Things I wrote on Intercapillary Space -- 4

The fourth and final tranche of links to posts I wrote on Intercapillary Space between 2006 and 2015, basically so that the authors I wrote about get included in this blog's label list. 

[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  ]

Part 4, continuing from Sep 2011 up to 2015. Anything I've published more recently on Intercapillary Space is simply a copy of a post on this blog, so I don't mention it. 

Better than Language (2011 poetry anthology edited by Chris Goode, including poetry by Anna Ticehurst, Francesca Lisette, Joe Luna, Jonny Liron, Josh Stanley, Jonty Tiplady, Linus Slug, Mike Wallace-Hadrill, Nat Raha, Sarah Kelly, Steve Willey, Timothy Thornton, and Tomas Weber):

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2011/09/better-than-language-2011-anthology.html

John Gilmore:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2011/11/art-of-writing-books-is-about-to-be.html

Rhys Mynydd:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2011/12/rhys-trimbles-mynydd.html

Gale Nelson / Jackson Mac Low:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2012/03/mac-lows-diastic-process-in-gale.html

Patricia Scanlan / Ink Sculptors:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2012/05/patricia-scanlan-ink-sculptors-press.html

Richard Murphy:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2012/05/suns-kingfisher-rod-richard-murphy.html

Paul Brown:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2012/12/paul-brown-cabin-in-mountains.html

Tim Allen:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2014/04/tim-allen-settings-etc.html

D.S. Marriott:

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2014/06/ds-marriott-poetry-links.html

Metambesen / Robert Kelly / Eléna Rivera / Tamas Panitz / George Quasha / Charlotte Mandell / Lynn Behrendt / Billie Chernicoff :

https://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2014/09/greetings-to-metambesen-robert-kelly-etc.html

Andrea Brady:

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2015/09/andrea-brady-cut-from-rushes-etc.html

playground

Blogs are dead, everyone's moving on! This vigorous meme continues to circulate in literary circles, Chris Goode (on closing down Thomson's) noting with something like surprise that Dennis Cooper's DCs is still so vigorous. (Great and alarming blog, but not necessarily one to browse in the workplace, as I found out to my cost yesterday.) And today Todd Swift is taking a break from his long-running Eyewear, using very similar rhetoric about there being more elegant and quicker ways to reach people. (Chris and Todd might not agree about a lot else, I'm thinking.) Perhaps I'd better wait. Todd tends to shoot from the hip, and many's the time that I've spotted the first few lines of one of his tastier posts on "Blogs I Follow", only to find that by the time I get there the post has already been pulled.

Mark Scroggins, it must be a couple of years ago now, also lauded the potential of Facebook and Twitter - but Mark still maintains his blog, and even writes good things on it, though never enough. But I just don't think Facebook has the potential that's claimed for it. (I subscribe to the now equally vigorous meme "What a waste of time and evergy is Facebook, I'm moving on".) I think it's quite good for vaguely staying in touch with the more shadowy outer circles of your acquaintance, and that's it.

But surely blogs themseves move pretty fast? Last autumn's targeted attack on Todd and Eyewear by the Barque crew Sean B, Frances K et al was so Swiftly tidied up that most people missed it, even if they were watching. Like a tussle in a disco, its 10 blurry seconds revealed a lot more about all the participants than anything that clear-minded literary historians compose.

It would be better to celebrate the democratization of literature, The Blog's gifting of an expressive outlet to such a various and surprising crowd of lay people - admittedly, not a representative bunch in global terms - but a large number of people, nevertheless, who might otherwise never have found writerly expression in any form. If many of the resultant blogs are quite generic, though in ways that might not have been predicted - e.g. the workplace blog - yet The Blog is also a container that can be used in many ways, most of them not discovered yet.

I am resisting the impulse to yet again list my favourite blogs. Most of them are in the list of links to your right, but it does need a spring clean.

