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Carol Ann Duffy: Rapture
Right, I’m not going to beat around the bush. Poetry can be really dry and really stuffy written down. It’s probably something rooted in the way we were clobbered over the head with it at school. However, having seen Inua Ellams perform at Book Slam and young spoken word artistes such as Alex Gwyther and Aisling Fahey from a Writer’s Block event earlier this year (where I first saw them) have reopened mine previously closed heart.
Rapture is a stunning, slim book of love poetry written by a lover to a lover in grief, in love, in fear and in hope. Winner of the 2005 T.S Eliot prize, it is a complete submission into the dark chambers and the lightest lofts of this great emotion we all seek desperately for – romantic or otherwise. This insatiable need to be accepted for who we are or to have a self newly discovered as you newly discover another is seamlessly explored by Duffy through beautiful turns of phrase.
The transformative joy of love, of lust are explored in Text:
I tend the mobile now/like an injured bird…
I re-read your first/your second, your third,/look for the small xx,/feeling absurd
and Name:
I hear your name/rhyming, rhyming,/rhyming with everything.
Whilst the darker, more self-consuming sides are explored in Elegy and the mysterious Presents.
Nature is used as a recurrent theme throughout Duffy’s poems. The rivers, the leaves off the tree, the birds and the moon are motifs which are continually returned to (so much so I found it a little tiring actually.)
River, Give and Row are the three I found most moving, the first almost a prayer of thanks, an open embrance of love after a torturous past; the second the fear of giving and having it taken away from you and of an enchanted lover becoming cold and distant and eventually going away; the last,, the immediate change in atmosphere between two in a fight:
But when we rowed,/the room swayed and sank down on its knees,/the air hurt and purpled like a bruise,/the sun banged the gate in the sky and fled…
But when we rowed,/our mouths knew no kiss, no kiss, no kiss…
It’s getting colder. Warm yourself up and Amazon this book.
It’s Just A Ride
In honour of the Village camped in Westminster, below is the best story from the greatest comedian, Bill Hicks.
Quote of the Day
Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
This book is incredible. I cried like a baby after I finished it. Foer tells his story through two generations who have become victims of War, minor players on a world stage yet these are the characters Foer chooses to weave his extraordinary and unusual story around.
Thomas Schell Snr, his wife the Grandmother tell their stories through letters to their son and their grandson and Oskar Schell, a completely enchanting little boy is on a mission which takes him through the whole of New York. These are people whose lives are blighted, torn apart by bombs falling from the sky. Or planes going through sky scrapers and the journey they all embark upon in order to heal. Below is an extract from the book told through one of the Grandmother’s letters to her grandson, Oskar.
I had never told her how much I loved her.
She was my sister.
We slept in the same bed.
There was never a right time to say it.
[…]
I thought about waking her.
But it was unnecessary.
There would be other nights.
And how can you say I love you to someone you love?
I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her.
Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you, Oskar.
It’s always necassary.
I love you,
Grandma
Google WikiLeaks
Book Slam: Dave Eggers 24/04/2010
I have written about Book Slam a fair few times now and instead of prose I’m thinking of writing in pretentious spacey prose-poetry because it must be getting very boring hearing me talk about the ‘cove/cave like quality of The Tabernacle’. So here it is. A review that is not a review but a poor cover up for my lack of imagination.
Malika Booker. BREADFRUIT.
The mic is brought down, small. Fiery.
“At the moment I’m like a bear, I’m hiding behind a desk.” She says, her necklace glinting across the crowd.
She has spun a poem out of a headline, of a group of immigrants, ARCTIC WOLVES, who travelled here and then on hearing they were being deported. Committed Suicide.
They Did Not Want To Go Back.
DAMAGED KITE. The poem about the disappointment her father wields upon her, yet is the dead earth, she continues to harvest.
“He was the corn.”
Her earthy clipped, Grenadian flavoured voice blasts her internal loss, universal.
THE PASSING ON, is of dancing matriarchs and of baby-girl would be’s. Of Aunts rubbing their backsides against the Po-Faced Police Men. Setting a pattern of behaviour which the baby-girl-childs recoil from but will follow.
“Old Spice Island. Why did we leave?”
