Parosetrie

The Spark Plug
(not by Seamus Heaney)

From a long time ago I remember
an ostensibly mundane object or event
let's make it a spark plug this time

(I looked up its name in Irish
in a big leathery book -
speouighbhellchoiughsh)

the curve and cylinder of it
filigreed with detail
and hard as a kitten's eye under a gas-lamp.

anyway, now it's a long time in the future
perhaps the very present
and that brassed intrusion

previously described
serves to in some way elucidate
my current situation.

You probably didn't know about this:

Jimmy Carter is filmed attacking a rabbit with an oar, yet somehow he's still thought of as a paragon of benevolence. Conspiracy theorists to work!

Charlton Heston
Was in at least one Western*
As well as playing Moses leading the Jews to the promised lands.
Anyway, the undertaker has taken the liberty of prising that gun out of Mr Heston's cold dead hands.


*the Western I am thinking of is The Big Country. He co-starred with Gregory Peck, and I once saw Peck asked about the film's significant homo-erotic undertones. The wooden-headed McCarthy-baiter smiled and softly replied 'please God nobody tell Charlton'.

If you aren't interested in Lamarckian evoloution you probably shouldn't bother reading this post

Dogtooth and I were in the taproom of the Cid and Aleph (a soulless chain pub we had been forced into by contingency) and the conversation was flagging. Suddenly Dogtooth seized one of my stray tentacles and tugged urgently upon it.
'Look' he hissed, 'isn't that disgraced Lamarckian biologist Paul Kammerer?'
'I don't see how it can be' I muttered, but he was already up and walking over. I followed a little way behind.
'You're Kammerer aren't you?' he said.
'I don't know this Kammerer you are talking about' said the accused party in a thick Viennese accent. I was ready to retreat at the sturdy rebuff, but Dogtooth pressed on, revealing a previously unsuspected streak of steel in his character.
'Yes you are, you fraudulent rascal. What happened, I thought you killed yourself?' The man sagged visibly in his seat.
'It's true. I am he. When my fraud was discovered I felt I had no choice but to shoot myself in the head with a pistol. There, according to scientific orthodoxy, it should have ended. However, a few days later I woke up with a cracking headache in a small wooden box. As I lay there in my coffin my mind worked furiously, and I remembered that my father had once been shot in the head in a hunting accident, but had survived thanks to receiving excellent medical attention. Clearly he had acquired an ability to survive shots to the head, and passes it on to me. I cried out loudly, and the strength of lung which my mother had acquired while shouting at passing traffic stood me in good stead. A wandering onion seller heard my cries, and dug me up. I escaped from an Austria in turmoil, and settled in South London. I have lived in secret until this moment.'
'You say you acquired a resistance to being shot in the head?' I asked. 'By what mechanism?'
He didn't seem to have any answer to this, and we were in the verge of walking away in disgust, when who should walk in but Karl Jung.
'What a coincidence' Dogtooth remarked.

'Has the naughty thumb of science prodded thy beauty'...?

Ben Macintyre is fed up with ugly science running its warty pustulent fingers all over nice friendly ancient mysteries. 'The myth of Stonehenge,' he explains, 'may be more powerful even than science.' It is possible that the true nature of Stonehenge may elude excavations, but that does not excuse a lot of Romantic gibberish about the death of the imagination. It is a feeble imagination in the first place that cannot accommodate scientific enquiry.

Hamilton busts centuries-old racist myth

You no doubt think that the sandwich was invented by a white Christian English aristocrat. It's all lies. Kids, don't trust whitey.

Bookends

Thank Moses and his sometime-contentious little apostrophe for Private Eye! What a blissful publication - providing, that is, that exposure to it is limited to once or twice a year, beyond which it strangely becomes very tedious very quickly. But were it not for a recent edition of Pseuds Corner (more potential apostrophe trouble for the incorrigible grammarian), only those sincere fools who actually read Pete Paphides's music review column in the Times would have been treated to this:

'Thom Yorke threw rave shapes into the light. Beaming its way forward like a speeding snowplough, a sublimely heavy 'Bodysnatcher' saw guitarist Jonny Greenwood oscillating between filigree fretwork and finger-shredding ectoplasmic scree.'

Proof, if ever it was needed, that any wanker with a thesaurus can be a rock critic. The unspeakable horror of music journalism cannot be overstated.

In related news, Morrissey is sueing NME for libel. For me, it's a win-win.

"The islands with all their minimum and lampblack"

"The islands with the vertebra of some Zeus."
Odysseas Elytis

I was reading Isaac D'Israelli's Curiosities Of Literature and I uncovered the charming detail that the expression 'bringing coal to Newcastle' has a Hebrew equivalent - 'to take olive oil to a city with many olive trees growing nearby'. Not as snappy as ours I feel, but it might make more sense in the original language. Other pleasing kickshaws from the same groaning table include the Chinese 'In a field of melons do not pull up your shoes; under a plum tree do not adjust your hat' and the Arabian saying 'the barber learns his art on the orphan's face'. Lest you get too carried away, there's a piece of stern, if somewhat oxymoronic wisdom to contend with in the dour Scots proverb 'wise men make proverbs but fools repeat them'.

