"You should make a point of trying everything once,
excepting incest and folk-dancing."

Sir Arnold Bax, Farewell, My Youth (1943)

Friday 17 December 2010

Four reforming finches...


AMONGST THE RUINS of the frozen and desiccated herb garden this morning I spied four familiar goldfinches with an obvious penchant for haute cuisine pecking merrily about. This is of course the so-called ‘gang of four’, as the tabloid press has dubbed them. Four finches that, in these times of austerity, have not opted to fly south to Africa for the winter, like those preening birds of paradise, but have decided to stay and tough it out with the proletariat tits and sparrows.

Admirable behaviour like this is rarely seen in the bird world; from the notorious underhanded behaviour of those liberal cuckoos to the lumbering greed of the more conservative waddling fowl – all of these and many other feathery followers flock to the balmy post-equatorial climbs – only to return when the good times are great the following spring. Is there, I wonder, a move to place sanctions upon deserting/returning birds; seed-exiles, if you will; should we, the hapless dupes who spread seed throughout the land indiscriminately, opt for a reform of bird feeding policies? Perhaps giving lower rations to non-dom avians and supplementing fat-ball credits for those doughty few who remain our yearlong garden companions?

After all, what is an English garden without the aesthetic flurry of activity provided by these airborne performers? Those who provide the most entertainment should be given the most reward.

Wednesday 15 December 2010

It's Christmas?


BEING LOCKED AWAY with a glass of port and a slice of game pie, like some exiled club bore (sans tweed), is a synecdoche for the main benefits of the yuletide season; libation and gluttony. In one’s own company Christmas is a time of peace and quiet sanctuary. Suffice to say that this is an idyll have I yet to enjoy. As when you add practically anyone else to the equation, even people you like (not to mention those whose company you are forced to endure only at this time of year), the burden of enforced jollity and having to hold back on the gin is enough to break the spirits of the most persistent caroller.

Speaking of which, I am lucky enough to live beyond the boundaries of several high-security fences and starved packs of attack dogs, and thus I can avoid a pack of yobs mumbling the first verse of ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’ – which they begin to ‘sing’ only after you have opened the front door (entrapment). But it doesn’t end there. Wall-to-wall guilt-trippingly tearful charity ads? Ruined ‘Uncle Buck’. Free sample of M&S mince pie, sir? Using more sawdust than last year, I see. E-card of a family I’ve never met from a person I can’t stand? Why do I even have a junk mail filter?

All of these, however, I almost gladly submit myself to, thanking the spirits of Christmas, when I realise with bile-fizzing relief that I don’t have to suffer the annual hardships that many millions of people across the globe surely must experience in the form of the office Christmas party. Not belonging to any such organisation (though Will Self does provide a solitary alternative) I have never joined a conga-line around the desks, photocopied my intimate parts, thrown up on my boss (or vice versa) or a potentially reputation-ruiningly bad tryst with the-blonde-from-accounts. Some people would yell ‘bah humbug’ at me or call me a ‘Grinch’ for such unseasonable misanthropy – but let them jeer; let bad gifts and unwanted relatives come – for I am one of the sainted few who can hold their heads up high safe in the knowledge that, no, we did not have any Lambrini with that new temp under the desk.

Friday 3 December 2010

Snow danger


AS I was thawing out the butter the other morning I overheard that British motorists are once again under the cosh of John Law: a £60 on-the-spot fine for anyone caught with snow on their car’s roof. The radix malorum? An attempt to stop any snow coming off said roof during transit and hitting cyclists.

Two questions come to mind: why are cyclists peddling about in the snow and why aren’t our sensible motorists being rewarded for causing them harm? This obviously opens the floodgates to a terrible litany of snow-related litigation and bureaucracy; postmen suing when, after taking receipt of a package, your closing the door displaces the snow above the portico, health and safety nuts coming around assessing the risk of our icicles and, of course, squirrels prosecuting you when they slip off the roof.

Furthermore, I have no doubt that the benefit-seeking classes will flock to their stolen bicycles in their thousands, desperately hounding some poor soul with snow on his car until, upon his accelerating away, he gives them the necessary pelt of snow so they can hit the speed-dial to a waiting meretricious no-win-no-fee shyster.

Love and Death in Hull


Life is first boredom, then fear.

from ‘Dockery and Son’ by Philip Larkin (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985)

If ever someone could be said to have lived a writer’s life it would be Philip Larkin. One of the 20th century’s greatest poets, yet who only ever published three mature collections of poetry over a glacially slow three decades, he nevertheless warded off any encroachments upon his independence with almost pathological fervour and was terrified by the prospect of a future filled with marriage and kids (“Children are horrible, aren’t they?”).

However, this view of family life is hardly surprising when we consider his upbringing in stifling middleclass Coventry, England, with father Sydney; affluent treasurer and sometime admirer of Hitler; and mother Eva; hopelessly and willingly helpless. Doting yet distant, Larkin’s parents were the model of tight-lipped post-World War I English suburbia and the model for everything Larkin feared about family life. His childhood (which he often dismissed as a “forgotten boredom” in interviews) was further restricted by extremely poor eyesight and a stammer; though he overcame the latter and the former proved to be a boon, of sorts, by preventing him from being fit to serve in World War II.

Like everything else in his life, Larkin found plenty to complain about when he went up to St John’s College, Oxford, to read English. But despite his grumbling he appears to have had some of the most carefree days of his life; making lifelong friendships, including one Kingsley Amis, drinking copiously and listening to his beloved jazz. He also went down with a first-class honours degree.

After graduating in 1943, fearing the government would find work for him if he could not, he successfully applied for the one-man position of librarian in a tiny provincial public library. Larkin was to spend the rest of his life as a librarian; working up to the rather more prestigious and demanding role of University Librarian at the University of Hull which he held from 1955 until his death. By all accounts he enjoyed his vocation and was extremely effective in it. More importantly, had he ever attempted to live as a professional poet he might never have produced the poem ‘Toads’:

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?


Larkin’s early collection of poetry The North Ship was published in 1945 and is heavily mired in the influence of W.B. Yeats. However, by the time his first mature work The Less Decieved was published in 1955 he had discovered the wonderful poetry of Thomas Hardy which allowed him to create the voice that would catapult him to the very heights of literary accalim with poems such as ‘Church Going’:

A serious house on a serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.


His next collection was not published until 1964; The Whitsun Weddings is his greatest achievementand includes many of his most popular poems, such as ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and the title poem.

His mother Eva lived until 1977 and thus loomed over almost all of her son’s life which was perhaps another reason (or excuse) why he never felt able to commit to a woman, though this is hardly an excuse for years of juggling with the emotions of the two other most important women in his life, Maeve Brennan and Monica Jones. It is debatable as to whether it speaks to Larkin’s credit or Maeve & Monica’s detriment that they suffered his caprice and self-absorption. However, it is does appear that his mother’s death coincided with the drying-up of his poetic output: his last collection, though not his best (which is still better than most), High Windows, was published in 1974 and was thought by some critics not to meet the high standards achieved by Larkin in the two preceding collections, though it does include many memorable poems like the ominous ‘The Building’:

The porters are scruffy; what keep drawing up
At the entrance are not taxis; and in the hall
As well as creepers hangs a frightening smell.


And the brutal ‘The Old Fools’:

At death; you break up: The bits that were you
Start speeding away from each other for ever
With no one to see you.


