Saturday, 30 January 2010
unwittingly complicit in a sadistic ritual
hampi,
last night, been here ten days, because its so easy, because of fest, and because we were both writing and working and we found Café Gopi for flagons of coffee and morning writing … and P under the cosh
first beer in three weeks, this is a holy town so no beer, or meat, so we had to buy it over the river… it was something of a commitment to cycle a mile to the wineshop … uphillish at the end of a 20km tootle…
and it might be a holy town but I just went for a last subtly beautiful sunset… of orange orb fading into wan… from the ruins above the temple… and there is crap pretty much everywhere… and by crap I mean human shit… cos the fest was big… and the young men don’t care
the same leering adolescents we’ve had enough of… and who make watching anything difficult because they’re so hyper and gangy and... well… every generation of forty year olds and over looks at their succeeding generation in their adolescence and thinks, we’re doomed, civilization is doomed… the ancient Greeks thought it, the ancient Hebrews thought it, many others must’ve thought it, an ungenerous English mind might think it now… and an Indian here could think it too
and it might be a holy town but… never is the sky wholly blue cos there are mines and factories and big cities and what have you well out of sight behind the bouldery hills
...
so we’ve had five hot days of walking… of cycling… of temples and ruins … of a jolly interlude tubing down some kinda rapids… of light climbing …and light bouldering… i.e. clambering up down and around the large and small and very large boulders which are the landscape... of trotting thrice out to the waterfall which isn’t a waterfall as we know it… but a underground torrent down beneath the smoothed rocks of this gorge-to-be …where the water has made Henry Moore sculpture after Henry Moore sculptue …and there are cool shallow pools for the slow swimming… [though mind the monkeys cos they love to steal your bag and taunt you]… of cycling along the rice-paddy valleys around below and between the high boulder hills
the fest was ok.. thick crowds… as with New Years Day Parade in Cochi, the fests are the only time the girls and young women are allowed out … and girls just wanna have fun ….and a mixed bag of dance and music … all difficult to judge cos well, its difficult to enjoy yourself when everything stops and starts so much, and its an alien tradition and you’re not sure what constitutes good… so you enjoy the faces of the performers… though too many of them look like professors surveying a class… and only a few are full of glee and zeal and wonder… and the music only rarely seems to syncopate … and only rarely do the dancers do something new and rhythmic… something with the body utterly compelling to the eye … which a good few do, but not enough, not enough… and none of the ensembles are wholly competent, so you have to watch the good ones and not look at the bad … and only a few are so good they can be playful with the form… and they are the ones to enjoy the most
...
...
and we did watch something truly awful, unsettlingly ugly… which made us feel unwillingly complicit in a sadistic ritual… enacted on a twelve year old girl… cos she’s dressed up in coloured silky finery and dances to recorded music, which cuts out for ten seconds of every minute… and after a couple of minutes the music is broken up by a voiceover which, we assume, explains the tradition of the form… which, we assume, isn’t karnatakan… and while the voiceover goes on, and on, the girl holds the same one-legged pose… but then the broken-rhythmed music gets in to it for fifteen or so long minutes, yes fifteen, where the poor girl is just whirling, and whirling, and there is something brutal about the rhythm and she is whirling whirling exactly the same whirl again and again and again, gamely never ceasing to go for it, and go for it, as it goes on for five minutes, ten minutes, with still the ten seconds of no backing track every minute, fifteen minutes, whirling, whirling, with men appearing from side of stage and looking at her, some with clipboards and conferring, and interfering with the spectacle, which hasn’t happened with any other performer, except this spectacle isn’t pretty, and we`re asking each other, what is this? why are they putting this girl through it? why? what moron thought this up? why did they think could be good? why isn’t someone stopping her? and some goodhearted souls to our left start clapping, loudly, as if hoping this will end it, cos no-one is enjoying it and we’re relieved some of the Indians are uncomfortable as us and STILL SHE SPINS DIZZYLESSLY ON to the brutal rhythm, the poor girl, and this is awful to watch because we can’t stop thinking, this girl is being tortured, this is awful, she is spinning spinning whirling spinning in the same againsame clockwork pattern without ceasing over the CD screw-ups and still going for it, keeping her rhythm her composure her smile but there is no point to it, and we, and we’re sure we’re not alone, we are angry this can be happening, this should not be happening, what career advancing proud parent or teacher or instructor or cultural commisar or shithead thinks this is good and then it stops, stops, its over and she get the biggest round of applause of the night, less for her dancing which was ok, but she’s only twelve, but chiefly we reckon [and we think we’re in sync with the audience] but chiefly FOR HER AS A HUMAN BEING cos that shouldn’t happen to a dog, to a Republican, to Osama Bin Laden…and then one of the clipboard cretins gives her a mike and she thanks the people of Karnataka for listening and I can only think of the Spanish Inquisition who would expect the tortured to thank the torturer afterwards…
…
next stop badami, another ex-capital, now only 25000, which, in India, is small… its not far but its six hours so the roads must be… an … entertainment...
