Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster

Richard Brautigan
Delacorte Pr 1969, Paperback, £1.60

He found fame writing prose – particularly his 1967 novel Trout Fishing in America – but he wrote poems first, and his habit of handing out cheaply-reproduced anthologies on the streets of San Francisco is a neat, although somewhat lazy and banal, image with which to brand him as the voice of the hippies.

Most of these poems are very short. Several of only a few lines long, quite a few reach ten or fifteen but have only a word or two per line. Multiple stanzas are rare, rhythm is freeform and rhyming is nowhere to be found. Some of it fails terribly, some of it is charming and perceptive.

For example: Castle of the Cormorants is fairly awful:

Hamlet with
a cormorant
under his arm
married Ophelia.
She was still
wet from drowning.
She looked like
a white flower
that had been
left in the
rain too long.
I love you,
said Ophelia,
and I love
that dark
bird you
hold in
your arms.

It’s not just the short lines bringing to mind the special poetry voice that people use to read out verse, full of pauses in the middle of sentences and strange slightly high-pitched monotone. That can be fine. The literary reference doesn’t help and the use of hackneyed imagery and comparisons (white flowers and rain) tops it off. Not his greatest moment. Another poem with short lines, A Childhood Spent in Tacoma, is much better:

If a door
were laid
on its side,
you could be
the captain
of a submarine.
Fire one!
Fire two!
If a door
were hanging
up straight,
you could
open it
and go
into the
kitchen.

It’s a wonderful depiction of a child’s imagination squeezed in next to the ordinary world, with that staccato ‘Fire one! Fire two!’ providing the separator.

Living in San Francisco, having contact with the computer scientists at MIT and SAIL in the mid to late 60s it would have been difficult for Brautigan to avoid technology. Hippies and computers don’t fit together easily as concepts and trying to reconcile the west coast counterculture with the origins of personal computing can show us a few things about both.

Brautigan himself was disdainful of the desire to reject technology altogether, as were many of the self-proclaimed hippies of the time. Brautigan, it ought to be noted, was not a hippy, despite the big moustache and intermittent adherence to any kind of personal hygiene regime.

Our image of the counterculture has been too shaped by Easy Rider, with its campfires and agrarian dropouts. It also gave birth to Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalogue, a big influence on the homebrew computer clubs that fostered several of the big developments that made our modern computer-enhanced society possible. One poem in particular spells out the technological optimism that was in the air. It’s an unusually long and well-polished work called All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace:

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

People and machines in partnership, improving each other and, crucially, closer and more able to appreciate nature thanks to the assistance of technology. Douglas Engelbart would agree entirely.

Adam Curtis’s series of films for the BBC, examining the effect of computers on society, used this poem as both its title and evidence that computers are insidious things, the cause of alienation from the true nature of ourselves and our economics, but there was a logical fault in his reasoning. Computers were involved in some things that went wrong, and there were negative consequences to some things that people did when they believed that computers would help, therefore the belief itself was fundamentally wrong and technology is incapable of helping, he implied. To trust technology is to mask our true state of being.

The films were beautifully made and fascinating to watch, but misled. The text of Machines of Loving Grace was read out as something that we’re bound to disagree with and feel scared about the looming tech invasion of our lovely unimprovable souls. On the contrary, I’m all for it.

Related posts:

1. Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (Shane’s book 26, 2011)

The Lost Leader

Mick Imlah
Faber and Faber 2008, Paperback, 144 pages, £9.99

Imlah grew up in Scotland until he was 10 years old, when he moved to England, where he stayed until he died. He clearly felt that he was a Scot though as his poems are full of the history and literature of Scotland, as well as rugby, family, drink, Tennyson and rationalism.