Larkin’s popularity comes partly from the fact that his poems are so accessible, not for him the symbolism of his youthful idol Yeats, but they are written about recognisable themes and events; universal themes which usually revolve around mankind’s two great preoccupations love/relationships and death. Many are stark but have a reflective melancholia to them – and amongst the beauty in misery there is much humour to be found. His poems are also precisely structured and he lamented poets for whom grammar seemed a dirty word.

Larkin spent his final years reluctantly and worrisomely accepting honorary degrees and produced very little poetry of any real quality. He succumbed to oesophageal cancer in 1985, the early death he had spent most of life fearing, but he did leave us with this last masterpiece: 'Aubade.'

Notes and asides:

- Larkin published two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter, in the forties and always intended to be a novelist, until the novels stopped coming, believing that the novel was the higher art form - ironically his friend Kingsley Amis, a highly successful novelist, always believed that the poem was the superior form.

- Larkin was always passionate about jazz and for many years reviewed it for The Daily Telegraph – always saving special scorn for those artists, who shall remain nameless, he deemed to be indulging themselves a little too much.

- In 2008 The Times named him the greatest post-war British writer

Key Collection:

The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

Key poems:

‘Toads’
‘The Whitsun Weddings’
‘An Arundel Tomb’
‘The Explosion’
‘Aubade’

Further reading:

Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955–1982, by Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life by Andrew Motion

Monday 29 November 2010

Showdown at the Library of Babel


THE HOUSE of Knowles-Smith is in disarray. We have been found out as charlatans and thugs; such is our standing in the community that Cyril Pollockill, a local fishmonger who owns the butchers, threw a bucket of unusable offal over my brogues as I walked past his shop the other morning. Indeed, such was his outrage that he ran out a good few minutes after I passed his window, not having a bucket of such slop readily close to hand, and stopped me in the street. His reproach was an unusual - as we are miles from London, and he’s no cockney - ‘Take that, guv’nor’. A cheer went up from the other passing villagers and I hurried away up the hill to lament our familial fall.

Our great shame, if I dare utter it, is this: we have been discovered as a house with not a single work of Jorge Luis Borges and none-but-one volume of Emile Zola, and that’s in the original French. Who knew that the tastes of provincial village-folk were so exacting? Once the word was out, we had a crowd rampaging through the library and other bookshelves, pissing on the Stephen Donaldson, tossing the Isabel Allende aside, desperately trying to see if maybe even an inferior Giovanni translation of Borges’ Fictions had been pushed behind some other volumes, but, alas, no. Before I blacked out from shock, I vaguely recall the village wolf-keeper, with a hint of pity in his milky eyes, dropping several works by Marmaduke Pickthall at my feet before straightening his flat cap and waddling off home for some beans and sausages on toast.

My neighbouring friend Edmund Prygge, lepidopterist and bigwig at the local amateur-Gilbert and Sullivan company, offered a kind word and a cup of weak tea but I could tell he thought we’d brought it on ourselves, and that he laid the responsibility with me. After all, hadn’t he warned me about the 93 year-old woman who had been thrown into the river by a mob last May for having a disproportionate ratio of Flaubert to Julian Barnes novels? Good man that he is though, Edmund didn’t bloviate for too long, he just passed the Battenberg.

Tuesday 16 November 2010

The Journals of John Cheever



THE JOURNALS OF JOHN CHEEVER By John Cheever. 399 pp.
London: Vintage.


WHEN THE calendar rolls into November and it’s cold enough for me to wear my luxuriant winter coats again, I always turn to John Cheever’s Journals. I have read them about four times and this year will be my fifth. Returning home from the cold I pour coffee to drink with some hot muffins or crumpets and put my feet up by a fire and let his captivating melancholia envelop me. It could be that they evoke the season or that I first read them at this time of year but, to me, everything about Cheever; Journals; Letters; and the brilliant short stories of American suburbia; strikes a certain autumnal chord. I think of him, wrapped up, walking in upstate New York, his cheeks reddened by the wind, leaves blowing over his brogues.

There is a certain patrician elegance to the bobbled sweater Cheever is pictured wearing on the front of Blake Bailey’s biography of the writer. For me it seems to evoke everything about Cheever’s faded suburbia, a culture that I, by virtue of being born on the other side of the Atlantic, could never truly be part of.

However, as I am quite suggestible, there is one danger to the Journals: I’m sorely tempted to drink gin or mix a martini every time he mentions the hard stuff – which is often (drink-along-a-Cheever, anyone?) - but this isn’t so bad, it just means that I, like him, wake up on the couch and then clamber through the cold dark into bed.

“I am a solitary drunkard… At four or half past four or sometimes five I stir up a martini, thinking that a great many men who can’t write as well as I can will already have set themselves down at barstools.”

- 1958

Of course there are other perils to reading Cheever, he is a paragon of the self-involved writer, a serial adulterer and he propounds a speciously tempting religious faith of adoration and thanksgiving:

"What am I doing here on my knees, shaking with alcohol and the cold? I do not pray, but I hope that my children will know much happiness. I believe that there was a Christ, that he spoke the Beatitudes, cured the sick, and died on the Cross, and it seems marvellous to me that men should, for two thousand years, have repeated this story as a means of expressing their deepest feelings and intuitions about life. My only noticeable experience is a pleasant sense of humility."

- Palm Sunday, 1967

Cheever chiefly enjoyed the liturgy and there is admittedly something attractive about ritual but surely he was just saving face – and his aforementioned drinking and philandering must have put him at odds with his faith.

In spite of, or because of, all of his virtues and vices I would recommend Cheever’s reflective Journals to anyone and expect that they would find them a rewarding exercise of time. (Particularly as a Christmas gift for any reflective writers in your life.)

Sunday 7 November 2010

Prisoner of first class


THERE IS no more loathsome part of travelling on the Great British railway system than occupying first class. That is, apart from the delays, surly staff, frequent demoralising changes, overcrowding and lack of facilities. Within this cesspool of disappointment there is a haven – of sorts – to be found in first class, but not for the reasons you might expect. To whit: on one occasion a young man passing through the 15 seat allotment set aside for first class passengers on a TransPennine Express service remarked, “A few tables and some chairs, what’s so first class about this?” and indeed how was he, going home to Manchester, to know that first class wasn’t a cross between the Orient Express and a pagan-Rome bathhouse? True, we all wish for a nymph-like courtesan to feed us fruit as we recline on an adjustable chaise longue brushing up on our Ernest Dowson but in reality no one invests in first class for luxury or comfort but rather for peaceful quiet isolation.

This is fairly easy to achieve on the larger Virgin trains but less so on the aforementioned TPEx where its afterthought of a first class compartment is constantly under siege from youths and drunks - both of whom usually flee like primitive life forms in the wake of the conductor (if and when he shambles along) but provide edgy distractions until that time. However, at peak times, when your regular commuter knows the score, it’s easy to feel like a 19th century aristocrat fearing for your neck as the huddled masses press up against the glass divides from their cramped standing compartments. The truth is that first class isn’t all that expensive but seems to be just expensive enough to keep 97% of people at bay and I can only assume that this is the product of stubborn British thrift. A stubbornness that takes gleeful delight in five words that leave me and other first class inhabitants stricken with terror: ‘first class has been declassified.’ When I hear these words statically transmitted over the intercom I develop an otherwise deeply-repressed involuntary facial tick which only increases as the packs of Geordie hen-partiers with their cava and footie lads with their Tennent’s lager waddle into their newfound seats.