BLUES FROM MY MOTHER. Of all the things mother’s say to us – of the burden and the love, of the conflicts and the contradictions. The infuriation that leads to us walking away from the cord. Still Tied.
“She is my ancient civilisation crumbling and we don’t want her to go away.
Oh no.
We don’t want her to go.”
Dave Eggers.
Heavy brows, eyes hidden by the bright lights. A Good Egg.
Zeitoun. Giving a voice to the unheard. Caught between the War on Terror and Katrina. The All American Family who happens to be Muslim.
He left his newborn baby in the yard, helping his wife up the stairs.
“How could he be partner to one and protector to another” At The Same Time.
Valentina. Amy. Flora.
Mutters and giggles into the mic. Bounces from the guitar to the Dulsima to the Yamaha.
Pulsing Symbols echo a reflection on the projector screen like sunbursts. Milky gold sun spots.
She has sad, heavy, wet eyes. She frowns when singing her songs of loss.
Furrows frame two glittering black orbs.
Sooz Belnavis: The Red Line
Whilst on a shoot with a friend, I heard this poem from Sooz Belnavis and I thought it was beautiful. So I’m sharing it.
THE RED LINE
The red line that birthed me,
That named me,
Flowered from me.
That punctuated line
That scrolls through my life like a scar.
The red line that draws
Between
Girlhood charms and the arms
Of a man
Old enough to be my father.
The line that is crossed with fleshy sword
And is breached, too,
By my own son
As he pushes through me,
We screaming
In unison,
Into the world.
The line that is written in tomes,
That I am unclean and separated,
Then joined and retied for the next month
And proffered,
As a ribbon of chastity,
Through my daughter.
The line that I race to,
Through childhood and towards freedom.
A Freedom?
When swatting,
I am poked by a deft finger,
To see the line has not yet been broken.
The line that traces our wedding bed.
The line I curse,
They curse,
When it comes and yields no child.
The line I beg for when my body is weak and
Exhausted from bearing too many children.
The line that trickles through my life,
Which sometimes
Swells like an ocean of misery
And a longing to end
Here and now.
The line flushing crimson to the floor,
Another dead child.
The line I stand before my tormentors that brands me barren.
————————-
The line that fed me and birthed me.
I swam through fragrant blood, slippy,
Oiling my way into the outside.
A renting and tearing renders me whole.
I bear the scar,
A line from navel to cunt.
The line that draws me into complexities,
Of a world of avoidances and do nots’.
The line that defines a hollow child,
I must fill in with supermarket glossies and
Predictable stereotypes.
I want to be strong
And do boyish things,
But the line tells me something different.
It speaks of a woman with children and a home.
I want to do girlish things,
But they tell me I am in a Mans’ world
And I must be strong.
The line tells me something different,
It renders me incapable of sensible thought, of movement,
It draws me to my bed,
It draws me inside myself.
They tell me I must be like a doll,
But I am strong,
But broken.
A line divides my heart and my intellect.
The line sometimes renders me insane.
I am a banshee, insatiable,
Screaming for everything and nothing.
It renders me insensible,
I do not know who I am.
But the line tells me something different,
I war with it and it wins.
I am slut, a mother, a whore, a wife,
I am superwoman,
I give birth to the world,
I am responsible for everything.
My smell is infectious,
A red flower blooms in my groin.
Smell it, it is fragrant.
The line says something different,
You are stinking,
You are unclean.
Disinfect the area,
Swab it out.
You are a woman,
You must be clean.
The line tells me something different,
It fed the crops once,
Ebbs and flows with the moon,
Grows fertile as land.
The line tells me something different,
It renders me no better than a cow,
My value dependant on my yield.
The line tells me different.
When you are ripped,
Stinking and empty,
You will be spat on and left
In your own mess.
My flower is fragrant…..Won’t you smell it ?
The line tells me something different.
Coming Up…
A review of Book Slam on Wednesday is due but work and ambition has delayed me thus far from writing up about DAVE EGGERS! Get in. Will do though, it was great.
Lovely
You know what? We Are Ace think I’m lovely and I think they are – well, they’re alright, steady on.Shits and Giggles: The Chins Get Wagging
Above: John and Chris. Awesome decor.
