Extravagaria

by Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid

This is a bilingual book of Neruda's poems, which I picked out of a box of books that was dumped on the sidewalk when visiting our dear friends in Brooklyn a few years ago. And now it will end up on the Central Line in London. What a life it has lead, this book!

I do like Neruda. He lived a full life and wrote passionate, funny, surreal poems about it all. He got the Nobel Prize for Literature the year I was born.

(My favourite poem of his is not in this book, sadly, and I can't seem to track down the excellent translation I once found online, so I leave you with a Google translation I tinkered with, which is slightly wonky, but serves its purpose. (It's all better in Spanish, of course.) This is one of those poems that I read thinking "this is about US, it's about MY FAMILY." How do they know, poets?)

Melancholy in the Families

I keep a blue bottle,
within it an ear and a portrait
when darkness forces
the feathers of the owl,
when the hoarse cherry tree
shatters its lips and with husks that sometimes the ocean breeze threatens to pierce,
I know that there are vast sunken depths
quartz ingots,

blue waters for a battle,
many silences, many
veins of retreat and camphor,
fallen things, medals, tenderness,
parachutes, kisses.

It is only the step of one day to another,
only one bottle
walking by the sea,
and a dining room where roses arrive,
an abandoned dining room
like a thorn, I refer to
a glass shattered, a curtain in the background
a deserted room through which a river flows
dragging the stones. It is a house
located in the foundations of rainfall,
a two storey house with obligatory windows
and strictly faithful vines.

I leave in the afternoon, I arrive
full of mud and death,
dragging the earth and its roots,
and its lazy belly, in which sleep
the bodies of wheat,
metals, collapsed elephants.

But above all there is a terrible,
a terrible abandoned dining room
with broken bottles of oil
and vinegar running underneath the seats,
a ray of the moon stopped,
something dark, and I look for

a comparison within me:
perhaps a tent surrounded by the sea
and broken panels dripping brine.

It's just a deserted dining room,

and around are extensions,
submerged plants, timber
I only know,
because I am sad and old,
and I know the earth, and am sad.

Victim of splogging

Update - I think one way might be to make it invite only for a while, so email if you want an invite before Thursday.

I think my humble blog has been hijacked by sploggers. I reckon it's something to do with using the Next Blog button to increase their traffic & I don't really get it. Vast volumes (well not that vast) of my stats come from the next blog button, which seems suspect. I should be beyond caring about this sort of thing by now, but it riles me. How do I make 'em stop, techie people?

So long, and thanks for all the fish

Douglas Adams

Once I saw the comedian Rich Hall doing standup. Funny and talented he is, for some reason that evening he died on stage - lost the thread of his material, and stood there in silence, hanging his head. Tumbleweed blew through the silent room. There was no heckling, everyone felt deeply sorry for him. "Tell us something funny!" "Tell us a joke!" came encouraging voices from the audience.

Ahem. Am feeling a bit like Rich Hall. I'll endeavour to amuse. And if it doesn't, there's always the delete button.

Found Douglas Adam at a perfect time, when I was a smartarse clever-clogs 13 year old who had just discovered sarcasm and irony. We quoted and requoted endlessly, to the point that as we got older we became a bit ashamed of them, because of their geeky reputation.

But here's the thing - there's a lot of philosophy and great insight tucked away inside these jokey sci-fi narratives. I often find myself, even now I'm a grownup, remembering something first perceived in this book. Like the Total Perspective Vortex, which tortures people by showing them how infinitesimately small and alone they are in the universe. And the phenomenon of SEP, or "Somebody Else's Problem" - a forcefield which surrounds an event and renders it invisible because it is seen as, well, someone else's problem. Or when I was working in some shit job, thinking to myself "Here I am, brain the size of a planet..."

Throwing in a copy of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe too.

Non Commercial House, Commercial Street

A free shop! What an awesome idea! And free cups of tea, to boot. Why did I never see this when I lived in the area? This the kind of thing I love about East London...

They shall be the lucky recipients of the rest of my bookshelves. As well as any local laundromats I can find.

(Catch it while you can folks, this blog has a limited shelf life because the piles are finally starting to go down.)

Lysistrata

by Aristophanes

A friend pointed out that this blog is exclusive to those who don't read fiction (don't read fiction!!! freaks!) I don't have much Non-fiction to give away. What about this, a play by an old Greek geezer? The women are altogether sick of the men going off to war, and think of an innovative way to stop it - they'll go on a sex strike until the men see sense. (A passive resistance strategy, long before Gandhi.) Leading to some interesting effects on the men.

It's brilliant satire, still relevant today...

Lysistrata illustration by Aubrey Beardsley

Art review, 2009

Taking a short break from reviewing books to reviewing art...

Time Out reviewed the shows from the past year but none of my favourites appeared in their top ten. So here they are:

Annette Messager, The Messagers at the Hayward














Spooky, mechanical, funny - featuring installations of stuffed toys,
inflatables, stockings, hair - they appeared quirky and childish at first but packed a real punch.

Saul Steinberg at the Dulwich Picture Gallery




















- beautiful line drawings many inspired by my favourite place, New York.

Swoon, Black Rat Press -




















Swoon is my favourite living artist, hands down, and this was a rare chance to see her work altogether in London. She is a street artist who makes giant beautiful pasteups inspired by Expressionism and Japanese woodcuts. She also sailed two giant boats made out of junk materials with her crew through Europe to the Venice Biennale this year. I want to persuade some gallery that handles her art to join the Own Art Arts Council scheme, so I can buy one of her pictures.

C215 at Signal Gallery

















- the same goes for French street artist C215, maestro of the stencil. I like the way he travels and engages with the communities he visits, and the way he never, ever repeats himself.


Word To Mother at the Stolen Space gallery -














makes things out of found materials, would happily own any of his art (though I saw a video recently which suggested that he might in fact be they), a bit out of my price range though.

Mythologies at the Haunch of Venison















This was a wicked group show, at what used to be the Museum of Mankind, and inspired by the old collection. Featuring voodoo artefacts and shadow puppet shows. Very very strong works, lots of variety.

Kuniyoshi at the Royal Academy











One of my printmaking friends got us free tickets. Truly beautiful, mind-bogglingly detailed and complex woodcuts which were the popular art of their day. He used to smuggle in political comment and criticism under the noses of the censors, in the guise of mythological creatures, legends and animals. Like all the best satirists.

I managed to miss Anish Kapoor at the RA. But £15 - that's fifteen pounds - for an exhibition? Elitist much?

Naked Lunch

by William Burroughs.

Yes, enough of all this seasonal warmth and good cheer, let's have something scary, transgressional, fucked-up and apocalyptic.

Read it as a teenager, one of those rites of passage, experimental reads, the cover of which shows how big and clever you are when you open it on the bus. I was desperate to read this after Maddie at sixth form college mentioned it with a shudder. She'd had a visceral reaction to it. "Couldn't finish it" she explained "It made me puke."

To be honest, I can't remember much about it - it's his fevered, disjointed imaginings about the junkie milieu and is paranoid, conspiracy theory, hallucinatory stuff, but he was a genius, no question. He also got away with shooting his wife dead - they were playing William Tell, (as you do), and the bullet went astray.

The book that made more of an impression on me was called Queer, about the pains of getting over someone (whilst simultaneously trying to kick heroin.) Incredibly painful and raw. Nowadays I steer away from this kind of downbeat material - when you're younger I think you are more resilient about reading dark things, maybe because you have less experience of real darkness in the world.

Anyway, I'm way behind with leaving these on the tube, I keep forgetting. Any suggestions for others places I could leave them gratefully received...