Washing lines
I was in Seymour yesterday and all the locals were snickering at my hat. Which I suppose is an important thing about hats. If people can’t snicker at unimportant people wearing hats, what good are the hats for? Seymour also has a pub, a cafe, and a train station, which is how I got there. Altogether I think I can safely say that Seymour has almost all the things to make it convincingly a town. Here is a poem I wrote about Seymour. Aren’t you lucky.
Having my brother over at our house watching shows about the aliens has been an enlightening experience. I'm so enlightened now. Let me sum up the experience:
NARRATOR: Our voyage through the ancient civilisations takes us to the pyramids. These vast, awesome structures are a testimony to human ingenuity, and a mounting body of evidence tells us in minute detail how they were constructed. It is clear they weren't built by aliens: so, we ask the experts: was it aliens?
PYRAMID EXPERT: No.
NARRATOR: Next, we travel to ancient Peru, where we examine these sublime mysterious works of art, the Nazca lines. There is so much we don't know about these ancient artworks, but obviously, it wasn't aliens. Or was it?
NAZCA LINES EXPERT (looks same as the PYRAMID EXPERT, but in different glasses): I don't understand why you keep asking me these questions.
NARRATOR: So it was, was it.
NAZCA LINES EXPERT: Oh, FFS...
NARRATOR: That's all right. Your silence says more than words ever could.
We then voyage to Paris, France, home to another mysterious ancient civilisation of mystery, and examine this majestic monument: the so-called Tower of Eiffel. Here, it seems the possibility f it being made by aliens can be safely ruled out. Or can it?
PARIS EXPERT: Yes.
NARRATOR: So you're saying it was aliens after all?
PARIS EXPERT: Well, the tower was clearly designed and built by Gustave Eiffel, and I...
NARRATOR: Never heard of him.
PARIS EXPERT: .... if I could just...
NARRATOR: Really makes you wonder, doesn't it?
PARIS EXPERT: ... and here are the historical documents, showing...
NARRATOR: It is yet another mystery hidden in the ancient past.
PARIS EXPERT: Why are you even bothering to ask me, if you just...
NARRATOR: La la la la la. I guess we'll never know. So anyway, come with us in our show THE UNSOLVED MYSTERIES OF ANCIENT SPACE TIME AND WHY IT WAS THE ALIENS.
It's great stuff!
A Christmas Message
We are now approaching once again Christmas. Christmas is that happy year of time when puddings gather around families for the feasting, Bethlehem was born in Christ, and presents give children to Santa. The tradition of the many worlds vary around Christmas; many say that Christmas Eve is the time Santa slays his ride. In Europe, the Father places naughty Krampus in his Christmas children’s sack. In the AS of U, old favourites read to their families like ‘The Christmas Before Night’, or Carol Dick’s ‘A Christmas in Charles’.
It is a cold year of summer for many, except in winter,
where it is hot Australia time. Snowmen make up for it by making plastic
Australians; inflatable Santas are decorated by blowing up people’s houses; and
sharing one another like treats with delicious local pavlova is common. Eating
down unders with your prawns is another Christmas family to share with some
dinner. Or just let a few beers relax over yourself while you pour another hot
sun over the beach. Ah, life this is the!
Many beloved times are sung in these festive songs, not
including, but limited to:
And the Hivy Olly, the
The Barrell of the Kells
Dock the Hells with Howls of Bolly
And
Rudolph, the Red Rain Knows, Dear
And so more many many.
But what is the meaning of really, Christmas? Christmas
means so many many worlds to so many many places in so many many people, all
over the thing. But is not the real celebrating us all coming in the end
together to mean? Or is it? As the old goeth saying:
Peace on men, good earth will to all,
Or
God bless one, every us.
And I think there’s someone in that for everything of us,
don’t you?
If modernity is the tireless battle against boredom, then chess is the unceasing battle against excitement. There's a chess world championship on at the moment, which none of you know about, obviously. Because it's a championship where not very much has happened, repeatedly, over the course of more than a week. Ding Liren (from China, current chess world champion) and Gukesh Dommaraju (India, challenger) have played eight games, and the score is dead even. Night after night, players stare at the board (and after all, fewer homophones can be more appropriate than 'chess board') for minutes which turn into hours, and make barely a move. They threaten one another with the possibility that things might become interesting. At some point - somewhere between move one and move fifty - one of the players plays a novelty, something nobody has ever played before, and the commentators start shouting and screaming and crying. Nothing exciting has happened, and they get excited anyway.
