July 4, 2012
What the student might have meant to write:
“Both Shakespeare and Orwell use the emotion of love to interesting effect.”
What the student wrote:
“It is also interesting to see how Shakespeare and Orwell make love.”
[If you have any similar examples - typos, Spoonerisms, unintentional smut - perhaps you'd like to share them with everyone.]
May 9, 2012
(“We can write what we wanna write… we gotta make ends meet before we get much older.”
Yes, reader, yes. The title and opening quote of this post come from “You’re The Voice”. Perhaps, after gigoid, a pearl from aural grit.
I quite like it, though, really. Bit of a ‘God’s jukebox’ thing, I think it was, the other morning, tunes bustling into earshot with an important message, “talking here to me alone”. John Farnham (and four-person songsmith committee)’s monster triumph of the spirit hit features lyrics that might be “really about” self-expression, world peace, or just trying to create a pop song, with metaphorical guns being held in people’s faces, demands of the (highway)Man, this “you”, these “we”.
It has been a long-standing understanding of mine that all writing can be interpreted as being about wrestling with the act of writing in some way. Well, words can be interpreted as being “about” pretty much anything, obvs. Linguistic ambiguity, like beer, is cause of and solution to the world’s problems.
I mean, though, the nub of my crux, what am I actually on about? I write about writing a lot. I write, when not posting here, about how much “writing” I’m not doing, or think I’m not doing, when I am, in fact, writing. I get stuck. I agree quite a lot with BS Johnson’s assertion that ‘Telling stories is telling lies.’ I’m fascinated by writing in itself, not so much by content, a lot of the time. I love the way words work, that people like to work with words. I love when people think they’re being really clever with words, sentence structures. I love when they manage it and when they fall on their arses. I love how different concerns can be foregrounded so vehemently, or drily, or comically/badly, subtly. I love and hate the absurd consequences of words, personally and globally. Words, these weird collections of glyphs, strings of sounds or characters, that people take so seriously, that are used to justify or excuse, or predict or prevent, command, forbid, caress and charm.
Words stop me writing, a lot of the time.
The writer Will Self is enjoying an opinion gig at the BBC, where he’s undertaking a project to introduce greater lexical variety to the populace through his postulates. I agree with what he says in a lot of ways, but then I’ve always been a bit of a Word Babcock, adjusting my glasses at the knowing reference, digging the sesquipedalian shuffle. Anyway, Self has been among the recent input – with the teaching – getting me thinking about gigs, about my interests, about writing, what I want or need to write about. This activity that, when I let it, helps me work out meaning in life.
For the first time in as long as I can remember, I am writing happily, without as much of the self-consciousness, apathy or loathing that stops me from bothering. Just getting it out, y’know? As the Pope said to JFK.)
So, yes, that, and, I’m going to be a dad in October.
February 21, 2012
(Apols to RZ, like, 50 yrs ago)
Like, 06.40 or something – he’s guessing – and lazy Henry is waking up in the bathroom the morning of the Grand Male Grooming Treat Birthday Present Spectacular (Guaranteed Hot Towels, Face Massage, Flame On! &c), bought with love and deep meaningfulness by Alain ‘Sipping’ Bull and Mike O’Trophy, his two favourite correspondents and long-term advocates of the entire removal of the large beard growing like tubers since about November 2011.
‘Y’know,’ Henry says aloud in the bathroom mirror, contemplating his features, ‘I read in the Kindle Sunday non-papers that facial hair is what all the A-list boys are sporting, so my first reaction was predictably contrary…’ He percusses out an over-elaborate laugh for every syllable of the last two words, wide-mouthed mugging, then his shoulders and features relax. ‘Plus it’ll be a weight off my face. So that’s one of them taken care of!’ His knowing asides into the electric toothbrush twitch his mouth again briefly, and he grabs a pad and pen for the rest of the revelation, seeing as he’s just off the john, letting it all fall out… ‘As above, so below… little high, little low, and today lazy Henry don’t need anyone’s help to know which if any way the wind blows, no sir, no,’ he thinks, wafting a hand, striking a match and trying not set his pad alight. ‘I’m blaming it on the Chinese food or the boogie or the Queen and her Government or anyone but me… Trumper for Men! Hmmm, bring it,’ he says as he reads off the bottle of scent, pondering his imminent future, soon to be fresh faced and full of wonder, heading out the bathroom door, intent.
