Hometown

It's strange going there now. I don't belong at all. It's all changing anyhow. Don't know anyone. Don't know where to go. No STIMULATION. So I sort of hibernate and force myself out at irregular intervals. It's ok though. But you can't go home again.

This is something new in the area though. The local UFO. (Actually its the roof of the Schwimmenbad)

Human beings and being human

Funny how with the onset of Christmas people relax. Though to some extent it's a greedfest, it does remind me how it's not necessarily the most difficult thing in the world to be nice and friendly. Maybe I've changed. Generally I don't find people all that interesting. Part of me would still prefer to be a hermit, in the middle of some woods or on a mountainside somewhere. But even if I was, I would probably still miss Christmas.

So my resolution for this Xmas and next year is to try and be more human. However inhuman (mechanical, conformist, rude, aggressive, addicted etc etc etc) others are around me. Smile more. Talk more. Care less about what others think. Accept myself as I am. And have a good time...

Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?

( from Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book)

Liverpool in the 60s

I'm fascinated by old photographs of Liverpool in the sixties. Partly because these guys were around in those days, but also because those little details - the old tramlines, the cobblestones for example - are things I can remember. Just about.

Now it's so long ago it looks like a different world. But Dylan and Lennon and so many others, unbeknownst even to themselves, were beginning to transform it. Appropriate perhaps that it was the decade colour began to predominate over black and white. But in these shots you see the old world of the war, of industry, which still felt so solid and heavy and permanent.

It was peaceful and ordered and claustrophobically static in those times. Dylan and Lennon were looking for a way out and showing a way out. Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848, but for those of us beginning to grow up then, his words were only just beginning to resonate:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

It's a freer world, but a colder one in some ways.

Paris..

... or the day trip that turned into a weekend. It was fun. As planned, I managed to see the Gainsbourg exhibition, the Maison Europeene de la Photographie and Sainte-Chapelle, and meet up with one of my former students. And since I managed to miss the train home, ended up in a bar listening to metal bands.

I never quite got white the French admire Gainsbourg so much. I find his music very thin. The latter part of his career seems to have been about being a success as a dirty old man. But the exhibition was interesting enough, revealing him to be more of an intellectual and self conscious artist than I'd thought. A bit like Andy Warhol, only uglier. I think the French like him more for his couldn't-give-a-shit attitude rather than anything else. And pulling all those women.

The Maison was disappointingly smaller than its website would have led you to believe but nevertheless contained four good exhibitions. Good press photos by Goksin Sipahioglu, but for me the highlight was Sabine Weiss. The name hadn't meant anything but some of the pictures were familiar. Especially that horse! Which was exhibited in a really large print. And deservedly so, it was probably the best pic in the entire building. I can see she could be accused of sentimentality perhaps but I feel she manages to stay just the right side of it. People and faces predominate, and a genuine warmth and interest in her subjects comes across. Perhaps there's something too constructed and deliberate in some of the other things - the 1950s Paris fog pictures for example - but I liked it. All of it.

And Sainte Chapelle was just too good to be true. Pity I had to go when it was crowded, could have sat there for hours and looked for so long at that stained glass that I would have got a very sore neck.

So after that whistle stop tourism it was great to have a get together with Emilie. And Clothilde turned up unexpectedly as well. Chatting so much I didn't make the train, ended up spending an evening listening to heavy metal bands and sleeping on Emilie's couch - not for long, as I had to get up at five. Good good good. But I'm tired tired tired...

New phone

I didn't want a new phone. I didn't need a new phone. But they kept calling me up and I kept telling them to call back because I was busy. But eventually I gave in. It wasn't costing anything after all.

And then when I got in on Tuesday there was a note to say they'd left it at No 21. So I knocked on Tony's door (Tony is an actor, taxi driver and general busybody, but he's ok) and sure enough he had it.

It's smart. Even though it took me about half an hour to get the back off so I could put the battery and sim card in I was quite excited with it. Nice design, nice shape, nice camera.

So I thought why not put some music on it. Fiddled with it to insert the USB lead but it just would not fit. Poked and prodded and drove myself nuts, trying other leads, violence, subtlety, screaming, all to no avail.

Is it a design fault? Am I missing something? Oh I know I need to ask somebody, or check the manual, or take it to the shop. I shouldn't take it personally I know. But Nokia, 3 Mobile - I want to take some violent revenge on you! For depriving me of something which I never particularly wanted in the first place!

