Early contributions to Intercapillary Space

 

This is a really boring post, but I figured it's time to link to some of the writing (mostly about poetry) that I produced for Intercapillary Space. Otherwise you might never know (and in quite a few cases I myself had forgotten) that I'd written about these guys. 

 IS was at its most vibrant in its first year, when we had relatively lots of contributors and Edmund just said to publish something every day if we could. (I just couldn't, none of us could, but we all tried.) You can get a better idea of the mix of improvisations that this advice produced by having a glance through some of the early months of Intercapillary Space in full. Just put https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/02/ into your browser, then change the 02 to an 03, and so on. 

This post covers things I wrote for IS between its inception (Feb 2006) and round about April 2007. What constrains it is the maximum total length of labels on a single post. So there'll have to be a follow-up or two. 

[My Intercapillary Space links: 

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2023/03/a-boring-story.html
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2023/03/more-intercapillary-space.html
https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2023/08/things-i-wrote-on-intercapillary-space-3.html

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2023/08/things-i-wrote-on-intercapillary-space-4.html  ]

 

I've omitted whatever I believe has already appeared on this blog (though I may have made some mistakes). 

Bob Cobbing:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/02/bob-cobbing-insistances.html

Peter Redgrove:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/02/redgrove-resurrection.html

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/03/peter-redgrove-speaker-for-silver.html

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/12/peter-redgrove-library.html

Moniza Alvi:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/04/three-leaves-of-moniza-alvi.html

Kathleen Raine:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/04/googling-kathleen-raine.html

Geraldine Monk:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/05/geraldine-monk-embellishment.html

Tua Forsström:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/05/tua-forsstrm-i-studied-once-at.html

Thomas Kinsella:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/06/thomas-kinsella-marginal-economy.html

Catherine Daly:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/08/catherine-daly-to-delite-and-instruct.html

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2007/11/catherine-daly-that-locket-sound.html

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2010/01/catherine-daly-vauxhall.html

Jessica Smith:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/10/jessica-smith-organic-furniture-cellar.html

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2011/11/link.html

Cathal Ó Searcaigh:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2006/11/cathal-searcaigh-by-hearth-in-mn-le.html

Arielle Greenberg:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2007/01/arielle-greenberg-my-kafka-century.html

Alexander Pope:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2007/03/superfluous-health.html

Robert Browning:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2007/04/robert-brownings-pauline.html

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2009/11/robert-brownings-strafford.html

sing like a canary

[The illustration shows a table of trigraphs from a WW2 German naval codebook.]



Chanteuse/Cantatrice was published in 2007, towards the end of Catherine Daly's brief ultra-prolific period, during which she published eight books.

The poem reads from both ends, hence the two jackets shown here, and the double titles of each poem.

The poem is a dazzling historical meditation around the themes of singing, betrayal, complicity, resistance, collaboration, staying alive, and cabaret. There's a lot of early 20th-century history here; also a lot of the Bible, fabrics, design, computer technology, cheesy FM radio pop and all sorts of other things. Daly in this DaDaDa-esque mode is polymathic, or rather, she makes polymathic designs.

Here, for instance, is the Middle Eastern supper section of  "21 Days" / "1001 Nights"

*

a pretty girl can get by on looks

                                            stories

                aristocracy of beauty

broidered and bordered                purfled

a girl can just sing, sing for her supper

                strained wine clear as olive oil

                Shami apples, Osmani quinces, and Omani peaches

                Sultani oranges and citrons

                Aleppine jasmine, scented myrtle berries, Damascene nenuphars,

flower of privet and chamomile, blood red anemones, violets,

               pomegranate bloom, eglantine, and narcissus

               mutton wrapped in banana leaf

               pistachio kernels, Tihamah raisins, shelled almonds

               open-orked tarts, fritters scented with musk, lemon loaves, melon

preserves, Zaynab's combs, ladies' fingers, Kazi's tit-bit

               pickled safflower and olives, in brine and in oil; with tarragon

and cream cheese and hard Syrian cheese

beautiful, indifferent girl

*

It's nearly all from Richard Burton's translation of "The Porter and The Three Ladies of Baghdad" in the Arabian Nights  ---

behold, there stood before him an honourable woman in a mantilla of Mosul silk, broidered with gold and bordered with brocade; her walking-shoes were also purfled with gold.... (compare line 4 of the extract above)

Shami : Syrian in this context, according to the commentator Abdulfeda.