*

The collaborative blog Montevidayo definitely needs to be on there, and it might be another demonstration of The Blog's developing vigour. Johannes Göransson is one of the people I listen to most attentively, and the way he's writing on recent posts about the Plague Ground (Playground) - e.g. this one, tracing implications of Joyelle McSweeney's original idea :

Welcome to the plague ground: There is still "too much" American poetry

- is typically beautiful with the beauty of clarity and pragmatic as a toolbox. Along certain lines the Montevidayo way converges with my own relativistic views of literature and artefacts generally. I'm not really talking about the detail, I mean the submersion in processes of decay and rebirth; artefacture as waste.

It so happens I'm reading Göransson's translation of Johan Jönson's Collobert Orbital at the moment. A fantastic book I will certainly write about some time.

*

CAMBRIDGE-POETRY-RELATED DREAM (dreamed last night).

I am reading the editor's preamble to a poetry magazine associated with the Cambridge School. The Editor tells us that this time he has, for pressing reasons that I forget, included a number of poems by both men AND women. He is well aware that, contrary to his usual practice, this flouts the principle of "NIcarnation" (in the dream I specifically noticed that this was an anagram of INcarnation). He then rather helpfully explains that NIcarnation means, of course, the separation of the sexes in poetry. His magazine usually prints either poems that are all by women or poems that are all by men. The heart of NIcarnational practice, as cultivated e.g. by Simon "Dionysus Crucified" Jarvis, is that a poem written by a male author should never refer in any way whatever to women, likewise a poem written by a woman should never refer in any way to men.

I'll resist interpreting this dream, at any rate publically, but I ought to say that as of today I haven't ever read anything by Simon Jarvis. (Maybe I will now, if only because I'm curious to find out whether his work does in any respect aspire to NIcarnation.)

*

"I made a suggestion once, but I didn't get any response, so I re-submitted it. Then I did get a response. It said, Shut up, we heard you the first time."

"Oh, that was the old suggestion scheme."

"The old suggestion scheme??"

"Yes, there was a suggestion scheme in Bob's time, but it got chocker with ideas so they killed it off."

*

AUTOMAGIC - Expression used by the UNIX community to explain things that happen on a computer that are clearly the result of some piece of automated stuff but no-one can remember exactly what it was.

*

YOUNG LENNIE'S KNOWLEDGE OF MALE SINGER-SONGWRITERS.

(L Sings a line or two of "The One I Love.")

L: "I expect that's part of your set-list, isn't it Mike?"

M: "To be honest I'm SO old that I really think of REM as newcomers. I was never that into them. Because I'd been around for Neil Young and The Band, that was 15 years earlier, I thought I'd heard it all before."

L: "Neil Young. Yes, don't tell me, he went to sixth-form college in Ipswich."

M: "Toronto."

L: "I'm sure it was Ipswich."

M: "We're talking about two different Neil Youngs. I'm talking about the internationally famous one, and you're talking about your mate down the pub."

L: "I do get mixed up. Was he the one who sang Rhinestone Cowboy?"

M: "No... - who was that ... can't remember"

Terry: "Glen Campbell."

L: "Well, I'm sure he wore rhinestones. Oh yeah, (illumination) I'm thinking of Neil DIAMOND."

M: (Illumination) "Hot August Night! Yes, he was a bit like Glen Campbell."

L: "Maybe it was PAUL Young."

M: "who -"

L: "- who went to Sixth-Form college in Ipswich."

M: "Wherever I lay my hat."

L: "That's it."

M: (hoping to sow more confusion) "And then there's Paul Simon."

L: "My God yes. But I do know that one. He's the one with the recording studio in Box."

Terry: "..No, that's Peter Gabriel! Remember he did "Solsbury Hill", that's a hill just outside of Bath."

M: "The one they ran the by-pass down after it was a hit."

M: (later, reluctant to miss an opportunity) "Talking of towns that end in -wich, did you know that it means a Roman salt extraction site..?"

close on me now.

Bit of a hiatus, but not of deep artistic, or any other, significance. It's been Christmas, and then before that it was moving home, back from the leafy walks of 2.4 West Swindon to the steeps of Frome (or as I prefer to think of it in limestone terms, from the Upper Jurassic to the Carboniferous).