All of this we endure for a stale biscuit or dry piece of fruitcake, a cup of putrid coffee and the faint hope that we might have that rare, perfect journey where we can doze over The Spectator for an hour or so. Perhaps our salvation lies in hiking up the prices so that armed silence-enforcement guards can be hired?

Tuesday 2 November 2010

Perfecting the work - W. B. Yeats


“The intellect of the man is forced to choose perfection of the life or of the work.”

William Butler Yeats (13 June, 1865 – 28 January 1939)

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all.

from ‘In Memory of William Butler Yeats’ by W. H. Auden

THE ABOVE quote from Auden’s elegiac poem no doubt refers to the fact that William Butler Yeat’s was influenced throughout his entire life by occult, mystical and astrological interests. In 1911 Yeats became a member of “The Ghost Club” – a paranormal investigation society – and joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890 (where he made an enemy of that infamous scamp, Aleister Crowley). He would remain in a splinter branch of the Order until 1921. Yeats was also, like many 19th century figures, influenced by the famous extoller of flimflam and humbug Emmanuel Swedenborg. Fortunately for us, however, he was also influenced by the unrivalled visionary William Blake (who renounced Swedenborg) and so, as Auden states, despite this belief in tarot, ghosts, magic/magick, angels, etc., the work survives all of this. (Both Yeats’ secretary, Ezra Pound, and his patient wife, Georgie, both deemed his occult proclivities hokum but those who wish to further explore Yeats’ ideas should consult A Vision (1925).)

Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865 into a prosperous and artistic family: his father, John Butler Yeats, was a law-student-turned-artist and his brother, Jack, would became an accomplished painter. Indeed, Yeats himself studied at the School of Art, Dublin, but quickly lost interests in any artistic ambitions involving a brush. His first significant poetry publication was the collection The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889) which is bogged down in peaty Irish mythology; this, and much other early work, is capable of overwhelming the Yeats neophyte. Thus, those discovering him for the first time should go straight to the best in The Collected Poems: everything post-1918 is a treat of Brobdingnagian scale and The Tower (1928) is the cream; which includes hit after hit of genius, such as:

On the soul’s journey. How it is whirled about,
Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,
Until it plunge into the sun;
And there, free and yet fast,
Being both Chance and Choice,
Forget its broken toys
And sink into its own delight at last.


from ‘All Soul’s Night’

As a symbolist Yeats’ poems are wrapped up in layer after illusory layer and are open to as much debate and interpretation as one has breath and patience for – language, especially such as is mystical in nature, is often chosen to suggest both abstract and concrete themes. Yeats is also one of the greatest masters of the traditional forms and eschewed modernism; though, he did experiment later in life.

Maud Gonne and George (Georgie) Hyde-Lees were the two great loves of Yeats’ life. He first met Gonne in 1889 and pursued her until his last proposal to her in 1916; however, they had consummated their relationship in 1908 though, sadly, Gonne encouraged a relationship of abstinence thereafter but, if nothing else, their one-night tryst yielded the poem ‘A Man Young and Old’:

Though nurtured like the sailing moon
In beauty's murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood


Yeats, at the age of 51, married the twenty-four year old Georgie in 1916 and gave him the children, Anne and Michael, he had long desired. The marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one and Georgie an indulgent wife: even to the extent of admitting a small army of mistresses to weep at his deathbed. Yeats died in Menton, France, on 28 January 1939. Initially his body was buried at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin but was later, as per his wishes, moved to Sligo, Ireland. His epitaph, taken from a late poem, ‘Under Ben Bulben’, reads:

Cast a cold Eye
On Life, on Death.
Horseman, pass by.



Notes and asides:

- As playwright, Yeats was instrumental in creating an Irish national theatre and his nationalist play ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’ is credited as having incited the 1916 Easter Rising

- Yeats served as a senator of the Irish Free State from 1922-1928

- Upon hearing that he had won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature Yeats’ first reaction was to ask “How much is it worth?”

Key collection:

The Tower (1928)

Key Poems:

All Soul’s Night
The Sorrow of Love
The Wild Swans at Coole
Sailing to Byzantium

Further reading:

- Foster, R. F. (1997). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. I: The Apprentice Mage. New York: Oxford UP

- Foster, R. F. (2003). W. B. Yeats: A Life, Vol. II: The Arch-Poet 1915–1939. New York: Oxford UP

(Until Foster’s two volume biography of Yeats is surpassed it remains the go-to source, but it is not insurmountable.)

Friday 29 October 2010

What's so good about goodbye?



IT SAYS a great deal about a country when our appliances are more cordial than our denizens. I have a Blu-ray player that insistently flashes ‘see you’ when you turn it off and gives you a hearty welcome when you switch it on. Compare this with your average shop-assistant: loathe to greet you, unaccountably smug and always texting – most likely the boy/girl they had behind the kebab shop the night before. Nevertheless, I have no interest in shoppies, but I do find the salutations of gadgetry quite interesting.

Why do manufacturers feel the need to make our laptops, phones and washing machines say hello? Give a product designer a digital display and they can’t help themselves but cram as much useless information in as possible; do they think we’re such petulant little twerps that we can’t to wait the scant few seconds for a device to start up without an inane greeting? Furthermore, they’re clearly ignorant of films such as ‘The Terminator’ – I guarantee you that the assent of the machines was started by one chirpy Blu-ray with aspirations.

I don’t think it’s a great selling point or a stroke of marketing genius, and I can’t imagine anyone was ever surveyed and clamoured for friendlier devices; surely you wouldn’t want taps asking you what you’ve got planned for the morning or light switches going over your dinner plans? No doubt the Japanese are working on very friendly machines. I think I would be satisfied with a machine that could teach better manners to the yoof, but, one supposes, the requisite ability to electrocute non-compliants would be a step in the Terminator direction. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my microwave has been reading Kierkegaard and is having a bit of an existential crisis.

Tuesday 26 October 2010

William Blake added you as a friend on Facebook



HISTORY isn’t littered with all that many visionaries, but those we do have tend to be of an artistic bent – not so much engineers. When I hear talk of visionaries, the names of artists such as Max Ernst and possibly the fawning royalist Salvador Dali come to mind, moreover I think of Coleridge and, combining the role of artist and poet, William Blake. I consider Blake to be one of the finest minds to have ever existed – and even that is putting it lightly.

All of which brings us improbably to Mark Zuckerberg and the new film ‘The Social Network’ – this is not a review of the film and nor do I ever intend to see it, even though it has received good reviews I can’t help but think there’s something of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ about the plot. However, I saw an advert somewhere in cyberspace for the film which described Mr Zuckerberg as, besides a genius, a visionary.

This strikes me as playing fast and loose with the term. (It should be noted that neither he nor anyone from Facebook was involved with the film so this isn’t necessarily his own vanity.) No one can deny that Facebook is a popular success and has made its founder a rich man. All good so far. But to call him a visionary opens up the door to Steve Jobs and any other successful computer programmers or designers. Speaking of emperors, Facebook itself is a little naked: it hasn’t brought people closer together, it’s part of the great 21st century long-con, that more communication means better communication. People can no longer wait more than a few hours to tell each other what they’ve been doing – who cares if they’ve been to the gym or which loser they like the best on X-Factor? How can one look forwards to seeing someone if you’ve watched a week long spat between her and her ex on the ‘News Feed’?

People need a break from technology in order to simply be – not much to ask, but not something they are likely to get with the continuing advances in smartphone technology. People can become dependent on virtual contact and relationships to the point where it impedes on their ‘real’ lives, and this, like addiction to computer games, is a surprisingly neglected health hazard, given our health-and-safety-conscious bureaucratic world.

