Connaissances

Save "The Poetry Society"

2011-07-27T20:09:00.006+02:00

After the recent months of disruption at the British Poetry Society which has caused the loss of Arts Council funding, there is a petition to the trustees to restore Judith Palmer as Director of the Poetry Society immediately. After reading several documents relating to the recent meeting between the board and the members of the Poetry Society and then, more importantly, the statement by the former director herself, I have had no hesitation in signing the petition to have Judith Palmer reinstated.

The Flight of the Turtle: New Writing Scotland 29

2011-07-27T18:55:00.004+02:00

My prose poem "Renata Perry" has been published in: The Flight of the Turtle: New Writing Scotland 29 published by the ASLS.

There’s nothing pure about Renata Perry except the pure cries of abandon of Renata Perry nothing so pure as the pure abandon of Renata Perry under the pure blue skies of Italy that Renata Perry can see from her bed the balcony opposite all covered in aerials pointed at transmitters waiting for signals Renata Perry is lying down under the weight of an angel waiting for signals under pure blue skies Renata Perry signals her mouth is dry and asks if he’ll be an angel and fetch some water Renata Perry watches him stiffly the weighty angel going stiffly to the bathroom and everybody says you can drink the water it’s true it’s incredibly pure but Renata Perry stays true to herself and the wine...

(Renata Perry, extract)

Don't Say Fairytale

2011-04-29T17:48:00.010+02:00

Why do we go weak at the knee when royal couples marry? Why do we weep when doomed princesses die? Why do we love to despise the ugly stepmother? Why do we criticise the whole shennanigan and then turn out to watch?

Perhaps the Egyptians understood this better than we do ourselves. They knew their pharoahs were destined to join the panthaeon of the gods. The people of Egypt knew that their own destinies were intimately entwined with those of their own leaders. If a dynasty failed, a whole civilisation would come crashing to its knees. The story discontinued, the great sustaining myth brought to an end.

The British Royal Family is Eastenders on acid. It is so much more intimate. So much more real. The wounds are real wounds. The deaths are real deaths. The love is real love. The hatred real hatred. To watch it, at its most epic moments, sends shivers down our spines as if someone were walking over our own graves.

Today, as William and Kate walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey, the commentator made a particular point of saying that this was not a fairytale. That, in view of historical events, William and Kate had only realistic expectations of their future together. And all the way through Horseguards and down the Mall, the word was never spoken. It became conspicuous by its absence. The commentary became anodine, pregnant with expectation of that one word.

Then at the end of the Mall, just outside Buckingham Palace, the veil finally slipped: the f-word was at last mentioned several times, almost in unison, by a chorus of commentators chanting the magical incantation. And why? Because the commentators saw the couple right in front of their commentary box. For the first time, they witnessed the magical spectacle with their own eyes. And no doubt the communal electricity was setting the hair of their necks on end.

What is a fairytale? It is a story. It is something not real. It is Peter Pan. It is Thumbelina. Something magical. Something that transcends time. A love affair with the gods. A myth. Fairytales never go away. We cling onto them. They are a promise of immortality. A promise that can lift certain individuals out of the drudgery of normality into another sphere of action over which they have little control. Their lives are no longer their own. Their destinies become controlled by the planets and the stars. "Did you see how the sun shone on them as they went into the church? And then again as they left?" said one spectator. Then she paused and considered, before pronouncing: "The sun shines on the righteous". Listen to those words. The sun shines on the righteous. The sun, over which we normally assume we have no control, shines on the righteous. And it really does...

From today, Kate Middleton is no longer herself. She is a fairytale princess. The hopes of William and Kate to just go on being themselves are over. Now the world is watching. The story has begun. The first act is finished. No, they will not come back onto the balcony for a second kiss. This is not tawdry show business. This is the real thing.

Launch of Upstairs at Duroc, Issue 12

2011-01-26T23:49:00.007+01:00

Time: 27 January 2011 · 19:00 - 22:00
Location: Berkeley Books of Paris, 8 rue Casimir Delavigne, Paris, France 75006

UPSTAIRS AT DUROC is pleased to announce the LAUNCH for its ISSUE 12

Come hear new work by

AMY HOLLOWELL, NINA KARACOSTA,
...ALICE NOTLEY, JONATHAN REGIER
and JOE ROSS.

AMY HOLLOWELL is the author of Peneloping: Episodes in the Day of She and Giacomettrics, and is a contributor to numerous publications in Europe & the US. A former editor of the Paris-based review Pharos, she is a journalist, translator & Zen Buddhist teacher.

NINA KARACOSTA’s work has appeared in Pomegranate Seeds: An Anthology of Greek-American Poetry, Best of Stain Anthology, Surreal-zine and The Melancholy Dane. An actor/poet born in Greece, she moved to NYC in 1995 & to Paris in 2009, which she now considers home.

ALICE NOTLEY has published over 30 books of poetry, including most recently, Reason and Other Women; Grave of Light, New and Selected Poems 1970-2005; and In the Pines. With her sons, Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, Notley edited The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. She is also the author of a book of essays on poets and poetry, Coming After. Notley has received many prizes and awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, two NEA Grants & the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Often considered an important figure in the New York School, Notley lives and writes in Paris.

JONATHAN REGIER’s first book of poetry, Three Years from Upstate, was published by Six Gallery Press (Pittsburgh, PA) in 2008. He’s now at work on a second book, as well as doing a PhD in the philosophy of science at Université Paris 7.

JOE ROSS is the author of 12 books of poetry. In 1997, he received an NEA Fellowship and moved from Washington, DC to San Diego, where he worked for that city’s Commission for Arts and Culture and, later, as Chief of Policy for elected officials. He was awarded the Gertrude Stein Poetry Award in 2003. In 2004, he and his wife moved to Paris, where their 2 children were born, and where he continues to publish while working as an educator.

Francois Hardy - J'Aurais Voulu

2011-01-23T23:46:00.002+01:00

Haiti

2010-12-08T01:09:00.002+01:00

With 230,000 people thought to have been killed by the earthquake earlier this year, and 1.3 million still homeless, Haiti remains in a desperate situation. Make a donation to Save the Children and help to protect survivors in their dangerous situation:

Save the Children

Men on a Street

2010-12-03T23:17:00.004+01:00

Funnyman by K T Tunstall

2010-11-14T23:05:00.005+01:00

Stone Going Home Again

2010-09-12T01:14:00.004+02:00

I have four prose poems in "Stone Going Home Again: New Writing Scotland 28".

The big day fell on a Thursday and Thursday fell on Dawn Dwyer as she leant on the kitchen sideboard all of a clatter it fell the way a drawer of cutlery pulled out too far can fall except there was no cutlery there was no drawer there was just Dawn Dwyer by herself in the kitchen leant against the kitchen sideboard trying to resist Thursday falling on her trying to hold up Thursday as houses outside try to hold up their rooves and trees hold up their leaves and Dawn Dwyer was trying to leave and hold up her head she was trying to hold up her shoulders but Thursday was pushing down on her and disaster teetered like a drawer of cutlery a weight that was supported but to which point of being extended suddenly would fall...

(Dawn Dwyer, extract)

Flooding in Pakistan - 14 Million Affected

2010-08-12T01:02:00.003+02:00

Donate now: UNICEF
Donate now: Disaster Emergency Commitee
Latest BBC news

Circalit And Little Episodes Short Story Competition

2010-07-31T14:33:00.002+02:00

Circalit And Little Episodes Get Writers to Open Up About Depression With Free Short Story Competition.

July, 29th, 2010 - Today Circalit, the UK’s premier social networking platform for writers, announced a free short story competition on the theme of “Broken Identities” with Little Episodes, an independent publisher and production company who raise awareness for those suffering from depression and addiction through the arts. The competition is peer reviewed, meaning that the public can read the submissions and vote for their favourites. By making all the submissions public, Little Episodes and Circalit hope to encourage writers to open up about mental health issues.

Writers can submit their work by creating a free account at www.circalit.com and posting their submissions up online. The deadline for submissions is 15th Sept 2010. Celebrated author and critic, Kasia Boddy, will judge the final winner from a short list of candidates. Kasia Boddy is author of numerous books including The American Short Story Since 1950, and she is currently editing an anthology of the top 25 American short stories of all time for Penguin Classics.

Little Episodes is a growing phenomenon in London, hosting events where people can display their art, play music, recite poetry and prose, or perform stand up comedy to raise awareness for depression. They are currently producing the second volume of their anthology series, “An Expression of Depression” where the winning short story will be published. Actress Sadie Frost, a contributor to Little Episodes anthology, said of the project, “I just thought, what a great thing to do, to channel that energy into something positive... I was in and out of hospital for a couple of years. The one thing that kept me alive at that time was writing.”

Lucie Barât, Founder of Little Episodes, commented, “We’re really excited about the idea of doing a peer reviewed competition and we love Circalit’s approach. With Circalit, it’s not just about having a single winner, it’s about getting the public involved by reading submissions and voting for their favourites. Circalit and Little Episodes have the same ethos, we want to give talented artists who haven’t had the break that they deserve a platform from which to make themselves heard and get some exposure. We both hope that this will be a good opportunity to raise awareness for mental health issues through art.”