...
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
a concatenating syncopation of phantasmagoria
and
its already getting very difficult to describe out there
and it hasn't even properly started yet
succinct simply isn't possible
unless you're satisfied with
but if i try and describe it the desc will run for pages...
...
bicycle repair man
i've been meaning to read To The Lighthouse for years but i've never got round to it
but have never used it as its the kind of in literary joke most people find annoying and i do too ... but in fact, i have been meaning to read To The Lighthouse for years but have never got round to it
have got as far as page 4 in the past
and page 40 in the past
but i either left town or it fell in the raintub, probably both ...
and who's afraid of virginia woolf ? well me well i'm irrationally intimidated by her and was annoyed by Nicole Kidman's prosthetic nose in The Hours ... i'm not sure what gets me about Virginia Woolf but maybe its just that i see her as one of those intimidatingly Upper Middle Class women who always put the frighteners on me the uppermiddle class mothers of college friends doing their best not to look down on pleb me
so today, as Priscilla is on a pushed-back deadline, the best thing for me to do is toddle off and leave her to it ...so, as its looking cloudy, i rent a bike and head off... i just motored through White Tiger by Aravind Aviga, which is an excellent read and Cafe Gopi, the rooftop where we go every morning for flagons of coffee, while writing with the clear-head of early morning, has a bookswap shelf but the only half decent book is... To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf... so i get it and take it with me in the bike's basket as i belt way too fast up the steep hill which confronts immediately you leave [which right now has fifty drummers, 10 Gods, including 4 monkey Gods and a couple of coconut-macheteing Krishnas, ten fanfare-type trumpeters and eleven bedecked elephants winding their way off it] ... so the hill half ruins me for the rest of the day and, having realised after the first hill that my thighs are whacked and the bike is even more severely decrepit, is in fact rubbish, i cycle 15 or so km, head into a long dead-end between a river and power station...whereupon i get a puncture...
when, as i approach a town, two ragamuffins kids, bruv'n'sis, find me and say, puncture... puncture... and point me to a bike repair shop ... which, being deep in the misery of reading Virginia, and sometimes being a decidedly unproactive person [much too loath to consider bettering my position] hadn't occurred to me...
speaking of intimidating middle class women, one thing you never get in england anymore, that i see anyhow is women who wear heavyish overcoats and walk about with their hands in their pockets creating a unique kind of silhouette
you see them in old english movies say, a canterbury tale
well... you might not get those women in england anymore ... but you do get them here
the vicar's wife in Ooty
busybodies, purposeful, no-nonsense, intelligent
they're another thing you used to get in england you don't get anymore ...but do get here ...
...
kids playing with a wheel and a stick
groups of kids playing cricket
leyland cars and trucks
royal enfield bikes
standard fireworks [?]
a complete disregard and loathing for the poor
...
Tuesday, 26 January 2010
with hindsight/ i'm shite
and i'm thinking how my two favourite books of last year were
lolita
and
midnight's children
and i'm even more keenly thinking how i didn't like either the first time
...
doesn't this mean my judgement was off?
well off?
horribly off?
and how do i know its still isn't horribly off?
meaning
with hindsight/
i'm shite
...
