J.D. Salinger

Blow me down, if J.D. Salinger 'Glass Family' stories aren't the most intense, immediate, mysterious, theatrical and hilarious stories I've read in ages. I've always said I wanted to read Catcher in the Rye, but like so many other things, never did. Thanks Kate, for lending me Franny and Zooey and forcing the issue. The way Zooey spouts off new age eastern philosophy and then in the same breath berates his mother while she watches him shave is brilliant. I recommend Salinger to anybody. Of course, you have already been there haven't you, being far less stupid than me?

Ludmila’s Broken English

Vernon God Little was one of my favourite books of 2004, so I went into DBC Pierre’s second novel, Ludmila’s Broken English expecting a lot, which is after all, what the second novel is supposedly about: expectation. I feel for Pierre in this novel, he obviously tried so hard to upstage VGL, adult characters, several settings, conjoined twins, a civil war in Ubilisk (a fictional Eastern European country). This had all the makings of something great.

The book has Pierre’s trademark metaphorical wizardry and odd, combative characters. The settings were great, with a kind of underbelly feeling - a rundown healthcare facility, seedy nightclubs, a wartorn town.

Ultimately though, the novel is let down by its action. Where VGL was tense and looming, a road trip to disaster, LBE seemed for the most part stuck in each scene. It chopped between two recently released twins in London and Ludmila, a young woman trying to escape poverty in Ubilisk. I’m not sure if this alternating format worked for Pierre, just as I was getting into one scene it would jump to another, the result was that nothing seemed to happen for a long time. I wasn’t really interested until the twins actually hopped on a plane and headed across Europe and the two worlds met. Up until then it seemed like a slow build-up and just didn’t have the pulling power that VGL (or most other novels) have.

It is unfair to compare the first and second novels of course, but even on it’s own I would have struggled to finish this book. And indeed, I did have to force myself. The blood spattered ending was bizarre too; characters suddenly dead who had been with us all the way through and a strange resolution which I won’t give away.

I liked Ludmila, she was obnoxious, intelligent and naive and seemed destined for disaster, much like Vernon in Pierre's previous novel. Although she always seemed like a secondary story to the twins, and I think here might lie one of the problems of the book. She seemed like the true heart of it and I don't think Pierre gave her enough texture to make her (and the book?) really come alive.

For me DBC Pierre is one of the most original writers around, and I'm willing to give him another couple of books' grace to really hit that sweet spot. Roll on the next one.

Somebody Loves Us All

By Damien Wilkins (VUP 2009).

We talked about this at our newly formed book group last night. So I can't claim all of this, but we seemed to be in agreement about most of what was said.

Damien is of course a tutor at the IIML, so we all struggled to not hear his voice while reading it, or in my case imagine him and his wife as the main characters!

For most of this book not a lot happens, Paddy seems to have it together more or less. His mother has a strange accent related affliction, but it's not life threatening, Paddy buys a bike in a kind of second mid-life crisis, but this doesn't really annoy anyone else, his step-daughter doesn't really like him, but they tolerate each other, the father of a former patient and long-time listener suddenly disappears, but turns out to be on holiday. So what drives this book? It's a good question and I'm not sure I know. I guess for a lot of it we are waiting to see what bad stuff is going to happen, which can only carry you so far. There are several ominous moments, but they always seem to be averted at the last minute. And this seems to be a continuing theme through the book, that narrowly avoided disaster; the disruption of expectation. It seems like life in this book is a series of near-misses until eventually one doesn't miss, and this is likely to happen when you least expect, and it's about what you do during those near-misses that counts. Not what happens when the big one comes.

There is something in there about communication, about connection. What is that people are waiting for? Why don't they say that thing now? Paddy lives next door his mother, but hardly ever sees her, when she suddenly gets this condition, he feels it's better to leave her alone, live life as normal. He talks to the father of a former patient every week on the phone, they are hardly friends, but somehow this small routine is important to Paddy. I was never sure what all this added up to, but it seemed relevant. Is it something about all those things in life that don't add up to anything?

In a lot of ways this is a bit of an anti-story and I think in lesser hands it would have been a disaster. A woman who wakes up one morning speaking in a French accent is hardly a premise with longevity and Damien wisely avoids making that the central story. And having no real dramatic arc is a bold move, instead he brings us into the lives (and the minds) of Paddy and his family. And this is what drives the book forward, the mis-communication, the odd moments, Paddy's interpretation of it all. The peripheral characters like Tony Gorzo, Camille and Iyob. They are hilarious and all bounce off Paddy's own baffled view of the world and himself.