In other non-news, I've been enjoying Madoc by Paul Muldoon. It's such a bloody wonderful mess I want to repeat the whole thing verbatim, but I'll exercise restraint, and just give you a couple of nice moments to tide you over as you rush headlong to the bookshop-

"[Archimedes]
Coleridge leaps out the tub. Imagine that."

" -Might the specter of Hamilton
playing a schottische

on his melodeon

of blood and guts and shit and piss
have been just enough to give Wilkinson a pause."

"All I have in the house is some left over
Squid cooked in its own ink
And this unfortunate cup of tea. Take it. Drink."

Post scriptoid

A footnote for the Mosley affair. Pious, self-appointed arbitrators of social acceptability (a.k.a. Guardian commentators) face an interesting decision this week. Do they side with the Jews or the perverts? These two erstwhile-discrete pursuits after moral equity are about to meet in the middle: either they defend, indiscriminately, the right to practise any form of sexual irregularity, provided it is legal and consensual (a Newtbook firm favourite at 5-4) or they defer to pressure from bolshy head-in-arse religious groups and censure an innocent man for enjoying a bit of imaginative, victimless sex in what he thought was the privacy of his own home. The Toynbees and the Buntings of this world could swing either way...

Odds and sods

Robert Maudsley looks like he might croak at any moment. In the meantime, I have been having my doubts about the capital's culture of gun-crime fear - do rising levels of gun ownership necessarily equate to rising levels of murder or assault? - but I have neither the inclination nor the wherewithal to emulate Hamilton's recent flair with facts and stats, so I'll let that one drop.

[Doesn't the foreshortening in this look a little strange - tiny legs...? No? Maybe not...]

I do, however, think we should try to resurrect the weregild, a measured system of criminal retribution that flourished in pre-mediaeval Scandinavia, if only to counteract this country's often hysterical attitude towards 'justice'. In other news, I've discovered a healthy crop of white-supremacist amateur poetry which I commend to you, dear reader, from the heart of my bottom. And if all else fails, you can always live as Sawney Bean did. All that is required is a restless libido and woman who shares your limited scope for employment and morality.

Nazi Sex!

Some people might find this new obsession with Max Mosley strange, but I'm tickled pink by the confident assertion that "fantasising about one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century is obviously completely inappropriate.”

Many thanks to the Times for this list of historical reprobates. I'm particularly fascinated by the third Marquess of Waterford, who may have been the alter ego of Spring Heeled Jack, the Post Newt's cryptid of choice. If anyone finds this sort of thing interesting then I would advise them to look into Edith Sitwell's The English Eccentrics. It's a corker. I don't think enough people read Sitwell. Or Norman Douglas for that matter, or Thomas Lovell Beddoes, or Angus Wilson. But I digress.

Paris Hilton's 'music' is put out by Heiress Records. I liked the honesty of that so much that I've decided to start a publishing house called Unreadable Vanity Published Arsewipe.

I really dropped the ball on this one

Good heaven's, look at muggins here blathering on about Balaclavabollocks while Mosley's son engages in Nazi themed orgies. I feel like a prize lemon. Still, it seems a bit cruel of everyone to yell at the poor chap for what sounds like a fairly embarrassing and expensive (£2,500 apparently) sexual predilection. Do we think that that this might have anything to do with the events of his early childhood, what with being separated from his parents and told that they were reviled fascists who he should be ashamed of? No, of course not, he is a horrible racist and should be punished for performing a consensual and private sex act, but not in any way the pervert might enjoy. What I'm personally interested in is how the video got out. If you are a prostitute specialising in Nazi themed S&M it seems that without discretion you don't have much of a business model.

Ephemera

I don't know how my fellow Newtists feel, but I doubt there is much love for Tennyson among us. I like his 'nature red in tooth and claw' but I always find his metre a bit shoddy for such an infamous tinkerer. However, although I'm not a particular partisan of 'The Charge of the Light Brigade, I couldn't resist giving you the fruits of some idle wikipidelling: a number of less famous works of art to emerge from Battle of Balaclava:
The Charge of the Heavy Brigade
The Trooper
The Charge of the Light Brigade (Richard Caton Woodville)Alfred reading TCOTLB in 'eminent Victorian' mode.
The Balaclava Hat
The Last of the Light Brigade
The Thin Red Line (Robert Gibb)
(It's actually not a bad painting I think. For the Woodville I can only apologise.)

Aboard the robust Post-Newt there has long been a broad base consensus that Dylanolatory is pretty unhealthy and deluded. Here is former a 'Yippie', the supremely unhealthy and deluded A.J. Weberman, with some revelations about the man himself. The Yippies seem to have been pretty loathsome as a group, so more on them later.

If anyone can find a video of Michael Power I will be forever in their debt.

Here's some Fuseli to get the taste of Woodville out of your mouth.