!
with hindsight
i'm shite
i just reread the play i've been writing and got so excited about below
and, sadly, its nowhere near as good as i thought it was
nowhere near
Trollocks
that i should get excited about it,
and then have my hopes/ expectations dashed
again
is, of course, scant consolation
...
of course
...
though its nothing fifty decent gags and some more good ideas can't sort out
...
mind you
isn't everything?
...
ㅑ누'ㅅ ㄷㅍㄷ교소ㅑㅜㅎ
ㅑ
Monday, 25 January 2010
wrote a play by mistake
whoops
wrote a play by mistake
how did that happen?
am meant to be writing a poetry show and i go off on a flight of fancy
follow it
keep following it
wake up in morning thinking about it and
pretty soon
crashbangwhoops have written a play by accident
...
three days in the writing
couple stuck in eternal hotel room find they are writing the same acutely self-referential piece about a couple stuck in a hotel room
rapidfire dialogue... post modern pisstake...
where post post modernism turns out to be modernism all over again... because ... [but that would be giving it away]
which passes for a happy ending
four cheers for modernism
...
...
Sunday, 24 January 2010
morality as dead a language as morse code
or was it his fellow iffy republican, Gonzales
the Geneva Convention is quaint and obsolete
...
and morse code is easy to understand the principles of
though slightly harder to learn so well its instinctive
but no-one goes there anymore, anyway
...
Saturday, 23 January 2010
A Mockney History Of Hampi
Vijayanagara
So what does it look like?
It looks like some posh tosser’s brother had this job lot of nice stone he couldn’t get rid of till he niftily manages to palm it off on some royal tosser, Prince Muggins the Mug and, how`s yer father, before you can say tenth wonder of the world, hello Hampi... then this little number turns out well lucrative for the family of posh tossers cos King Mugbad the Crap and his kids and their kids are a dumb bunch of suckers and, cor strike a light, how’s yer father, hello Hampi bigstyle
And then cos the Mugginses wasted all the dosh on all the stone shit they ends up in this big battle where they might have the numbers but the other lot have got some big shooters and they’ve got shorter bows and arrers than the other lot cos the Mugginses have blown all their readies on some concrete bloody Mandapams stretching right aross the horizon... cos simply everyone and his status seeking wife had to have a Mandapam.... and where the muslims have got cavalry and what have King Muggins the Buggins and the Mugginses got? a stone chariot, yes stone, looks nice on a postcard to yer Aunty Mabel but bugger all use to anyone
So next thing the Muslim so-and-so's from the north are all grinning from ear to ear while Muggins the Last is having his head paraded around the Deccan bloody Plain on the end of a bloody spear, and’e ain’t gonna see his toes again this side of Doomsday, and next thing the still grinning Muslims are dismantling the place pricy concrete brick by pricier concrete brick … so that this city which was compared to the best in Europe is turned into ruins pronto and no-one ever really lives in the gaff again… while only a few lucky fuckers get to do a runner east with as much treasure as you can carry on 550 elephants, which is a lot yeah?... where no-one ever learns a lesson and soon some more Mandapams are going up like there`s no tomorrow... or yesterday... and more money gets spent on concrete you can`t eat or fight with and the Muslims are in the Deccan bigtime till the British show up, stick a sword in some guts and pretty soon everyone is equal cos they`re all stuffed
...Friday, 22 January 2010
creepy creak
…
The biggest ants I’ever seen
Well close
An inch long
And black
Yet not scary
Except when they turn their big
black
flat
heads
I’m sure I can hear a creak
…
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Would the British still be in India if they hadn't been so racist?
Would they?
?