Kasia Boddy, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at University College London, commented “I think this is a very worthwhile project and I’m glad to be a part of it. This collaboration between Circalit and Little Episodes demonstrates the strengths of the internet as a social and cultural resource with real potential to change lives.”

Circalit, which started life as a site where screenwriters could showcase their work to film studios, has already hosted free competitions with companies such as the BBC and Hollywood producer, Julie Richardson. It’s social networking features make it an invaluable resource for writers looking to make industry contacts and it is integrated with Facebook, giving talented writers the means to spread their wings and go viral across the internet.

Raoul Tawadey, CEO and founder of Circalit, said, “We’re very happy to be working with Little Episodes, who do a fantastic job destigmatizing depression and encouraging self-expression through creativity. We’re proud that Circalit can be used as a platform to bring these issues to life, and we hope to discover some bright new literary talent. This is a great opportunity for writers to gain exposure, so I encourage everyone to read the short stories and vote for your favourites.”

About Circalit

Circalit is the world’s premier social networking site for writers. The site was launched in February 2010 as a site where screenwriters can showcase their work to film studios, and is now also home to novelists, playwrights and short story writers across the globe. Its free service allows writers to have their work reviewed by peers and industry professionals, enter into free competitions, create a fan base for their work and network with industry contacts. Circalit’s mission is to digitize and democratize the way that good literature is discovered by industry professionals.

Les Anglais

2010-07-23T00:18:00.006+02:00

The Stone of Scone:

A tub of butter:

We may not live in France any more, but we can still go back there on holiday. And yet we find it too hot now, simply sweltering compared to Norway.

On the way home from Toulouse, I was not too surprised to find that the easyjet flight back to Gatwick had been cancelled. We had made the mistake of waiting in another part of the airport for some time and then only going to the gate when it was due to open. If we had gone sooner, we might not have found ourselves at the back of the queue for "sorting out".

Based on previous bad experience with easyjet on pretty much every occasion I have flown with them, I had built a back up plan into our travel arrangements: my connecting flight would be caught after a 24 hour stop over in London. But it just wasn't enough. No flight to London available until 48 hours later. And a 24 hour wait to get back to Bristol.

In the heat of southern France we made frenzied calls to change the booking with the hire car company and found ourselves unwillingly competing with other irate passengers for flights, hotel and taxis. A quite pathetic spectacle really.

That night I lay awake all night (literally) in a horrible air conditioned room in a Toulouse hotel of the kind that: (1) has a contantly wheezing fan; (2) freezes your face while at the same time turning your bed into a toasted sandwich maker - too drafty to throw the covers off - (3) a small white box with no indication of how to turn off the power and just for good measure (4) a set of pillows, each one resembling in all possible ways the Stone of Scone.

The other reason I couldn't sleep was the worry of leaving my family in France with no more than an easyjet ticket for protection. I had to decide: would I get up at 4.30 a.m. and buy a BA ticket to make sure I got an early flight back to London and thereby make my connection, or would I lie in bed and go with the family to Bristol and then turn up to work in Norway 2 or 3 days late?

I got up at 4.30 a.m. and I got my ticket.

The family were okay.

No thanks to easyjet.

As I sat in Gatwick, waiting for my flight to Norway, having checked in painlessly with Norwegian airlines ticket scanning machine (a world apart from the easyjet savannah watering hole stampede we had survived on the way down to Toulouse), I watched the flight departures board fill up with all of easyjet's late flights and cancellations, including the same flight to Toulouse cancelled for a second day in a row.

As I watched, I began to get an angry feeling that easyjet had never had the intention of putting flights out to Toulouse on a regular basis. Instead, they had conned us into thinking that we might get a flight, but that in reality it was only sending flights out as a sort of rescue service for its own stranded passengers. Though only at its own convenience. So how long was it possible to stay waiting for a flight? According to the information we received in Toulouse, easyjet would guarantee that it wasn't more than a week. But what kind of people do you think you're ferrying around easyjet? Jobseekers?

But to get back to the lighter side... I forgot to mention that I was rather sick while this was going on. Luckily I had the foresight to sort myself out with Smecta and immodium. This is another aspect of France we don't miss: the business of constantly getting bugs or suffering from food gone off in the heat...

Anyway, I hadn't been able to eat for the previous 2 days and my wife had put some dinner she had made into four resealable plastic tubs that had once contained butter. While waiting in a rather bedraggled state for our easyjet flight next to the car hire counter, my wife had persuaded us to eat our cold dinner leftovers. So we all tucked in. It was a meal consisting of rather a lot of cold mashed potato. In my case it turned out to be a bad idea.

What was strange though, was the way all the people in the grindingly slow car hire queue were looking at us like we were some sort of green aliens. Were they looking at us oddly? Yes, they really were. And then we realised that to them, it just looked like we were a family sitting together eating President butter directly from the container. And what's more, we each had our own tub of it. Zut Alors! Les Anglais!

Despite Their Hypocrisy

2010-07-14T00:09:00.007+02:00

I'm just back from holiday in France where we have been in the Dordogne. It is one of my favourite places, having a great deal of history about it, some of that human history stretching very far back in time: the famous painted caves of Lascaux and elsewhere - and some of it more recent: the many medieval castles and the romanesque churches of Souilliac and Perigueux.

Because of the temperatures last week we spent a good part of the holiday trying to keep cool. One day we managed this by going to visit the romanesque church (formerly an abbey) in Souilliac. It's a very large church, more like a cathedral really, but very simple inside (as befits a monastery) and with some striking carved columns inside the large door of the nave. Many beasts of different kind have been carved rising up the columns, each one biting the one next to it and seemingly affirming the tooth-and-claw nature of existence.

I had spent the holiday reading Terry Jones' book about medieval occupations. It is entitled 'Medieval Lives'. I recommend it as a thought-provoking journey through the social landscape of the time. Jones is not an unbiased commentator and his personal take on the behaviour of those living in the past provides thought-provoking insights. He is particularly down on the idea of knightly chivalry and also well explains why he believes that monks became hypocritical in their behaviour. The riches of the church, he explains, came from the wealthy kings, barons and knights who paid the monks to pray for their souls after slaughtering the enemy in battle. For every dead man, someone would have to pray for 40 days - and as the lords didn't have the time to do it, they preferred to pay a monk to do their praying for them. A lot of people died (notably in the early days of the Norman Conquest) and therefore the number of abbeys that had to be built and housed with praying monks was large).

But the rub was, according to Jones, that the monks, who took their vows in order to lead a simple and pure life, instead inherited a world of conspicuous wealth boosted by all kinds of taxes on local populations. They overate and found ways to circumvent their vows of silence using a sign language that was known throughout Europe.

With these thoughts in my head, I sat in Soulliac abbey looking up at the beautifully pure proportions of the cupola and arches, the restrained windows up high which brought touches of colour into the muted yellows of the shaded interior.

We were alone in the building, keeping quiet as one generally does in a holy place, when two men, dressed as tourists, came into the church. They walked quickly down to the altar area and then one of them began singing Gregorian chants. He continued for several minutes, walking around like any normal tourist, but singing in what might have been Latin. He seemed to be testing the acoustics. Then, as quickly as they had come, both men left.

I have never seen anyone visit a church and behave in this way before, and found myself quite impressed by the man's presumption. My thirteen year old daughter, normally quite retiring, clearly felt the same way and was emboldened to go up to the altar area and try out her own voice.

My family were now alone in the cathedral as she sang to us, her lovely singing filling the vast echoey space. Her impromptu performance consisted of devotional songs which she had learnt this year before going on a choir tour in Belgium. The sound took on an immense physicality as it bounded out into the great amplifying chamber and reverberated back at varying intervals from the different enclaves of the church.

Those minutes of her singing are ones I will always remember. And here was also the other side of history. The other legacy of history that cannot be contained in arguments (however well justified) between the pages of a book. Which has to be gone out and looked for and touched and sung into being. At that moment I wanted to thank the monks and the chevaliers for what they had left behind, despite their hypocrisy.

Fortunata and the Four Gods

2010-06-19T00:19:00.005+02:00

My brother Nick Wonham has just unveiled another of his creations, this time for the Museum of London. It's very much along the lines of his previous CD stories produced for Choose and Tell, but this time access is free for everyone. He's a clever story teller and, as always, delivers a tale that both amuses and educates. Click here (and remember to tell the kids).

What is Poetry For?

2010-06-19T00:13:00.001+02:00

When I think about what I use poetry for, the only honest answer I can come up with is that I use it to preserve things. I use it to preserve the things that matter to me. Like any preserver (taxidermist, pickler) I have to be careful about the methods I use. Preserving things can be a challenge, but the challenge is not the point - it is something incidental. The final product may look a little odd and bear only a passing resemblance to the raw materials that went into it, but that's not the point. What's important is the special alchemy between what is being preserved and the method of preservation.