There is a lot in this book and I was never bored. Someone at the book group said they weren't so into the cycling scenes, but I didn't mind those, maybe being a cyclist myself helped there. Damien has such great characters and always something underlying, something subtle grating on the interactions, that we read on waiting for it all to erupt. Luckily Damien never lets that happen.

This passage seemed to say something about Damien's style:

There were other divisions. He the bathroom, but she vacuumed. He took things to the post office but she managed their join bank account, keeping an eye on the automatic payments and all other bills except those connected with their various insurances which were somehow his area despite the fact he'd overlooked a double payment on their car insurance for several months. This had all developed mysteriously, in some cases with a kind of illogic, and lying in bed, stunned by the dream he'd just had, it was nice to gather up a few domestic details.

I am not a man...I am Eric Cantona

Looking for Eric is a Ken Loach film about a middle-aged football obsessed postman named Eric who is having a bit of a shit time. Luckily the philosophizing football legend, Eric Cantona, stops by for a joint and chat. This sets Eric on the path of redemption.

It was a weak story. There were heavy themes set up: youth gangs, men who walk out on their families, panic attacks, which was all fine and had the basis, if not a little melodramatic, of a good story. The problem was, all this was resolved in incredibly juvenile ways. I won't give it away, but let me just say, there is no way a psychopathic gangster would back down because of THAT! I guess if was a comedy, but it is a Ken Loach film, and surely those kind of grim situations need some kind of meaningful resolution?

Luckily, none of that matters, because Eric Cantona, the man, the actor, the legend was absolutely incredible. Oozing cool, style and wit, he was the movie. In fact I kind of wished he was the main character. Loved his beard too, are all French men so cool? Probably not, but Eric is.

It wasn't a bad movie, funny enough and saved by Cantona and the glimpses into Manchester life, but let's just say it had a few holes in the defence.

Video of Eric Cantona's infamous philosophy

Balls. Yay!

4 days after hand in and the sun is shining and so are the birds and so is...whatever, I'm done.

Balls

Only 4 days to go till folio hand in. I find myself in a weird space between not having enough time to rewrite the whole thing (I wonder if anyone has ever tried?) and being sick of tinkering. In fact I constantly have to check that I am not over-editing and removing anything that was interesting about the poem in the first place. It is easy to do that, I think, the bits that your editor brain seems to think don't fit are often the lines that make a poem wonderful. The clunky, unfortunate, slightly baffling sections. Sometimes happy accidents, sometimes where the sound of the words have taken over from the narrative. It's tempting to try and smooth all those parts out, make some kind of homogeneous ball.

I saw on Myth Busters a few weeks ago, there is a craft where people polish balls of dung into shiny ornaments (these are called dorodango or happy mud balls in Japan). It takes days of polishing with your hands - apparently it is the oil from your skin that helps bring up the sheen as well as help draw out the excess water, but eventually you get this pretty brown ball that looks a bit like glazed pottery.

Shoot an Editor Day

This is a message from the Overactive Editor Gland Degenerative Disease Society

In today's world, 1 in 5 people live with or are an Overactive Editor.

Over three thousand terrible manuscripts were attributed to this disease in New Zealand last year. Imagine what it is like in places where clean paper is freely available and ink is cheap?

We all shake our heads and say, but what can I do? How can someone like me make a difference?

Well now you can...

OEGDDS International has organised 'Shoot an Editor' day on the 10th of November and we want you to pull the trigger.

Dan Brown, author of the famously erotic movie - The Da Vinci Code, says:

"If just everyone of us shot just one editor, books like 'Stranger in a Strange Land' and 'A Lifetime of Love: Poems on the Passages of Life' by Leonard Nimoy might have had a chance at a better life. A life where words like 'tootle-oo' and 'farness' can exist without threat of violence or ridicule. How many years must this vicious cycle of Over Editing go on?"

Please shoot your editor this 'Shoot an Editor' day and give generously.

And please, please don't let him trick you into changing the title. Again.

Potential Titles

First Born, Then What?

The Wolf Market

Idea for a Film (Short?)

Witnessless

The Arborist

On Parole

Tasseography

Motive

The Evangelical Book of Unconvincing Certainty

The Evangelical Book of Convincing Uncertainty

Wolf Music

Rebuilding

Folio is being rebuilt at an excruciatingly slow pace.

I've got about 25 pages settled in, so it should be simple just to spatter a few more in there, but no.

Haphazard rewriting, a bit of a mess of ideas overall and no real structure to speak of. What fun!