For every other invader swiftly married in… the Mughals for instance
So that within a hundred years or so they were pretty much of local blood
Well the British, being a new kind of racist, didn’t
Within their Empire mindset it was unthinkable… a British man marrying a Indian woman … with the opposite being even more unthinkable …But, imagine if they hadn’t, they would still be the upper class here…
The British were better armed… they were taller and therefore stronger and more imposing … they had the mystique of the incomprehensible… and the undefeated… and they were whiter ... after all, the Indian upper class revere fairness of skin… and you see a form of this every day in the uneasying skin cream adverts aimed at teenagers…and, as with many other upper classes in ex-colonies, like the Malaysians, the Indian Upper Class model themselves in so many ways on the British Upper Class as was, though rarely in religion… [Independence Square in Kuala Lumpur has a cricket pitch on top of it… which is like turning Trafalgar Square into a Gridiron]… and had those Anglos sensibly become Anglo-Indians, then those Anglo-Indians, like the Indo-Mughals before them, would have stayed in power till something else dislodged them… like the British dislodged the Mughals…
Which racism was all very good news for the Congress Brahmins, who got this country, which had never existed before on such a scale, with very little effort… the sudden weakness of the
Because the British also got
For few seem to stress how there might be a geographical India… it leaps off the map … but there is no historical India… and if there was it absolutely certainly contained Pakistan … India had NEVER been politically unified until the British who, suddenly having no-postwar-choice, found themselves forced to hand it over to the New Indians
What a marvelous piece of luck for the opposition in the 1940s?! what a very neat thing to happen?!… to be given this whole country… on a platter… this ancient country with so much glorious future
And before, having visited the site of Tippu Sultan’s defeat and very death, I wondered quite what I thought about it… was it… one bunch of brutal bastard toughnuts destroying another bunch of brutal bastard toughnuts?
Or is it an issue that Tippu Sultan was their toughnut, an Indian toughnut?… even though he does seem to have been responsible for the death of many Hindus and Christians… though his many apologists deny this, seeing him as a great visionary poet scholar and warrior…
Which is a tough question… does it matter that he was their toughnut?
After all, in Africa, the benighted Africans were probably better off under their rapacious colonial bastard leaders than with the bastard leaders of the murderous and fractured societies they now have… not everywhere of course but… in many places.
[And maybe not everyone would agree but I reckon, if someone is murdering you wholesale, the better option is the ones who kill the least…. And bollocks to dogma, or morality, or nationalism.]
Whilst the Indians were milked for well over a century by the British and their Imperial economic squeeze … Tippu Sultan might have squandered money on the de rigeur opulence …but he would not have taken the money out of the country… which was the whole reason the British were there… extracting the cash… which meant that India in many ways went backwards under British rule… before that it was undoubtedly a dynamic place, a patchwork of diversely antiquated and dynamic political unities… it seems to be common knowledge that the Indians had good boatyards in 1750 yet they hardly had any in 1950… because the British simply controlled everything and didn’t want them building ships… or much else for that matter
Whilst they had astutely instituted an iniquitous landowner system… the Zamindars… large landowners who were given the land and who, often absentees, extracted their own tithes from the peasants and were then taxed themselves by the British… which outside instituted feudal system of course made it much easier for the British to get their money… rather than impossibly running after every peasant themselves
It seems very difficult to judge if the British were more or less brutal than their predecessors, few of whom, if any, were saints… Were there more massacres under the British, or less?... Were the hospitals and jails worse under the British, better, or much the same?… What is not difficult to judge is that the economic squeeze of the British was much worse… Tippu and the others of course grabbed the cash for themselves, and maybe the most the locals got out of its was the small drippings of some old-fashioned trickle-down effect… yet he didn’t sail away with boatloads of booty
A book on all this would be good to read …
...
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
shut me in, shut me out
Well, as I’ve said
And I have to say
The writing’s tough
Particularly the writing
And one of the bollocks-ups in my whole time as a performance poet has been how I barely wrote for years
Because I was running shows
Frequently less
You either administrate
or you create
So I had to stop running shows in order to write them
Even though I was pretty good at running them
Most people who try are actually bad
Not afraid of hard work
…
And one of the bummers of writing is the amount of wasted work
Especially when you see how disorganized I am as a writer
Memory
I have pieces I’ve been writing for twenty years which are no nearer completion than they were ten years ago
…
would work on for years
without hope of their ever being published
so they would work and work on them for decades
purely for their own sense of art
painstakingly perfecting them
year after year after year
not in the belief anyone would ever see them
but purely to make them function perfectly as works of art
which is alot yeah?