Myths and legendary Caledonian figures (St Columba, Michael Scott, William Wallace and Robert the Bruce) walk with Orpheus and Eurydice, lifting historical Scotland to the poetic status of Olympus. The collection starts with a quote from Edwin Muir, the Scottish modernist poet and translator of Kafka, which asserts that ‘no poet in Scotland can take as his inspiration the folk impulse that created the ballads, the people’s songs, and the legends of Mary Stuart and Prince Charlie. He has no choice but to be at once more individual and less local.’

This, says Imlah with every poem, is not the case. The folk impulse isn’t meaningless nostalgia, it’s the identity of a nation. He makes this point very successfully with charming poems and a deep knowledge and understanding, but I can’t help remembering that Imlah was an expat Scot who live in north London. He clearly loved the country but not enough to actually live there. Muir, at least, moved to and from his native country.

The words aren’t perfect. Some of the rhythms falter slightly and there’s the occasional downright lumpy rhyme (Granite and planet in one and I’m sure I saw bonnet and on it, but I can’t find it now), but mostly this is lovely subtle work. Well worth looking out for.

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Logue’s Homer

Christopher Logue
Faber and Faber 2005, Paperback, 64 pages, £8.99

Again, there is a strangeness to Logue’s writing, and a wonderful fusion of the ancient myth with the modern. There is a delightful irony underlying the entire thing, as if Logue constantly has a mischievous twist at the corner of his mouth.

The Greeks are still suffering from Agamemnon’s disastrous insult to Achilles, and they are driven back to their ships in headlong retreat before Hector’s fury. The highlight of Cold Calls is the embassy to Achilles; it bristles with arrogance, hubris and machismo.

Anyone who has read the rest of Logue’s Homer will want this volume. For those who haven’t, don’t delay!

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Four Quartets (Faber Poetry)

T.S. Eliot
Faber and Faber 2001, Paperback, 64 pages, £9.99

There are four longish poems here. They were published separately but hang together perfectly, and the central characters are time and reality. The first, Burnt Norton, is the most abstract. God is that which can exist outside time, we’re bound together by time and experience everything in terms of it. The present is of paramount importance and is all we know.

The others bring in wordly metaphors: the sea, the weather, fire, London, wildlife, singing and dancing move in and out, employed to describe a set of Christian philosophical beliefs, more than ethics and into the nature of reality.

There’s a lot of Christianity here but no preaching. It’s laid out for the reader to interact with but at no point is it necessary to believe it. This is what it is, what you do with it is your affair.

Go and read this book. It’s very short, so you can read it again, and then again after that. This is what the twentieth century was like.

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I hadn’t read it before, in fact my knowledge of the classics is so poor that I barely knew the story. If you’re like me, here’s a summary: It’s been 20 years since Odysseus left Ithaca to fight the Trojan War. In the meantime more than 100 suitors have descended on his home in an attempt to woo his wife Penelope and convince her that her husband is dead. Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, sets out to find news of his father, who is alive but whose journey home has been thwarted by the gods and a series of adventures.

The Odyssey (Penguin Classics)

Bernard Knox (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 1997, Paperback, 560 pages, £14.99

As James noted in his review last year, the structure of The Odyssey is remarkably complex. Odysseus, our hero, doesn’t appear for some time and when he does his story is told in both the present and in a series of flashbacks. It’s even more impressive when you realise that this story would have been told orally. It requires an attentive audience.

Both orator and audience would have been helped by the poem’s repetitive nature. Certain phrases and rituals are repeated throughout, adding an internal rhythm to the narrative.

The oddities of the time make the story hard to relate to in places. Despite his desire to return home, the conventions of hospitality require Odysseus to stop as a guest with those who ask, often for years at a time. He’s not much of one for mercy either, brutally slaughtering the servant women who had sex with the suitors.

Strangest of all, though, is the role of the gods, who pretty much move the humans around like pawns. It makes it hard to get that involved in the story – the gods will do as they like anyway. That may be Homer’s point – it’s not worth worrying about things too much since fate is out of your hands. It’s best to barbecue another pig’s thigh and relax.

Everyone should read The Odyssey because of its importance in the history of literature. It’s an important work but one which, I’m afraid, had little emotional impact on me.