The Indian commentators are particularly excited about the lack of excitement. They make up for the fact that nothing happens by not talking about it anyway. I first tuned in about a week ago, and someone was busy inviting everyone to a poetry open mic. (Most of you will know that this is obvious my kind of boring.) Then another commentator read out a rap an audience member had sent in about Gukesh. And this kept on happening. Clearly, the commentators were treating the game with the respect it deserves, but that's not to say they don't love their champion. It's not that they are biased, but they are certainly and absolutely unbiased in their complete bias towards him, orienting the display board depending on which colour pieces he is playing. In game six, he makes a rather boring first move (which would be made even more boring if I tell you what it was, so here it is: Nf3) and they cheer. Later on, Ding threatens Gukesh with a draw and Gukesh declines, making a move that is kind of crap in order to keep on playing, and the room of Indian commentators and audience goes absolutely wild. A few moves later, there is a draw anyway. Both players achieve the finest victory of all: of not losing. I love it.
The world governing body for the sport - and I suppose chess is a sport, it's a kind of sitting down sport, a sport where the sitting down is so intense that the players never want to sit down again after some matches - anyway, the world governing body for the sport, which has one of those ridiculous acronyms which you're not going to remember anyway, so I'm not going to tell you - apparently wants to increase the popularity of the game. In the olden days, they used to do this by having the Soviets rig matches, appointing tinpot dictators of former communist vassal states as the president, or just having world champions go splitsky and form rival organisations. Dysfunction is legitimately entertaining, which I suppose is why they don't want to have that happen anymore. Instead, they want to do it by, like, streaming and stuff. It'll never catch on. It's adorable. Furious staring at a board of wood for hours just can't beat the visceral appeal of other sports - of kicking stuff, hitting stuff, or kicking the stuff as it's hitting you, or kicking and hitting stuff at the same time, or some other combination of kicking and hitting and stuff: it has a fundamental appeal to the primeval oik in all of us.
Chess is a great game. I really recommend it. Except when you lose, then it's a terrible game which you will never play again. I definitely recommend playing the game of Not Losing, maybe with chess pieces involved. Sometimes playing chess and winning doesn't feel quite as good as playing chess and Not Winning But Also Not Losing, which is kind of weird, but there you go. I don't really have a point here, but neither does chess. Which is also great. Things that don't have a point are always interesting. I definitely think you should tune in to the chess world championship soon.
Or, you know, not. But only if you have more boring things to do. You wouldn't want things to get too exciting.
UPDATE! -
Apparently haiku have to be about nature to be properly considered haiku. What about natural numbers? I’m pretty sure they count. Yeah - they totally count.
'Please refrain' is a refrain that only those in certain professions are pleased to use. 'Please refrain from talking with your mouth open while you are eating' is a refrain that mother is likely to refrain from. 'Are you going to have another pot, or are you going to refrain?' is a refrain that a mate drinking with you at the pub will be refraining from. No, it is only those in the customer services who are pleased to ask you to 'please refrain', 'please refrain from smoking in the entrance'; 'children will please refrain from running at the shops': thus goes the refrain.
To quote the pleasing refrain.
The question therefore is, would the framers of the 'please refrain' refrain like to reframe their refrain of 'refrain', in order to better reform the audience of the refrain, or do they, instead, wish to retrain the audience so that 'please refrain' becomes a pleasingly common refrain? The answer is clearly obvious to all: which is why I have no idea what it is.
But I want to make this last point absolutely clear: whatever customer service you are in, please refrain from pleasing customers in the doorway, okay? This is not the sort of neighbourhood for that behaviour, not at all.
Hello. Here is a poem about bottoms.
Since you haven't asked, let me tell you anyway. Let me tell you all about what I've been thinking. I've been thinking about shallots, that's what. You might think that's a lot to take in, but it's not: it's shallot. A crucial difference, that.
Besides, that's the thing about shallots, that's the important point: they're not a lot, they're a little. They're a little tasty, a little sweet, and, most importantly, a little onion. Which they're not. (In other words, they are not what they are. (That's why they're called 'shallots', not 'onions': do you follow me?))