Osmani : Turkish, Ottoman

flower of privet : Burton's fancy rendering of henna flowers (Lawsonia inermis)

nenuphars : water-lilies

Tihamah: Red Sea coastal plain of Arabia

open-orked : open-worked in Burton

Scheherezade's situation ("singing" to stay alive) is linked by Daly to the women in war-time Europe with which her book is largely concerned. 

Here's another extract to demonstrate the mixed mode in which the book mainly works:

*

"If this is Upper Silesia, what must Lower Silesia be like?"

by itself, a rotor performs simple encryption

substitution cipher

a rotor, one of 26 positions

calls on language to act on people, then a multitude

via pirate radio? mp3?

            Edelweiss Pirates, proletarian, criminal

found

and never

until they are

where lost things

Hoch's buried collage

one or more musicians

in different places or groups work on the same

             lyric, story, cause, reason

                          song, side, system

musician network

"workers report" method

hanged from meat hooks suspended from a T-bar across the ceiling of

              the execution chamber

Order of the Red Banner

Order of the Fatherland War, First Class

geostationery satellite

wireless

code

based on a fantasy novel written pseudonymously

              with a title including the name of John Calvin's Greek teacher

"putting an arm round the neck of her guide, who set her down upon

the pavement without so much as ruffling the trimming of her green

dress. No lover would have been so careful"

*

(from "White Rose" / "Red Orchestra") 

White Rose, Red Orchestra : resistance groups in Nazi Germany

"If this is Upper Silesia..." : P. G. Wodehouse, from his wartime broadcasts.

"a rotor performs simple encryption": loosely based on the Wikipedia entry for Enigma machine.

Hoch: Hannah Höch, pioneer of photo-montage

Order of the Red Banner, Order of the Fatherland, First Class: Soviet military decorations awarded to Mildred Fish-Harnack of the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle)

John Calvin's Greek teacher: Andrea Alciati, or Melchior Wolmar? (I haven't been able to trace the pseudonymous fantasy novel.) 

"putting an arm round the neck of her guide..." From the opening paragraph of Ellen Marriage's translation of Balzac's A Woman of Thirty (Une femme de trente ans).

*

I wrote about some of Catherine Daly's other books in these three pieces:

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2006/08/catherine-daly-to-delite-and-instruct.html

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2007/11/catherine-daly-that-locket-sound.html

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/catherine-daly-vauxhall.html

[The illustration shows a German WW2 Enigma encryption machine. The plugboard at the front increased encryption complexity by temporarily swapping letter-pairs, in this case A-J and S-O. It was normal to swap about ten pairs.]



At last a new Catherine Daly book!... (took me a year to notice, tho)

Busy!


So instead here's a link, to the online PDF of Catherine Daly's Controller / Seedbed , which came out in June 2014 (I think, her first book for about seven years).


https://ia600704.us.archive.org/4/items/limitcyclepress/Catherine_Daly-Controller-Seedbed.pdf


Publisher's site:

Limit Cycle Press (Jukka-Pekka Kervinen):

http://limitcyclepress.blogspot.fi/

dear diary

A tree shattered on the ground, from yesterday's stormy winds: horse-chestnut I think. I was out driving late last night. I listened to Exile on Main Street, and decided that maybe it wasn't so very like Villette, after all. Then I listened to a country compilation, which happened to include someone's rendering of the Patsy Cline song I Fall To Pieces - or rather, the first verse of it - (this is one of those country compilations that costs £1 in Dr Barnardos, so you don't ask too many questions) - but of course that made me want to hear Michael Nesmith sing it, and I remembered I had Loose Salute in the car, so I listened to it for the millionth time, and after that I couldn't help going back to Magnetic South for the two millionth time. I compared my experience of this brace of albums with Exile on Main Street (from around the same period) and wondered if an album I was discovering so late in the day could ever acquire - for my brain - the ineffable burnish, the singular communicativeness, of these albums that I'd known for thirty years. [They should have been the first two vols in an extraordinary Star Wars-style triple trilogy, but it foundered after four volumes. The others were Nevada Fighter, the last of the First National Band trilogy, and Tantamount To Treason (the only release with the 2nd National Band). Since I seem to be in a senile phase of picking up my early life's dropped stitches, perhaps it's time I went in search of the never-heard-by-me Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash.

Then I listened to Joan Davis' Promiseland, and even after all this it still sounded fantastic.