Mathieu Boogaerts - Bandit

2010-04-26T00:34:00.003+02:00

Mathieu Boogaerts (born 1970) is an original. His voice is distinctive and his rhythms unusual, possibly inspired by Africa where he spent much time travelling. His first record was "Super" in 1996, his most recent "I Love You" in 2008. The video accompanying this seems to have been created by a fan, but it fits perfectly the song.

SOS Help

2010-04-25T23:18:00.005+02:00

I have agreed to post this message to help spread the word about SOS Help. Their web site has a useful page of Community Links that will assist newcomers to France find their bearings. Here's the message from SOS Help:

Feel like talking? SOS Help, an English speaking crisis line in France, is open from 3 pm to 11 pm daily.

Call us up to talk about anything on your mind – from loneliness to stress to concerns about integrating into a new culture.

We are here to listen! Call us at 01 46 21 46 46 or visit us online at www.soshelpline.org for more information.

Irony Again

2010-04-22T22:35:00.005+02:00

A letter from a friend brings news or recent musings in the Economist magazine on the subject of poetry:

"Modern poetry seems all too often to be associated with coy, small-minded ironists; teasing, finicky word players who often write in disappointingly short lines and seem to lack the ambition, the emotional force, the rhetorical reach, and even the range of subject matter of great poets of the past. Where to go these days to find the real thing? Derek Walcott, born on the Caribbean island of St Lucia in 1930, and winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1992, is one answer..."

As soon as I read that comment about "coy, small-minded ironists" I began to jump. I think the term irony is much abused. Critics of a certain bent often use it to criticise what they don't like. Especially if they don't actually know why they don't like it. And normally the people who they accuse of being ironists are not being ironic at all.

How many truly ironic poems can you think of? If you can think of some I'd love you to leave a comment. That would have to be a poem written in an ironic manner, with a dash of sarcasm for example. And I don't mean poems that explore real ironies. I mean poets who write in an ironic manner. "Come gentle bombs and fall on Slough..." by John Betjeman might be one. Bombs are not gentle, in fact they are the opposite, so he must be being ironic. The irony is complex and the outward appearance (that he is being cruel to the people of Slough) is mitigated by the discovery of his real intention: to be cruel to the architecture of Slough: "...it isn't fit for humans now". It's ironic, it's memorable and it is gracefully amusing.

The concept of irony takes quite a lot of time to think about. It requires examples in order to put it into context, and examples do not always spring quickly to mind. But here is one I thought about this evening: playing the card game "Happy Families" always makes my children unhappy (because they get upset when they forget to say "Thank You" and lose the cards they just won.)

Why is this ironic? Because a game which is supposed to be about happy families creates unhappy ones. Watching our children burst into tears, we feel it might be better to call the game "Unhappy Families" because that would be more rational and fitting. So, the name is incongruous, all the more so because the reality is the exact opposite of the proposed happy experience that is suggested by the name.

To me, this type of irony is a beautiful thing. It reveals how intention can be flawed. It reveals how innocence is undermined by our own harsh-won experience. It is truth-revealing. You could say it is anti-romantic and I think that could be correct, if you believe that romance depends on existing in a state of innocent bliss, ever yearning for unachievable ideals.

If you're interested to pursue this further, carry on and read this article which I wrote a few years ago.

A House I Pass Every Morning No. 10: The Guarded House

2010-04-06T23:07:00.007+02:00

It's not a house you are allowed to enter. There are three giants at the gate keeping guard. Also the gate is locked. Whenever someone comes near, the giants whisper to each other:
"What shall we do to him?"
"Wait till he gets closer!"
"Does he dare ring the bell?"
"Watch to see if he rings the bell!"
"Then let's thrash him!"
"Yes, let's kill him!"
"Let's worse than kill him!"
"What's worse than kill him?"
"Let's scorn him and then kill him!"
"How do we scorn him?"
"Here's how we scorn him. We let him ring the bell. We say: Who is it?. He says: A visitor. We say: Who are you visiting? He says: the Guarded House. We say: Who invited you? He says: nobody. We say: Nobody? Nobody invited you? You came here because of nobody? You came here for nothing? What do you bother us for? We are the Guards. What are you? You are like crap on the pavement. We have so much better things to do than concern ourselves with the likes of you, you worthless piece of trash."
"Then can we thrash him?"
"Yes we can thrash him."
"Then can we kill him?"
"Yes we can kill him."
"Shh! Look, he's coming this way!"

Sure enough, the man is walking towards the guarded house down the street. He is looking up at the tall trees. He is coming towards the green gate. He is drawing close to the bell on the wall. He's raising his arm. Or is he just swinging it? No, he's raising it. No, he's swinging it. No, he's really raising it! He's going to ring the bell! He's so close!

But no, he's only scratching his nose. And then he walks on past, just as he does every morning.

Berry - Mademoiselle

2010-03-20T18:55:00.007+01:00

Berry is the performing name of Élise Pottier who made her artistic debut at sixteen in the theatre. She performed in several plays, notably "Les Femmes Savantes" directed by Béatrice Agenin. At the same time, she appeared in cabaret where she met Mano, a jazz composer. Together with Lionel Dudognon, they perform under the name of Berry, a reference to the region from which George Sand came. The first album called "Mademoiselle" was released in 2008, with the title track issued as a single as well as two other tracks entitled Le Bonheur and Demain, both well worth a listen. The official video of Mademoiselle is here.

Absence by Michael Lynch

2010-03-03T00:09:00.007+01:00

There is inside her words a river where no one speaks
the branches of dead trees appearing here as white roots
her hands weaving inside the white water’s texture the eyes of a young woman standing without movement

I thought perhaps it was the light later she said it was
the stillness that held her to this crossing the wind sudden in its absence frozen within that memory of white

I asked her, after awhile, Who are you? she was so still, her eyes, her hands empty, the light without movement I imagined she was telling me again how we would never be absent from each other because of the words we use to dream each other into existence
even now years later
the light covering the statue’s eyes white with sun
I hear again the silence

her hands cupping its stillness like a shell holding me here, whispering into the empty trees
seeing the six white birds passing above my words like a boat drifting into the stone eye of the bridge,

where on the other side is the boatman wearing a soft hat like mine an old man telling his story knowing in that same instant it is a boy’s too, the past and the future reversed, no longer holding each other’s hands now we have gone past the barrier

she told me once there is a woman thinking of you
who brings you into existence though I knew each man she remembered would have the same lines in his hands, his eyes
each evening by the river each afternoon would see the small moon behind the curtains becoming the light that was absent inside all things that die,
the smell of her hands even now in this light have become a stone heavy with emptiness

remember she said to me that day, we must forgive each other and god

each time

the absence that is here inside our words becomes like an invisible child hiding from the light’s annihilation

+ + + + +

Michael Lynch lives in a small village in the South of France and teaches creative writing at the Skidmore College Program in France. Most of his work has been published by small presses. His most recent book was called "Experiments in the Architecture of Light". He has also published a novel: "An American Soldier" (Little Brown) and has recently finished working on a trilogy. An opera libretto which he wrote, "The Magician", won a National Endowment for the Arts award.

This is part of a series of poems from invited poets. Previous contributors were Luke Heeley, Joe Ross, George Szirtes, Elizabeth Spackman, Ivy Alvarez, Rufo Quintavalle, Todd Swift, Michelle Noteboom, Beverley Bie Brahic, Ethan Gilsdorf, Amy Hollowell, Choman Hardi, and Jeramy Dodds, Jennifer K. Dick. Illustration by Jonathan Wonham.

Earthquake in Haiti

2010-01-15T23:18:00.004+01:00

Donate now: UNICEF.
Donate now: Disasters Emergency Committee

Science Cocktails

2009-10-25T19:24:00.006+01:00

Have you tried one of the new science cocktails?

Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years by Jared M. Diamond (Vintage).

The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony (Princeton University Press).

Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate by William F. Ruddiman (Princeton University Press).

Ice, Mud and Blood: Lessons from Climates Past by Chris Turney (Palgrave Macmillan).

Bones, Rocks and Stars: The Science of When Things Happened by Chris Turney (Palgrave Macmillan).

Sex, Drugs and DNA: Science's Taboos Confronted by M. Stebbins (Palgrave).

Epidemics and History: Disease, Power and Imperialism by S. Watts (Yale University Press).

Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the meaning of life by Nick Lane (OUP Oxford).

Enough already? Here are a few I mixed myself...

Mud, Wheels and Power: How Imperial Roadside Maintenance Shaped the Modern World by Dan R. Lane (Countrywide).

Sex, Plagues and Language: the origin of communication taboos by Watt Nansens (IOU).

Horses, Germs and Stars: How Ringworm shaped Hollywood and American Culture in the 1940s by A. Paul Lynn (Corporation Press).

Ice, Guns and DNA: All that Science Left of the World by Anne X. Pert (Oxbridge).

Bottoms Up!

Purchase Upstairs at Duroc Online

2009-10-04T19:47:00.004+02:00

I've just noticed that there is a rather cool development on the WICE web site which allows you to buy copies of Upstairs at Duroc online using Paypal. So now if you've always wanted to sample this excellent magazine of new writing, it couldn't be simpler: just click here.