On youtube, Chin Review caused a bit of an online riot. Two upside-down chins, called Tarquin and Julian sit together for their book and film reviews, except this surreal journey into Schindler’s List and Origin of Species (which has spawned the catchphrase ‘Smash Dem Guinea Pigs)’ is stupidly hilarious – and with a combined total of 206 223 hits, there are a hell of load of other people that think they are funny too. Their chemistry is electric and their laughter contagious, they are just two blokes having a whale of a time. All in the name of – CHEESE AND WINE!!
Hello guys, for those of us just familiar with your Chin Review personas, could you introduce yourself to us?
John: Hello, I am Chris. My favourite colour is Yellow Ochre.
Chris: Hello, I am John. My hobbies are Scalectrix.
My brother and I used to talk to each other upside down just as you do on Chin Review so I feel like you jacked our idea (!) Where did the idea for Chin Review originate from, it’s hilarious! Who helps you with the set up? How did you feel when it blew up on Youtube?
It’s one of those age-old ideas that everyone does. We just raised the bar by making jazzy felt suits for our faces. Unfortunately we have to film it all ourselves, which is quite difficult when the blood is rushing to your head. What you are actually witnessing is the slow brain death of two young men.
The best thing about the way that you work is your obvious chemistry, how did you meet and when did you found We Are Ace?
We met at Mrs Curly’s play school. We made some videos with a VHS camcorder when we were very young and We Are Ace is a desperate attempt to recapture our lost youth.
Excluding Chin Review, what are you most proud of?
C: I captured the flag at a paint ball event. I was the second person ever to do it.
The adrenaline was pumping through my veins. Picture the scene, Sheena: I was in a bush, my heartbeat thumping in my ears, paint balls ricocheting around me like tiny spastic melons. My team mates were running past me towards the enemy’s flag. Time seemed to stand still as, one-by-one, my team mates – my brothers – fell in a hell-orgy of screams and coloured paint. Slowly, steadily, and with the determination of Tyra Banks I crawled, Sheena. I became one with the ground, invisible to my enemies, fused with the earth. At one with the soil and sticks. I crept on my hands and face over through the foul stink of death and emulsion. All around me I could hear the muffled cries of my fallen comrades as I slithered over the wet ground like an oily ghost in pursuit of some cloth on a stick. And as I lay in the mud there, Sheena, I saw the true futility of war; that we would be the forgotten ones, that no gravestone would mark the spot where so many of us laid down our lives for glory, for honour, for our country, for a bit of cloth on a stick.
Cloth on a stick.
It was then, Sheena, that I made up my mind. I fought through the existential mine-field of over-used war metaphors and crawled on with a single purpose burning in my heart and coursing through my veins. The flag would be mine, Sheena. I got up and ran forward, the paint balls bounced off me as I ran; none of them burst – I was invincible, and with the will of God at my side and the smell of glory in my nostrils I took the flag and returned unharmed to the base. The cheers of my team mates sounded muffled in my ears as I was overcome with emotion and the rush of adrenaline. That day, the day of the fallen, I finally understood victory and the cost which we all must bear.
War is hell, Sheena. Paint ball is bearable.
Wow, Chris. That was awesome, Chris.
John: I once met Geoff Capes, world’s strongest man 1985, at a Haven holiday camp when I was 7.
Who was your last text from?
John: It was a text from Channel 5 saying that I’d not won the Gadget Show competition. Again.
Chris: It was from my girlfriend asking if our friend Charlie had been sick in the sink.
What was the last lie you told?
“Yes, we have permission to film here.” x10
What plot line of a book are you currently ripping apart with rabid teeth? (I mean, what are you reading?)
John: I am reading a biography of Orson Welles. Awesome Welles.
Chris: I am reading Cormac McCarthy’s “Suttree.” I also have a lot of philosophy books I bought off Amazon which I have never opened. They make me look deep and cool.
What was the last film you watched and why did you watch it?
John: The last film I saw at the cinema was Hook. It was in 1993.
Chris: The last film I saw was Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto”. To keep a fast pace they decided to make all the characters run a lot.
What other projects are you working on at the moment?
There will be a new video out very soon, which has required a lot of post production work (but only took a day to film).