I've now remembered that the first trilogy was meant to represent tradition, the second trilogy the present-day and the third trilogy futuristic. This was one of those impossibly grandiose schemes that artists love to project, like Spenser's 24-book Faerie Queene, Wordsworth's Recluse, etc. They remind me of the usually-sensational unbuilt buildings that form such a large part of most architects' legacies. I'm waiting, not very stoically, to find out if Catherine Daly's and Richard Makin's trilogies end up being composed partly in the irrealis.

Of course most people find lost works, like lost sheep, unreasonably intriguing. (Who ever bothers to talk about Smile now?) That was why one of my regular conversations with Mutti was about the Swallows & Amazons books that WEREN'T on her shelf, The Picts and the Martyrs, and Great Northern?. I think perhaps she hadn't cared for them as much as the others, but anyway she didn't mind responding to my irritating questions.

the leaves darken

I have a new piece on Intercapillary Space, which touches on books by David Wevill, Jeremy Reed, Giles Goodland, Hanne Bramness, Lars Amund-Vaage, María Baranda and Carrie Etter.

Makin and Philpott must have read my mind. Anyway they've been too quick for me (not that this was difficult), and now that Dwelling is about to be published in Reality Street Editions, have adroitly withdrawn its ur-text St Leonards from public display at Great Works. Foreseeing this, I had vaguely planned to take a copy of the text and self-appoint myself as a Makin "scholar" with access to materials denied to the public at large. I'm glad this plan went wrong. You can still go there to read Makin's earlier Work in Process (though the first couple of photos have gone missing). And you should, every day.

Talking of long-deferred plans, I'm bitterly disappointed to discover that Great Works has now ceased trading - I had a quiet but profound ambition to get something published in it. In personal compensation, the final tranche does include a new poem from one of my fave poets, Catherine Daly, which is grand news - all publication activity from her seeming to have dried up for the past four years or so, unless that's a transatlantic illusion. Anyway, Great Works remains a great site for discovering things. Long pause while I go off to dip more deeply into Paul Holman's The Memory of the Drift. And to look up "grimoire" (book of magic), a word employed by both Holman and Makin.

In other news, Daithidh MacEoghaidh heartily detests The Littlest Feeling, for all the right reasons.

lit ephem

I'm employed now.

I'm translating a Swedish popular song "Vårvindar friska" (spring breezes) and some snapsvise elaborations. Probably the song is popular more for the melody than the words. It's one of those aaba tunes where the "a" bit is in the minor and it switches dramatically and crescendoingly into the major at "b". (The funeral march in Chopin's sonata has the same format.)

I've read Catherine Daly's Vauxhall and I'll write about it soon. I had my doubts about Vauxhall after some quick dips and I looked askance at it for about a year or more untill I finally got the space to sit down and read it all through; when I got to the end I realized it's a kite that flies. Is it so evidently a step into the dark as, say, Papercraft or To Delite? Is it more a summation of "this is the things I can do", only better than ever? The latter is my first thought. I'm kind of surmising that the unexpected lack of new publications since Vauxhall (Daly had kept up a stream of pubs to that point) indicates a pause for new direction.

Also, Tony Lopez' Darwin. If Ron Silliman was talking about the cover when he hyperbolized that it "might just be" the most beautiful book of poetry ever (which he wasn't, not consciously at least), then I have to warn you that this cover does tend to flake off, because Acts of Language have printed it cheaply on an office colour printer, it isn't a proper book jacket. But anyway, it is a neat cover (Iceland mountain scenery with some dirty snow and a white streak of sky on the horizon). And this is another brilliant book, consisting of found sentences. Ron was right to draw attention to the formal aspect of the book and he drew out the variable paragraph lengths and called this a soft aspect, which it is, but there's a hard aspect too because the sentences in each of the ten sections add up to 55.

Some of the sentences can be Googled. E.g. the man in the beige or golden trousers was a description of a Maddy suspect in the Guardian. Surprisingly, Darwin's own writings, which provide a good many of the sentences, don't seem to be on the Internet. That can't be right, that must be Google being weird.

You know how Giles Goodland's Capital provides a reference for every sentence? Well, what I mean is it would be great if you did make a poem of this kind (i.e. not a flarf poem) in which Every sentence was Googlable, because then it would mean that if you read a sentence that you wanted to explore further, you could just go and do it straight away, leaving the poem for a moment in the same way that you leave a room. In this way the poem would perhaps have a generous transparency, it would no longer so tightly control what you did with its materials.