Renan Luce - La Lettre

2009-09-23T21:26:00.006+02:00

Renan Luce was born in Paris in 1980 but grew up in Brittany. His music is said to have been influenced by the 20th century singer and songwriter Georges Brassens. He released his first album Repenti in September 2006. If you'd like to watch the official video of this song it is here on You Tube.

Review: Make Nothing Happen by Rufo Quintavalle

2009-08-10T00:15:00.010+02:00

W.H. Auden's well known observation "poetry makes nothing happen" can be interpreted in two ways. Normally, it is understood to be something of an inditement on poetry of the type: no matter how hard poetry tries, it is unable to change anything. But it can also be read a second way, as a comment on the art of poetry itself. Poetry makes nothing happen because it is not required to move forward in the way that a story does. It can be a sort of frozen moment.

Quintavalle's approach to making nothing happen is to follow the dictum: "less is more". Many of the poems in his first collection "Make Nothing Happen" are short, some consisting of only four or five words. They seem to ask: what is the minimum required of a poem? And by extension: what is the minimum required of a poet? If the minimum required is to exist: then what does it mean to exist?

It seems that from starting out to answer a very simple question, or perhaps because he has started out to answer a very simple question, Quintavalle has arrived immediately up against the thorny problems of existence: why do we exist, how real is our existence, what is the purpose of pain, how do we know who we are, why shouldn't we be someone else, will heaven save us, what will remain of us?

If you think providing answers to all these questions sounds a rather ambitious project for a pamphlet of 23 poems, likely to lead to something rather bloated and grandiose, then you would be mistaken. Here's an example of his approach: the poem "Keldur". From the outset, the poem appears straightforward and conversational, slyly humourous and personalised:

I don't understand anything: why I came into
this body, this life;
my wife says I think too much,
that I have too much free time,
but I wouldn't want less, and besides,
I'd hardly call it free.

But having welcomed us into the poem in this informal manner, he then poses a conundrum:

Up the road there is what was a house
and now is a building on a farm;
before the house there was nothing,
and around the farm there is nothing still.

At first sight there seems to be no link between the first and second half of the poem. But then we ask: is an analogy being drawn between his own body and a house? If it is the case, then what does it mean when the house is no more a house but simply a building on a farm? A collection of buildings produces something practical: a farm. The farm makes money, it pays for itself. But it doesn't provide any answers to the problems posed in the first half of the poem: "around the farm there is nothing still". Collective approaches, such as religion, are no more likely to throw up answers than individual approaches, such as poetry.

Many of the poems, while short, require considerable thought to understand what is going on inside them. In part, this complexity is achieved through playful use of language which amounts already to a distinctive Quintavalle style. It is the result of choosing line breaks that multiply the possible interpretations of a line:

There is a thing in pigeons freeze
and shake them they rattle sometimes

Or through over-extending a sentence with clauses so that unusual log-jams of words unexpectedly occur. For example, the "does what that" phrase below:

Layering a history
on history like concrete or that carpet
so plausible birds sat down on it to eat
does what that a newspaper doesn't do?

This collection marks a highly original debut. And while certain poems are as good as anything being written today, for example: Rocks, Milosz in California and Cathedral, it makes more sense to view the poems as constituent parts of a whole that is characteristically Quintavallian.

* * * *

Make Nothing Happen by Rufo Quintavalle is available from Oystercatcher Press at a cost of £4.

A stanza in the snow, as equal by Jennifer K. Dick

2009-07-26T00:05:00.007+02:00

                             (ties) (lies) (-fuge)
Within that subtle

graze the key, stroke back
in that dining, that mahogany
contemporary debate His hands

Breaking

Hers
blue-white         Is she
the smallest dish, this porcelaine
sealed room
                       within which Machiavelli writes--
My prince, why this tingling absence?
Eleven figures march along, six
carry the casket, time
ticks in the ear, season-change,
backcount to this divide

when
               180 x2             or 2x
equals Us
                        U.S.
                                   You as or are
Capt
               that Inter
Ruption
               a corrective
Squal
               this (disem-) body
Fall into the stone
crypt within what banks          She

Atop or on or
crumble the pages
follow
               For folly is
this bedlam
bedfellow sequestered
That You, that he,
We: house arrest—

Venice in Medici Machiavellic gates
(gardenless) (the values)

subtract

His              Grasp            Her
stanza in the snow, as equal.

+ + + + +

Jennifer K. Dick was born in Minnesota, raised in Iowa and currently lives in Paris, France where she works as a teacher of American Literature, Creative Writing and English. She has carried out doctoral research in the field of Comparative Literature with an emphasis on Visual studies, Modernism, Postmodernism and the Avant-garde. She also holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Colorado State University. Her published works include the book Fluorescence (University of Georgia Press, 2004), Retina/Rétine (Estepa Editions, Paris, 2005) and ENCLOSURES (BlazeVox, New York, 2007).

This is part of a series of poems from invited poets. Previous contributors were Luke Heeley, Joe Ross, George Szirtes, Elizabeth Spackman, Ivy Alvarez, Rufo Quintavalle, Todd Swift, Michelle Noteboom, Beverley Bie Brahic, Ethan Gilsdorf, Amy Hollowell, Choman Hardi, and Jeramy Dodds. Illustration by Jonathan Wonham.

Cesar's Thumb

2009-07-22T22:11:00.012+02:00

A thumb. It's a gigantic bronze sculpture by Cesar located in La Defense, Paris. It's about 10 metres high. It was one of the very first remarkable things I saw when I moved to Paris in 2003. At the time I had a negative reaction to this work of art. Now I love it.

Why was my first view negative? I think it was because I saw it too much in the context of the buildings around it. The very high sky-scrapers (gratte-ciel) that dominate La Defense. It seemed to me that the thumb was only made enormous because the sky-scrapers were enormous. I saw the enormous bland buildings and then I saw the enormous bland thumb and it seemed like a bad joke to me. Somehow the negative feeling I had about the buildings played off directly onto the thumb.

And the thumb is surely enormous only because the buildings are enormous. A question of appropriate scale, of the thumb sculpture not being dwarfed by its surroundings. But it's also a question of opportunity: opportunity for Cesar; opportunity for us.

Imagine this thumb now being lifted onto the back of an articulated lorry and going off on a tour of France. Imagine that thumb popping up on the top of an Alp. On the beach in St Tropez. Standing next to a lighthouse on some wild coast of Brittany. Then it would prove its scale, its appropriateness to every situation.

It could take its place among the menhirs of Carnac. It could spend an afternoon blocking traffic on the motorway during a bank holiday weekend. It could give a mighty thumbs up to the grape harvest in Champagne.

And everywhere it went, people would look at their own thumbs. They would hold them up and move them further from or closer to their faces until their own thumbs were the same size as Cesar's thumb. And that distance between the thumb and their face would depend upon how far they were from Cesar's thumb.

Cesar's thumb would return to Paris heroic. The ultimate measure of scale, known everywhere. It would return to its place at the foot of the giant buildings and people would crowd around it, closer and closer, their own thumbs held up, closer and closer until the buildings were blotted out not only by Cesar's giant thumb, but also by their own thumbs. Then they could once more know who they were.

Poetry Reading in London, 14th July 2009

2009-07-08T23:09:00.002+02:00

OXFAM POETRY SERIES
in tandem with the 14-day UK festival BOOKFEST
invites you to a poetry reading with UK, USA & Australian poets:

Barbara Beck
David Caddy
Jennifer K Dick
Brentley Frazer
Rufo Quintavalle
George Vance
Jonathan Wonham

They will be introduced by UK poet Todd Swift

AT: 7 pm, the 14th of July 2009
Oxfam Books and Music
91 Marylebone High Street
London, W1.
Baker street tube station +7-10 minute walk.
http://www.oxfammarylebone.co.uk/
Please note this is not Marylebone Road.

RSVP & book in advance via Contact Martin Penny at Tel: 0207 4873570
or via email at oxfammarylebone@hotmail.com

For more details, poet's biographies and access map click here.

The Oxfam poetry series has been running for six years, since 2004, when it was launched by Sir Andrew Motion & Wendy Cope. In that time, the series has featured over 100 leading poets, & raised tens of thousands of pounds for Oxfam's work to alleviate poverty & suffering.

7 Spring Melodies

2009-04-29T00:19:00.009+02:00

The Blue Note 7 play Birdland

George has tagged me for my 7 current Spring music favourites. Here they are:

Charlotte Gainsbourg: 5.55 (Title track of the album which just arrived through the post. My daughters think it's dull, they'd prefer Pink.)

Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (Since I'm just back from my first visit to New York).

Something else I can't remember that I was whistling around the streets of New York once I got bored of whistling Rhapsody in Blue.

Cold Play: Don't Panic (from the album Parachutes. Spring morning music.... "We live in a beautiful World")

The Blue Note 7: Little B's Poem (I saw The Blue Note 7 play the last night of a fifty city tour at Birdland in New York last Sunday). This was my favourite track. Their album released on Blue Note records is called Mosaic.