Our output is sporadic because we do it for mere shits and giggles, but that’s the best way; we’re not aiming to please a particular demographic. We make stuff that we find funny, it’s pure coincidence that other people seem to find it funny too.
Addicted yet? Then we have your next fix! Check out We Are Ace’s Youtube page and their webpage
Above: They couldn’t understand why there was a crowd of women heading towards them.
E-terview conducted by Sheena Patel
George Orwell: Down and Out In Paris and London
The only books I ever knew from Orwell, real name Eric Blair, were the obvious; his Stalinist nightmare Nineteen Eighty Four and the surreal, Animal Farm. I was told to read this book as I’m following a trail of breadcrumbs in travelling books.
Down and Out in London and Paris is an autobiographical account of a life immersed in poverty on both sides of the channel. It was brilliantly mislabeled ‘Fiction’ when it was first published thus giving it a broad appeal however it seems to have slipped from mainstream reading lists. Dire mistake. This could be the British precursor to On the Road, however without the women and the wild, American optimism and pulling power of Sal Paradise and Moriarty. We traipse, journey and weave our way through the heaving, noisy and the drunk streets of Paris and their bustling hotels and hostels where rent, the next meal and the congregation of people living, sometimes joyously, hand-to-mouth transform their way to the quiet, formal and migratory living of British vagrants, forced to move continuously on a ‘tea-and-two-slices’ diet. Orwell’s youthful, optimisitic, highly vivid recollections of the people he meets, the money he spends and the beginning of the thought process of the way he sees society works; we realise, nothing has changed at all.
Books Are Dangerous
Whilst staring at VideoJug, the best way to do nothing whilst watching other people tell you how to do things like make Pesto, or How to Kiss Passionately, I was told of a prophetic scene in Fahrenheit 451. Julie Christie stares zombie-like at a huge screen with a woman telling her how to throw a dinner party. After searching for it on youtube, I found something far more interesting instead:
Deciphering A Line
I wrote a review of Ursula Doyle’s Love Letters of Great Men and just recently I found a blog that breaks down the translation from the original text: ‘ever thine, ever mine, ever ours.’
It’s called Jahsonic which is like an Encyclopedia of culture, check it out (though it has closed you can have a rummage around in the archives.)
I’m Spoiling You. No Really, I am.
I went to see Jay Ray (Joshua Radin) at Barfly in Camden (standing right at the front, yeah boi!) and got a treat of man candy in the shape of The Boy Who Trapped The Sun and Alan Pownall. Both were extraordinary, great banter and awesome toons.
Check Pownall here (studiously looking away from the camera. That’s what cool cats do.) It’s a pretty song, acoustic, but you can get the full whack on his myspace page.
The Boy Who Trapped The Sun is a folky artist – totally had the audience is rapturous silence.
A Rising Star: Andreya Triana
In October’s Book Slam session a girl with a mic and a boy with a guitar took the stage. Her curly hair was swept up on one side. She opened her mouth and started singing. You could hear a pin drop for how much she moved everyone with her earthy voice and the gentle strumming in the background. It was hair raising. She sounds like Floetry and Lauren Hill mixed together. Her name is Andreya Triana, her album (produced by the legendary Bonobo) is out this year.
So I thought I’d share it with you.
Banksy: Wall and Piece
From the (In)Famous One Himself – labelled an inspiration or a down-right nuisance, and spawning a thousand spin offs after him it is, not the best or the first but the most well known wall scribbler in the whole of the land. Many believe he has nicked Blek le Rat‘s style but in this country, Banksy is the most mainstream and a by-word for the fringe artiste-cum-commercial dream.
Below: Blek Le Rat’s Stencil Graffiti
Below: Banksy’s Rat
For fans, Wall and Piece is a wonderful way to get into the mind of this media savvy walking spray can; the book includes anecdotes such as running from the scene of a robbery on Portobello Road while doing his Che Guevara across the bridge and commentary on his more outlandish stunts like almost but avoiding getting shot near the Gaza Strip and putting dummies dressed in Guantanamo Bay prisoner uniforms in Disney Land. As most of his work is either in expensive loft conversions, fancy corporate soho offices or in galleries and there doesn’t seem to much of it on the street anymore, the collection of graff work in this coffee table sized coaster is now a memorial to a street memory.