...they gestate
...
at length
...
lines attract other lines and it all coalesces
...
…
And the piece below is a classic example
Editing and editing
Editing and editing
Editing and editing
Editing and editing
Editing and editing
Editing and editing
Editing and editing
Editing and editing
Editing and editing
though maybe I’m a bit old for such full-on-ness
but its alot of work to have put in for zero product
not to mention the flow
and as i know it does work, maybe its a good example of how a solid performance piece doesn't have to work on the page
i'd be surprised, seeing how its essentially impressionistic
and don't have to know
...
...
...
The you you become
Yes, you’re going to spend a long time being
So it pays to becoming a you you like
And me? …I want my heart
To lend and not take
To river not lake
To give and not take
To river not lake
the ifs and buts
and wrongs and ruts
And ahhh its
My pleasure your pain
Your pleasure my pain
My pleasure your pain
Your pleasure my pain
Cos ahh, we are the dogs of liberty, dogs of liberty, dogs of liberty
We are the ghosts of liberty, ghosts of liberty, ghosts of liberty
And we are but rollingstock
only in us can they be borne
AND SAMUEL BECKETT HE WROTE
AND JAMES JOYCE HE WROTE
AND WHO’S MINDSET WOULD YOU PREFER?
THOSE WHO KNOW NO HISTORY ARE CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT
THE MORE YOU KNOW
THE LESS YOU KNOW
SO THE TRICK IS
KNOWLEDGE AND LACK OF KNOWLEDGE
The tricky bit
for I believe FREEDOM IS THE LAND BETWEEN WHAT YOU KNOW
AND WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW
And I wonder if the freeing
So this is called
IF YOU’RE NOT GROWING YOU’RE SHRINKING
I was making myself feel queasy
but it ain’t that easy
and weave
a newness,
unsheddable
head
seeking to live and create and be
to not get dragged far out into the chaos
yet neither be beached immoveable
…
and pulled and pushed
and so retain the chance
the choice
o roll me in roll out
pull me in pull me out
no pretence at any pretence
come on now while we jest
me I sought I sought up I sought the rest
me i got tipped off
i sucked it up and I chewed it
i let the chaos overwhelm me
this was me running round
dispassionate at my own disaster
never
ever
in fragments
so shut me in shut me out
wear me in wear me out
the cars growl impersonal
the streetshow freakshow a sped up slideshow
the old skin shed and
dead
spluttering abob in the tunneled spaces
ricocheting blundering tripping slipping
with
running fast running ragged running slick running raw
running wild running on running true running more
the rhythm becoming an energy
the choosing becoming a cruising
a collision a decision
a sound a booming
the stretch becoming a reach,
the rolling risen pulse of cadence,
now falling further still,
now,
so
deal me in deal me out
see me in see me out
a pleasure in every sense
lets go see about this mess
the world hasn't even begun yet
you never can win
i got you ...
between the malignant and the benign
but, ooh, don’t you like the vibration
of being caught in the oscillation
between capture and liberation
so, twisted, hamfisted
count me in count me out
see me in see me out
born to be ripped off
and me i ripped the script off
a bowling down the lane ball
trenchlike streets of the mazelike city
of the pretty suburban pretty
with
running fast running ragged running slick running raw
running wild running on running true running more
the sound becoming an melody
the choice becoming a voice
an emotion a musing
a fusion a fission
the stretch becoming a reach,
the flame becoming a fire,
now falling,
and soon,
scaling higher
and I’ve some inner specifications to rearrange
yes I’ve some inner specifications to rearrange
the expansion of the possible
a growing sense of newness
unbegun
the racking up of good reasons why
and nothing beats a fail like a try
of intellectual rigour
sound of floors smashing
on rock
cos its a disaster we’re not moving faster
so find me in find me out
fit me in fit me out
no pretence at any pretence
come on now while we jest
born to be ripped off
come on now before you guess
...