Glob-a-log

.                          (So very much the bohemian type…)

Okay, finally a bit of news that I like:

“The rousing strains of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” might have catapulted him to a landslide victory in the vote for the nation’s favourite poem back in 1995, but the reading tastes of the UK appear to have taken a more modernist turn over the following 14 years with TS Eliot today named the nation’s favourite poet in a BBC poll.”

So, these are the UK’s favourite ten poets:

T.S. Eliot
John Donne
Benjamin Zephaniah
Wilfred Owen
Philip Larkin
William Blake
William Butler Yeats
John Betjeman
John Keats
Dylan Thomas

Of those ten, there are five poets I really do like a lot.

I can’t say I remember any other top 10 list, where I agreed with 50% of the expressed choices of the vox populi. Maybe my standards are slipping, with old age and all of that.

Still, I’m quite pleased Eliot won. My first ‘loves’ were Owen and Thomas but later I got more and more enthralled by the ‘accountant poet.’

He so did not look the part but I still think his ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, which is close to a century old now, might be the best poem ever written in the English language.

So, I will copy/paste that poem directly down below, to celebrate Eliot’s election.

Such a pity he couldn’t be there to receive the news: I’m sure he would have hated all the attention and would have looked very much like a disgruntled office clerk who’d misplaced his bicycle clips.

Anyway, here goes:

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
.      .      .      .      .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
.      .      .      .      .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
.      .      .      .      .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

.                       (Talking of Michelangelo – or something…)

(Plus ça change: Jerk-shirts ‘R’ Us…)

One last time about Polanski. I promise: I’ll return to more tasteful matters tomorrow. A minor genocide here, a mad terrorist there. So, yes, normal services will be resumed after this last part of the Cinepaedophile Trilogy.

Today though, I want to talk about ex-pats – and how you define that term.

So, Arnold Schwarzenegger definitely is an ex-pat.

Superman, on the other hand, is a refugee. As was Leon Trotsky.

Which is not the same as an ex-pat.

Polanski started as a Polish refugee, before he became an international fugitive from justice.

Now, can you ever call a fugitive from justice an ex-pat? Was Joseph Mengele? Was our famous paedophile, who was both fugitive and refugee?

Can an ice pick ever be a short cut to answering this kind of question?

Enough about that though – and enough about this whole sorry Polanski business. So, I’ll just leave you with a short list of quite famous ex-pats, in alphabetical order:

ADAM;
Father of the species – which explains quite a lot, in fact. He had to move away from where he was created, following a dispute with the local grocer. Something to do with the price of fruit.

BRAUN, WERNHER VON;
German born rocket scientist. Made a rather smart career move in the mid-forties and left Germany for the USA. Made himself very popular with his new bosses. Hence: Braunie points.

COLUMBUS;
Nitwit. Went out for a curry, ended up with a big Mac.

DOROTHY;
Left Kansas for a better place. But then again, who doesn’t?

FLIPPER;
Left a shark-infested ocean for a steady job in the shark-infested world of TV. Where he had to put up with an obnoxious, red-haired, Australian kid – and lots of reruns. Smart move, Flipper!

HANNIBAL;
Moved from Africa to Italy, by way of the Alps, riding an elephant. There is one born every minute.

HITLER;
Austrian-born house-painter, turned Führer, turned stark raving mad.

KHOMEINI;
Born in Persia. Lived in France for a while, sipping Anisette on the boulevard Champs Élysées, watching the lovely Parisiennes go by. Then went back to install Islamic rule in Iran. Maybe better known as book critic and incidental sales promoter for Salmon Rushdie.

PLATH, SYLVIA;
American poet who moved to England and was exposed to the English weather, all types of disgusting, English food and an English husband. Subsequently committed suicide.

SCHWARZENEGGER, ARNOLD;
Austrian born muscle model, turned thespian. Moved to the USA, when the European Union seriously started to crack down on the illegal administration of steroids to live stock animals.

SUPERMAN;
Migrated from planet Krypton to the USA, where he changed his name and, like so many other hapless immigrants, came to grief. In the end he practically lived out of phone booths.

(So, will this be the final director’s cut…?)

***   ***   ***

(More Polanski nonsense HERE & HERE…)

(Whatever gets you though the night…)

Now, I know that people who live in glass houses hate it when Jesus goes on and on about throwing stones. So, me, I’m writing this in Holland, while my girlfriend lives in Prague – which means that I’m not exactly in the best position to criticize people whose loving & living arrangements seem to be somewhat odd.

