“THE MAGIC WORDS ARE: UP AGAINST THE WALL MOTHERFUCKER”

(after a chat in the pub the other day)

 ”In the month of May, 1848, I was called to Northampton on business, and having seen and admired some of John Clare’s poems, I felt a strong desire to have an interview with him, and I ventured to call at the asylum, and was at once introduced to the principal. I told him the object of my calling, and how delighted I should be to have an interview with him (Mr. Clare). He made no objection, and as it was a very fine day, he said we could go and have a walk in the grounds of the institution. We discussed many subjects, and I found him very rational, there being very little evidence of derangement in his mental faculties. To my surprise he left me and went to the boundary wall with paper and pencil in hand, but very soon returned bringing a manuscript which he had written. The lines were noble in sentiment and rich in language, and I much regretted failing to get a copy. Before leaving him he said he should like to see me again, and intimated that he would in the meantime compose me two or three pieces.”

 — Jesse Hall, 8th Sept. 1893

 

here motherfucker are some magic words, literally written up against the wall of the asylum Clare would die in:

An Invite To Eternity

Wilt thou go with me sweet maid
Say maiden wilt thou go with me
Through the valley depths of shade
Of night and dark obscurity
Where the path hath lost its way
Where the sun forgets the day
Where there’s nor life nor light to see
Sweet maiden wilt thou go with me

Where stones will turn to flooding streams
Where plains will rise like ocean waves
Where life will fade like visioned dreams
And mountains darken into caves
Say maiden wilt thou go with me
Through this sad non-identity
Where parents live and are forgot
And sisters live and know us not

Say maiden wilt thou go with me
In this strange death of life to be
To live in death and be the same
Without this life or home or name
At once to be and not to be
That was and is not—yet to see
Things pass like shadows—and the sky
Above below, around us lie

That land of shadows wilt thou trace
And look nor know each others face
The present mixed with reasons gone
And past and present all as one
Say maiden can thy life be led
To join the living with the dead
Then trace thy footsteps on with me
We’re wed to one eternity

 

 

two poems for the Zapfino typeface

[click for larger]

what on earth

[...] In 1864 Dr Garrigou visited the cave of Niaux, whose paintings, particularly in the Salon noir, have now long been recognized as masterpieces of Quaternary art and could not fail to attract the attention of even the most uninformed visitor. Nevertheless, although he had just explored the rock shelter of Bruniquel in the Tarn, and was therefore aware of the existence of a Palaeolithic art, he merely made the following entry in his diary: ‘There are some paintings on the wall. What on earth can they be?‘

—Annette Laming (trans. Eleanore Frances Armstrong), Lascaux: Paintings and Engravings (Penguin Books, 1959), p.16

THESE / WHILE NEGOTIATIONS

These earners grow kits while negotiations rot genial lingos

These estrange risk row while negotiations roost in alleging

These risks tower anger while negotiations roll seagoing tin

These gaskets win error while negotiations retool a slinging

 

These registrars woken while negotiations tilling oreganos

These workers angriest while negotiations alleging torsion

These resowing starker while negotiations ring gasoline lot

These assert reworking while negotiations agonise trolling

 

These rake songwriters while negotiations altering soloing

These reassert working while negotiations realigning loots

Better Than Language, ed. Chris Goode

an announcement from Chris Goode (beescope.blogspot.com):

BETTER THAN LANGUAGE:
An anthology of new modernist poetries
edited and introduced by Chris Goode

Better Than Language brings together the work of thirteen young poets engaging with the broadest conceivable range of late modernist modes and strategies. Sometimes difficult but always enticing, the restlessly smart poems collected here offer a wide-open invitation to adventurous readers.