Facebook is, of course, to be highly commended for the advances it has made in aiding stalkers, i.e. the general male population, hunt down the various women they work with, commute with or have groped the night before. Not all that different from its initial incarnation as ‘FaceMash’. There is no malice behind any of this; I do, somewhat grudgingly, use Facebook and clearly Zuckerberg is a talent but in one hundred years’ time I don’t think he’ll be rubbing shoulders on Wikipedia with Hieronymus Bosch and Blake. Of course, I could be wrong; he could be the architect of the future.

Thursday 14 October 2010

Bad Peaches - Part VI

We make fairly quick progress from thereon, my legs obviously not hurt, and Sal further helps when we reach the steps leading up to the French windows. When we enter the house I am rushed to nearest fireplace and fussed over with towel and hot water, brandy and some sort of broth, all before the doctor even arrives.

Dr. Ferguson washes the wounds once more and dresses them with bandages, and instructs Sal as he does for future reference. He tells me he’ll be back tomorrow to make sure there’s no major damage to my senses or pneumonia but that he doesn’t feel unduly worried at the moment, and I must simply let the other injuries heal and lead a sedentary life - I tell him not to worry on this account.

After he has left I take more of Dr. Sal’s prescribed brandy and make an attempt at some of the broth but nausea makes this too much of a challenge. In the subsequent hours I drift in and out of a deep sleep, next to the fire in a semi-comfortable armchair, wrapped in a blanket like a hapless newborn and with Dutch a lump of limbs and ears at my feet; Sal and Pete check on me every so often, when they do, and I am conscious, they then intrude on my canvass of dreams and memories, appearing in past events where they don’t belong – such as Sal as the cook at camp around the time Walt died. Gradually this seems to become a more and more convincing fit, but how could she still be that old all of those years ago?

A clock in a near hallway chimes twelve times and this brings me into something approaching consciousness. Sal sits on a stool by the other side of the doorway, I glance back at her for a moment and then into the fire and I remember; I was right, that girl was Sal. I croak her name through my dry mouth, then coughing I repeat it more clearly.

‘Yes, Mr. Burke,’ she says as she waddles over and leans over me.

‘Do you remember when you first worked for me, in the camps?’

‘Oh, yes sir, of course I do, damned cold on those desert nights,’ she says nodding, then admonishes herself, ‘Excuse my cussin’.’

‘Of course. Do you remember Mr. Haines?’ I ask and her eyes drop, ‘Walt Haines?
‘Mr. Haines, why yes, terrible, just terrible,’ she says and fiddles with her knitting, still clasped between her stumpy fingers.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sir?’

‘What’s terrible?’

‘Well, sir, why what happened to him, of course, the demon alcohol took him too soon,’ she shakes her head disapprovingly, despite forcing brandy down me like cough syrup earlier on.

‘The demon alcohol,’ I say in agreeable tones, ‘I’ve never been able to remember exactly what happened that night,’ I say, pausing at Sal’s increasing reluctance, ‘I mean, how much I was… involved, say.’

‘Oh, you, sir? No, no. Not you, you were asleep after the fight, why I –‘

‘Fight?’

‘You and he, Mr. Burke that is, you two did quarrel that evenin’, and you were both drunk, forgive me for saying so, but you went back to your tent and Mr. Haines, well, he went back to his.’

‘Then how did he-?’

‘Bad peaches,’ she says, interrupting me as if I should know what exactly she means, after a few moments my blank expression coerces more from her, ‘Mr. Haines, I told him I didn’t have none, but he insisted and I had to give him a can I knew weren’t no good. Lord, if I’d’ve known then…’

‘Bad peaches,’ I say matter-of-factly and then, after a brief moment, nod reassuringly to her as I settle back into my chair, Sal taking this as a signal to leave.

I cannot resist a light smile over my weather-cracked lips both at the very idea of an old can of peaches being the end of someone and of the guilt Sal has obviously been carrying around with her all these years over her perceived crime. I stoke the fire and am then abruptly distracted away from all the events of the past by the physical onslaught I have put my weary old self through today. And all for a horse.

Bad Peaches - Part V

The three bodies sit on the back of a cart like any other load ready to be taken into town; the driver reassuringly strokes his horses’ muzzles each in turn as if the beasts could divine the nature of their sombre cargo. Clearly he credits them with enough suspicion as he himself possesses, evidenced by the small crucifix he presses into his hand as if trying to make it a part of him. I seethe silently and internally at this display, averting my gaze before he senses it upon him. As a rule I try not to employ the devout; religious men won’t work Sundays. I make a grim half-smile for a brief moment at this recurrent private joke, true as it is.

I turn as I hear the dull thud of other hooves coming towards me, smiling fully and unabashed as my own horse is brought towards me. I take the reigns and give him a reassuring pat, muttering general niceties at the animal and tracing the diamond on his forehead.

‘Same old journey, Hector,’ I say softly as I heave myself up into the saddle and then looking down to Laurence, ‘Shouldn’t be more than a day, two tops, if we can get moving well enough. You know what to do.’

The Sergeant nods once, a wordless reply to confirm that he will keep things running as always in my absence. Walt’s too, for that matter.

I give the signal for our small convoy to head out and Hector sets off to take position just ahead of the cart, two gunmen leading the way ahead and another two bringing up the rear.

-------------

We arrive in the small town as the last of the sunlight vanishes far over the flat plains; almost cutting our journey a little too close and leaving us sitting ducks for undesirables, both hostile locals and those passing through for a quick buck. I pinch the bridge of my nose as my head seems to throb violently once more and look for the town hall, if you could describe it as such, which has no visible lights and so I settle down for a sleepless night in the similarly dilapidated hotel while the men take shifts to protect our absent friends from jackals and other raiders of the night.

Upon waking (not so sleepless after all), I descend into the lobby and decline the gristly, black plate of what I assume passes as breakfast and make my way to see the appropriate officials to register the three deaths and arrange for their families, if they have any, to be informed and take possession of their worldly goods; though, these are hardly likely to be much more than a lucky bullet and a comb. The clerk is ruddy-faced, middle aged man who goes about his business in an admirably efficient, if not entirely pleasant, fashion: the way he refers to the dead men by their initial and surname is particularly bile-inducing; Where is W. Haines from? How old is W. Haines? Does W. Haines have any family? Only this question quells the desire within me to give his family something to be informed about.

“Sir?”

I stare blankly, then, “No, no family.”

The clerk nods and presents me with several documents to sign, and thereafter I leave the stuffy little office and gulp in the fresh air, only wishing it weren’t so dry afterwards. The dread wells up inside me again as if it wants to burst from me and shatter my very being, but just can’t. I take a few deep breaths and lean against a hitching post, looking up to see the cart with the bodies being taken to their final resting place. I walk along after it, the town seeming appropriately devoid of life as I slowly progress down what passes for its main street to the small clapboard chapel and accompanying grave yard.

The cart-driver tells me that they have ready-dug graves and then goes on to tell me how much this simple display of efficiency appals him. For reasons unknown I don’t go on to tell him how much I want to bury him and his insipid superstitions in one of them, crucifix and all.

I shake this thought from my head and turn abruptly from the driver, wandering to the prospective grave sites, I breathe heavily again, but involuntarily this time; not even noon and already I’ve been driven to mentally murdering two men, and, banal though they might be, this is unhealthy, especially given recent events.