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Homer’s Odyssey

Simon Armitage
Faber and Faber 2007, Paperback, 272 pages, £12.99

Armitage sticks with the chronology of the original so that the story is told from first Telemachus’s present perspective, then Odysseus’s present, then in flashback narrated by Odysseus, then back to Odysseus in the present. The play format means that each line spoken is preceded by the character’s name, and this slightly skews the sections of the story that Odysseus narrates to the Phaeacians (i.e. the flashbacks) so that they become indistinguishable from current events in the timeline as they are bring told. Armitage counters this by topping and tailing each flashback section with a short scene labelled ‘In the Hall of the Phaeacians’.

The theme of return is never less than front and centre. When Nausicaa tries to persuade Odysseus to stay and recuperate before heading back to Ithaca (after twenty years!) her mother, Arete, has this great line:

Haven’t you been listening?
Every step of the way something has tripped him up.
Opportunities have been traps.
Open doors have been prisons.
Invitations have been life sentences.

He won’t be sidetracked again.
We won’t offer the same temptation.

This beautifully captures Odysseus’s plight – bear in mind the importance of hospitality in ancient Greek culture. An invitation to stay would oblige Odysseus to do so. Odysseus replies:

So compassionate.
So… understanding.

Armitage’s version is great fun and beautifully crafted, written with enormous respect for the Homeric tradition, but not slavish adherence. The result is well worth a few hours of your reading time.

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I’ve fallen so far behind with these posts that my memory of Under Milk Wood is of lying in the garden on one of the last really hot days of summer, drinking a long cold drink, listening to the swearing exasperated sounds of my neighbours moving out of the flat upstairs and luxuriating in the fantastic use of language on these pages.

I don’t think I’ve ever come across anything more joyfully written. There’s love and attention in every word, every tiny line that sketches the inhabitants of a Welsh village, its houses and landscape.

We start before they wake up, we follow them throughout the day and we go to sleep after they do. We come to love them as much as Thomas did.

They’re sometimes flawed people and they seem to live more in their daydreams than in reality. Sometimes the dreams are happy things, like Dai Bread the baker’s harem, or they can be traumatic, like Mr Pugh’s murder fantasies or Mrs Willy Nilly’s punishments.

The names are cartoonish and comic, the verses could have been patronising and twee but they’re never anything but wonderful.

It’s difficult to read the words without Richard Burton popping into your head once in a while, especially passages with a lot of Rs in them, but that can’t be a bad thing, can it.

This edition dispenses with the stage directions to have first voice and second voice dividing the narrative. The intorduction explains that they didn’t want to interrupt the flow by making you read ‘First voice’ and ‘Second voice’ however many times it would have been, and that in spoken form the change of tone isn’t such a split. I’m not so sure about that and would have appreciated the cue to separate the speakers

First voice often gives background, then second voice takes over when the specifics of a dream or a conversation are entered into, so you go from description of concepts to facts when you hear the difference. For example, compare the way you read these two passages, first with stage directions, then uninterrupted.

FIRST VOICE

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of

SECOND VOICE

her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass’d and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.

Or, without first and second voices:

From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring, moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper, dream of her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned, whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass’d and barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving hotwaterbottled body.

Loses a bit, don’t you think? I get the point that as an audio piece we wouldn’t hear a voice say ‘Second voice’ as we would reading it to ourselves, but I think you’d skip over the actual words after a few times, just taking the shape as a change marker. Still pretty marvellous though.

Watever you do with your life, make sure that at least one day of it is spent reading Under Milk Wood.

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The Odyssey (Penguin Classics)

Bernard Knox (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 1997, Paperback, 560 pages, £14.99

Of course, above anything else, The Odyssey is a wonderful story, full of adventure and exploits. It’s must less realistic than The Illiad, strange as it may sound to say that considering the gods that fill Homer’s other great epic. In The Odyssey, we have the Cyclops, the Sirens, Aeolus and his bag containing the winds and Circe’s magic to name only a few of the characters who are neither gods nor men.