This Mortal Coil: You and Your Sister (from the album 'Blood'.)

Alanis Morissette: Thank U (from the album Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.)

Since it's a long time since I tagged anyone, or wrote a blog post for that matter, I will agree to tag 7 people . . . Lucy, Clare, Jen, Ivy, Dick, Lesley and Mike . . . then I'll slip away and hide . . .

Tarmac

2009-03-25T23:26:00.002+01:00

I was back in Paris last week and returned for the first time to the neighbourhood where I used to live on the Western side of Paris. The sun shone bright and low in the sky, reflecting off tarmac spread on the cracks in the road, making it look like silver caligraphy or a hot lava flow. Daffodils were in bloom and I met our gardener having his evening beer (well deserved as always) in the cafe at the end of our road. "Ca commence à pousser" I told him, and we laughed a knowing laugh together.

J'ai Disparu

2009-03-04T00:47:00.001+01:00

I just looked at my Connaissances blog and found it had disappeared. Not the blog itself, just the content. Is that what happens if you don't post for two months? When I did a test post, the content came back. So what will happen to all this writing? Will it stay here in the ether for ever? Or will Google silently ingest it one day? Does anyone have any theories?

Daho & Gainsbourg (Again)

2009-01-10T01:44:00.003+01:00

"If" by Etienne Daho and Charlotte Gainsbourg. A lot of video recently, but this is just too good not to share.

Happy New Year: La Vie en Rose

2009-01-07T23:25:00.006+01:00

Des yeux qui font baisser les miens,
Un rire qui se perd sur sa bouche,
Voilà le portrait sans retouche
De l'homme auquel j'appartiens…
Quand il me prends dans ses bras,
Qu’Il me parle tout bas,
Je vois la vie en rose;
Il me dit des mots d'amour,
Des mots de tous les jours,
Et ça me fait quelque chose.
Il est entré dans mon coeur,
Une part de bonheur,
et je connais la cause,
C'est toi pour moi,
Moi par toi dans la vie;
Il me l’a dit, l'a juré, pour la vie;
Et, dès que je t'aperçois,
Alors je sens en moi
Mon coeur qui bat.
Des nuits d'amour à plus finir,
Un grand bonheur qui prend sa place,
Les ennuis, les chagrins s'effacent…
Heureux, heureux à en mourir!
Quand il m’a prends dans ses bras
Il me parle tout bas
Je vois la vie en rose
Il me dit des mots d'amour
Des mots de tous les jours
Et ça me fait quelque chose.
Il est entré dans mon coeur,
Une part de bonheur,
et je connais la cause.
C'est toi pour moi, moi pour toi dans la vie
Il m’a la dit, l'a juré, pour la vie.
Et, dès que je t'aperçois
Alors je sens en moi
Mon coeur qui bat.

French version by Edith Piaf

Hold me close and hold me fast,
The magic spell you cast,
This is La Vie en Rose.

When you kiss me, Heaven sighs,
And though I close my eyes,
I see La Vie en Rose.

When you press me to your heart,
I'm in a world apart,
A world where roses bloom;

And when you speak, angels sing from above;
Everyday words seem to turn into love songs.

Give your heart and soul to me
And life will always be
La Vie en Rose.

English version by Mack David

Best of Scottish

2009-01-06T21:14:00.003+01:00

Every year, the Scottish Poetry Library commissions a selection of the best Scottish poems published. The twenty poems selected in 2008 can now be read online here.

Leaving France

2008-11-09T16:01:00.001+01:00

Leaving France was rather painful for us. After five years in situ we were leaving behind friends, a language that we had learned and were growing to love, a deeper understanding of French society and the way to get along and enjoy life. The move itself was fraught with difficulty since we were obliged to rid ourselves of a large proportion of our belongings. As a result, all our furniture and an enormous number of books had to be sorted, packed and shipped back to the UK.

Our grumpy removers proved less than helpful and the move turned into a logistical nightmare. For a couple of months I was running eveywhere with an A4 lever arch file packed full of documents (tax, banking, ferry bookings, flight bookings, rental car bookings, insurance, car import documents etc etc etc ad nauseam).

At one point, I hardly slept for three nights due to packing and tidying and had to organise a last minute van hire in order to come back to France and rescue some of our belongings from a kindly neighbour's basement where we had temporarily left them. All of this while somehow attending work meetings with business partners, putting on a cheery face and a good show as if nothing were remotely wrong.

There were upsides however. We had a wonderful farewell party in our garden attended by nearly all of our friends. The weather held, the food flew off the tables and everyone drank too much (since we couldn't bring our drinks cabinet to Norway). And then there were the friends who rallied round and helped us to survive relocation, looking after the children for us as we packed box after box of belongings, helping us to shift unwanted furniture and to feed us when all our kitchen utensils had disappeared.

And, unexpectedly, the French postal service proved a useful ally in our moment of need, providing an excellent forwarding service for our mail. Their best service: the one that helps you to leave the country...

Now, every time I receive another package with the jolly little Sempé-inspired cartoon on the outside, it fills me with a nostalgic glow. And that word: "Réexpédition" has such a grand and adventurous ring to it, as if St Exupery himself had delivered it. It goes a little way towards recompensing for the fact that every book delivered by La Poste during the past five years has been snapped in half by some maladjusted postal sorting machine...

Charlotte Gainsbourg

2008-11-07T23:48:00.002+01:00

Continuing a superficial exploration of French Pop, this evening Connaissances presents Charlotte Gainsbourg, veritable French bijoux. Is this French pop? Jarvis Cocker and ze English language feature, but with the influence of French duo Air and the breathy Charlotte, it certainly seems to belong more to the Côte Sud of La Manche. Anyway, it's divine.

Don't Eat Jewellery

2008-10-25T01:11:00.003+02:00

Upstairs at Duroc Issue 11: Call for Submissions

2008-10-24T23:37:00.000+02:00

Upstairs at Duroc is an international literary magazine edited at the offices of WICE in Paris. The editors are now accepting submissions of new work for Issue 11 of the magazine. Submissions of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, photographs and illustrations will be accepted until 31st Jan 2009. The editorial process is anonymous and submissions of new and previously unpublished work are welcome from any corner of the globe. Submission of work by e-mail is preferred. For further details of how to submit click here.

Upstairs at Duroc Issue 10: Celebratory Launch Reading

2008-10-22T22:40:00.001+02:00

Upstairs at Duroc Issue 10 has recently been published. This is a 10th Anniversary edition featuring poetry from George Szirtes, Marilyn Hacker, Cole Swenson, C.K. Williams, Michelle Noteboom and many others together with prose pieces from Floyd Skloot, Phillip Lopate and Wendy Richardson.

To mark the occasion, Wice and Upstairs at Duroc have organised a celebratory reading featuring Nicholas Manning, Michelle Noteboom, Timothy Bradford and Jennifer K. Dick on 13 November at the American Library in Paris.

For further information, click here. The reading is free and all our welcome.

Review: A Field Guide to Surreal Botany

2008-10-07T21:52:00.003+02:00

Title: "A Field Guide to Surreal Botany"
Edited by: Jason Erik Lundgren and Janet Chui
Publisher: Two Cranes Press
Format: Paperback, 76 pp
ISBN: 978-981-08-1017-7

A Field Guide to Surreal Botany is an illustrated guide to 48 species of surreal plant from all corners of the globe. The guide is organised by geographic region which will prove useful for quick look up purposes. A few of the species are said to have a worldwide distribution, no doubt reflecting the pervasive influence of communication networks on the distribution of invasive species.

The guide is beautifully illustrated by Janet Chui whose paintings manage to capture the often very rare or difficult to photograph plants described in the guide. Each plant is given at least a page with a detailed description of plant appearance, ecology and life cycle. There are also in depth notes to accompany each plant which are frequently very engaging. The text layout is clear without too many unnecessary flourishes (on which count the editors are to be congratulated). The text is notably well written and often includes information on the discovery of the plant or cultural references.

Surreal plants form a diverse grouping, often providing considerable personal dangers or observational challenges to the botanist. This guide outlines some of the potential risks, or the best opportunities for getting a glimpse of these "outlier" species, much enhancing the guide's utility.

"A Field Guide to Surreal Botany" is an invaluable resource for botanists, restoration ecologists, and all plant enthusiasts. The editors are to be applauded on bringing together such a diverse and fascinating collection of material. The guide would make an ideal present and an indispensable addition to any botanist's collecting bag.

Thanks to I.M. Gontorseede of Wiffly-in-the-Wold for this review.

On the Other Hand...

2008-09-30T20:02:00.001+02:00

On the other hand, maybe I will create a new blog for all things Norwegian. I've spent this evening researching Norwegian poets and it just doesn't seem right to post it on Connaissances. So I've posted it on a new blog called Icebus.

New Poem

2008-09-29T22:50:00.000+02:00

I've posted a new poem on Rewords entitled "Exceptionally".