Somewhere in the middle of this, I finished my essay about Harry Martinson and Chickweed Wintergreen and Karin Boye and Swedish popular song, and put it on Intercapillary Space (in a rudimentary form, it has been coming to birth here on this blog since August). I think I've managed to blend enough matters of acute personal interest into this essay to more or less defeat the well-intentioned interest of any other person on the planet.

Another great blog has come to an end, or to put it another way (because I'd like to see this in a celebratory rather than elegiac spirit), has been triumphantly completed. This is Chris Goode's Thomson's Bank of Communicable Desire. Does anyone ever read completed blogs, though? You should read this one. In principle, I am against blogs coming to an end. Death comes soon enough, so why forestall it? That's why I don't like themed blogs. Let your blog be anything, let it change and grow.

I am reading something you might not expect (or might you?): Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons, the first of a long sequence of books for children written in the 1930s. Since I'm being opinionated, let me say that it usually makes me sad to see grown-ups reading books for children. The reason I got to this place was that I accidentally discovered that these books had been read not only by my grandmother (who lovingly collected them all), but then by my father and his brother, and then by my sister. As for me, I remember the books very well, as impressive physical objects (they are early, though not first, editions). As a child staying at my grandmother's house, I often used to linger over the maps in the endpapers, and I used to ask Mutti what the stories were about and I enjoyed her telling me and talking about which ones were her favourites. But I'm now certain that I never read them myself; the only page I recognized was the first one. I liked books, I was a bookish child, but it turns out that often I only dreamed over these family treasures. (In the same way I recently discovered that I never had read the whole of Selma Lagerlöf's Wonderful Adventures of Nils.) To read these books now is to be re-admitted to secrets of my own family history. I discover, for example, where my father learnt to fill a kettle from a lake; Ransome is very informative about sailing and camping. And I discover one constituent of the ideal of a family that my father had in his head; he had to find it where he could. I asked him if he and his brother ever got the chance to make use of all this sailing lore. He laughed wryly. Of course there was no possibility of that, there was no money at all. (But at some stage the boys found out that their estranged father, Mutti's ex-husband, had gone and bought himself a boat; it rankled.)

Around Christmas I also finished Villette, one of the few nineteenth-century classic English novels that for some reason I've missed out on up until now (most of the others I read in university days). - Perhaps I should qualify this by saying that I'm referring to the acknowledged list of classic novels as represented by the Penguin English Library, circa 1977. And even so, I can think of quite a few others: Adam Bede, Daniel Deronda, anything by Thackeray or Disraeli or Reade, Wives and Daughters, Jude the Obscure... But anyway, Villette's reputation was HUGE, even though a lot of people hadn't actually read it. Anyway I'm fitfully writing about Villette for the Brief Hist. (And, thanks to my other sister, finally listening to Exile On Main Street in the car, another masterpiece that I missed first time around and that I somewhat associate with Villette in terms of reputation, obscurity, sprawl, over-ripeness and a feeling about it that is half awed and half queasy.)

brief hist / IS - Better Than Language review

My review of the 2011 UK Poetry Anthology Better Than Language, which gradually emerged from within one of the posts below (they tend to go on spluttering like Darwinian ponds long after initial publication), has now achieved enough fixity to be relocated to
Intercapillary Space.

more seedlings

I'm still compiling and completing the previous brief-hist/literary/cultural post, but I thought I'd better begin another one because it was getting pretty long.

R.F. Langley died recently. I don't really know what it was that prompted me, but in a £20 splurge of extravagance I've bought all his books; they turned up today and I just had time to read "Mariana" (which fascinatingly wipes over Tennyson) before I left for work.

Meanwhile I'm reading Giles Goodland's What The Things Sang. It's been well reviewed by Alastair Noon in Jacket, and Steve Spence in Stride; some of what they say I will inevitably repeat when I inevitably write about this for IS. It's an overwhelming book; one of those poetry volumes you definitely can't read through at one sitting. I'm about a quarter of the way through and nowhere near collecting my thoughts.