If you want to read more about the origins of stencil graffiti and the battle between Blek Le Rat and Banksy then check out this guy’s blog: Atticusthird.
Jack Kerouac: On The Road
Above: Neal Cassady aka Dean Moriarty and Jack Kerouac aka Sal Paradise
I have a confession to make and I am truly ashamed. Once, last summer, I picked up this book and after reading two pages I dismissed it as a teenage boy angsty novel and put it aside and never picked it up again. After having a conversation with a Significant Other, I was persuaded (through intense arguing) to give it another go. So I picked it up. Re-read the pages that made me dismiss it to the dark depths of the tried-and-tested land fill and kept reading and reading and reading so much and getting so involved I’d forget where I was.
Meet Sal Paradise and the unstoppable, uncontrollable, lovable, ruthless and breathless Dean Moriarty aka Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, immortalised forever as twenty year olds grabbing a firm hold of the arteries of the America, embodied by the endless road, the endless country and their adventures of travelling ‘Further’ into the unknown. They turned their frantic, burning existence into a kind of poetry that spurned the movement of a generation to the Beat, transformed Kerouac into a living legend in his lifetime and made countless teenagers pick up a bag and ‘lessgo.’
From Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac:
The spinning text, the endless sentences and the breathless excitement of music, of rhythm and of Beat, for the beautiful sake of moving has made this novel a fundamental building block in American culture. The Generation who pushed the American Dream to the limits, and sought it not through self-improvement but through living on the margins, being sexually promiscuous and putting stock in life and interpretation, experience and beatnik friendship. There is a question that this lifestyle is not sustainable for a long period of time for how long can you move? How long before your friends put down roots in their rootless existance? How long before you run out of land?
It has given me the itch and the longing to strike out and leave for no good reason but to be on the road.
Pick the book up, put all your possessions down.
And Go.
Quote of the Day
1 John 2:19
People leave you because they are not joined to you. And if they’re not joined to you, you can’t make them stay. Let them go. And it doesn’t mean that they are a bad person it just means that their part in the story is over. You’ve got to know when people’s part in your story is over so that you don’t keep trying to raise the dead. You’ve got to know when it’s dead.
Sorry, you take nice photographs – sometimes!
Just thought I’d direct you to a World Sketches, a blog that documents places Pete sees on his travels.
He wrote something quite cheeky on my About page which is how I discovered his blog, but I’m really glad he did. With pictures like this:
and this:
ed. Ursula Doyle: Love Letters of Great Men
What came first: the book or Sex and the City: The Movie?
Well, it was actually the movie. According to the Telegraph, after fans watched the film, booksellers were hounded for a copy of the book Carrie reads to Mr Big. Although the letters are real, the compilation never existed and so publishers went to work.
Yes I am a fan and when I saw Love Letters of Great Men, I nearly passed out. (What can I say? The avocation of blind consumerism becomes me.) Compiled by Ursula Doyle, this collection of beautiful prose and poetry comes from the heartfelt hands and minds of great men – or at least Great men as some of the men, well, weren’t so great. However, it will make you hanker after the times when declarations of love by feathered pen and parchment paper were all that connected men and women separated by great expansive seas. It will make you want to wish away these present days where romance has been reduced to an e-card and instead of wishing and wondering where your Significant Other is in the world, we now have the attractive prospect of pinning down your Dear Heart’s location with Partner Tracker advertised on MTV.
This book is a beautiful collection of letters; keep an eye out for Robert Browning’s letters – nay, his poetry, to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. His words are so lyrical you’ll wish the blur of limbs and lips you picked up at the pub would text you like that.
I Might Just Pull A Gweneth
Quote:
“The stuff to the left is our snazzy new featured post area, basically the most interesting stuff going on around the site with a nice visual slug from each.”
Is this the highest accolade or what!
Musicians Making Merry in Moving Machines. Genius.
Just So Films was founded by three filmmakers who rather brilliantly had the idea of adding:
To one of these:
And turned out with this:
They have had everyone from Seasick Steve, Mumford and Sons and William Orbit sit in the back of a black cab and sing to a camera. So simple and absolutely addictive.
Check out their website Black Cab Sessions and fritter away the rest of your time not already spent on Facebook.
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