Popping up out of the Ether

2008-09-24T21:30:00.001+02:00

It's almost three months since my last post. Apologies first of all to those who have left comments that have received no reply. And secondly thanks to those who have continued to direct internet traffic towards Connaissances, especially Clare Dudman who has left a very kind comment about this blog during an interview with Mark Thwaite at the Book Depository web site.

My "Adieu" from Paris was a cryptic one, not saying where I was going, whether I would be back to blog again some day. To be honest, I was not sure about the future. I didn't know whether it would feel right to blog on Connaissances from my new home in Norway. Connaissances is so much about France, French poetry, French way of life. What sense would there be in continuing a French blog from Norway?

On the other hand, with all the past three months of moving chaos, Connaissances seems to beckon me back with a pleasant familiarity, a promise to provide a sense of continuity of thought, of camraderie, of common interest which, I somehow feel, an enforced move to colder climes should not be allowed to undermine. Connaissances has become a place where people who know me can find me whenever they want, can see what I am thinking about and can join the conversation in my head. That is the important thing, and not where I happen to be hanging my hat.

So there will be no new blog entitled: "Snakker du Norske?", "The Trolls are Rising", "Moonlight on a Mountain Lake" or even "Granitic Eddas". Norway will certainly find its way onto this blog's menu, but it will not be the main course.

And on the same note, I'll also be continuing some of my other Paris activities, such as the editing of Upstairs at Duroc magazine, since this has become an equally important part of my writing life. I'm still going to continue translating French poetry as well, at least until I can get my head around Norwegian...

Reading in Paris - Thursday 3rd July

2008-06-26T21:35:00.000+02:00

Paris Writers Workshop
and the literary journal Upstairs at Duroc

invite you to a reading
featuring prose and poetry by

Jeffrey Greene
Marilyn Hacker
Ellen Hinsey
Chim Nwabueze
Jonathan Wonham

At Forum 104
104 rue de Vaugirard
75006 Paris
Metro St. Placide or Montparnasse
(in the Bibliothèque of Forum 104)

Thursday July 3, 2008, 7 PM

Adieu

2008-06-26T20:51:00.001+02:00

Our days in France are limited. Limited to only a couple of weeks in fact. Where has the time gone? We've been in France for five years now, having arrived in the midst of the dreadful canicule heat wave summer of 2003. I remember when we first arrived at our new house, walking in through the door at 10 pm in the evening and feeling the heat trapped inside. I touched the radiator and shouted "some idiots left the heating turned on!" But they hadn't. It was just the latent heat of that tremendously hot day still throbbing through the pipes.

My younger daughter, that's her in the photograph above, has grown up here, and it's her who will miss the place most. I can hear her playing next door at the moment, talking to herself in French. Luckily we have been able to find a French school in the place we are going to, so she will not lose this gift. It has been great to see her slowly fitting in among her French peer group, and to see how well loved she is by the teacher, whom she adores in return, kissing her on the cheek in the morning when she arrives and in the evening when she leaves. She is the only child that does this!

France hasn't changed very radically in the five years we have been here, and I think that is, on the whole, a good thing. The longer I am here, the more I appreciate the rather conservative approach of the French. A suspicious approach to liberal free market economics, a healthy over-evaluation of their own culture, a robust state bureaucracy, plenty of rules, plenty of formality, no Sunday opening. All of this is good for France in an odd sort of way. It slows down the pace of life to one that is manageable, not frenetic. It values traditional things and at the same time does not seem to stymie innovation.

There is, in France, a level of group activity which should be the envy of other countries in Europe. In my sphere of interest, for example, there is the 'Marche de la Poesie' which brings together all the small publishers of poetry from all over France and unites them in a single poetry jamboree. This kind of event, which exists in all different spheres and at both regional and countrywide level, can allow you to become passionate about the things you love, whether that be reading poetry, consuming wine and cheese or touring on a racing bicycle.

So now we have to bid our adieus. Several friends have said they wished we were staying. Have said how much they value our contributions to the community. They are especially referring to my wife who has energetically supported almost every organisation known in Croissy-sur-Seine. But... our thoughts are already moving on, we have found a new house, are dreaming of mountains, fjords and sandy beaches...

A House I Pass Every Morning No. 9: The Brick House

2008-06-16T23:04:00.003+02:00

The intelligent pig built his house of bricks.

He sat quite safe and snug inside, watching the remains of a wolf turning in the pot.

He was proud of his house and its beautiful bricks.

They fitted together so neatly, and the brickmaker had delivered two different colours so that, almost by chance, the pig had found himself positioning his bricks to make fancy patterns.

He was not quite sure why he had started making patterns, but it was sure that once he had started, it had become difficult to stop.

His house was so unlike the others. The different coloured bricks, the pattern.

A pig who built his house of stone could never have a house like that. Stone was all rough edged, a thousand mottled shades. There was no precision in it. You couldn't even lie them in an even row.

Precision and strength, that's what his house had. It was the embodiment of law and order. Any wolf that snuck up to his door would get what it had coming to it.

A grey day in Paris, with a flash of red

2008-06-12T22:32:00.000+02:00

It's been a grey day in Paris, cloud chasing cloud across a sombre sky patched with blue, occasional spatters of rain on the windows. This time of year seems to be generally quite wet. Freakishly powerful thunderstorms strike the city from time to time causing flooding, interspersed with a few hot days here and there, just enough to get the mould spores growing. A couple of weeks ago I was walking home in the evening from the train when it started to rain. A few minutes later, before I made the safety of my home, the lightning was crashing so close to me I put my umbrella down and decided to run for it. By the time I got inside I was drowned like a rat.

Toay, I left my office at La Defense early in order to come home and see my daughter play guitar in her school music concert. I rarely leave the office as early as 3.30 pm, and I don't know what encouraged me to walk a little further down the platform than I usually do, but when I sat down on the train, I suddenly realised that I was sitting opposite an extremely old man.

It is quite rare to see very old people on the RER. Maybe it's the door handles that can be difficult to turn which discourages them. Maybe its the rude character of the seats and the grafitti scratched on the windows. This very old man was shrewd looking and turning his head rapidly from side to side in order to look out of the windows and peer all around him. He was not just sitting, but animatedly observing.

His skin was very pale, almost transparent, patched here and there on his neck with light brown liver spots. He was wearing golden glasses with rather large lenses that gave his face a hawkish appearance, his nose slightly hooked and his head turning as if looking for prey. His hair was completely white, a little tufty in places and forming a halo around his head. There was a plump man sitting next to him, hemming him in, and when this man got off at Nanterre Université, the old man got up, apparently rather relieved, and took off his thick winter coat.

Underneath he was wearing a jacket and tie, the jacket cut in a heavy dark green tweed. On one thick, wide lapel of the jacket, a tiny but bright flash of red had been sown that stood out against the dark green wool. It is the sign that this very old man was a member of France's 'Légion d’Honneur'. Now I was sure. It was Claude Levi-Strauss. This year, on 28th November, he will be 100 years old.

"When the miracle occurs, as it sometimes does; when, on one side and the other of the hidden crack, there are suddenly to be found cheek-by-jowl two green plants of hidden species, each of which has chosen the most favourable soil; and when at the same time two ammonites with unevenly intricate involutions can be glimpsed in the rocks, thus testifying in their own way to a gap of several tens of thousands of years suddenly space and time become one: the living diversity of the moment juxtaposes and perpetuates the ages. Thought and emotion move into a new dimension where every drop of sweat, every muscular movement, every gasp of breath becomes symbolic of a past history, the development of which is reproduced in my body, at the same time as my thought embraces its significance. I feel myself to be steeped in a more dense intelligibility, within which centuries and distances answer each other and speak with one and the same voice." Claude Levi-Strauss 'Tristes Tropiques'

A Brick Is... (Part 2)

2008-06-11T21:57:00.001+02:00

Beach Brick
Originally uploaded by SideLong.

Following their summary of the historical development of brick-making and its cultural impact, the authors move on to an analysis of the brick in the collective imagination. Their method is to make a questionnaire which draws responses on the associative aspects of bricks. Questions such as: "If a brick was an animal, what animal would it be?" A question frequently answered by the response 'tortoise', a creature with a somewhat brick like shape, but which also carried its home on its back.

The responses of 120 questioned people are analysed in a structured way, looking at (1) substance: fire, earth (2) fabrication (3) aspect: form, colour, texture, density (4) construction role: basic element, decoration (5) use (6) properties: durability, weaknesses, physical constraints.

The author's interpretations are preceded by short 'poems' which reuse the words issued from the questionnaire. Here is the first one, in translation, preceding the section on 'Fire'.

THE FIRE
which smoulders under the RED EARTH
the HOT STONE
sparked from the FLINTSTONE
split by the FLAME-THROWER
the LIGHTNING
the THUNDER
disappearing into SULPHUR
ACRID SMELL OF BURNING
touching the STARS
the UNIVERSE
reappearing as a god RA SUN FLAMING
LIGHT
falling as METEOR
accompanying ORPHEUS to HELL
SATAN

VOLCANO
with its HAMMERS its ANVILS
will deliver it to men

Half the people qquestioned made reference to fire in their responses, sometimes by reference to the sun, but more often to subterranean fire, hell, volcanos... fire at once purifying, living and at the same time destructive, choking. Here, already, is the first break in signification: well-being and isolation versus violence, war and suffocation.