I clutch my head as the indefinable pain reaches a new crescendo, I stagger forwards and hold my hand in front of my eyes; where did this blood come from? In my distraction I lose my footing and tumble into one of the graves, someone is calling my name but this too seems distant and indefinable. I heave myself up from the sandy earth and claw at the walls of the grave but I can claim no purchase and I scramble pathetically until I am crippled by a pain through my back which brings me heavily to my knees.

The voice calls out my name again and I open my eyes to grey skies and rain, sand – sand, but not of the desert, just a bunker. The voice is clear now and as, apparently, is the pain in my head and back.

‘Mr. Burke?’ says the stranger, as he tries to help me to my feet.

‘I never fell in,’ I say, taking advantage of the stranger to lift myself out of the bunker.

But, no, not a stranger, just Pete.

‘Don’t worry sir, you’re okay, I think.’

I look around in a stupor, my clothes are soaked through yet patches of my own blood are still apparent against my shirt like gruesome inkblots, I scan the surroundings through the sheets of rain and light mist.

‘But what about the horse?’

‘Horse?’ asks Pete cluelessly, ‘Don’t worry about that now, let’s get you inside.’

Wednesday 13 October 2010

The Queen's English


Lady Gaga’s language uses and abuses

I KNOW a person who refuses to see any merit in Lady Gaga; as an artist or a person. Normally this would be of little regard to me, but her disdain of the performer extends beyond a simple dislike for the music and, indeed, what we might loosely term ‘pop’ isn’t exactly her thing so I could excuse that. But the hostility towards all things Gaga, from her and other quarters, arouses my interest. Hence, I was inspired to delve further into the Haus of Gaga and decided to consider the lyrics – perhaps these could be one source of the vehement rage that abounds?

I should confess straight away that I like Gaga. Opera’s more my thing, but I like her, the music does more for me than anything else you might hear on a station playing contemporary music, i.e. I can stomach the whole song. But wait, that sounds disingenuous in itself, let’s just say I like Gaga. I even iPod Gaga. Perhaps, then, this piece is a more a validation of my own relationship with Lady Gaga.

People say her songs are all about sex. They are wrong. Some of them are. Many allude to it. She is undoubtedly sexual. But it is the sensationalist reaction to see ‘sex’ and then rubber stamp and dismiss everything else. (Both Madonna (surely now upwardly beatified to Saint of pop?) and Henry Miller fell prey to this kind of public backlash.) But Gaga’s songs seek to feed off the whole of the human experience.

Let us start with a rebuttal of those who sneer at the opening of Bad Romance (BR):

Rah, rah, ah, ah, ah
Roma, roma, ma
Gaga, ooh la la


Perhaps the ‘ooh la la’ is a little much, but since when has this sort of lyrical playfulness been a crime? Nonsense syllables have a history in jazz music going back to the twenties and even the Chairman of the Board himself, Sinatra, employed his famous ‘dooby-dooby-doo’ scat at end of Strangers in the Night. Sticking with BR we have a filthy melting pot of synecdoche that encapsulates the idea that Gaga wants the whole of you, down to your ‘ugly’, ‘disease’ and ‘revenge’. This establishes the idea of the ‘bad romance’ as one that accepts a person as a whole, for better or worse. An idealised relationship.

Alternatively, Poker Face is song where romance has no business, it is a high stakes world of love ‘em and leave ‘em – but love ‘em physically. The juxtaposition of Russian roulette and rough love is a reaffirmation of the much maligned idea that sex should be exciting. The entire song is a litany of gambling-themed double entendres and the poker face itself is a metaphor for the caprice and inscrutability that a woman can dominate a man with, without ever showing her hand, as it were.

Gender politics and feminism are obviously strong themes within Gaga’s milieu (and yes, Germaine, just how obvious is a debate for another time) but they are most clearly expressed through the interesting Dance in the Dark: Gaga intones ‘I’m a free bitch’ at the beginning of the song but the more subtle overtures are found in the preceding line:

Silicone, saline, poison, inject me, baby

Far from nonsense nouns, the inference here is that men use these chemicals, and other cosmetics, to suppress women; like the subject of the song who has to dance in the dark because her boyfriend thinks her a ‘mess’ and a ‘tramp’ but she finds freedom when dancing, i.e. can be herself (à la Just Dance, perhaps). Gaga believes, to the contrary, she is a vamp – a more powerful female guise. The listing of iconic women is a little trite and adds little to the song, and, furthermore, it sustains a cult of victimhood if women identify with people like Marilyn Monroe.

As an aside, Lady Gaga appears to be more preoccupied with feminism than her near contemporaries: Lily Allen merely compains about her boyfriend's sexual inadequacy whilst Katy Perry flaunts her inadequate sexuality in the most meretricious way possible, that is, spouting religious tripe between kissing girls (in the manner of attention seeking dancefloor whores) and video shoots where white liquid spurts from her cupcake bikini.

To some extent, female empowerment is also explored in Telephone – but only in the scant notion that she should be allowed to be with her friends and have a night out without interference from an unspecified significant other. This is extended throughout the song and the lyrics have little more to say – they also include the unforgivable R&B cliché of rhyming club with bubb’ (bubbles = champagne) – unforgivable because 50 Cent, at the very least, has used a similar tactic with Bud[weiser]. Bad Gaga.

Paparazzi picks up the standard of another favourite Gaga subject: fame. There is some ambiguity here, is the paparazzi itself the biggest fan or are the paparazzi and the obsessive fan symbolic of the media and celebrity as a whole? Either way, a single word, ‘plastic’, bears the tremendous weight of dispelling the façade of fame and is followed by what could be quite a bitter sentiment about the whole thing; ‘but/We’ll still have fun.’

We could go on, and we haven’t even touched on her support for the LGBT Community (including her activism for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell), but I hope this will serve as an interesting, if brief, foray into the Haus of Gaga. Also, Love Games… ‘disco stick’… speaks for itself.

Bad Peaches - Part IV

My head throbs all evening, even though I can’t find so much as a bump or scratch on it, and then when I think about the pain it seems to be almost elsewhere, at the back of my mind. This doesn’t improve my usually dour mood and gives me extra cause to confine myself to my tent for the evening. The camp’s young negress cook brought me beans earlier but I leave them to cool and thicken in the bowl, unable to shake the days events from my mind; not just all the upset around the claim and the camp, but Walt’s plans.

I can still manage to sip whiskey from a tin cup, enjoying the sting as it slides down my throat. He is being unreasonable. Why can’t he see? Gold first, above all; then silver; then copper and other metals; then the filthy muck below can be summoned. But Walt has never cared for our product as much for what it can be exchanged for. People would laugh in my face if I tried to tell them I felt the opposite; that the joy is in bringing in a claim – no, the claim.

How can I retire now? With so much gold still out there in this New World; the very thought of someone else blowing holes in the earth and stumbling like a newborn into something tantamount to El Dorado makes me seethe with envy almost to the point of rage, or hernia. Perhaps I am ill. Perhaps Walt is right; it’s just gold, Hank, he’d say.

I reach across the table and pick out a chunk of the yellow metal from among a few samples, holding it up to catch the lamp light, letting the dull glow caress the mottled surface before tightening my grip around it so that the same surface digs into my skin. Gold is forever, you see, you can’t burn it up, its value isn’t in its use – its very uselessness and permanence has made men slaughter each other more than almost anything else. The allure is primal and ancient, like a sparkling fire we contain all to ourselves. Just gold, I release my grip. Just gold, I drop it to the table.