‘December was fine,’ he thinks, chewing his pen and sat in his best seat by the window, ‘winter beard has been keeping us warm, but then January swept in the new, and February has come and nearly went…’ and in a sudden deceleration, his anxiety parachuting out behind, he thinks ‘Here we are, now, again.’ Teeth set and brow knits. Sat looking at his netbook, Henry gets all performance anxiety, beside himself, running his fingers through his beard, twirling. Feeling the whole instantaneous digital age imminent singularity blues thing, he instead falls to reading Tarantula, half-vaporised contrails, spidery handwritten notes from the jet age, and its 10,500 resonances help reassure him a bit. Like, a bit.
‘So,’ he says, nodding, breathing shallow, ‘so, j’essaye un essay on the single transferable thought… okay, Ray K, ok,’ Henry acknowledges over his shoulder, cracks his knuckles, ‘okay, digital love, but… no, no, no, no, no no NO! Mama mia.’ He seizes up. ‘Too little to say, too much time, too much time to be without love, not enough reason to give it all up.’ And then all of a sudden the group finger seems t’be pointing in his face and he’s batting it away shrieking, right clicking but there’s no more new tabs opening, no way out, and ‘I’m a man, not a mouse!’ he squeaks feebly, but they carry on a pointy pointy anyway, til Henry falls to his knees for shrieving, trapped, 100 years behind a thicket of accusatory digits… ‘Free me!’ he wheezes, but time bends, his back creaks, his bough breaks and any day now he’s suddenly imprisoned, trombone shot of him clutching the bars at the window while Laughing Miss Prision and the Agley Gang ride off, having tricked him into taking their place in the cells.
Right Now! With a whoomph of breath Henry shakes his head and he’s awake, not in gaol but still on his knees, praying in front of a glowing screen and curling a finger round his chin feeling all pre-shave and ready for the shearing. Getting to his feet, lips pursed slightly, he thinks “Well, what about this writing, then?” and lets the little thought storm break over his parched brain, lines jag out and discharge into the parchment, fingers, nibs and typewriter hammers sparking, forging something, finally, about something or other.
Later, dapper, showered and shaved and sitting over a more relaxed fifth double espresso, he reads somewhere else about time crystals and the idea seems to make sense in his head – yes, he strokes a ghost beard, yes, his eyes narrow, yes, crystalline rhizomes in the 4th dimension form in seconds/millennia, of course, – but strikes him as being very difficult to make clear when all he has are the insubstantial hieroglyphs bequeathed him by his Uncle Geoffrey. ‘Even words, especially words, especially these words, aren’t helping,’ he explains on a postcard sent in duplicate to Mike O’Trophy and Alain Bull, timed to arrive also by simultaneous teleportation link.
While the little ring tone boops hoopily, the green tea-drinking native American says deadpan ‘You know, I actually never met Mike O’Trophy, but he sounds like a real fun guy.’ Henry rolls his eyes and says ‘Jesus,’ without heat, and Mike nods his head, sliding into shot, one-third split screen, with that Robert De Niro lower lip. ‘Yeah, Him too,’ he says, and him and Bull virtually high five as Henry’s putting his coat on, now just a little embarrassed by it all, reaching for the Further On switch and saying ‘Please can we go now please?’
This episode has been brought to you by Curzon Cologne.
September 11, 2011
Caveat: it is not without wariness that I appropriate song lyrics, movie quotes & titles. To an extent, all word juggling is a weird sort of magical allusion. And it comes about that some words which seem piddling and insignificant or irrelevant lead me through to different areas of understanding. My understanding of the universe I’m in has been partly shaped through different authors, musicians, groups, soloists, films… emotions affected, nuance added to emotion, pictures sharpened or obscured. They all make as much sense as each other in different ways. Shots trombone: I find I catch sight of myself imitating in crazy mirrors, strutting or bent sinister in 5D. There are always further reflections to be found, and one might never be able to account for all the implications. Crazy mirrors…
You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t, rise above.