In other words, if Miss Wolfe, 33, from Pennsylviania wants to follow her dream and marry the love of her life, whom she only sees ten times a year, for which she must travel 169 miles, who am I to judge?

Furthermore, if you already enjoyed some 3000 rides with your intended, I suppose you know what you’re getting yourself in for, in that respect.

Anyway, I do wish her all the best, but still…:

“Amy Wolfe, a US church organist who claims to have objectum sexuality, a condition that makes sufferers attracted to inanimate objects, plans to marry a magic carpet fairground ride. This follows a “courtship” of 3,000 rides over ten years with the 80ft gondola ride called 1001 Nachts. Miss Wolfe, 33, from Pennsylvania, will change her surname to Weber after the manufacturer of the ride she travels 160 miles to visit 10 times per year, according to reports.”

It’s a bit of a blow to the whole Christian church, though.

I mean, they don’t get the punters in anymore by threatening them with the fires of Hell. So, one of the church’s current main selling points is that it’s so easy to meet eligible men and women in church. A ‘Pick a hymn, pick a date’ kind of deal.

It becomes rather hard to sell this to the customers though when your own organists are so deeply unimpressed with the indoor dating pool that they will sooner say their ‘I do’ to a magic carpet ride.

(Whatever you do, don’t let her come near you…!)

Today, swine flu (again, yes.)

Now, me, I think this Mexican swine flu thing is just God’s subtle way of telling the world He’s really sick and tired of people still doing that fucking Mexican wave and asking us politely to desist from doing so any longer.

If I’m right about that (and people don’t get the hint) I expect the flu will be just the first of a series of progressively more interesting and bloody plagues. A bit like Moses and the Pharaoh and that “Let my people go” song and dance routine.

Still, getting the swine flu isn’t much fun and dying from it even less so. Getting killed by a Mexican pig disease is kind of humiliating. Like getting your head smashed in accidentally by a singing Venetian gondelier.

So, me being the great humanitarian, I will use this column to give the panic stricken world three useful tips of how to avoid getting the flu, in the first place.

Apart from not doing the Mexican wave, that is. (Or going to Mecca.)

1) For men: Get circumcised. Everybody knows pigs and Jews don’t mingle much. I’m not saying all pigs are anti-Semitic but I’ve never even heard one of them say, “Some of my best friends wear skull caps.” So, go and get rid of that foreskin and you can be sure that no pig will want to get close enough to you to infect you.

2) For women: Don’t date policemen.

3) For everybody: Sue the sick little fuckers. In Medieval times, they would put animals on trial for all kinds of stuff. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t do the same thing, preventively. Give them ASBOs or restraining orders. Make it very clear to any oinker that, if it even thinks of sneezing at you, you will take it to court. In other words: Threaten to change it into your personal piggy bank and break it.

Okay, another lazy Sunday. The weather is quite miserable here and I’m sure the papers would be happy enough to conform to that and to piss on whatever’s left of anyone’s parade, so I’m not even going to read any of today’s headlines. I’m sure the world will be able to continue to be fucked, without me making generally unhelpful remarks from the sidelines.

So, let’s do something fun instead.

I worked through my old archives and came up with ten very weird YouTube clips, which I will present below in a sort of Top 10, be it in a more or less random order.

My question now to all of you, of course, is to add one or more of your own.

Let’s see if we can transform this silly little list into a genuine Top 100…

1) Kevin Rowland: Concrete and clay

2) The cock is dead, le coq est mort, der Hahn ist tot

3) Christopher Lee: Drinking song

4) William Shatner: Rocketman

5) The Muppets: LOTR spoof

6) Nina Hagen and Freaky Fukin Weirdoz: Hit me

7) ANON: The garden gnome to space song

8) Bob Dylan meets Dr Seuss (sort of…)

9) Paul Young, the mime version: Wherever I lay my hat (that’s my home)

10) World of War: The porn song:

(Gravity: Been coming to a place near you, out of nowhere, since Newton…)

Now, this truly is a tale for our time:

“Office worker Mr Coleman, 23, was ‘tweeting’ to his followers on his Blackberry while jogging to work when he cracked his head on a heavy low-hanging branch. The force of the impact sent the dazed runner crashing to the pavement and left him with a badly bruised black eye.

“One minute I was running along posting a tweet, the next I was lying on my back on the pavement in agony. The branch came out of nowhere and hit my face hard.””

