Daily Denby

The Climate by Edwin Denby (1948)

I myself like the climate of New York
I see it in the air up between the street
You use a worn-down cafeteria fork
But the climate you don't use stays fresh and neat.
Even we people who walk about in it
We have to submit to wear too, get muddy,
Air keeps changing but the nose ceases to fit
And sleekness is used up, and the end's shoddy.
Monday, you're down; Tuesday, dying seems a fuss
An adult looks new in the weather's motion
The sky is in the streets with the trucks and us,
Stands awhile, then lifts across land and ocean.
We can take it for granted that here we're home
In our record climate I look pleased or glum.

But you have to hear it in Denby's voice for full effect

Read all about him here

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain

Often I really want to buy into Iain Sinclair- he's so bald and referential. I always try, and then get so far, and feel a bit ashamed of my own world's lack of filthy texture and phatic stains. It's kind of the opposite of Emerson- it makes me feel too clean, healthy and optimistic. I don't smoke, and I don't really drink, not as a lifestyle, and I only collect books and references with the delusion perhaps of their utility, rather than as a enervating obsession. Instead I guess I should be looking through the flood damaged detritus of somewhere grimy like, I don't know, Hartlepool (if it floods there), to find that one lost fabled and besmirched copy of a Blake plate where he draws the map of London showing the plague pit where he buried his mojo. And then find that it is under the Olympic Stadium, but has been found and is being installed beneath the Millennium Wheel using lottery money. Or some such Robert Frippery.

I think the following sentence, the last in the introduction to his supremely depressing anthology, "London: City of Disappearances", sums up why I can only take Sinclair in small doses:_

'At the finish, even the cabinet of curiosities will betray us; all we can ever know is the shape the missing object leaves in the dust - and the stories, the lies we assemble to disguise the pain of an absence we cannot define.'

I can see how it's trying to be all Gatsby-ish, 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past', and I am extremely partial to a bit of Gatsby-business, but come on, give me a break. I can't let such unadulterated miserrimus win the day. What about Smarties? These will never betray us. And what about the stories of Dick King-Smith? Are these really there to disguise the pain of an absence we cannot define? Please, Iain, let me have something as a sop, I worked hard in school, and was a good boy to my mummy...

Also, it is funny how every writer in the anthology starts to sound like Sinclair, there is totally not one drop of contrast. And I love a drop of contrast. Everybody is bookish and disappointed, a mage of wistful and bitter anti-nostalgic nostalgia.

Much better is the slewish glut of Russian absurdist satire that I am reading. Here, in the middle of the morass of human crapness is a precious and graspable seam (as all seams should be) of the dark humour which I find lacking in Sinclair's right-on spoddy superciliousness.

But to end more aptly with some Edward Thomas:-

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be for what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

But at least Thomas had the decency to be at the front in WW1 writing this, not in bijou Hackney buying fruit on Columbia Road. Still, to conclude, I am a big fan of Sinky, and will continue to be until he is forgotten and I can rediscover him.

"For Blake the exegete is an "Angel", a "Philosopher". Either pitiful or presumptuous in Blake's eyes, such exegetes lift intellectual candles before the suns of vision"

Cumdurgeonly Urgency

A rhopalic is a form of wordplay named after the Greek word for club, which is thin at one end, and thick at the other.

A rhopalic by letter:-

I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications' incomprehensibleness.

A rhopalic by syllable:-

Some people completely misunderstand adminstrative extemporization- idiosyncratical antianthropomorphism undenominationalizing politico-ecclesiastical honorificabilitudinity.

Gulp.

laziness is a warm gun

Language, but no words...

in living color....

the anchorite cockroach- wham!

For my hirsute homunculus pal Dr Pot, here follows an 'Incidence' of Daniil Kharms, who is not only my favourite looking author, but a mighty great writer too...

The Plummeting Old Woman

A certain old woman, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of a window, plummeted to the ground, and was smashed to pieces.

Another old woman leaned out of the window and began looking at the remains of the first one, but she also, out of excessive curiosity, fell out of the window, plummeted to the ground and was smashed to pieces.

Then a third old woman plummeted from the window, then a fourth, then a fifth.

By the time a sixth old woman had plummeted down, I was fed up watching them, and went off to Mal'tseviskiy Market where, it was said, a knitted shawl had been given to a certain blind man.

THE END

[Blogging post-scriptum:- suddenly made me think of the style of Gilliam's Python animations, with their old 'Pepperpot' women. But Kharms was writing in the 1920s. Eventually he was censored, and only allowed to write children's stories and teach. He couldn't stop with the dastardly absurdist satire though, and died in a gulag in 1941.]

Valency Debate

Important news from Alexandre Dumas:-

"Cornelius kissed the tips of her fingers passionately. Was this because the hand held one of the offsets of the great black tulip? Was it because the hand was Rosa's hand? Those wiser than ourselves must find the answer."

Potlatch of another mouth

I in the of a enough to a. Much like a from a, but I like the of, in the very very and very. The and my like its my with the every around me.

I stood naked in the middle of a corn field tall enough to swallow a person well over six feet. Much like a scene from a superman movie, but I appear nothing like the man of steel, in fact image the absolute opposite very short, very bold, and very round. The wind breeze, gusting and tickling my toffee like skin, its sweet smell devouring my nostrils with sensational aroma, the bright sun light making every thing around me yellowishly stunning.

Emerson at Random

To go with Thoreau, now have this spanker. Have read into Emerson more before; he, like Whitman, makes me feel unhealthy. His sentences are so long and descriptive, and demanding on the eyes and/or lungs. But there is no doubt that he can lay a sentence, full of juice and teeth, and how seminal his goddamn healthy optimism feels. And he looks like he'd nut you before argue the coin toss. Such earnest nonsense...

I must fester now.

1. Is not that a just objection to much of our reading? It is a pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neighbours. It is peeping.

2. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am over-instructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated.

3. There is also benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it. Their culture generally enables the travelled English to avoid any ridiculous extremes of this self-pleasing, and to give it an agreeable air.

4. For the steady wrongheadedness of one perverse person irritates the best: since we must withstand absurdity. Hence all the dozen inmates are soon perverted, with whatever virtues and industries they have, into contradictors, accusers, explainers, and repairers of this one malefactor; like a boat about to be overset, or a carriage run away with,- not only the foolish pilot or driver, but everybody on board is forced to assume strange and ridiculous attitudes, to balance the vehicle and prevent the upsetting.

5. When the spirit is not master of the world, then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, and dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, laying traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on a horse or a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a little praise, that the great soul cannot choose but laugh at such earnest nonsense.