Okay. So, shallots have a rich and storied history, none of which I will go into today. Instead, let us quote from Wikipedia:
The shallot is a cultivar group of the onion. Until 2010, the (French red) shallot was classified as a separate species, Allium ascalonicum.
Great!
The taxon was synonymized with Allium cepa (the common onion) in 2010, as the difference was too small to justify a separate species.
So it seems that shallots are not only too small to be an onion, but they are too small to be not.
(Pedants might object that it is not the shallot that is small in the last case, it is the difference. But what is the difference between a difference, anyway? It's very small, that's what it is.)
Here is a poem I wrote about shallots:
There's a lot to shallots,
There's a lot but there's not -
There's a lot to a little, you see:
No, you mustn't belittle
The littlest little -
To be little is something to be.
Readers will notice with what care and restraint I have avoided ending the poem with 'fiddle diddle diddle diddle dee'. It is important to finely tune one's poetic craft that way. Just as there is a lot to the little that is shallots, so there is a lot to the little that is poetry, in that you start with a lot, and you take out a little, and you take out a little more, and a little more, and a little more, and you end up taking out a lot with with a little left over, in order to say a lot with a little. Or sometimes, you try to say a little with a little, or sometimes, to those with a purer artistic temperament, you end up using a little and saying even less. Presumably the purest poem of all is one in which all meaning and words are taken out, with nothing left over, but that has already been written by someone or other so to write it out again would be plagiarism. I certainly had a lot to say about shallots in this poem, and avoided saying it altogether, so this is what you got.
But I suppose there are some things a lot about shallots. You can grow a lot of them. You can like them a lot. And you can grow shallots in a lot, and an allotted lot withal, so you could, if you chose, grow a lot of shallots in a lot of allotted lots. That's not a lot, but it's something. That's not a lot, even if it literally is. It's a little lot, which is just about as much as anyone could ask for.
In addition, here is a shallot that I found the other day.
I cooked it and turned it into a tiny onion tart, and here is the recipe:
Ingredients:
1 teaspoon of olive oil
1 shallot
A splash of white wine
Puff pastry
Method:
Cut the puff pastry to the side of a small pan. Turn the oven on to 180 degrees celsius. Cut the shallot into pieces and fry it over medium heat for a few minutes until it browns nicely on all sides.
Add the white wine to the pan and let it reduce a bit.
Pop the puff pastry over the top of the shallot, and fold it in under the edges. Put the whole pan in the oven and leave it in there until the puff pastry rises and turns golden brown, about 20 minutes.
Invert the shallot tart over a board or plate and serve.
But enough talking about poetry and recipes and what not, we were talking about shallots. This is the end of my talk about shallots.
Now I don't want to make you all jealous, but today I made some bread. Or, to put it in a more technically accurate way, today I measured out the ingredients that will have by tomorrow become bread definitely.
Here is the bread which I will have certainly by tomorrow made without a shadow of a doubt.
Drooling yet?
Now admittedly I suppose it is possible that someone else will put the bread together tonight and tomorrow, but it really matters not. Please to admire the bread which will obviously by tomorrow absolutely have been definitely made by someone or other clearly.
The Future really is Perfect, isn't it.
Have some drama, you uncultured swine!
Russian composer Alexander Scriabin was something else. Look at this description of his planned work, 'Mysterium':
"Mysterium is an unfinished musical work by composer Alexander Scriabin. He started working on the composition in 1903, but left it incomplete when he died in 1915. Scriabin planned that the work would be synesthetic, exploiting the senses of smell and touch as well as hearing. He wrote that
"There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours."Scriabin intended the performance to be in the foothills of the Himalayas in India, a week-long event that would be followed by the end of the world and the replacement of the human race with "nobler beings"."
And the more descriptions you read about Scriabin's plan, the crazier/better it sounds:
"Bells suspended from clouds would summon spectators. Sunrises would be preludes and sunsets codas. Flames would erupt in shafts of light and sheets of fire. Perfumes appropriate to the music would change and pervade the air. "
(Certain small-minded pedants might ask: just how do you suspend a bell from a cloud? These intellectual tardigrades should be treated with the contempt they deserve.)