Odysseus is a wonderful hero, full of intelligence and guile – “wily Odysseus” as he is frequently referred to by Homer. Fagles’s translation has the feel of a great epic, and is at pains to keep the ritualistic elements of the text – “wine-dark sea”, “Dawn with her rose-red fingers”, “deathless gods” and so on. In his introduction, Bernard Knox speculates that these formulaic passages were key to the process of recitation and improvisation, giving the poet a framework within which to work. Here it emphasises the epic form, and gives the text a lovely rhythm.

Fagles favours translation into blank verse, and tries to retain the metre of the original text. Obviously I can’t judge whether he’s succeeded there, but it does have a wonderful lilting quality to it.

The structure of The Odyssey is fascinating. It starts with Telemachus (Odysseus’s son) at home on Ithaca desperate for news of his father and humiliated by his mother’s suitors. Only some way in do we join Odysseus, and his story is told partially in the present, partially in the past and partially through his own reminiscences of his journey home from Troy. For most of the time, he’s incognito, reluctant to reveal himself in case he angers men in addition to the gods. The final books deal with Odysseus’s revenge on the suitors, and only the final book seems out of place (there is some debate about its authenticity).

The morality of Homer’s time is very different from our own. Odysseus thinks nothing of savage revenge and punishment. No man can escape the fate decided for them by the gods, not even Odysseus himself, and yet we know that his fate is to avenge himself on his enemies. Homer’s ability to sustain the dramatic tension even though we know the outcome is remarkable.

Everyone should read The Odyssey, and I’ve never read a better version of it than the one by Robert Fagles.

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While you are all enjoying the afternoon in Brockley, I am at work, but wanted to add this post soon, since its a book I borrowed from a friend in Raskelf, North Yorkshire and I need to post it back to her.

I’m usually reluctant to read about books set in South Africa, still too many confusions about what it is to be a white Southern African woman in the latter part of the 20th century.  However, this is one I am so very glad I picked up.

Just the kind of writing I enjoy: lyrical, emotional, engaging in plot and character.  It helped that I know and love cape Town, like other writers I have reviewed, Finuala Dowling makes no concessions to the reader who is unfamiliar with her cultural references and use of not only the vernacular, but also a different language (the Afrikaans remains untranslated).  But the writing is good enough and the contextualisation detailed enough that I think this enhances any reader’s experience rather than making it a book only with meaning for people from that region.

She is a poet, and the story is about a poet and the book is full of poetry.  What interested me – something I believe non-Cape Tonians would respond to and enjoy – was that the reader is exposed in this way to the many ways that South Africans of all types express themselves poetically.  This feels completely natural (ie not as if there were a list she was going through and ticking off) because the protaganist is editing an issue of a poetry journal and necessarily is required to read and consider a range of poetry.

The love story is central to the form of the book (which is made up of diary entries that are being posted to the woman the poet loves) but it isn’t an over-riding element and the other people and their stories are as important and as fascinating.

I have often read reviews that comment on how well a male writer has conveyed a female character, and because one of the themes of the novel is gender and the multiplicity of options that are available to men and women in working out their own gender issues, I think it is valid to point out that I think she captures the voice of the poet very well, and that it is a convincing portrayal of a man (albeit not a typical South African man oops shoot me down in flames!!)

This is one of those books that you can’t bear to end.  I loved it

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Here we are given the first battle scenes of the Illiad in all their gore and bloodthirstiness. There is little to my earlier review about Logue’s wonderful fusion of modern and ancient, cinema and poetry, poetry and downright crudity. There’s a memorable page where he sets out the dispositions of the armies as though it were a Napoleonic campaign, the name of each warrior boxed, but within the context of the verse. As always with Faber, the slim volume is beautifully printed and bound.

I simply can’t recommend this brilliant literary game any more highly.

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