Monjoie! Marchons! Dieu le veut! Walloons!

I am returned from abroad. The continental sun has scalded by milky complexion and French food continues to disappoint. Every third car on the road was either Renault, Peugeot or Citroen: protectionism or blinding national pride? Who can say. I almost visited Laon cathedral, and then almost visited Clairvaux abbey, before stopping for lunch and almost finishing a motorway-cafe quiche Lorraine. The Belgians are still the most dangerous drivers on the Eurasian plate, the European currency is strong on the pound and the kilometre is down by .3 against the mile, making journeys across central Europe expensive but mercifully brief.

But what is it?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/mpd/permalink/m1JG0D3G3XMYT8:m2TJVF2M6HKLIS

I've been working on a theory that there is a correlation between high suicide rates, popularity of chess and alcoholism, and the number of speakers of Uralic languages that a country has, and I had a look at the relevant data. Some interesting facts:

China is the only country where more women commit suicide than men, usually the ratio goes hugely the other way.

Commonwealth Caribbean countries have very low suicide rates, but Guyana, which shares with them a similar culture, ethic mix, background, history and climate, has one of the highest in the world.

Puerto Rico has almost half the suicide rate of the United States: perhaps potential immigrants should be warned about this.

The suicide rate in Lithuania is nearly forty times that in Azerbaijan.
Nobody seems to know how many Africans kill themselves. A lot? Very few? It's just too early to say.

I'm off to read Thomas Lovell Beddoes and drink Amaro Erbes.

Why I Miss The Fifteenth Century

Websites like this make me feel like a Venusian. I was barely even aware of the existence of a font called 'comic sans'.

Meanwhile, in Don DeLillo's sitting room:

Look forward to herring from you

When a passing reference to unusual or even perfectly ordinary food in a discursive historical essay tickles me to the extent that the details before and after dissolve in hopeless mirth, it's a sure sign that I am really too trivial to be reading history books in the first place. One such instance owes itself to the 'Norwich herring pie render', a duty thought to predate the Norman Conquest which the king would have collected annually as recently as 1816 when, presumably, the prince regent got drunk and tried to abolish Norwich - or so I like to think. The render is a fantastic concept in itself and an example of the sort of creative taxation which the Post-Newt would back to the hilt. Nevertheless, one wonders what was really vexing Charles I when his house-servants sat down to pen this series of irritable complaints:

A Young Person's Guide to Anglo-Saxon Poetry

My translations of Wendish seafaring discourses from the Anglo-Saxon are awaiting publication. The companies I have approached have been, alas, steadfast in refusal, and many have been quick to point out that both my style and subject are antique and irrelevant. One saucy fellow described my work as 'irredeemably at odds with the preferences of today's reading public.'

'Problem is, it's crap,' he added charmlessly. I think they are all quite wrong; in the meantime, it occurred to me that young people these days might take a dear pleasure in writing their own alliterative poetry, yet are inclined to hold this particular verse-form at a little distance. The narrator's CV in any Anglo-Saxon poem can seem a little daunting: most have fought/lost/been maimed in at least two full-scale epic battles; many have wandered the earth for an unaccountable period of time, meditating on their own terrible grief and physical discomfort; few have not buried most or all of their friends, lovers, liege-lords and family members; one or two even begin to show signs of critical mental illness.

Apart from the alliterative technique which is easily mastered, there is a fairly steady formula for Anglo-Saxon verse:

1) Choose your setting. There are only really three options open to you, which makes this a pretty painless choice. You can choose either a) the aftermath of a horrific battle or b) a small boat hopelessly lost miles out at sea or c) a dream in which the narrator converses with a valuable holy relic. All settings will compel the narrator to dwell diseasedly on dead companions and personal misery, so your choice will only have implications for your poem's scenery and decorative imagery.

2) Marshal your cliches. Here is a list of stock words and phrases that constitute the bulk of any Anglo-Saxon poem. Repetition of any or all of them should give your poem that sense of tedious, self-indulgent lamentation that is the trademark of all Old English verse: 'noble/brave/beloved kinsman', 'freezing waves', 'bitter sorrows', 'breast-cares', breast-companions', 'breast-chamber', 'miserable', 'grieving', 'far from home', 'generous lord', 'covered over with earth/snow/frost (or all three)'.

3) Leave room for considerable ambiguity in the text. This is not strictly a criterion of Anglo-Saxon poetry, or even of poetry in general, and prosecution of this advice will In No Way improve the quality of your (in most cases) decidedly amateurish poetry. However, years from now when the accidental series of events that constituted your life are scrutinised by the fickle vulture of posterity, your poems will receive greater attention and critical acclaim if they prove 'difficult'. See the poetry of William Empson for conclusive evidence that this is the case.

From the Diary of Anchovey Hamiltonne

I dide preapare mieselfe fore a fancie dresse partie, inne the mannere of a Bannannae, an afrik fruitte of some renowne. Itte was a pore partie, ande one manne was verie rude to mee. I rite this in a foulle moode.