I push away from the table, rise up and, swiping my hat and the whiskey bottle, leave the tent. I’ve weighed my options. Done the calculations.

----------------

I stir from a deep, fitful sleep, confused, with the sun in my eyes and many voices in my ears. My eyes focus abruptly upon the round, corpulent face of Sergeant Laurence; ‘Sir?’ he asks, his voice carrying above the others. I blink.

‘Sir?’ he repeats as I swing my legs up from my cot, still fully clothed, and, pulling my body into a sitting position, I ask what the commotion is about.

‘Mr. Burke, it’s Mr. Haines, sir, he’s gone and fallen into the oil well. Sir, he’s dead.’

I blink again, taking in a sharp and unexpected breath as malignant dread wells up inside my stomach with flashes of memory. I stand up, anxiety giving unrest to my limbs, which the Sergeant takes for light-headedness arising from the news and tries to steady me. I shake him away and push through the onlookers out into the air and then on towards the well.

When I arrive at the scene Walt’s body has been fished out by some of the men, I ask who found him; an albino raises his hand sheepishly and tells me, after further prompting, that he had been told by Walt the night before to meet him at dawn with some of the others to begin repairs to the shaft, stabilising it, readying it. He tells me he was lucky to catch site of the body at the bottom of the shaft, just a patch of arm showing against the blackened rock and settled oil.

I inspect Walt’s body; he almost looks like a burns victim and I am directed to the back of his head, which is caved in like a broken egg, by the albino who offers unlooked for speculation that it was probably from the fall down the shaft. I ignore his prattling as my mind flashes with dread again – I remember arguing with Walt about the oil, Standard and, of course, the gold; but where, here at the shaft? I can’t remember.

‘Probably drunk again and came up here to boast to very the oil itself,’ says the Sergeant. I look up at him expressionlessly and get up from my knees. I nod gravely, ‘That must’ve been it.’

‘At least now,’ says the Sergeant with a pause, ‘you don’t have to sell to Standard, I guess.’ Both his tone and expression are entirely inscrutable.

I turn away from the scene, glancing back for another moment at Walt’s bludgeoned head. Was it a nasty fall; against a rock, perhaps a strut; or was it a pickaxe?

Three men dead and counting.

Bad Peaches - Part III

And then, I can feel dirt… sand… under my fingertips. My eyes open and close swiftly to bright clear skies which I momentarily squint into before I feel heavy rain patter down over the dry ground and myself. I pull myself wearily up from the ground and realise, looking down at my clothes; not rain, not water – oil.

I’m surrounded by desert, people are tearing around and shouting; orders to put out lights, cigarettes, fires; get this or that equipment; and someone is calling me –“Hank”- I look around still bleary from the.. from whatever happened. Again-“Hank!”
A short man blackened and slick with oil grabs my shoulders; Walt Haines, my business partner.

‘Oil, Hank, oil!’ He laughs and wipes his hand over my face laughing and then turning to the ferocious spout of oil towering above us. ‘Christ, we comes for gold and we finds it alright, even if it ain’t yeller.'

Yes. Yes, now I remember. We were digging out here for gold. Digging nearly a week without a find and then… hell broke loose.

I tug on his shoulder and shout, above the torrent of the oil, ‘Walt, what happened to the horse?’

‘What?’ he squints, in the strange manner people do when they can’t hear you, so I shout again. He answers, ‘Horse? What horse? You need a horse we got plenty over at camp.’ He shrugs and turns back to the oil.

Then another call; ‘Boss? Boss!’ I look towards the burly figure shouting over at me from behind some displaced rocks, ‘Over here, sir!’

I stare for a further moment and then, patting Walt’s shoulder, I rush over to the scene. The burly figure, Sergeant Laurence, one of my longest-serving men, and several other workers are crowded around a prostrate figure, a young man, no older than twenty years, I start to ask what the matter is – but then I notice the expanding puddle of blood in the sand, some absorbed by the dry dust, but mostly pooling up near his head, now mingling with droplets of oil.

He twitches a little. But the light has gone from his eyes.

‘Are you alright, sir?’ the Sergeant bustles, his thick moustache, smeared with oil, flicks up and down as he speaks.

I raise my hand and speak curtly, under the circumstances; ‘I’m fine. Get this boy out of here,’ I gesture to the two other men, ‘Get him back to camp.’

‘Doctor?’ asks one.

I shake my head and turn quickly back to the scene, settled chaos now. I make my uneasy way towards the other men, the dry desert earth now an acrid marshland, the Sergeant follows me, presumably his vast bulk allowing him an extra advantage of purchase over the slick ground, and we attend to the other men; asking, is anyone else is injured? a few broken bones, nothing serious, boss; my head still rings; anyone caught down the shaft? Simpkins, sir.

Two dead. My mercenary mind is unable not to begin doing internal calculations; weighing the profit and loss of two dead men against a tide of oil and prospect. The result of the calculation remains respectfully at the back of my mind, for now.
I snap back into attention at the Sergeant’s bellowing; ‘Alright you men, back it up, back to camp. No sense standing around and getting your Sunday suits all oiled up. Let’s move, boys.’

The Sergeant, running calculations in my head again, is surely literally worth his weight in gold; a veteran of the Civil War, like all good officers he knows what his commander would want him to do in an emergency and now freed from the regulations of the military he is able to carry them out without the order from me. The men gather themselves up and form a troupe bound for the camp, like some dark pack of ghouls from a child’s nightmare.

Sergeant Laurence only starts out once he’s sure Walt and I are coming along too. Walt is still grinning from ear to ear, and apparently has been all the while he was gawping at the spout as his teeth are like little liquorish candies.

‘Christ, Hank, this is better than a ton of gold, for sure,’ he says, rubbing his filthy hands together, wringing them with anticipation, or greed.

I sigh, more reserved, ‘The hell we know about moving oil?’

‘We’ll sell to Standard, they’ll pay. Boy’ll they ever pay.’

‘Sure, we’ll sell those bastards this heap of oil and they’ll have every last speck of gold here too.’

‘What’ll we wanna be scrubbing around for gold when we sell to ol’ John D.?’

‘Ol’ John D. will be laughing himself to yet another bank with all the gold under our feet here. I say we wait. We-‘

‘Awh, Hank, we ain’t getting no younger, I’m tired of all this. Don’t you wanna sleep in a bed off the floor? A good meal? Nice girl?’

‘I’m already married-‘

‘Well then you could get yourself another gal, too.'

I glare.

‘Each to his own, Hank, each to his own...’ says Walt as he sticks his hands into his pockets, swiftly taking them out upon realising they, like everything, are covered in oil.

Friday 8 October 2010

Bad Peaches - Part II

After my porridge I take my coffee out onto the veranda, leaving Sal to tend to the dishes and uneaten toast. It is a still, bleak day. There is a calm that suggests a storm but my arthritis would usually have flared by now if that was the case. Arthritis and bad weather are the calling cards of the mining business. The West has a reputation to keep and short of the possibility of a flooded shaft you can’t shut down the operation every time there’s a sputter of rain. I can also take comfort in my arthritis; it is constant evidence of and testament to the punishing work of a lifetime.

I take a few sips of the strong black coffee, another reminder of the camps. I gaze over the surrounding land, ornamental gardens in the foreground extending towards my private, personal golf course. Eighteen holes.

I hate that game.

Beyond the course is the - Wait. No, it couldn’t be. I squint into the distance, but no, there’s nothing there. For a moment, a cruel trick by a degenerating brain, I could have sworn my old horse, Hector, trotted over the crest of that hill.