Moving to the second quality of substance: 'Earth' preceded by the following:

MAN
locks up the FIRE
in the BREAD OVEN
and returns TO WORK THE EARTH
HUMID
WARM
AROMATIC

Where ELMS grow
the EARTH
is HEAVY
PLASTIC
he MOULDS it

DUST
under the SUN
WATER
indeed a MUSH
that he KNEADS BY HAND
as he has seen his MOTHER do
KNEADING THE ESSENTIAL BREAD

He invents a tool to FASHION it
BEAT it
FORM it
MOULD it

So that with his MOTHER
and his FOREBEARS
leading his BROTHERS
his COUSINS
his UNCLES
he reopens the OVEN
where the BREAD is cooked
and places his DOUGH

Clay and earth are named, sometimes with the rhyming asociation of 'Terre-Mere'. reminsicent of the earth's fecundity and the matriarchal gods (Persephone, Inanna-Ishtar) worshipped by the first agricultural civilisations and later side-lined by male celestial deities in more urban, hierarchical societies.

A Brick Is... (Part 1)

2008-06-01T11:20:00.008+02:00

Bricks
Originally uploaded by Esparta.

Last week I was invited to our neighbour's house to participate in a "soiree de conversation anglais". Each member of the group prepares a short recitation in English on a set subject. The contributions are generally humorous and eccentric explorations of an alien language. This week the subject was 'Hot and Cold'. We learnt that a 'hot seat' in America is an electric chair and pondered the origin of 'cold turkey', wondering if perhaps the phrase 'cold chicken' might be used to describe the enforced deprivation of minor drugs such as caffeine. After a dose of language, the evening moved on to a pot-luck supper - which turned out to be very pot-luck: black pudding, onion quiche and seven different desserts...

Our neighbours, both members of the group, have lived in their house for more than thirty years. The husband is an architect who designed the house in the 1970s. It is semi-detached, originally built as an experiment in communal living with his neighbour (not us, the other one). The interior design is open plan with upper and lower level connected to form a large open space in the living area. Our neighbours love to travel and have many souveniers of visits to Africa. The book case is also quite fascinating and I sometimes glance surreptitiously at it when I visit.

On this latest occasion, I noticed a copy of Ferdinand de Saussure's 'Cours de linguistique générale', a large, daunting-looking book with a bright orange cover. I asked if I could have a look at it and immediately noticed that it had been read and analysed in some detail with pencil jottings in the margin. When I asked about this, our friend explained that it had been one of the basic texts that had informed his architectural thesis, an analysis of the signification of bricks.

I have borrowed this thesis, written in 1978, and have it in front of me now. The introduction outlines the scope of the study: "We have tried a different approach to the problem (of the signification of architecture). If architecture - a social product - can be a bearer of signs, it is not architecture itself which should be interpreted, but the conditions which produce it... but the subject is too vast, and we must find a narrower point of focus. The brick is the first achieved element in the history of architecture of which a trace can be found..."

The thesis charts the use of brick from the moment 9000 years ago when, with the cultivation of wheat, mediterranean peoples began a sedentary lifestyle and began to invest their energy in the building of permanent homes using brick. They discuss the first brick to have been discovered from archaeological investigations, which comes from Jericho and was made around the 8th millenium. The clay in this area, a powdery aeolian silt containing a strong proportion of lime creates a maleable mixture which is extremely strong when it dries. For the authors, the finger prints made along the top of these bricks, evokes a loaf of bread.

They trace the importance of brick in the building of the earliest great civilisations of Sumeria and Mesopotamia. The god of brick was called Kulla, created from a pinch of clay drawn from the Apson, the "primordial river". "The brick is the symbol of the man fixed in his home, with security and divine protection; but also of limit: of rules, of measure. The closed society as opposed to the open society of the nomad." The development of the oven-baked brick facilitated, according to the authors, a social stratification of society with these better quality bricks being used for palaces and official buildings. Eventually, among the Babylonians, the oven-baked bricks of palaces began to be marked with the seal of the god-king.

The Romans were responsible for propagating brick-making technology throughout their empire, and hence into all parts of Europe. Through the next centuries, however, it was generally the regions that lacked building stone which turned to brick as a building material. This meant that certain regions of Europe became strongly identified with brick built buildings, others not. In Tudor Britain, however, the use of brick became fashioanble since it was associated with the cnstruction of royal palaces, even to the extent that, in regions where stone was common, brick remained the preferred building material among the nobility. In regions where stone was not present, itinerant brick-makers would construct houses from bricks made of clay extracted from a pit that eventually became the house's own cellar.

By 1820, in a world of economic liberalism and inexistant work laws, whole families would manufacture tonnes of brick during 16 hour work days. The quality of the bricks was better when worked by hand, moulding the clay with sand scattered on the work bench in the same manner that a baker would kneed bread on a bench scattered with flour, to stop the dough from sticking. From around this date, the hand-process was replaced little-by-little by machines which accelerated the brick-making process, while replicating the traditional mixing and moulding manipulations of the hand process.

Industrialisation, and the seach for materials which would allow the bricks to bake more quickly - thereby saving energy costs, degraded the quality of bricks and gave them the reputation of a cheap material. In Britain, the 'Fletton Brick' quarried from the Lower Oxford Clay near Peterborough, was found to use 65% less energy to bake than other bricks and gave rise to the London Brick Company, a business so successful that its economical product was able to fight off all competition and hence provide a distinctive face to much British architecture.

Industrialisation also led to innovation in brick production, notably in the creation of perforated bricks of different size and shape with a variety of surface textures. This in turn led to a technicialisation of what had always been a relatively simple process: the building of a wall. Now different kinds of brick were required to provide strength, ventilation, insulation etc.

In opposition to this specialism, at the close of the 20th Century, brick-makers were also returning to traditional methods of brick-creation. Such bricks were expensive and were used in a distinctly different manner than the traditional, as decorative gables and entrance decorations, their presence symbolic of a 'lost paradise'.

All of this historical evolution has left the brick with a very varied image and symbolic significance which is then taken up in the second part of the thesis by an analysis of the associative and significatory aspects of brick (to be continued...)

Vicky's Tips

2008-05-19T22:45:00.001+02:00

Vicky, my better half, is currently making regular appearances on the Yvelines Premiere cable TV network: "L'atualité des Yvelines dans la langue de Shakespeare..." It's a TV show aimed at ex-pats living in Paris.

This week, Vicky scrubs up well as a James Bond girl...

She appears about half way through...

And if you feel in need of further tippilation, there are two of her other shows here.

Reading in Aberdeen, Thursday 15th May 2008

2008-05-14T11:20:00.004+02:00

I will be reading my poetry in Aberdeen tomorrow evening, Thursday 15th May, with three other poets from Paris: Joe Ross, Michelle Noteboom and Rufo Quintavalle.

The reading is part of Aberdeen's Wordfringe festival and will be held at Books and Beans bookshop, 22 Belmont Street, starting at 6.30 pm.

Further details can be found here.

Odes to Flowers

2008-05-08T01:06:00.002+02:00

So, it should be evident by now that Connaissances is not by any stretch of the imagination a journal. From time to time I record where I have been, especially if that leads on to a new observation about geology and its relation to poetry or to France and its relation to my life and/or any other combination thereof. There are poems because I believe that sharing poetry is important to my continuing existence as anything like a real person and occasionally there are personal asides, of which this is one.

The last few weeks have not seen many posts because I have been much taken up both with work and with the painful news that my father was seriously ill. I have resisted writing about this until I knew the outcome of surgery which he underwent nearly two weeks ago now. I am glad to say that despite the very serious nature of this operation he has now made a good start on his recovery.

Although we don't really know why a healthy man in his late sixties was suddenly struck down by a rare infection that was literally eating away at his vertebrae, what we can say is that he was fortunate on three counts: to have been diagnosed fairly rapidly, to have found an excellent surgeon in the national health service and to have been in a good state of health prior to becoming ill. If things had been otherwise on any of these three counts, things might have rapidly resolved themselves entirely differently. Which is a rather frightening thought since (1) diagnosis came after he literally refused to leave the hospital after they told him to go home due to the bed waiting list; (2) the excellent surgeon left on holiday a week after his operation; (3) his life-long good health depended upon a fairly strict personal regime which I would say is now rather uncommon, if not exceedingly rare. Which is as much to say, if it had happened to anyone else, they would likely be dead by now.

Visiting the long corridors of the hospital where he received his treatment has been a salutary reminder of the precarious nature of any individual's existence, even when we believe ourselves to be in good health and beyond the clutches of whatever dread thing awaits each of us. It is a reminder that we should be aware that we may be called upon to come to terms rapidly with what life has offered and what we have made of it.

