My Ray Morimura arrived. I bought it at the affordable art fair. Given that my days have become little more than writing at my desk, eating ice-cream and staring at the wall, I figured I should have something nice to look at. I would like to accompany this with prints by Romare Bearden, Ingrid Pollard and Emory Douglas. In fact, I’d like to accompany it with most of the work I saw at the Thin Black Line exhibition at the Tate Britain shortly before I left the UK.

I’m working on a piece for a new anthology set to come out mid-2012. It’s called In Their Own Voicesand will be edited by Helen Ivory and George Szirtes. Fifty or so authors will each talk about their “poetics”. I’m having trouble working out what that means. I understand that “poetics” refers to discourse around the theory of poetry (thank you wikipedia), but every attempt I’ve made to apply the term to my work seems false. So I’ve been concentrating on the tension between my self-identification as a writer and my tendency to perform rather than publish. In doing so, I’ve been reading lots of fascinating essays and article, including a piece by Peter Middleton called “The Contemporary Poetry Reading.” It was written in 1998, so a lot has changed since then, but I love that he begins with a description of a reader on stage and then this:

“This ritual is an ordinary poetry reading of the kind that has become widespread in the past forty years, and is therefore so familiar to most readers of contemporary poetry that its strangeness requires an alienating description to be visible at all. Listeners and poets have had almost nothing to say about this phenomenon despite its importance for financing and fostering their careers, assisting the distribution of their poetry, and even shaping its very forms.” (p.262)

There’s a lot to be said for writing about performance as opposed to published material. For one, the rules are different. There’s no point talking about the usual parts of poetry – metre, rhyme, structure etc – because they’re superseded by the fact that I’m ON STAGE, usually doing something strange with my hands, as I try to make the next thirty minutes as enjoyable as possible. I’m trying to work out a way of talking about the gestures and intonations that almost all poets from a certain scene will use. This pieceby Mairead Byrne is a very funny comparison between the FUN of stand-up comedy and the ANGUISH of poetry readings.However, taking the piss out of poetry is par for the course, and although I find such self deprecating humour useful for understanding the conventions / mechanics / affectations of being a poetry-reading-type-person, I think many of the conclusions people come to about poetry in performance are wrong. Just because we use a mocking tone to talk about ourselves doesn’t mean we must necessarily conclude that what we do is rubbish or lacking. (Most) poets know this, but I wonder about critics and audience members. Specifically, I wonder about people who come up to me afterwards and say that they wish they could read the piece about X, because they need the words in front of them to understand / savour it better. I have never felt this way after a reading – even if I then buy the person’s book. I wonder if other people who are regulars at poetry events find that they can follow the poet, remember the good lines, guess at the form and structure, recognise clever uses of vocabulary and so on without having to see the text. And do other people find that they go to a reading not to see someone once, but to find poets they’d like to see over and over again? This talk of attending a poetry reading and hearing something once isn’t a true reflection of how poetry readings work, nor the reason some people might enjoy them.

Anyway, I thought the above video “An Idea in Search of Light” was apt for a number of reasons. First, the fact that I am trying to see my own ideas more clearly. Second, I like the theme of wonder. Third, I am mining ubuweb for all it’s worth – even if the house killed SOPA, you can bet there are people who’d like to see it destroyed.

Last night was technically my second performance of the year (the first was in New York, at an event with the rather opulent title of “Rivers of Honey.”) Bani and Riduan were cool to work with and I think the final result made for an unusual night out in Singapore. Seeing Riduan’s collection of drums and his loop machine made me want to experiment more with music. Without using the R word, maybe that’s an idea for 2012.

Check out Riduan Zalani here. And Bani Haykal here.

“No heroism, just… basic human decency.”

Last night, the motion for the debate was: ‘Cultural boycott can be an effective, indeed morally imperative, political strategy’. Speaking in favour was Omar Barghouti and Seni Seneviratne. Against, Carol Gould and Jonathan Freedland.

To cut a long story short, the discussion became very heated and there was a lot of heckling. Gould in particular received a lot of laughter and shouts when she talked about the attacks on Israel. An audience member shouted out that people were heckling because you could not compare the thousands of Palestinian deaths with the relatively few Israeli casualties.