Bruce Springsteen – Tunnel of love
‘Ten years asleep’ is, however, not a Bruce lyric. It’s a song by Kingmaker. Kingmaker was a pre-Britpop band from Kingston upon Hull, chewed up and stuck flat to the pavement by the mid-1990s. I saw them support The Wonder Stuff in 1991, 20 years ago this December. They were not a bad band. Paul D. Heaton, of The Beautiful South, and also a Kingston-upon-Hullion, saw them as middle-class chancers from suburban castles. I would tend to agree that there was an element of the student/indie disco irritant about them, but what their address has to do with anything is beside the by. Perhaps a similar gleam of clever-clever bitterness momentarily threatened Heaton’s industry.
True Pop Anecdote: a personal experience of Paul Heaton. I was working in a hotel bar in 1994, serving him a gin & tonic with Becks chaser at 10.30am, and he invited me out for a drink with him and pals when I finished. I arrived at Bairds Bar in the Gallowgate around 14.00 in time to see him being carried out, paralytic, by two of the crew. My pints of lager were supped with a more together companion of his. Make what you will of that metaphor for the working-class artistic burden.
Anyway, I remember reading that the Kingmaker song ‘Ten Years Asleep’ was written as a comment on the preceding decade of Conservative government, the co-opting of 1970s punks into The MANagement, the gleeful abandonment of a society identified as non-existent by Mrs Thatcher, the triumph of the brutes. ‘Don’t pretend to care when you don’t care,’ it suggested that lamentations were meaningless if a society was just going through the motions, if complicity was commonplace.
Of course, of course, the point is, I was reminded of this track by hearing and reading nothing all week but ‘ten years on’ themed pieces. The ten year anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the USA, specifically the passenger jets flown into the World Trade Centres and the Pentagon, as well as the loss of a flight presumed headed for the White House. I haven’t wanted to join in the mass of commentary, of remembrance and application of meaning and justification. This is partly because I have communicated my thoughts in other places over the years since then, in anti-war pamphlets, blogs and such. It is partly because I thought it would be superfluous. What can I add?
It was a fucking shame, excuse my Anglo Saxon, that so many people died, it always is a shame, as it is a shame that so many more thousands have died since in wars fought to no good purpose but for national leaders to be seen to be doing something about something about which nothing can be done, not by perpetual war.
I said this on the day in 2001, in fact, and I recall because I wrote it down: ‘There’ll be a horrible bloody revenge attack on someone, when they could be turning the other cheek.’ Rising above. By which I meant not doing nothing, but inviting dialogue, finding out why and what for and what could be done to stop it. Perhaps spending military budget money on building bridges, I mean, actual bridges, or schools, perhaps, perhaps getting into actually unbelievable levels of debt doing nice stuff, for example.
However, there was no cheek turning, just a continuation of the previous decades’ posturing and out of focus ideologies. Hearing G.W. Bush today talking about God, as if it helps give him gravity, and Blair in a BBC interview surfacing to offer the demented view that his foreign policy actions have had no impact on people worldwide… I wonder about that failure of logic, the absence of even a smidgen of understanding of words meaning peace, hope, love, the same as I wonder about any people who try to justify murder and vicious attack. I wonder… well, I read somewhere – I am having trouble sourcing the quote – that Christopher Hitchens, who supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, criticised those opposing the wars as the kind of people who, on discovering a poisonous snake in their child’s room, would first call People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). I like to think of myself as the kind of person who would not respond to such a discovery by setting fire to the rest of the house.
It is unfortunate that these are the first things that come to my mind, that this is a world that’s been ten years asleep, having nightmares of planes slamming into buildings and war without end, bitterness without resolution, people believing everything that people tell them about what must be done, that things must be done, that people must be told. I think this is part of the reason why I have become a teacher. I wanted to encourage people to think for their selves, to understand and to question words, so the people that want to burn down the house cannot sustain forever a monopoly on running things.
All I can add today: peace.
