May 17th
May 14th
May 11th
This was the fifth and last in my sequence of contributions to the folio Fragments published by Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop in 2003, a joint venture between myself and the artist Calum Colvin. This poem appeared in slightly less formal presentation (not every line beginning with a capital) in access to the silence.
The complete folio is available to galleries for hire from Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop. Last time I saw it up was at the Arnolfini in Bristol where I was doing a reading.
May 10th
This week actions and demos against cross-party supported hired benefit-cutters Atos. List and times of actions here
Glasgow Thursday 12th. Report on Edinburgh small demo yesterday here
May 9th
Another two of my contributions to the folio Fragments.
(3)
(4)
May 7th
These two document images were used by Edinburgh Printmakers Workshop to produce large prints to accompany and mirror prints by the visual artist Calum Colvin about eight years ago. Ossian was the focus of Calum's idea at first when Calum and I first discussed the projected suite of five prints each. The finished folio by us both was published under the title Fragments.
I'll put the other three templates up in the next few days.
(1)
(2)
May 5th
Photographed in my room sometime late nineties. Published access to the silence.
May 3rd
Three Voices whose bearers died in the Holocaust
Theodore Ritch was born in Odessa in 1894. Leaving Russia in 1917 he had a successful career in Europe and America as an opera tenor. He retired to teach singing in Paris, but was arrested there in 1943 and sent by train from the concentration camp at Drancy to one of the principal camps in Poland. He died in the vehicle en route.
Theodore Ritch sings "E Lucevan le Stelle"
Josef Schmidt was born in 1904 in a part of Romania and his voice first attracted attention as cantor in his local synagogue. Sent to study music in Berlin he became internationally famous making many records, with sundry Europe-America tours, and singing as lead in a number of films. Still he could not live in Nazi Germany, and was further forced in 1940 to flee occupied France for Brussels. But projected escape to America was thwarted as that route had been closed to passengers before he could take advantage of it. He managed to get to Switzerland but despite his fame and that American tours had made him possessor of an American visa, he was interned in harsh conditions in a refugee camp. Complaints of chest pains went unattended. He died of a heart attack in November 1942 aged 38.
Josef Schmidt sings "Non piangere, Liù" (recorded 1934)
Ottilie Metziger was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1878. She became a leading contralto of the first two decades of the twentieth century, being first contralto at the Hamburg Opera from 1903 to 1915 singing alongside Enrico Caruso and other great names of the day. After a further career in Dresden Opera and appearances at the principal European operatic houses, she spent two years in America between 1922 and 1924. Returning to Germany where she began teaching music she was forced in 1934 to flee Berlin. She settled in Brussels but there she was arrested in the street in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz where she died on a date, it is thought, sometime in February 1943. She would have been 64 at the time of her death.
Ottilie Metzger sings Schubert's "An die Musik" (recorded in Berlin in July 1910)
May 2nd
The recording on Friday was a success. Which is to say, I gave it some kind of laldy in the room for two sessions over something like 80 minutes. And the response was favourable, people seemed well pleased and talking to me afterwards and so on.
But. I hate the fact of being recorded in the presence of people when reading my poems. In terms of “response” that has been much deeper in readings I have done over this past couple of years than it was on Friday. Not that I have given a damn about the “response”. It is and always has been just being in the presence of people in a kind of dialogue, inhabiting the words I know, “playing my tunes” as I think of of my Glasgow poems, and finding out the kinetics of the thought of various poems supposedly about “politics”, setting out to the end of them the way I write essays, which is to say setting out to find out how I get to the end.
Friday was different. It was part of a MayDay series of events that was going on in the STUC advertised through the same union bodies who had been at an event 18 months ago where I gave a rowdy ten minute contribution in among singers and comedians. Fine, and no inauthenticity there; but a long way from me talking about haeccitas and my kinetic formal poems at the CCA ten days ago. That wasn’t stuffy, at the end of it I was able to read nora’s place in a way I had never read before and will never read again: the whole concept of “thisness” in relation to a person had, to myself, been contextualised: so nora was revealed to me, more than to anyone, as something I fell into reading in a way that I was discovering it as I read it.
And that can only even possibly happen when nothing is being recorded. Where there is no possibility of being self-objectified, and the transitoriness is what counts. Being versus having, as I have said all me life now. Of course I’m a trooper enough to have put on a good show on Friday. But it wasn’t me. It was brave after a fashion, I tell myself. But for the first time in my life I think, I had to be “a performer”. And I rose to it, I performed well. Even, in poems like “A Fair Cop” I did get into it, released it as it came. And the poem to Sonya and some others, could be declaimed-in-the-presence of, so to speak.