The poets represented are: SARAH KELLY | JONNY LIRON | FRANCESCA LISETTE | JOE LUNA | NAT RAHA | LINUS SLUG | JOSH STANLEY | TIMOTHY THORNTON | ANNA TICEHURST | JONTY TIPLADY | MIKE WALLACE-HADRILL | TOMAS WEBER | and STEVE WILLEY

Paperback 234x156mm: 253pp
Publication date: 25 July 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9563706-1-7

Launch events:

Thursday 28th July:
Stoke Newington International Airport
London N16 7NJ
7.30pm
£5, or free entry with book purchase (£10 on the night)

Monday 8th August:
Hi Zero
Brighton
details to follow – http://hizeroreadings.tumblr.com/

for more information & pre-orders, see http://www.ganzfeldpress.com/

poem for Luke Roberts which in the end I have just left as it is but was going to edit

remember this

Thanks for the Memory

An increase in the average quantity
of transmitter (or other activating substance
released from the VRS) arriving
at the postsynaptic side over an extended
period of time (minutes to days) should lead
to an augmentation in the number of receptor sites
and an expansion of the postsynaptic
receptor region, through conversion of receptor
monomers into receptor
polymers and perhaps some increase in
the synthesis of monomers. [None
of these ideas bears upon the
chemical basis of depolarization
induced by acquisition
induced by acquisition of transmitter
induced by acquisition by receptor.
induced by acquisition There is evidence

J.H. Prynne, Wound Response (1974), in Poems, Bloodaxe (2005), p.220

cf.

An increase in the average quantity of transmitter (or other activating substance released from the VRS) arriving at the postsynaptic side over an extended period of time (minutes to days) should lead to an augmentation in the number of receptor sites and an expansion of the postsynaptic receptor region, through conversion of receptor monomers into receptor polymers and perhaps some increase in the synthesis of monomers. [None of these ideas bears upon the chemical basis of depolarization induced by acquisition of transmitter by receptor. There is evidence that disulfide links are near the receptor sites.]

Kosower, E.M., “A molecular basis for learning and memory”, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (vol. 69 no. 11, 1972), p.3295

fan fiction

FROM A GREAT HEIGHT

hello i have filed this in the category “Art” on my blog on the internet

uh

this is almost exactly two years old and I barely remember writing it.

---

 

Where face O breath
goto it is function it
is face A reproof, it

scr reproof is valid

this ant. This Pelton

nozzle put reproof

endface.

Now AB breath shift
it is menace face B VG.

 

  *

 

Francis menace is an
ant here making VE it
okay, AB scr the bench

agent. Sub menace rotor

bench, goto P O ester

cleavage, or else put to

dowhile.

Bench lap B down VR
as iterate loop to here.

 

  *

 

VM loop the ant is it
is news what it means
in O wholly B, AB to

A being Kaplan, being

okay being mammal

hazard platter stop

writehex.

Dial news marker
titled unit Kaplan.

 

  *

 

Then titled undialled
AB hex vector, put
marker dial to face.

An ant is there, mark

Voith an ant to goto

now face dial at. If

makeshift

O breath function VX
then it is now valid to.

 

 

 

---

a Whitman jingle

something a friend said prompted me to look this up this afternoon. It was still on my laptop. One of the oddest tasks set in autumn term was a “free” 300-word response to anything on the syllabus for that term. The title itself is appalingly cocky but I’m reproducing it here unedited because — right, okay. Given the choice, “anything studied this term”, you’re going to write about the thing you liked the most, obviously. As soon as you like something, three hundred words is nowhere NEAR enough to say why you like it. Basically, the amount of enthusiastic response I tried to cram into this amuses me — reading it is like watching (very lossy) data compression — and I still went 59 words over. Given that is more than 10% of 300, I assume I was penalized for it.

---

Singing, selves, bodies, houses, boats, love, in Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’

How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turned over upon me
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

(‘Song of Myself’, ll.88-90)

‘I sing myself’, sings a voice (l.1). Not about myself, simply ‘I sing myself’: the syntax ramifies a network of relationships between the singing voice, the self being sung, and the relation of the ‘I’ to both of these. It certainly feels like a reconfiguring of epic for the American everyman, or American everybody, emphasis on body: these words don’t just recast the invoked muse of classical epic as located in a self, but in a self which, through the sheer sensory excess of the opening, has its origin specifically in the physical, bodily processes of being: alive: sensing, expressing, loving. Does the singing create the self, or can the song occur only when the self pre-exists it?