Freedland made two very direct points: first, that he was not discouraging of action taken against the Israeli government he regularly criticises, but that a boycott, specifically, will not work in the country he “knows well”. Second, he said that the audience had revealed that they were against the principle of a Jewish state, not just the military actions of Israel. “It might make you feel good,” he said, “but you won’t change anything.” He called it “aromatherapy”.

Seneviratne made several comparisons with South Africa, which is the most obvious; the boycott of South African goods was an act of solidarity which did, eventually, contribute to the end of Apartheid. Despite Freedland’s claim that it was a “comfortable” analogue, she made the point so straight-forwardly that it was difficult to see how Freedland and Gould could bounce back. They didn’t, to be fair. In the face of Barghouti’s clear, articulate and compelling arguments emphasising the boycott as an act of non-complicity rather than heroism, Freedland and Gould were very much on the back foot.

No-one in the audience stood up to make any arguments against the boycott either, except one woman who asked why Jews were also referred to as a homogenous group. In this vein, Gould asked how one could call Israel an apartheid state if Barghouti himself had studied at the university of Tel Aviv – after all, did black people routinely study at Witts in South Africa? Barghouti dismissed any personal definitions of apartheid and stuck to the UN definition. I feel he’d already put the nail in the coffin when, during his speech, he said that the boycott was about ordinary people in allied countries refusing to be complicit in the actions of their government; that this boycott was to be taken up by Westerners because Israel is the only country that contravenes international law, but is still welcomed by countries like Britain and America; and that you cannot stand by and let culture be used as a tool to sweeten controversial military action. Gould said this was a shutting down of dialogue, and Freedland said it would make Israel even more isolated and belligerent because they’d believe that the world hated them. Freedland asked why Seneviratne, as a Sri Lankan, was not rooting for Tamils – or any other country with human rights abuses. She said if they called for a boycott she would happily join them too. Freedland was trying to make her look like a hypocrite, but unfortunately that argument is a bit like asking him why he doesn’t also become a doctor or a general, as well as a writer, if he cares about tackling injustice. Obviously, one person cannot do everything, or wholly support every cause.

At the end of the debate, the audience were asked to raise their hands if they were pro, anti or ambivalent about the current boycott of Israeli academy and culture. The vast majority were pro. Had there been a compelling moral argument that didn’t fall back on Nazi rhetoric, the Anti-boycott side might have been more interesting. Gould was heckled a lot, and this I thought was disrespectful in the context of the discussion, but she didn’t make compelling points in response the way Freedland did.

Barghouti shone and thus he wins the t.shirt. He had an endless bank of quotations at his disposal and nothing ruffled his feathers. As problematic as the comparison is, time will tell whether the result of the boycott will put Freedland and Gould in same position as white pro-apartheid South Africans, most of whom will deny they ever held that position.

I’m blogging for the Southbank Literature Festival. Just put up my first post.

People often say things that would be excellent on a t.shirt, especially at literary events. So that’s what I’m doing on the blog – posting potential t.shirt quotations alongside the write-up. These are the first, from Tim Graves and DJ Connell respectively. There are more to come. At the end of the festival I’ll get two of them printed. Huzzah.

First, I will write up a very long Letter to Potential Applicants, a piece I’ve been thinking about for some time and which will (hopefully) be a useful addition to all the stuff written about Oxford. I am both fascinated and repulsed by my education, unlike Zadie Smith who managed to get over any issues of entitlement / inferiority very quickly. I suspect there are others who have not yet arrived who will be especially prone to this dilemma, so I’m writing for them. Second, I will devote all my time and energy to re-discovering why, exactly, I picked English.

I retain a hazy idea which is sustained by the fact that almost every weekend for the past three years I have taken the Oxford Tube out of the land of the dead and into that of the living; London, as anyone who knows me will verify, has become a shining light on the horizon, where the writers I refer to are alive, with twitter accounts and birthdays I can actually attend. They blog, they fuck up, they are brilliant, they hate fish, they bite their nails, they take on the media. My relationship with Oxford and London is a bastard-paradoxical-conflation of the Iliad and the Odyssey – I’m endlessly trying to get home, and yet home is a locus of battle / revelation from which I’m endlessly returning. Will universities ever embrace the vitality I witness every time I go to London? Will it ever be possible to acknowledge the fact that the subjects they offer move?