Rothko

Took myself off to see the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern. Hard to sum up my reactions - it was too busy to really be able to relax and take it all in properly. All I can say really is seeing these paintings for real for the first time is there is certainly more to them than I thought. But what more is harder to define. He could make a landscape using two colours, one block of grey and one of black. And I do mean a landscape, the eye forces you to see the imaginary concrete in the abstract, or so it seems. (Whether it was his intention is another matter.)

But I don't want to get into art theory. They are just good to look at, good for quiet contemplation. And I love the immensity and scale of the really big ones.

Suspend thought, suspend judgement, just look.

Reading a bit about him it's clear that he was a deep thinker about what he did - but here are two relatively simple quotations which I liked:

"Pictures must be miraculous."

"Silence is so accurate."

Oh and thanks to Sui for the free ticket!

L'autre monde

My recent Camino continues to reverberate: my song 'A Bus Stop in Galicia' was one effort at making sense of it, trying to make sense of the 'spiritual' element. Though I was scoffing at superficial new-agery there, I was trying to also give a sense of the elusive positivity that seems to have flowed from it, but one shouldn't try to explain these things too much.

Then unexpectedly (the way the best things always happen) a contact who has an automatic quotation generator on his email sent me this. Which seems to sum it up perfectly:

Il y a un autre monde, mais il est dans celui-ci," says Paul Eluard. To speak of another world has, historically, been to commit to a mystical or religious agenda, and to a province of wishful thinking normally inhabited by children and the simpleminded, as opposed to the real, factual, less deceived world of grown-up rationalists. A good deal of argument has gone into defining terms such as "mystical," "religious," and "rational," but Eluard's remark points us in another direction altogether: the other world is here, now, but we miss it every day: we see what we expect to see and we think as we (are) expect(ed) to think. Eluard's secular program was to uncover the autremonde—the nonfactual truth of being: the missed world and, by extension, the missed self who sees and imagines outside the bounds of socially engineered expectations—not by a rational process, as the term is usually understood, but by a reattunement to the continuum of objects, weather, and the other lives that we inhabit.
— John Burnside
(from the Summer 2005 issue of Poetry Review and the May 2006 issue of Harper's)

I wouldn't describe my re-attunement to things in precisely those terms, but something of that nature is certainly happening.

Going deeper....

(Photo of Eluard and some of his surrealist pals by the incredible Lee Miller)

Party time

It was supposedly the company Christmas party. I don't know why I went. It was a 'corporate event' replete with self-regard and self-congratulation on the part of those in command and control. In fact it reminded me of a political party conference - the only difference (and the only consolation) was the free booze.

Everything of this nature aspires to the condition of showbiz and the attention span of the TV watcher. References were made to recent electoral changes in a foreign state and cheered by British citizens. Well I suppose what's on TV is more interesting than G.Brown and his gang.

Fighting to be heard against the voices of self-congratulation ringing in my ears were lines from some old songs. "I thought it was the UK, or just another country"; "Yes it's time for the Dr Goebbels show".

Oh I am still an old punkrocker and proud of it. So much so that I left before the dancing started. If it ever did.

Why 'underwater'??

It started as a poem title. And then it cropped up again in some song lyrics. The idea of plunging in, of leaping into a new element. The idea of depth. The metaphor is commonplace enough. It seems to be a useful one for a lot of ideas and experiences I've had lately, and things, hopefully, still to come.

But I still don't like getting wet that much, on the literal level. But, as the song lyrics say, "You can't avoid the heavy rain."

Or as Randall Jarrell said: "A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great."

I knew I shouldn't have...

Started this I mean. First post and I manage to offend somebody. Roci I adore your surveys, I just thought the idea about famous people was a little erm..silly. Ish. But I will always answer your questions. Soy aficionado, no?

And guten Abend David, nice to see you looked in. I must follow your blogging when I get a minute.

More tomorrow. Maybe....

In principio

Ha ha, I had to start this just so I could post a comment on somebody else's (Ingvill's, hi)

Never wanted to, I will only irritate people...

Today I am in conceited intellectual mood/mode. My Spanish colleague sent a silly survey around asking "Should we have someone famous working here?"

I answered:

No thanks! 'Fame’ is a construct used by late capitalism to distract the people from their true desires, keep them in their place and assuage the anxieties of the anomie of fractured modernity. It is more important to celebrate the autonomy of the "ordinary" individual. ( From my thesis "Hello! - Celebrity culture and the coming apocalypse" University of Old Holborn 1997)

But actually I mean it! The old situationist is as unreconstructed as ever...