn’t have many novels in our house. The one that we did have, and that I read and re-read, spent long hours studying its glossy illustrations, was a battered hardback of RM Ballantyne’s Coral Island. Coral Island is, my re-reading had me realise, one of those tales that says more about the attitudes and values of the society from which the narrator comes than of the exotic events the narrator describes.

I knew that I wouldn’t be the first to base an updated novel on Coral Island. William Golding had done so with a more realistic and contemporary boys’ own adventure, Lord of the Flies. I took my three lads far into the future, again as children of empire, but this time as part of an inter-galactic empire. To give a broad clue to its inspiration I titled their tale, Balant.

The four SF books that grew out of Balant took each their titles from the different tales told. Happiness: a planet; You Human: the Leander Chronicle (nothing whatsoever to do with Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Far and away my favourite of all his books. And while I’m at it nor was Haruki Murakami an inspiration for my 3-in-one detective novel, The Company Chronicles. Just love all those hard Cs together.) I’ve again digressed. The final two of the Balant series was Not Now: Death, Dreams, and Reasons for Living and Eternals: the unMaking of Heaven.

Going the other way, some of my novels grew out of their titles. The End of Science Fiction for one. While Once Were Windows Once Were Doors grew out of my fascination with ruins and my wondering what would become of a world where Jerusalem, the most fought over place in history, was finally and completely obliterated.

My non-fiction Anti began with its title. And I was certain of We Need Madmen from its very first page. The Care Vortex, Something’s Wrong and Two Bridgwater Days I had no need to check. Likewise the long titles for my historical novels.

For my next novel – the writing of it about half-way through – I have already decided on the title. I have done a search for possible duplication and there are, as yet, none like it. I am however keeping a weather eye on Murakami.

Fingers crossed. (Not the title.)

The 7th Man – http://shorturl.at/afmV8