The movement downward and inward from ‘tongue’ (l.6) to ‘throat’ (l.84) — the channel through which breath and therefore song happens — is peppered with (inflected by) house- or boat-building procedures (‘braced in the beams’, l.49); more than just the nailing of wood to construct a frame for a home, or bolster a pre-existing shell internally, these structures (bodies, dwelling places, navigable vessels) form a cluster of constructed blueprints, deployed interchangeably as the sites of emotion or sensation.

The body is not the destination, but is something corruptible or transcendable for poetic purposes. Like the conspicuously un-ordered epical lists of events (all that matters is that to list America is to sing America), the actual spatial arrangement of human body parts is subordinate to the fact of their being sung: the ‘bare-stript heart’ is more figurative than literal, the ‘plunged’ tongue as figuratively lyrical as it is actually erotic.

‘I know… a kelson of the creation is love’ (l.95). Kelson: one of the primary structural beams in a boat-hull, perhaps the ‘Yankee clipper’ of l.180 (so maybe also the American body). But this kelson is of ‘creation’: a solid wooden strut of pure love connecting everything to everything (‘every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you’). Bodies, throats, boats, homes, are one: Whitman has his voice sing (be) a ‘self’, as impersonal and as big as the cosmos, as atomic and intimate as licking a lover’s chest on a sunny day.

 

re-arranging Couperin

(this is a sort of placeholder post to remind me to do it properly at some point.)

Recently I had access to a piano for a short while, and decided on a project for this time. Below is the first page of Le Tic-Toc-Coc, by Francois Couperin. If you read music what’s immediately striking is the fact that both hands are playing at precisely the same pitch — indeed, the first note of the piece is the F above middle C, played by both hands simultaneously. Written either for two instruments, or for a single harpsichord with two keyboards, this is a pièce croisée, a style of keyboard writing which exploits the sonic effects of two hands playing in the same register.

tktktktktktktktktktktktk!

[ THIS VIDEO ] is a clip of it in its original form, on a two-manual harpsichord. In order to play it on a single-manual instrument, like a piano, a great deal of rewriting had to occur, in order to avoid the almost constant hitting of the same key with two fingers. There have been several arrangements of the piece for piano, but in most of the simplifications, just as when we follow Couperin’s suggestion that the left hand simply be played an octave down, something of the thrill of the quickly-repeated notes is lost.

I tried, inspired by [ THIS EXTRAORDINARY PERFORMANCE ] by Grigory Sokolov, to create as faithful a reproduction of the original as possible for a single keyboard, and found the simplest approach to this was to write the hands on a single stave — l.h. stems down, r.h. stems up, as the visual qualities of the notation make it very easy to spot when, for example, to get your hand out of the way, because the other one wants that note. When I finish this project I will hopefully have found some way of notating those notes in the left hand which, against the odds, are sustained. I may just include these notes as a sort of quasi “ossia” stave, underneath — I’ve never really come up against a situation where I can’t find a way of notating both the physical manoeuvres and all or most of the musical qualities with which these manoeuvres should be performed.

Here is a section of the sheet of sketches I just found (to demonstrate), which prompted this post; and [ HERE ] is a video of the progress I made. Slightly too fast, a little panicked, but getting there; and educative in the sense e.g. that the most frequent mistake in my playing always occurs in what (in the original score, above) is the second bar. More importantly, I worked bloody hard, and I’m SHOWING OFF. I look forward to continuing once I get to a piano again. I’ll post a playing score here when I’ve prepared it properly. But for now — essays. And exams to revise for.

tktktktktktkt

The Ealdwic Ensemble: FRANK F**K FOR THAT

– the Ealdwic Ensemble is a new contemporary chamber ensemble; this is our first concert, and we’re very excited. It’s music by young composers, as well as more canonical work, for various solo and ensemble combinations, interspersed with readings of poetry by Frank O’Hara, and finishing with Morton Feldman’s For Frank O’Hara. Full programme:

FRANK F**K FOR THAT

Thursday March 31st, 7.30pm (for 8pm)
The Great Hall, King’s College London
£5/£3 conc.