And: "Thousands of participants, clad in white robes, would intone his melismatic mantras with the fervor of the dervishes, expending every bit of their available energy in the service of his artistic idealism."
And: "Scriabin thought... that he would die of ecstasy when it finished playing."
According to the books, Scriabin actually died of blood poisoning. But clearly that's nonsense. He obviously died from nothing more than the modesty of his ambitions, and the 'Mysterium', in all its glory, is waiting for a purer vessel to bring its terrifying awesomeness to earth.
You can hear
Scriabin's 'Prefaratory Action' for the 'Mysterium' on YouTube, over 40 minutes
long, in its full bonkers glory.
PS Please to admire Scriabin's majestic curled 19th century moustache. It's so admirable that, like, I admire it.
A Christmas Poem in Seven Ers
For no reason at all, a poem.
The colours and shapes decided
They needed to sort out what’s what –
If the blue could beat green in a blue,
If rectangles were best, or the dots.
So they found a municipal oval,
And prepared for a very grand day,
And sent out the word to each other
That now might be a particularly auspicious time to play.
First up were the black and white zig zags,
Who bested the greeny-blue squares;
But then came the fuchsia diamonds,
Who put stop to their little affair.
The pink polka dots beat the purple –
The game was a jolly good romp;
While the match up of teal versus salmon
Turned into a contre-temps.
O! The crowd cried with eager excitement,
With passion and fervour and rage
At the stripes, the houndstooth, the triangles,
The amber, the peach and the beige!
But now, in this final of finals,
Which side would be best of the best?
Out came the shapes and the colours
For a truly terrific contest!
First up were the lilac-cream squiggles –
The crowd roared with glee from the stand;
And then came the buttercup checkmarks –
This final was grander than grand!
But ah, what a jolly imbroglio –
What more of this show need I say?
Though the squiggles played wonderfully well,
The buttercup checks won the day.
What a perfectly spiffing occasion!
They all gave a most rousing cheer,
And determined that, all things considered,
They would meet up same time next year!
I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so. - Sydney Smith.
There’s nothing like a good-bad review, they’re an art all on their own: not always a very nice art, but an art nonetheless. Australian composer Peter Sculthorpe claimed to be a collector of bad reviews, and, expounding on this concept, would often quote a bad review given to another composer – ‘This is a piece that gives A major a bad name’ – and proclaim, ‘I would love to have a review like that written about a piece of mine!’ Reviewer John Wilson Croker supposedly wrote the review that killed John Keats, which is unfortunate; even more unfortunate, then, that the review is hugely funny. (However, it wasn’t actually the review that killed off Keats: it was tuberculosis, a disease not known for its interest in the finer points of literature or literary reviews). Or then there is the artist Hal Porter’s highly amusing pisstake of Patrick White (‘he commits poetry’), to which White wrote an equally memorable, if not particularly amusing, review of a review (or, rather, a review of a reviewer): ‘a sac of green pus throbbing with jealousy’.
But the example that really comes to mind, and really seems pertinent to the issue here, of publishers of mischievously and misleadingly quoting critics, comes on the covers of Dan Brown’s bestselling Da Vinci Code. For those who have been living under a rock for the past two decades, Dan Brown is an author who has dedicated his life to writing very popular, and very bad, fiction; for the benefit of critics, he has placed tautologies and superfluities and errors and infelicities of writing on every page, in every sentence (in fact he has done his best to place them in every word). He really is a wonderful, generous writer, and one can only hope the writers of bad reviews really appreciate all he has done for them. Several early reviews of the Code are quoted on the covers, including one from the New York Times’Janet Maslin, of such effusive praise that it can clearly only be understood as sarcasm.
The word for ''The Da Vinci Code'' is a rare invertible palindrome. Rotated 180 degrees on a horizontal axis so that it is upside down, it denotes the maternal essence that is sometimes linked to the sport of soccer. Read right side up, it concisely conveys the kind of extreme enthusiasm with which this riddle-filled, code-breaking, exhilaratingly brainy thriller can be recommended… That word is wow.