For me Darwin has a definite subject, I think Lopez's stuff always does, which in this case I guess you could define as the post-Darwinized world. A lot of the sentences are scientific, academic, or high-minded, quality journalism. There's a paucity of women's names - well it goes deeper than that, I feel a conspicuous lack of a female presence in the many-sourced writings. That builds a tension up. And a lack of conversation, of spontaneity, of frivolity. Is it even a conspicuous lack of real life altogether? You begin to feel stifled, as if the quoted sentences are doubly-written hence doubly distanced from the world in which we exist... You can't help noticing, also, how many of the undeniably highminded scientific extracts do involve animal testing. I think this is all deliberate and Darwin is possibly just as angry a poem as that one about bullimia in Conductors of Chaos. - I hear on the radio this morning a report that most bullimics have been bullied. A sort of feeling of being bullied is how I respond to the aggregated highminded sentences of the scientists and pundits. For it is not only faith schools (see below) that enforce a view of life.

So what's the relationship between a literary work like this and science? does it 1. seek to go on its own totally independent exploratory journey, using science as just one of its fuels 2. or try to register resonances in a world admittedly influenced by science 3. try to compose a critique of science, inevitably and necessarily from without? The latter is really what I'm interested in. I think you can criticize science as a social force by straightforward observation. Can you also erect an alternative methodology to go behind science? Such as collage in this case? or religion? or homeopathy?

Because I've also recently read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which looked irresistible in the bookshop and was very OK in reality, though not the unprecedented masterpiece of thinking and literature that the gushers would have you think. Dawkins is indeed (as he hopes) consciousness-raising on religious labelling of children and on religious schools - i.e. I think differently about these things now than I did before I read the book: last week I didn't see either of these things as presenting a moral problem but now I do. And I like where he starts to go on the "by-product of evolutionary advantage" theory re why religion exists. His descriptions of the evils of religion are temperate and hence all the more overwhelming. But (talking about sectarian violence) it might well have been supplemented by a recognition that religion often becomes a place of last defence in response to the oppression of others.

His comments about the traditional arguments for God are suave dismissals rather than refutations. His own argument for the non-existence of God is likewise traditional and open to question (variant on the argument from improbability, or who made God? - basically an overturning of Paley in the light of Darwin). Open to question re relevance - for does this argument not concern a creator who is just part of nature? Surely the sort of religious people who are interested in philosophical proofs or disproofs of god all accept evolution as a matter of course, so whatever they mean by god doesn't mean a creator such as appears in Dawkins' argument - therefore it may seem to miss its target. Even so, it may be dead right. He seems to underplay fine tuning. He scornfully mentions "the argument from present ignorance", yet doesn't reveal any means of countering it. He analogizes the origin of language with genetic drift, but that's not a good analogy at all. He agrees with Boenhoeffer in his scorn for "a god of the gaps", but Boenhoffer was merely wrong. There is no other kind of god. If I was a believer I would glorify this god of the gaps. It is not a diminution of god, more a definition of god. False spatial analogy says that as science closes more and more gaps, god shrinks. But does "present ignorance" really shrink? Or does additional knowledge mean additional gaps that we never even imagined before? That's another false spatial analogy maybe, but I reckon it's a better one. Dawkins derides those who leap in with the god-answer whenever we temporarily don't understand things. But why not admit that it is (maybe temporarily, maybe not) the right answer? that god=gap? that god simply is the sort of solution we imagine when we can't see any other.

The real problem with the lack of relativism is that Dawkins doesn't understand how two contradictory things can be true at the same time. His truth is simple. At one point he asks guilelessly how religions can claim belief as virtuous when belief is obviously something involuntary - you cannot choose what to believe. I absolutely disagree: overwhelmingly people do decide what they're going to believe. That is, what they're going to say they believe and even think they believe ("belief" fragments into a million neurons when you try and pin it down). Surely after Freud you have no excuse for such innocence. So Dawkins is constantly taking the statements or beliefs of religious people and treating them to scientific demolition, but this is a category mistake. This approach, you might guess, is more appropriate to an argument against fundamentalism than the evasive slippery faithful in an Anglican church or a "mind body and spirit" bookshelf. And certainly US Christian fundamentalism is a tragedy waiting to happen. But do even fundamentalists believe the bible literally (in the scientific sense of literally)? That last parenthesis, in fact, suggests the frail relevance of Dawkins' attack. I think fundamentalists have their own non-scientific idea of what "literally" means. I suggest that in the real world (as opposed to a philosopher's thought experiment) it is not really Possible to believe that the bible is true (scientific sense). But it is all too possible to be a fundamentalist.