Yes, that old ‘came out of nowhere’ defence.

Also beloved by car drivers who use their mobiles while driving (and the more old-fashioned creeps who enjoy a bit of drunk-driving) and subsequently hit a dog, child, granny or cuddly E.T. crossing the road – all of whom ALWAYS came out of nowhere.

The ‘came out of nowhere’ defence also has a twin brother, called the ‘noone could have foreseen this’ gambit.

That one has been used extensively, throughout history, both by the ‘Peace at any price’ brigade and by those who’ve never seen a a fight they didn’t want to pick or join, immediately. (Humanity isn’t very good at learning from past mistakes but it wouldn’t hurt for our professional doves and hawks to be forced, each day, to watch clips of Mr Chamberlain’s trip to Munich and Colin Powell’s WMD speech at the UN, respectively.)

More recently, both the ‘came out of nowhere’ and ‘noone could have foreseen this’ defence were used by both governments and financial institutions to ‘explain’ the latest global economical meltdown.

(It’s close to being a law of nature that, whenever both these defences are used, we deal with the kind of crisis that could, in fact, have been foreseen by any toddler with merely a working knowledge of piggy banking.)

Of course, all of us are human and thus kind of stupid, so it’s good that we can fall back on these commonly used tactics – and, as long as we don’t overdo it, we maybe should allow ourselves and our fellow dumb critters the use of them.

I’d suggest anyone up till the age of ten might use them, more or less, indiscriminately. Teens probably should be given a monthly allowance, until both their zits and hormones have had time to settle down a bit.

Between the age of twenty and thirty, we might just let people get away with these lame excuses once per season but after that, until death, senility or incontinence hits, there shouldn’t be a call for this type of defence more than once a year.

One caveat though: It doesn’t matter whether you talk about the collapse of a global market system or the disintegration of an overstuffed bin bag: If you’ve used one of these two defences for either of these occasions, you’re not allowed to use any of the two, during the rest of that calendar year.

Me, I’ve been saving up mine, for the last few years but I do intend to use one of them with a vengeance, whenever the time is ripe.

It involves a baker’s dozen of beehives, an outdoors swimming pool filled with honey, a half brick and a quite elaborate pulley system.

Now, I’m not picky and I only need one individual out of the following groups of persons to walk past my house:

1) Any TV quiz or reality TV show host or TV sports analist
2) Any politician
3) Any professional PC plodder
4) Any raving Godhead, be they Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Jew
5) Any Holocaust denier, Scientologist or Elvis-shot-Kennedy-and-blew-up-the-Twin-Towers type
6) Any of the makers of ‘Mama Mia!’, ‘Dances with Wolves’, ‘Spiderman 3′, ‘The Nutty Professor’, ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ and/or ‘Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves’
7) Any of the inventors of the karaoke machine, the Crazy Frog ring tone, elevator music and speaking toilets
8) Bono

So, whenever any of the above mentioned persons will find themselves struggling not to drown in my honey pool, while beset by a horde of angry bees who don’t like their hives getting pulley-ed from over them and while sporting an angry bruise where a carefully coincidentally launched half-brick hit them…

… well, then I will simply smile politely, with a slightly puzzled look on my face and state that whatever just happened precisely:

a) came out of nowhere and
b) could not have been foreseen by anyone…

(Sail on, sail on, o mighty Ship of State…!)

Sometimes, the old ones definitely are the best. Be it Rhett Butler’s, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” to Shakespeare’s Mercutio shouting, “A plague a’ both your houses”

Which, in the following case, would be a plague on the political & business classes, on both sides of the pond.

So, yesterday, we could read that good-for-fuck-all General Motors will get another ‘loan’. Not, mind you, to ensure they will finally get their house in order. No, they will receive another $30 billion to help ’steer the company into bankruptcy next week.’

In other words, those stupid arseholes can’t even go bust without government help.

Meanwhile, in Britland, the New Labour government showed us yet again how glaringly incompetent a bureaucratic busy-body machine can be, if you give it enough silly money and monopolistic mandates to play with:

“A two-year-long, 178-page report that cost taxpayers £500,000 has arrived at the unsurprising conclusion that passengers are likely to be in a “positive emotional state” if their train is punctual and announcements are audible and comprehensible, and in a “negative” frame of mind if the service is late and no one tells them why.”

You know, given the arrogant incompetence of our political and business leaders, it would almost be preferable just to give up.