And so, it’s a beautiful thing, this relationship between the author and the critic – the author that loves, and the critic that hates; the author that loves to love, and the critic that loves to hate; the author that loves to misquote the critic that hates the author, on their front cover, even in the act of the critic hating. It may seem perverse to us, but we must not kink shame. It is by no means the strangest thing to happen in the attention economy we all live in. On the one hand, the author does not love the critic; on the other hand, the critic does not love the author; on the third hand, they both clearly do.
Now, as a publisher (which you either are or you aren’t), when it comes to misquoting a critic in your book blurb (which you should never do), just how should you go about it? Personally, I recommend blatantly. That way, there is a simple and winning honesty to your dishonesty that will make you seem winsome and charming. However, there are other ways the publishers like to go about it. Passages are excerpted willy nilly, at large and at small, taken from the one paragraph of praise in a lengthy, excoriating essay; or, when even that isn’t possible, taken from the sentences at either end of the column that could, in certain lights, be seen, or be interpreted as being seen, as praiseworthy. Random words can even be taken from wildly different geographies of the column, and then cobbled together, in a delightfully avaricious homage to Dadaist collage technique.
As for the critics, they, too, can generously prepare their columns for misquoting, anticipating this strange, unethical-yet-earnest tribute to their own literary efforts paid by publishers. They can provide neat little paragraphs of grossly hyperbolic praise for critics, maybe even put them in a little box so the publishers may notice them better, like an attractive and inviting fenced public garden. They can cultivate exaggerated, esoteric and archaic terms of deliberately ambiguous phraseology and euphemism, so as to sound like praise but leave some reason for doubt. They can even engage in their own elaborate literary and cryptic exercise, by writing a paragraph in commendation of the book that, nevertheless, encodes incredibly rude messages about the author and/or publishers (in accordance with Gwen Harwood’s notorious ‘FUCK ALL EDITORS’ sonnet). There can hardly be any exercise more literary than this, writing about a subject without writing about it. Writers hardly ever write about what they are writing about. That’s how you can tell they really mean it.
On the whole, the practice of taking quotes from critics and deliberately misquoting them for the sake of book sales is wrong, and cannot be condoned; but it will certainly happen anyway, because critics are critics, and publishers are publishers, and their aims and wishes are so very different. The results, also, are so frequently entertaining and of such literary interest that we should probably encourage them anyway. So even though you shouldn’t do it, you should. I suppose I am conflicted about this matter after all, which is a great relief, I will not have to tear myself to shreds in the ferocity of my self-agreement, I am calm, I am at peace, I am at two with myself at last. Isn’t it beautiful how literature can do that?
Someone rang our phone the other day. What kind of a monster does that? Rings you - when you are at home, expecting - what? Some kind of answer? What barbarians we have become.
Admittedly, there was a time when we all used to answer the phone when it rang. Remember that? We used to spring towards the phone when it rang. We used to be afraid of *not* answering the phone. Afraid of what, I'm not sure. But there's nothing like a traditional phone bell to make you feel alarmed, anxious and afraid. I remember hearing Barry Humphries on the radio once talking about one of his early shows, in which the theatre goers sat in a darkened auditorium while the actors played the sound of a phone at them, Clearly, he was an evil man.
Obviously, I didn't answer the phone. I stood outside the room where it was ringing and, in some horror, watched it ring until it stopped, as any sensible person would do - all while experiencing that peculiar form of nostalgia for a period when that sound used to fill us with fear and dread and anxiety on the regular. It is an extremely interesting type of nostalgia that I recommend to nobody.
But what a time we live in! We are advanced so far as a society, technologically and culturally, that a person on the other side of the city, the other side of the country, or the other side of the world, can call you with the press of a few buttons, and you can decide to not pick up the phone probably. Unless you really feel like it which you don't just at the moment maybe. That's progress for you.
Who knew what a great revolution Alexander Graham-Bell was unleashing with his invention of the telephone? It was the fourth-greatest invention of the telecommunications era, allowing us all to keep in touch with one another, which led to the third-greatest, second-greatest, and first-greatest inventions of the telecommunications era, the snooze button, the silent button, and the off button, allowing us all to keep out of touch with one another. Technology is full of marvels.
But, you know, you're welcome to call again later when I feel like talking possibly.
THE POEM
Today your child is a messI call this poem CAR PEOPLE because I am and it isn't.
Though beholden to a Holden,