But a real reading for me is one where I do what I can do then, as I walk from the stage, the whole flushes out of my mind and I forget about it all together. Each reading for me is a new one, and I never know what i will read. Sometimes, as in St Ives some months back, I will step into my poems as the only safe space for miles around, at least to be in the presence of the words. A poem I wrote that was in access to the silence has it:
The respite, that “present” wasn’t available to me on Friday, it just couldn’t be on an occasion where folk were there “to be present at a recording”. It wasn’t a place where my inmost feelings could venture into the words, safe in their transitoriness in form. So there was no place for nora, certainly, though I read her “well enough”.
I’ll edit down the CD to whatever comes over best, maybe subsititute another nora or whatever from what I have already recorded. What I say here by the way I know will be absolutely unfathomable to some people who were there on Friday and who I know really enjoyed what happened. I gave a good performance overall. It was "a good night out". But my work isn’t about “peformance”, though it might seem performatory. in fact that is precisely why I usually forbid actors reading it on radio or TV. What I did enjoy reading (and naturally a performance) was my version of some of Brecht’s Mother Courage songs. In the absence yet of permission from Germany for Smokestack to publish my translation of the play—only one British publisher has been given permission to publish the play in the past half century—it was a chance to let some of my translation at least be heard.
April 28th
Still some tickets left for my reading tomorrow Friday 29th at the STUC centre, the old converted school at the top of Woodlands Road. Some may know the building for the Stand comedy venue, though the event won’t be in that room but the main central atrium. You can get in at the door though a lot of the tickets are away so if you want to buy in advance you can get them online here.
The evening is organised by Fair Pley Ltd who are recording it to issue it as a CD later this year. There’s a few things going on in the centre over the weekend to do with MayDay and as an alternative to the unmentionable event in London. I don’t usually plan in advance my readings, it’s not the way I work, but I’m pretty certain I will give my Mother Courage songs an airing as well as a fair selection of my work from the sixties to date.
There will be a little show of some of my posters, some of which I think can be bought or at least ordered. I will also project some visual work here and there to vary it or even give my voice a little rest. I’ll do two sets with an interval.
There will be a bar, and Fair Pley have arranged a curry buffet before the show so that people don't have to miss their teatime grub. Doors open 6.15 pm, my reading kicks off at seven.
April 27th
April 26th
Nearly a fortnight since we came back from a week’s holiday in Fuerteventura. A week that proved wonderfully restorative for dodgy Glasgow lungs like mine; and being without British “news” for a week was like a Victorian colonic for the mind. Before we left for holiday, my attempts to avoid the mediawide orchestrated anti-Gaddafi hate-garbage had been breached by a headline the morning after 140 Cruise missiles had begun 28-country Nato's onslaught on the same Libyan government forces previously described as “kept deliberately small in number lest they should overthrow their leader.” The headline which caught my eye as I queued in my local Saintsbury's read “Top Guns 1 Mad Dog 0”. British racism and colonialism as alive and well as ever in its hack “journalists”.
A deal of the Left backed the Libyan protestors at first as a popular rising, but came to realise that whoever the mass of the people demonstrating initially were, their leaders are now a “council” of American-Nato implants. Men like military leader Khalifa Hifter, understood to have become a CIA agent after twenty years in Washington; or their so-called “finance minister” Ali Tarhouni just back from 26 years as senior business lecturer in Washington University, where his wife is in the Attorney General’s office. Tarhouni arranged the seizure of the Libyan nationalised bank and oil assets which Qatar agreed to market. Just like that. Qatar had patched up its difference with Egypt, so their Al Jazeera station could get back into Nato line, forgetting Egypt protest and making its anchor reporter in Libya the ex Fox News Anita MacNaught, there with all the other Western hacks in Benghazi practically doubling that city’s population to broadcast endless one-sided rumour and "reporting".
Mass shooting of demonstrators in Bahrain, forget it. The home of the Fifth Fleet is the home of the Fifth Fleet. The “Arab Dawn” well and truly flushed down the lav. Egypt under pro-Nato Tawani has banned strikes and the very demonstrations that were two months ago hailed as symptoms of the people’s desire for freedom. Bluster about “human rights” and the usual “fearless” so called war-reporting against “tryanny” is now focussed exclusively - and endlessly - on Libya, Syria and Iran. Which is to say, the three countries in the Meditteranean not on side with the Nato alliance. And that is how “the Arab Dawn” has been dealt with, and is being dealt with. The "desire for freedom" is now a three-country affair. Read all about it. You might as well. You have no choice.