To return to that famous tree we once climbed out of, select a solid enough looking branch and either hang ourselves or, preferably, all those useless shits – elected and unelected – who got us in this fine mess, in the first place.

In the meantime, right now, I’m not in the mood to spend any more time reading or commenting on ever more infuriating news stories.

So, I’m off to the park, to feed the ducks and to listen to some Leonard Cohen on my neolithic Walkman.

It’s a shame I can’t really invite my readers to come and join me in my duck feeding frenzy but at least I can leave you with a few, fitting Cohen songs to chew on. Enjoy:

1) Democracy

2) Closing time &

3) The Future:

You cannot bathe in the same river twice.

That’s what they say.

You know what?

Fuck that.

Here are three great river bathing songs:

1) Julie London: Cry me a river

2) Bruce Springsteen: The river

3) Annie Lennox: River deep, mountain high

And it’s time, time, time…)

Caught between work, the bar and bed, I realize time, this moment, is not a friend. You know how certain people are always waiting for you to fuck up. That’s time, when you’re not very careful: Not so much a fuck buddy as Buddy Holly’s last airplane ride.

Anyway, let’s talk time – and let’s start with Leonard again:

“It’s four in the morning, the end of december
I’m writing you now just to see if you’re better
New York is cold, but I like where I’m living
There’s music on Clinton Street all through the evening.

I hear that you’re building your little house deep in the desert
You’re living for nothing now, I hope you’re keeping some kind of record.”

Or, you can say, like Bowie, that

“Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth
You pull on your finger, then another finger, then your cigarette
The wall-to-wall is calling, it lingers, then you forget”

Still, maybe it is better to go with Jim Groce’s

“If I could save time in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to do
Is to save every day
Till eternity passes away
Just to spend them with you”

(Strange rebirth…)

There has been a fair amount of articles about racism lately, in the various international newspapers. From Republican politicians sending out ‘magic negro’ CDs, to British princes calling people their ‘Paki mates’; from the New York Post and its Obama Apegate, to the Pope’s (somewhat unsurprising) love affair with Holocaust deniers. All in all, it has been a less than delightful smorgasbord of more or less random nastiness and I have to admit that I am heartily sick of it.

Reading all that stuff can make the brain turn on itself, with bits on the right side snarling at and taking bites of bits on the left hand side and vice versa, till you become so stupid with frustrated and angry boredom that you start to foam round the mouth and shout at your computer screen.

It also makes me entertain quite violent thoughts about all types of racists. That it would be nice, for instance, if they could simply go back to where they came from, evolutionary speaking. That is, swinging from trees – or, failing that, to be hung from them.

Not nice, I know but the world would be a much better place if people like that would, as that old song has it, become ’strange fruit.’

It would be even better, of course, if you could do real magic and change each and every boring, brain-dead bigot into a love poem. One firm hit over the head with a magic wand (or cudgel) and, let’s say, that bishop that claims that there were no gas chambers in the German concentration camps was reborn or remade into this lovely Jane Hirshfield poem…:

“See how the roads are strewn
white,
as if your hand, traveling my body,
came to be that flock of blossoms,
scent of February in the dark.
See how my hips eclipse your hips,
how the moon, huge as a grain-barge, passes by.
And promises do not hold,
certainties do not hold,
the risen cries fall and fail to hold,
but my body, confusion of crossings, I give you
broadcast, to move with your hand,
where nothing is saved but breaks out in a thousand directions,
armful of wild plum, weeds.”

… and what better way to deal with the Pope who gives his blessing to Holocaust deniers than to remake him in the image of Pablo Neruda’s Sonnet LXXXl:

“And now you’re mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away;
your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.”

Yes, as make-over shows go, turning hateful trolls into love poems takes some beating – and we could even expand the field, by including politicians and other perverse pests.

Wouldn’t it have been fun if we could have changed George Bush in T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock…’

or Tony Blair into Frederico García Lorca’s ‘Before The Dawn…’

or Robert Mugabe into W.H. Auden’s ‘O Tell MeThe Truth About Love…’

or Vladimir Putin into Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘To Say Before Going To Sleep...’

and all the world’s bankers and hedge funds managers into Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover beach…?‘

Plus, as a last and most impressive magic trick, we would change the whole damn, European Commission, the UN’s Human Rights Commission, the British parliament, the US Senate & Congress and, just for fun, the British Cricket Board, Pamela Anderson’s fake tits and all ABBA songs and Dan Brown novels into this one short, yet hauntingly beautiful Robert Graves poem:

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.