The Arabic Star

Let's talk fonts. Who votes for Palantino? I like the space it has. This place seems to have a reasonable range of free serif fonts. I think I'll look for something similar to Palantino, but less Microsofty.

My biggest break through has been to go for the six pronged asterisk, otherwise known as the Arabic star.

Also most of the books I've been looking at seem to have different justifications depending on the overall width of the poem. I like that idea too. There is nothing uglier than having a short lined poem left-justified with an ocean of white space between it and the edge of the page.

And of course have decided to go for slightly larger font titles, bolded and title-cased. I used to do lower case titles (except for the first letter), but this looks too grungy I think and doesn't really separate the title from the poem. Makes it look a bit like a first line. When you are as rubbish at coming up with titles as I am you need to keep them as separated as possible.

Think about it people.

Form

Michael Palmer talks about the difference between the 'laws of form' and the 'rules of form'. The latter being able to be learnt, seemingly fixed and in many cases not particularly exciting. While the former, can never be learnt, but also can never be broken if writing good poetry. I like to think of the 'laws of form' as being completely different for each poem. Where one poem might require couplets and end rhymes, another might want to be a single stanza of variable lines and syncopated enjambments. You can't learn what those might be, in fact I don't think you can even plan it. Until you start writing the poem it will be formless. Until a conversation, a subject or a tone starts to emerge there are no laws. It's a blank page after all and what form do you put on a blank page?

From The Danish Notebook (quoted in Active Boundaries. New Directions, 2008) which he was apparently asked to write as a kind of journal, 'connecting the dots', type thing:

I once thought I should find a form for this little book you have asked for, but now it seems unformed would be better, a book at fault. Displaced. I accepted your invitation because it seemed an impossible thing for me to do, against my nature as a writer. Of course one should never have such a nature. If you discover that you do, you must erase it, as violently as possible. Coup de torchon. Clean slate. One of our cats, the apricot-colored one, is sleeping on the computer as I write this. He doesn't give a shit one way or the other. As long as the computer stays warm.

He goes to say that the book did eventually find its own form "beyond conscious intent or design" that exposed "hidden memories and patterns." That last little bit about the cat is indeed against Palmer's nature. I've never seen him write anything so mundane and confessional before. It was very exciting. I think I'm going to have to try and track down that book. Hopefully it's not out of print.

I think pattern is good way of looking at it. Where is the pattern in this? And there is no pattern that can be imposed on an unwritten work.

Passive resistance

Three things have happened lately that have made me think about how politics (not sure that is the right word) interacts with poetry/art and if I should be doing more of that, which in short I think I should. So...

1. I've been reading Michael Palmer's essays in Active Boundaries (New Directions, 2008) all of which so far are as much concerned with politics as with poetry (in his mind they don't exist without each other I feel). He talks about George Bush, the Iraq ware, Vietnam, The Cold War - all the things that shaped who he is/was as an artist I think. He is so passionate about it and yet from his poetry, you would struggle to find an overt political subject. But it seems if he is always thinking about it working on what he seems to feel is a 'war on language'. So that was really interesting.
2. I went to the start of the World Peace March (it starts in NZ and goes around the world in 90 days), which was also a celebration of Mahatma Ghandi's birthday. I'm not what you'd call a peace activist, but I'm certainly a pacifist and I think passive resistance is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen (I have seen it on a small scale and it's impossible to beat). So I was incredibly interested in that.
3. I watched the Tua vs. Cameron boxing fight which made me feel sick. I am not against sport or competition or even aggression in the context of those two things and the actual boxing match was not such a bad thing. I think it was the spectators that bothered me the most, the baying for blood. The comments after the match - how wonderful it was, how sensational - it had been a particularly short and brutal knockout. Cameron was out of it by the end of the 1st round and at the start of the second Tua had him on the ropes and was pummeling him even as Cameron's legs collapsed and he fell to the ground. So by anyones standards it wasn't a tense battle between two great sportsmen, it was one guy getting the shit kicked out of him by another guy, but that's what these particular spectators wanted. And while I am loathe to draw the connection between that and greater issues of violence - international war, domestic violence etc. Maybe it does start in places like a boxing match at mystery creek?

So I guess I'm saddened by the whole thing. But then what do you do with that? How do you write a good poem about it. Palmer might use the bullshit hype/marketing speak of the fight promoters to illustrate something (however obliquely) that way, but what should I do? Describe the fight in detail? Describe everything about the fight except the fight itself? Talk about what I would have been doing instead of watching it? Run with the words 'Mystery Creek'? Have a dream? Talk about hippos and dinosaurs? I dunno. My poetry is often meaningless and that seems to be my violence, the thing that saddens me the most.