Unless the token scattering of leftwing commentators like Seamus Milne, or if you can be bothered, through some dogged work on the net. I recommend the Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar whose articles on the Middle East since January can be seen here Worth reading from a point of view in short supply in these parts.
April 19th
An online emag emailed my website to ask if I could give them a thousand words about the royal wedding. A picture tells a thousand words, so I have sent them the following.
No thanks!
April 17th
April 15th
Have agreed to read tonight at a CND fundraising social in a place called McPhabbs, Sandyford Place on Sauchiehall Street. Not a CND member myself, but any opposition to any part of the arms industry I won’t take issue with. I have never been a fan of the halberd.
April 5th
I'll probably be away from the internet until April 14th. On that day I should be at the CCA in the evening for an event organised by the Scottish Writers Centre where I'll show projections of slideshow poems and visual work and read from outside the narrative.
April 3rd
Some time ago Leslie Crook wrote a poetry sequence “The Book of the Dead” about life in a psychiatric hospital. He had a few copies typed up which he left anonymously around secondhand book shops in the west end of Glasgow. Then about 18 months ago he paid for Clydeside Press, Glasgow’s radical community printer publishers, to produce a 100 copies this time bearing his name.
I like and admire the sequence very much, and thank Leslie for consenting to let me publish it here.
April 1st
The UK Parliamentary Attack on the Sick and Disabled
Some Local Counter-Organisation and Self-help.
Demonstration by Disabled Rights Group Black Triangle at Atos Scottish headquarters in Livingstone, January 24th.
A similar demonstration was held at the Atos offices in Cadogan Street Glasgow on February 23rd.
A friend who accompanied someone with mental health issues to an Atos disability reassessment interview found the interviewer to be sitting behind a computer screen out of eye contact. Answers to the standard questionaire were clicked into the computer. My friend attested to the interviewer (who had a heavy German accent which made the situation slightly more surreal) as to the reliability of the patient’s answers and his day to day fluctuation in continuing severity of illness. Notice was posted to the claimant subsequently that his benefit had been terminated. He went through the process of appeal. Fully nine months later he was called to the appeal interview. This was heard before what seemed to be a retired psychiatrist and a retired social worker. On conclusion he was asked to wait outside the room then was called in after ten minutes to be told that his appeal had been upheld.
The questions in the initial interview are not accidentally loaded in their narrowness and their inability to take qualificatory answers. They are so loaded because they were designed using purely financial, not medical, targets set by the previous government— the Labour government under Work and Pensions minister James Purnell and his successors such as the recently ermined “Lord” Hutton, helped across the floor of the House after the elections to provide the Conservatives with his template for cutting public pensions. The target is to cut benefit spending by billions of pounds, indeed, as Purnell and his chums established, to remove the words “benefit” and “entitlement” from the equation altogether. An unknown number of claimants have disappeared from records. Some are known to have commited suicide, like the Edinburgh poet Paul Reekie near to whose body last June were found letters including the disallowance of his housing and incapacity benefit. The press as always are loyal to measures stigmatising the poor and unemployed: “94% of benefit claimants shown to be cheats” was a headline in the Daily Mail, where else, in January this year. Since 40% of those who go to disability appeal have it eventually upheld this is taken as evidence by Labourites and Liberals small and large “L”, that the system is decent at heart and can catch the really needy. Nonsense. It simply shows that the financial targets have been set to disallow 60% of that percentage of the disallowed who have been capable and willing to survive the long wait for an appeal to be heard.
So, no help to the sick and unemployed from the Parliamentary parties, who have united in attacking them. Not that they would admit it in plain words. They prefer sweetsounding mealy ones. However some non-party local groups have been making protest and trying to help one another. The Edinburgh Coalition against Poverty have been involved and their site has useful information and links to others for those caught up in having to claim help or to work out what to do when summoned to interview. Another small organisation of Glasgow anti-benefit cuts people are on the web here where you will also find an email address. And a UK-wide network of organisations trying to help one another and take some kind of public action can be found here at a site called Benefit Claimants Fight Back
Many of these including the Scottish groups will be taking part in the third National Day of Protest Against the Cuts on Thursday April 14th. I’ll post such word as I am given of Scottish action taking place, though those interested can make their own contacts using the links preceding.
Previous Journal Entries
2010
November to December here
September to October here
July to August here
May to June here
March to April here
January to February here
2009
September to December here
March to August here