Oliver Rappoport Senderos
György Ligeti Études pour piano, Book 1 — V. Arc-en-ciel
Ewan Campbell Patterned Echo Patterns
Helmut Lachenmann Dal niente (Interieur III)
Matías Hancke de la Fuente El eco en su sombra
Edgard Varèse Density 21.5
Morton Feldman For Frank O’Hara

The Ealdwic Ensemble:
 ILZE IKSE, flutes
 VICTOR DE LA ROSA, clarinets
 DAVID HOLMES, percussion
 TIMOTHY THORNTON, piano
 GUY BUTTON, violin
 SOPHIE RIVLIN, cello

 EWAN CAMPBELL, conductor

with THOMAS MITCHELL and ELIZABETH COHEN, readers

–

So, yes. It’s at 7.30pm (for an 8pm start) on Thursday 31st of March, in The Great Hall, King’s College London—£5/£3 concessions (I think totally free if you’re a member of KCL). AND there’ll be drinks.

also — open rehearsal for anyone interested, on March 30th, 7-9pm.

DEFINITELY COME!

FISH!

I keep cooking fish things which are sort of loose variations on escabeche — one of my favourite things but which I’ve never been able to get right and have sort of given up on. This was a lazy improvisation and string of error corrections which turned out REALLY good

1. heat oil to medium with a bit of fish stock (or, I suppose, just use the oil out of a tinned fish tin)
2. thinly slice an onion and far too much garlic into this, soften all that a bit; add some thyme, oregano, that sort of business
3. quite soon, add a tomato, also thinly sliced; here too add a hefty splash of white wine vinegar
4. turn to high and reduce it, letting it burn on a bit, etc, whilst you:
5. sear til blackening some fish in very hot oil
6. the veg bit should have reduced a lot by now. Put in some leaves; I used rocket (but would really like to try watercress), and then (no, honestly) about two cups of boiling water
7. turn up to high. Let it reduce a tiny bit but mostly it’s just to wilt the leaves and deglaze the burnt stuff off the pan. Keep testing til it’s become a kind of very rich but not-too-thick soup
8. put in a bowl. Salt, pepper. Just put the charred fish on top

in future I want to try this with herring, I think herring would be perfect for it. Unfortunately I am on a budget and only had tinned pilchards, but if even THEY were good, well, I shall try this again. Next rung up: sardines

It might also be interesting to make this, then put it in the fridge for a day and have it, cool, the next afternoon. Or perhaps just chill the soup bit and then cook the fish and add them (would that be weird?)

wey

February

prose from Nicholas Breton. This is from Fantasticks seruing for a perpetuall prognostication (1626):

16. The 12. Moneths — February

IT is now February, & the Sun is gotten vp a Cockestride of his climbing, the Ualleyes now are painted white, and the brookes are full of water: the Frog goes to séeke out the Paddocke, and the Crow and the Rooke begin to mislike their old Makes: forward Connies begin now to kindle, & the fat grounds are not without Lambes: the Gardiner fals to sorting of his seeds, and the Husbandman falls afresh to scowring of his Ploughshare: the Terme trauellers make the Shooemakers Haruest, and the Chaundlers cheese makes the chalke walke apace: The Fishmonger sorts his ware against Lent: and a Lambe-skinne is good for a lame arme: the waters now alter the nature of their softnes, and the soft earth is made stony hard: The Ayre is sharp and piercing, and the winds blow cold: the Tauernes and the Innes seldome lack Guests, & the Ostler knows how to gaine by his Hay: the hunting Horse is at the héeles of the Hound, while the ambling Nagge carrieth the Physitian and his footcloth: the blood of Youth begins to spring, and the honour of Art is gotten by Exercise: The trees a little begin to bud, and the sap begins to rise vp out of the root: Physick now hath work among weake bodies, and the Apothecaries drugges are very gainfull: There is hope of a better time not farre off, for this in it selfe is little comfortable: and for the small pleasure that I find in it, I will thus briefly conclude of it: It is the poore mans pick-purse, and the misers cutthroat, the enemy to pleasure, and the time of patience. Farewell.