I look down into my coffee and shake my head, laughing softly out loud to myself.
I place myself on one of the cast iron chairs that sit along the veranda like God’s own waiting room and further sip my sharp, smoky beverage. Pete appears from within the house and, despite my futile protestations, lays a tartan blanket over me and sets down the newspapers on the table by my side. I thumb through these with little interest in the tapestry of corruption and fiscal stumbling that they weave before me. More an exercise in keeping the faculties alert than a lust for current affairs, as we are hearing ‘the news’ more and more referred to, as if we should be thankful they aren’t still flogging the corpse of things past.

Despite the bite of the weather that prevents my reaching a state of comfort I drift in and out of consciousness, battling with my own dreams and the stories from the newspapers, weaving together unlikely scenarios involving golfing with the President in the wilder parts of California. This state of being persists and I battle internally also between the shame of sleeping pre-noon and the stubbornness of not wanting to retreat indoors.

I am awake to the abrupt clatter of china hitting the slate surface of the veranda; a broken handle. I lean forwards to pick it up again, newspapers slide off of my lap, but then my eye is caught in the distance… the horse again. I squint towards the hill, my eyes have held up well, and there is the unmistakable figure of a horse mulling around up there.

Surely it’s just a runaway from a neighbouring farm? But I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look like Hector. I toss aside the blanket and rise to my feet, walking to edge of the platform again; the horse seems almost to stare at me from the hill. I walk along to the steps that lead down into the ornamental garden and I come through the pristine hedges to the lawns, the horse still a couple of hundred yards away, I trek over to it through the moist grass and cautiously make my approach.

I’ve handled horses for as long as I can remember but this one has to be the calmest, confident even, animal I have ever encountered. I move closer towards it and stroke its muzzle gently to avoid spooking it–him, actually.

Uncanny: the same uneven diamond between the eyes as Hector. I softly whisper that name close to his ear whilst stroking the underside of his muzzle. Now I’ve never believed that horses are like dogs and have the capacity to recognise the sounds of names but I’d struggle to say that those huge, glassy eyes didn’t flicker with understanding just then. Wishful thinking of an old fool.

As I pat him more firmly, reassuringly, to cement our trust, the storm I had sensed earlier breaks with an alarming, for both of us, almost tangible flash accompanied scant seconds later with a chorus of thunder that shakes me to my core. Hector II is clearly more substantially affected as before I can offer an ‘Easy boy’ he bucks and tosses me clean off of my feet with an immensely strong limb.

As I am knocked back through the air, during these seconds that seem stretched to minutes, I am first aware of the lack of ground beneath my feet; secondly aware of the sharp dull pain that now pierces through my upper body, perhaps even head; thirdly aware that gravity is working its magic to bring me back down and, finally, the heavy thump when it does which precipitates a further blow, this time to the back of my head, and a wholly unwelcome landing on my spine.

Wednesday 6 October 2010

Bad Peaches - Part I

My skin wretches in relief and muscles relax in my arched back, as the scolding flow from the shower ceases as I twist the golden faucet tight. I stand still and heave a deep breath out as normal feeling returns to my near blistered and long-since worn-out body. I amble out of the recess that houses the shower – wet-room, they call it. Little do they realize that I’ve only just gotten completely used to the idea of a bathroom.

Bathroom. In Dakota (when it was just Dakota) you had a tin bath, and you shared it with your siblings - after your father. (But, most likely, he wasn’t around that particular evening, anyway.) This bathroom is bigger than the house I grew up in. And all this marble. How they forget - I’ve seen Napoleon’s tomb.

I lean hunched against one of the rails they insisted I install – because they think I am so very old, so brittle… so weak. I’m just tired.

I compose myself and dry off my body, which can take a while as daydreaming always comes to me at this point. I wince at the mirror as I catch sight of an old man grappling with one of my monogrammed towels. The wince is, of course, just for show; trying to mislead myself just like the snake oil man of my past misled hundreds of people out of hundreds of their dollars. It’s the hardest thing in the world to concede defeat to time.
I finish with the towel, hang it over the rack – and, naturally, it slides off, but it’s more than my spine’s worth to try and pick it up. They would chide me for a little humour like that. If, that is to say, they were listening.

I scoff. At something, or nothing. This stirs the attention of Dutch, my old bloodhound - as long in the tooth as his master and proving all too well the adage that dog and master grow alike; in temperament and appearance. I drape myself in the heavy toweled bathrobe, letting it absorb the remaining moisture on my skin.
He follows me out into the bedchamber, both of us making slow, weary progress. I sit myself down on the edge of the bed for a breather and Dutch nudges his muzzle against my knee, we share a look of mutual understanding.

Our moment is brought to an abrupt end as my negro valet, Pete, enters and I am filled with the energy that authority provides as necessity. “Mornin’, Mr. Burke,” he says with a familiar nod, I reply in kind. His youngest child has a fever. Nothing serious. His wife has taken her to the doctor.

I rise and Pete lays out the appropriate outfit for the day. He doesn’t dress me, I still reserve that luxury for myself. Pete leaves. Heavy Oxford cotton shirt, dark cords and a thick cardigan to resist the chill outdoors.

I leave my cane where it rests by the bedside. The hip isn’t so bad today. Dutch lays like a half-filled sack by the warmth of the fireplace embers, these days he comes when he pleases. As I leave the room I tap the glass covering a painting of my favourite horse for luck.

I tread down the stairs to commence the first of the rituals that have come to consume my last days. Hours? I wonder. Hope?

Breakfast is, at least, a fairly essential ritual as the quacks tell us it kick-starts the engines and stokes the fires of productivity. Or, at least, that’s what I would’ve told my boys back in the camps. On the other hand, for me personally, you could say it’s a fairly unessential ritual. To whit; what fires? What productivity?

Sal bustles in like a human dessert cart with my ritual breakfast. Porridge oats. Not the sweet ‘n’ creamed kind but salted so as you know you’re eating something. Sal has worked in this house since there was a house; she has fed her porridge, her biscuits and her peach cobbler to three generations of Burkes. Not that my grandchildren scuff the marble with their presence so much as I have to call a mason. But Sal, or so she would have us believe, enjoys no activity more than cooking and I have never been one to deny anyone the light of their days.

I Wish I had a Sylvia Plath


Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

from ‘Lady Lazarus’

“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”

Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963)

Tragedy. Tragedy is a word often associated with Sylvia Plath and, certainly, when she took her life in 1963 that was a tragedy but to call her life tragic is to ignore the almost palpably vibrant work that it produced. One reason for this association is the public obsession with literary biography (which we indulge here, of course) which means that people know more about the lives of Plath, and husband Ted Hughes, than they know, or would ever care to, about her poetry. Another reason for this is that, as the above quote indicates, Plath wrote about death and horror to a great extent and so her work, influenced by depression, comes full circle in the end.

Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1932; after studying at Smith College and a suicide attempt she won a Fulbright scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge where she met Ted Hughes. The two bonded over a love of poetry, and wrote together for much of their early relationship, they married in 1956; the marriage was stormy and Hughes proved an imperfect husband, to say the least. Five months after Hughes and Plath separated Sylvia was found dead on February 10, 1963 from carbon monoxide poisoning (having taken care to shield her two children from the gas), aged only 30.