I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm very excited to hear there's a Bob Cobbing Radio 4 programe online:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00zlbl5

!WARNING: SPOILERS FROM THE OFF!
Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy. Abridged audiobooks, read by Martin Wenner. Wenner is evidently bilingual, and my greatest pleasure when listening to this was probably his pronunciation of the Swedish names and placenames. He has quite a lot of fun. When Blomkvist and Salander are in London speaking English to English characters, they suddenly develop strong Swedish accents. In the Australian scene Wenner switches between Swedish-English (Blomkvist), Australian-English (Jeff) and Swedish-Australian-English (Harriet). Clever stuff.

Having got to the end, I am now re-listening to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. The title in Swedish was Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women), which says a lot more about what the book is. The abridgement contains about a fifth of the text; satisfying listening (compared e.g. to the disembowelled 2-CD Villette I heard recently) but naturally not much good for detailed textual queries. (For example, I've only just discovered that there's an enigmatic prelude to The Girl Who Played With Fire, it's not in the audiobook.)

With that caveat, I think this first vol is the best of the three books Larsson managed to complete, from most points of view. Because here he drew most enquiringly on his knowledge of far-right groups and his witnessing of violence against women; here his wonderful Salander's mixture of feelings is more intuitively portrayed than later; the violence is more scary; and the Vangers are more credible than the buffoonish Niedermans and doddery Section professionals that take up space in the later books. Credible in a way. Martin Vanger's diseased woman-hating psychopathy has just horribly shown up in Swindon (formerly claimed to be the most crime-free town in the UK) - but it seems unlikely the Swindon killer is the CEO of a large company.

Astrid Lindgren, Elizabeth George, Dorothy Sayers, Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid. Why does Blomkvist read only female authors? (I reckon it's fully as ingeniously planned as the "Leviticus" murders.)

In which future volume did Larsson intend to bring Camilla forward? (Lisbeth's sister, who remains resolutely unspoken about in the three completed volumes.) Larsson uses a technique of selective consciousness-reporting. Thus in "The Girl Who Played With Fire" the whole slowly developing mystery about Zalachenko is only sustained because until Larsson is ready he tells us not a word about Salander's father. Even though, in other respects, we spend a load of time inside Salander's consciousness. Is this "cheating"? While consciousness-reporting is always selective (though novelists tend to create the illusion that this is not so), are certain conventions of disclosure to be obeyed, are authorial silences about germane matters something we should think about? Not, I mean, because of rules of whodunnits, that's neither here nor there, but perhaps because the reader has been manipulated into spending a lot of time thinking about something that isn't worth thinking about, a mere manufactured puzzle (I'm remembering C.S. Lewis complaining about Chapman's Shadow of Night). Maybe that's not the question to ask. Is it also about plausibility - people would be bound to demand answers about Camilla at various points in the books. (From the mythological point of view it seems relevant that Anita and Cecilia Vanger are also twins.)

I am also reading: Moliere's The Misanthrope; Home Run (book about escapes from Nazi Europe); John Steinbeck's East of Eden; Chris Goode's blog (recently talking about poetry as a window or a wall, analogies that deserve further examination).

for st catherine's day

I am a votary of St Catherine, because this is the day when, perceptibly, my winter blues start to fade away. I guess a scientist would have a stab at explaining that - perhaps it's when, though the days are still growing shorter, this shortening has slowed down so much that it no longer upsets me. Whatever, today is Christmas and spring rolled into one, for me.

So let's write sentimentally about some Christmas songs. Because this year, instead of the usual feeling of misanthropic loathing, I'm really enjoying hearing them as we walk around the lit cities and sparkling shops. Big inspiration, by the way, from this post on Chris Goode's wonderful blog.

Judy Garland: "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (1944). This is such a sad song! It's been getting gradually less sad over the years: even by Judy Garland's time some of the words had been brightened up, and with Sinatra this process went further. Gradually the meaning of the song changed from consolation (take your mind off things and enjoy Christmas, I know next year looks pretty bleak but God willing we'll make it) to celebration (The future's looking good and Christmas is so special). Garland's version catches the song in mid-transformation, hence at its most emotionally complex and open-ended, and her performance is emotionally intelligent in a fragile way, she already knows too much for her own good, but it's a priceless gift for the rest of us. There's a bit where she switches from one melody to another, in the blink of an eye, that still deceives you after a hundred listens, though you've never noticed it.