Dawkins of course gives me that "two cultures" feeling. He's very 19th-century and comically very like C.S. Lewis as if they are not diametrically opposed ideologists at all, but two quarrelsome boys in a large Victorian children's nursery in an Oxford suburb. [That sentence seems, I discover, to betray unconscious recollection of Eagleton's review] He only understands light literature, children's literature, and Shakespeare. He quotes A.A. Milne. Modernism doesn't mean anything to him, nor does relativism. This oughtn't to be a surprise. I've written before about the costs of being a scientist, how it seems to be very difficult to live both in the art world and the science world at the same time. But of course it DOES take me by surprise. And I think, well, I know you know a lot (I do tend to address authors in this silently hectoring way while I'm reading their books)..., but all the sociological markers that I really understand (i.e. the literary ones) tell me that you don't know anything at all. It's an optical illusion of mixed signals that the arty reader has to over-ride.

(Of course it's not just about lit v science, there are also chasms between artistic communities. I caught my breath yesterday to hear the violinist Lara St John on the radio talking about being Tolkien-mad - no, not so much that, but - extolling Tolkien's prose as wonderfully musical. Maybe she's even right, but that's not the point. It's just socially infantile (in the literary world). Then she played her arrangement - for violin - of Liszt's Totentanz, which was beyond amazing... Well anyhow, people are very various and I suppose communities like the various literature ones are just designed to paper over the cracks of how appallingly different people are. If we within the self-protecting community were honest, who would not turn out to be near-illiterate, stupidly misinformed, or grossly and heretically prejudiced?

I've also been reading Cobbett, whose own hyperboles come to a climax in the country around Warminster (e.g. Bishopstrow)- he never found better meat than at Warminster market - it was evidently then not so conspicuously an army town. My own idea of Warminster is chiefly connected with the Little Chef, Morrisons, the park and the nature reserve. Cobbett's anti-Semitism affects me as a new disturbance. With Chopin or Wagner, the problem was how to accept that a violent anti-Semite might nevertheless produce great art. But at least I could say, well they don't sound like the sort of people I'd have got on with personally. With Cobbett, the problem is more searching - violent anti-Semitism in someone I find thoroughly pleasant company, someone I think I'd have got on with really well. The truth is, we are never really safe from evil beliefs, if we don't have them it's just an accident. Or should I, as Richard Dawkins thinks, say thank-you to science for nurturing the enlightened beliefs that I hope I share? Maybe...

And Martin Chuzzlewit, which I'm reading with a somber critical face on me, occasionally cracking against its will into helpless laughter.

secret kitty

This is Button. In Frome, all the dogs are called Jenson and all the cats are called Button. I named Button this morning after she (or he) nipped through the front door while I was talking to a neighbour. Apparently Button has been left behind by some people who've done a runner from the estate, so if you live in Frome and you want a cute nearly-kitten cat, then it seems like this one's going begging. I don't know if they're the same people who left the outside sofa and the crashed hanging baskets.

Button wants to move in with me, but that's no good. I'm allergic to cat hair, I'm never here, I'm not allowed pets, and besides, I think we'd compete for the same social role. Also, I like all the creatures that Button roams around killing. So when I left for work, Button had to go too.

Still, I did feel the pull. Button was extremely tactful, not asking for any food, not bothering me while I was washing up, just having a look round and then settling down in silence. (There was some minor trouble with a potted plant.) I've never known a guest who was so quick at grasping social niceties, so perfectly decorative.

We need company so much, but not everyone can manage relationships with other people. We crash in language, in bed, in parent/child incomprehension. They all go away. We don't know we're lonely, but we're so, so lonely. Then, one day, in walks Button. Button seems to appreciate the hoovered stairs, the counterpane smoothed free of any wrinkles and the scatter-cushions. Button sits and watches us fussing at the sink. Button's eyes go sleepy, Button is completely relaxed. It's a long time since we saw someone truly relaxed in our company.

Cats used to have a job as mousers, but now they are a parasite species. Our species needs a superfluity of maternal feelings and therefore by some fortune or other there'll always be quite a few people who have the feelings without the use for them. That's an ecological niche for any animal who can accept this superfluity of love. Just as, since we cleared Britain of larger carnivores and then moved off the land ourselves, we created a new niche (bursting with excess venison) for any animal that would be discreet enough to keep out of human byways, a niche now inhabited, as some think, by Button's larger cousins. (And since that curious animal stalked me on Long Knoll one dusk, I guess I think so too.)

[Title in honour of Catherine Daly's free and bewildering eBook Secret Kitty]