Despite her short life Plath wrote prodigiously, her annual output between 1956 and her death averaged 32 poems. Her work was influenced by early Dylan Thomas as well as WH Auden and Anne Sexton, and, indeed, Hughes himself. Her first collection of poems The Colossus was published in 1961; however, it was the posthumously published Ariel that brought her great critical acclaim. Mad poets don’t usually write about madness, they write about religion, chocolate, grandfather clocks and cats but Plath did – it was her metier and her poetry is full of lines that smack you around the face, such as:

The day she visited the dissecting room
They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey,
Already half unstrung…


from ‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room’

Plath’s poems can have a powerful effect on the reader and even superficially gentle ones such as ‘Mushrooms’ are filled with menace and neurosis. All of Plath’s work finds the creepiness in things and this is her great strength; showing us nothing so much as the dark side of life (sometimes rather blandly termed ‘confessional poetry’), even if, at times, this can get too much or seem put on.

In conclusion, Plath needs to be rescued from her status as the patron saint of the angst ridden teenage girl; she is not the ‘greatest’ poet or the ‘best’ poet but she is an important poet and deserves to be read.

Notes and asides:

- Plath had her first published poem aged 8.
- Plath was the first poet to win the Nobel Prize for Poetry posthumously for her The Collected Poems in 1982

Key collection:


Ariel (1965)

Key poems:

Ariel
Lady Lazarus
Tulips

Further reading:
The Collected Poems (1981) edited by Ted Hughes

Birthday Letters (1998) by Ted Hughes

The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath

The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991) by Jacqueline Rose

**Originally written for Poets United**

WH Auden and the Addictions of Sin


“All sin tends to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is what is called damnation.”

- Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973)

W. H. Auden was born in England in the city of York (not all that far from where this author sits now) in 1907 and would become one of the most influential poets and greatest writers of the 20th century. Auden grew up reading all subjects equally; science, philosophy and literature and thus spent his first year at Christ Church, Oxford studying biology until he switched to his true calling, English, in his second year. Eventually he came down from Oxford with an unspectacular third class degree (not a first showing his natural flare and lightning mind, nor a fourth showing contempt for the examinations) and spent time in Berlin, indulging an interest in the still fresh work of Freud, before returning to England to teach English.

In 1937 Auden went to volunteer for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War where his closely held left-wing views were forced to mature by the realities of war, though he would always remain staunchly on the left. More war was to come, of course, and in January 1939 Auden went to live in New York, becoming a US citizen in 1946, which was seen by British critics and readers alike as something of a betrayal and his reputation suffered for many years. Between 1956-61 Auden returned England, however sporadically, to fulfil his duties as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, something of a sign of forgiveness and a recognition of his status as a literary great, while wintering still in New York and summering in various parts of Europe (he was only required to give three lectures a year). Auden moved to Oxford permanently in 1972 and died in Vienna in 1973.

Auden was a prolific writer during his 66 years (about 400 poems; his Collected Poems is around 900 pages) though many critics feel that his work after 1939, after he had left Britain for America, never reached the heights he had previously scaled due to intentional over-intellectualism and simply failed to touch our imaginations in the same way. It is certainly possible that the tumultuous events of the first half of the 20th century sparked a perfect synergy within Auden that produced his best work but this author refuses to write-off his later work: About the House (1965) is a masterful exploration of each room of his Swiss chalet (including the lavatory) and associated memories through poetry.

His early work was heavily influenced by T. S. Eliot (who was involved in Auden’s first published works at Faber) but his influences were extremely broad including Thomas Hardy, Gilbert and Sullivan, Dante and Pope, as well as Old Norse ballads and heroic poems. A young poet searching for inspiration or guidance on subject matter or form should toss out all their ‘How to’ guides and look no further than the poems of W. H. Auden; his styles and forms run from the quatrain to haiku, couplets to verse letters. Furthermore, his subject matter not only ran the whole gamut of human emotion but delved into history, current events (of the time) and the lives of great writers. In short he is, in this author’s opinion, a poet for all seasons.

Notes and asides:

- During his lifetime Auden counted among his lovers novelist Christopher Isherwood (A Single Man) and composer & conductor Benjamin Britten (operatic adaptions of Billy Budd and The Turn of the Screw etc.).
- Auden shared a passion for the Icelandic sagas with his friend and fellow Oxford professor, J. R. R. Tolkien, whose ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy he also greatly admired; - indeed, an interest in these sagas was deemed by Auden to be an essential quality of a writer (!). Auden did not, however, share Tolkien’s devout Christian faith.
- Auden had a resurgence of popularity in the 1990s when his poem ‘Funeral Blues’ was read at the funeral in the popular film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994).

Key collections:

Look, Stranger! (London, 1936; US edn., On This Island, New York, 1937)
About the House (New York, London, 1965)

Key poems:


Taller Today, we remember similar evenings (1928)
Lullaby (1937)
Musée des Beaux Arts (1938)
September 1 1939 (1939)
In Memory of W.B. Yeats (1939)

Further reading:

Collected Poems (1994) edited by Edward Mendelson

W. H. Auden – A Biography (1981; new ed. 2010) by Humphrey Carpenter

NB: The title of this piece ‘The Addictions of Sin’ is also the title of a very fine BBC documentary about Auden, which can easily be found on YouTube.

**Originally written for Poets United**

Teppanyaki Manchester

Teppanyaki Manchester
Connaught Building, 58-60 George Street, City

“Never been touched, never been kissed,” was the slogan that our table’s teppanyaki chef underscored our Birthday Girl with once he discovered the nature of the occasion. That we didn’t capitalise thoroughly enough on this throughout the rest of our night is our fault. That we suffered through the indignity of the rest of our meal is, well, also our fault.

A teppanyaki restaurant aims, one can only assume, to recreate the somewhat Spartan conditions of Japanese army encampments by crowding its punters around a large hotplate and on this point Teppanyaki Manchester scores very highly indeed but why should we, in central Manchester c. 2010, want to recreate this atmosphere? Perhaps the answers lies in the 6th criteria of the ‘Taste of Manchester’ website (Teppanyaki is in this discerning guide’s top 50 best restaurants): “motivated and keen people running a quality show”. Quality. Show.

As far as I could tell, our quality show ended after our personal chef had finished banging his spatulas against the hotplate and juggling a few eggs. Naturally I envy him his talent as a juggler but I resent the idea that this allows him to proceed to serve up a generic meal of grilled meat/fish/tofu to the consuming public. The one further show-stopper involved diner-participation and Birthday Girl and a couple of friends were goaded into having a go at flicking an eggshell into the hotplate’s crap-shoot. However, I will say that he created some of the best egg-fried rice I’d ever tasted (probably imitable at home if you too happen to have about 5 dozen bulbs of garlic) and the stern faux-geishas pressed upon us miso soup that was unique amongst its kind for being edible.

The rest of my meal was essentially grilled meat – the sort of meal that you’d probably send back in any establishment that didn’t have a knife wielding chef looming over you from behind an imposing slab of hot metal.

Certainly the staff were “motivated”; chef didn’t spare an eyebrow in getting that plate hot enough to toss our food out onto and I don’t remember anyone actually asking for the bill before the head stern faux-geisha presented it to us. But, of course, teppanyaki is the speed dating of restaurants for the modern world; the place was packed and they never seat less than 6 so prepare yourself for sharing your meal with other mugs but don’t count on being around long enough to really get to know them.

Highlights include rice and Japanese beers, at a price no young professionals or hen parties can afford to shrug at: the set menus range from £26.15 to £41.60 – if I had to go again I would avoid these and sacrifice the erroneous salad, generically bland appetisers and ice cream/fruit dessert.