Three Degrees: "Mary's Boy Child" (1998).

Jester Hairston's great song of 1956, one of the few Christmas carols of modern times to be known everywhere. Hairston, whose grandparents were slaves, studied music at the Juilliard school, was a long-time composer, choirmaster, arranger, services to the TV industry, etc. Also an occasional bit-part actor in a surprising number of Hollywood movies (he's on Hollywood Blvd). In his song as it originally stands (e.g. Harry Belafonte), the message is a warm comfort to all humanity.

The Three Degrees, long-running MOR soul girl trio from Philly, with variable personnel, chiefly remembered for Gamble/Huff hits in the 1970s when they were said to be Prince Charles' favourite artistes. Their album "Christmas with the Three Degrees" is not so well known perhaps, and it's been repackaged so many times that it's difficult to pin down the orginal release date, but I'll go for 1998 because that's what the group's own site says, though when I heard this song I was quite satisfied that it came from their golden era. With its sleek, discreetly funky backing - the kind you could sway to without toppling off high heels, and the marvellous way that the lead (Valerie?) pronounces "Bethleham", this is totally infectious, and so concise as to be nearly disdainful - they don't bother with half the lyrics e.g. so the climactic key change is made, not to celebrate Jesus being born, but to herald Joseph and Mary's rooflessness in a strange town. In this reorientation the song now becomes inescapably about motherhood seen from a grandmotherly distance.

The Fall, "Rowche Rumble" (1979). None of Mark E Smith's ramblings make any sense, we all know that, so this can't possibly be about towns on prescription drugs and global capitalist profiteering in the business of non-cure addictive medicine dished out with legal and governmental backing to vulnerable people. The drums sound like cardboard on the studio version, the song kind of drags and whizzes at the same time, but this is somehow great. If I had to choose between this and the more fuelled-up version on Totale's Turns, ...well I don't. I'm in complete agreement with Robin Purves about the exact moment when the Fall Experiment, until then on a planet-expanding trajectory, suddenly hits its ceiling (in 1981, 3/4 of the way through Hex Enduction Hour). Despite all of the good stuff since, (mainly, it was in the next few years) ambition perceptibly shrank, vision became restricted, the music turned in on itself. It started mining a vein. Purves says it's when the band really did stop being democratic, when Riley could no longer stand up to Smith, when Smith was no longer humbled by Megas Jonsson. You judge the later work in terms of pop music, though sometimes frightening pop music. But the Fall up to Hex was a different thing. Its influence on alt-poetry is massive. [The flip was "In My Area", and is now further immortalized by being mentioned in Richard Makin's Dwelling.]

Marina and the Diamonds, The Family Jewels (2010). Don't lose sight of these prodigious three-minute wedges of disaffection.

I'm a stray cat on the roam
choking on a chicken bone

Happy Xmas!

*

And anyway, I've loved St Catherine since I read her very legendary legend in the South English Legendary, and also read (truly or not) that the tale of Catherine the martyr, inasmuch as it has any historical credibility whatever, is dimly based on a heathen princess who was martyred by Christians. So I think she should be a saint for all of us, and a comfort against persecution by all authorities. [Though I must admit, in her heyday it was her royalty, intellect, and independence that commended her to noble women throughout Christendom.]

*

By the way, Purves' piece also includes a spirited attack on Derek Bailey's improvisational music - exemplifying yet again the surprisingly familiar pattern that when people in the alt-poetry community really want to think honestly about their poetic, they'll more likely talk about music than poetry. This may be partly because we don't want to accentuate differences between each other, we need each other's support too badly; maybe, too, because most of our fundamental ideas about art in fact originated when we were thinking about pop music in our teens. If I can extrapolate from my own experience. (This is definitely a good way to look at Chris Goode's piece, for example.)