I like this paradox idea, and  Zeno’s comes to mind when I think about the fact that while we English students are sitting there reading “Sheepishness in the Winter’s Tale”* a digital revolution is occurring, and yet we are the supposed heirs of the publishing industry. If you don’t believe motion exists, as Zeno did – that is, if you do everything conceivable to disprove and discredit the idea – then yes, we are Achilles scrabbling furiously behind the tortoise of history (if, of course, we’ve managed to get over the cripplingly infinite nature of beginning). So much to read and we must (for whatever reason) do it chronologically! A thousand years to cover in three! All hail the straight line, and let us congeal in stasis.

It’s more complicated than that of course. I am wholly of my education and wholly baffled by it. I’m just bitter because I went to a weight-lifting class and have incurred the wrath of my triceps. My body is a vindictive mother-fucker at times. So is my mind which decided to put it through that trash two days before the exam. Together they have a beautiful relationship, full of stops and starts and sabotage. But anyway, I am partly convinced that all my academic success prior to university was the result of unselfconscious spontaneous creativity. I am wholly convinced I lost that after my first term and need to re-discover it, and that this process of losing and finding will be an unwelcome but permanent fixture for the rest of my life.

In true Chicken Soup for the Soul style:

* It’s a very interesting essay by Paul Yachnin about how Shakespeare uses Ovine life to represent the nature of Leonte’s infanticide.

BEARD!

I know this sounds funny and I know this sounds weird

But I woke to find one morning that my mum had grown a beard.

And my dad was kinda worried and my dog was kinda scared

Especially when we realised that my mother LIKED her beard.

It was long and brown and hairy and striped with black and grey,

And my mother took to stroking it when she had something smart to say.

And she shampooed it and she conditioned it and she kept it very prim

She stood right up to the mirror when she gave her beard a trim.

Now I know that this sounds funny and I know that it sounds weird,

But I woke to find one morning that my mum had grown a beard.

And she didn’t seem too bothered when we went out to the shops,

She just laughed and carried on when people gave her funny looks.

We walked down the fresh fruit aisle and I collapsed with despair

When I saw a friend from school was also shopping there.

And I tried to disguise it and I tried to turn and run,

But before I could prevent it, my friend turned and saw my mum -

And I know that this sounds funny and I know that it sounds weird,

But I looked up and I saw my friend’s mum also had a beard!

It was short and very orange and curly ’round her ears

And she looked very pleased indeed as she picked up a bag of pears.

My friends mum and my mum waved as they walked by

And they spent a while chatting about the products they could try

To make their beards more luscious, more luxurious and thick

And how to wash out gum and jam and things that tend to stick.

And I know that this sounds funny, I know that this sounds weird,

But all the mums in town had started to grow beards.

They set up their own committees and the Bearded Ladies Club,

And they left us instructions on cooking our own grub

Because they had got together and they made it very clear

That they were sick of wearing aprons and being called ‘dear’.

They were sick of washing dishes and hoovering the stairs,

Tired of wearing lipstick and running household affairs.
So I know that it sounds funny, and I know that it sounds weird

But I kinda sorta maybe almost like my mother’s beard,

And when I go to school, I’ve started to impress

Because my mum’s got a beard and now my dad wears a dress.

Apparently not. Now I can’t sing, and I have no talent for instruments despite having tried many, but have never been able to shake the feeling that what I do is a weird, even archaic art which doesn’t fully utilise the voice. Linguists often point out that the vocal tract is used most fully when singing, which suggests we all have a natural propensity, but it’s beaten out of us at school. So I’m all about the speaking voice, which despite the above, I still think is underestimated and underused.

But there’s this idea that a poet is on the same continuum as a song-writer. A little while ago I had the pleasure of reading at Akilah and there saw a woman named Becca do her thing acapella. I was so impressed I wanted to write for her. But when I tried, I realised I couldn’t come up with shit in a particular metre, or come close to the self-contained line that, say, Joni Mitchell, is so brilliant at. I’m gonna have another crack, but I’m messy, me, and all about the enjambment.