When I visited him in hospital, he mentioned how much he regretted missing the Spring and all of the flowers. When we wheeled him to the gym for his first lessons in learning to refind his balance, we passed a bed of tulips over which he exclaimed loudly. Perhaps these indicators are the first signs of a life that will seem in future even sweeter, more urgent. I can only guess. Anyhow, it makes me think of writing odes to flowers and other coded prayers of thanks to the universe in general and to one brilliant surgeon Mr N. Patel in particular.

A house I pass every morning No. 8

2008-05-08T00:50:00.002+02:00

Where is the beautiful tree?? The beautiful tree that grew in your garden?? The beautiful tree that grew in my thoughts?? You never thought of my thoughts?? Here, I'll show you them. Here on your fresh-painted door. See them now??

You think you can cut down my thoughts?? You think you can white wash over them?? My thoughts will grow back. My thoughts will carry on growing. See the heavy question marks that sprout from them?? When they are ripe, they'll drop down and grow into new questions. And more of them. So do not try to stop them. It's the harvest you reap.

There are many questions that will grow and here are some. Like what is beauty?? Like what part of mine is your garden?? Like what part of yours is my thought?? Like do you understand your responsibility to protect more than things? Your responsibility to protect thought?? To protect beauty?? And do you understand that if you do not I will plant more questions?? Questions heavy with questions?? Questions that are moreover not necessarily just??

Where is the beautiful tree?? The beautiful tree that grew in your garden?? The beautiful tree that grew in my thoughts??

Helpless Weird Writer

2008-04-28T23:23:00.003+02:00

My friend George Szirtes has tagged me as a fellow "helpless weird writer" to tell 6 random facts about myself. The idea of "random" facts is a rather strange one and not easy to arrive at. I suppose I should try and spin an interior bottle and see which one of my brain cells it ends up pointing at. Well here goes:

(1) I have an ashtray on my desk (I don't smoke) made out of petrified wood. My Dad bought it back for me from Uruguay and it still has the label on of the shop where he bought it. On the whole, the idea of being petrified is preferable to me than that of being incinerated or buried. I quite like the idea of people bashing bits off me to take home and put on their mantlepieces or use as doorstops.

(2) I'm going to have a plant for which I provided the first ever description included in "A Field Guide to Surreal Botany" which will be published by Two Cranes Press for the Surreal Botanists Association. The plant in question is "Couch Kelp".

(3) I once had a girlfriend whose surname was Porn. We never got past kissing.

(4) My first ever time away from home was on a PGL holiday in Wales. One day we went pony trekking in the hills and the saddle of the boy on the pony in front of me was too loose. He toppled sideways and ended up hanging upside down underneath his pony.

(5) One of my early poems, written when I was about sixteen, had a line in it about 'latex seaweed'. I showed it to a friend and he, for some reason, found this very funny. It became a running joke for him. From that moment on, I realised poetry could make a difference in the world.

(6) When I was at boarding school, I passed the time by writing letters to politicians and celebrities. Sometimes I wrote the letters in the name of friends (asking what I'd have to do to become a member of the House of Commons, for example), and sometimes in my own name. One letter I wrote to Mary Whitehouse asking for a signed photograph and praising her as a "shining knight against pornography" was published in a book called "Fan Mail". It was my first ever publication. She did indeed send a photograph which I treasure to this day.

Hope that is weird, helpless and random enough.

Qu'est-ce qu'une pierre?

2008-04-23T01:05:00.000+02:00

Qu'est-ce qu'une pierre, ce que nous nommons une pierre, cette chose de la nature terrestre dont notre cerveau nous propose une image visuelle particulière, une idée d'origine et de composition dans le monde de la matière, que le poète accueille dans son monde d'expérience intime avec la vie, les choses de la terre et la lumière...

La matière manque-t-elle vraiment au poème? Le poème existe-t-il en dehors du corps-cerveau-société des humains qui le vivent, l'écrivent, le disent, le lisent et le revivent, chacun selon sa propre expérience, selon la complexité de son cerveau unique, sa vie unique? Je ne vois comment se pourrait opérer la séparation entre le poème, le corps-cerveau humain, les sociétés humaines, la terre et les Univers???

From an interview with Lorand Gaspar by Laurent Margantin on remue.net

Care for your Pets

2008-04-13T12:40:00.003+02:00

Picking up their shared Nintendogs, a small pink console that barks, elder daughter has just discovered that younger daughter has, in the last hour, spent $822 on 57 bags of dogfood. When interrogated as to why she had done this, younger daughter says: "I didn't want the puppies to die."

French Particularities No. 17: Les Chaises

2008-04-12T19:12:00.005+02:00

Between rides, Les Chaises is still for several minutes as people climb up onto the platform and choose their chair. The platform is like a stage, and they are the performers, lost, looking for the seat with their name on it. It's a relief to sit down, and when they do, they're suddenly a member of the audience, waiting for the show to start.

There are two kinds of chair: twin seats and single seats. Small boys and girls like to sit together on the twin seats. Adults prefer the single seats, large men glancing uneasily up into the steel rigging of the chair some twenty feet up where they see a steel bar that looks like a specially adapted coat-hanger strung with two light, whippy chains.

Teenage girls have been on Les Chaises many times before and have grown cocksure. They twist the chair so that the chains wind up like a rubber band, until eventually they are standing on tip-toes with the chains wound into a tight braid above their heads. When Les Chaises starts to move, they are whipped off their feet and start to spin chaotically, madly. They let out screams that mingle with the fake-happy organ music that has started to seep out from inside the central pillar.

The transformation from static to dynamic is brutal and graceful all at once. The chairs rise up into the air like enchanted furniture. Suddenly the riders are silouhetted against the sky, hair-flying, arms and legs outspread. Against gravity they rise and fall as the great mexican hat of Les Chaises nods like a drunken hombre on a long summer afternoon. It is a dream, they are the black albatrosses swarming before his eyes, looking for a tree to perch in the middle of the ocean. The branches grab at their ankles, the music grows cold. The heavy men feel gravity pulling at their legs. The young women grasp their bosoms.

Each tries not to slip forward on their seat, gripping the silver handles of the chair or the arm of a companion. Some imagine flying, others falling. Some think of the moon, others try to spot the faces of their mothers, fathers, blurred on the ground below, quick flashes of a past life suddenly transformed by perspective.

The heaving machine begins to slow, the chairs start to descend. Everyone has survived. The riders leave their places, say goodbye to the stage. There was never any risk, was there? The great hidden machine has let them fly, giddily, fatherly. They trusted it, the painted panels, the naked ladies at their bath, the Fragonard madamoiselles swinging in forest glades, the muscle-thick ropes supporting all their blustering silk and lace, their pale pink shoes taking flight.

Poetry Reading at WICE, 9th April 2008

2008-04-07T23:58:00.000+02:00

The Paris literary journal UPSTAIRS AT DUROC

invites you to a reading of new work by five authors:

Sandy Florian, Choman Hardi, Christine Herzer, Chim Nwabueze & Simon Pettet

On Wednesday April 9, 2008, 7:30 PM

At WICE, 20 Boulevard du Montparnasse, 75015 Paris (go through street door into courtyard)

Metro Duroc, Falguiere or Montparnasse

Sandy Florian earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Brown University in 2003, where she was recipient of the Francis Mason Harris Award for the best manuscript by a woman. She is the author of Telescope (Action Books 2006), 32 Pedals & 47 Stops (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2007) and The Tree of No (forthcoming with Action Books 2008). Her work appears in over 40 national and international journals. She lives in Paris, where she teaches at WICE and the American University.

Choman Hardi was born in Iraqi Kurdistan. Her family fled to Iran in 1988. She came to England as a refugee in 1993 where she was educated at Queen's College Oxford and elsewhere. She has published two collections of poetry in Kurdish. Her highly acclaimed collection in English, Life for us, was published by Bloodaxe in 2004.

Poet and visual artist Christine Herzer is working on her MFA in poetry at Bennington College, Vermont. She has studied with Michael Burkard and Timothy Liu. She is currently in Paris to work on an artist book.

Chim Nwabueze, poet and composer from New York currently living in France, is the author of Experiments and Drafts (USU 1998) and Convergences (USU 2004). He has done numerous recordings of experimental music around the musical saw (sonorous blade) of which he is a rare specialist: Among these are Improvisations for saw and piano harp (with Sylvie Menta, 1999), Working with ladders (with Kenta Nagai, fretless guitar, 1999).

Simon Pettet is the author of More Winnowed Fragments (Talisman, 2006), Selected Poems (Talisman, 1995), the collaborations Conversations About Everything & Talking Pictures with filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt. He edited Art Writings of Pulitzer-prize-winning "NY School" poet James Schuyler. Hearth, a book of poems, is forthcoming in 2008. He will be having a public interview session with Jennifer K Dick at WICE on 8 April & will give a workshop/special film session also at WICE this week

Come listen to poetry and music and pick up your copy of Upstairs at Duroc's Issue #9

Le vent de l'hiver

2008-03-30T21:10:00.000+02:00

Raphaël (Raphaël Haroche, born 1975) achieved popular success with his third album "Caravane", which sold more than a million copies. In September 2007, he recorded his fourth studio album: "Je sais que la terre est plate" which was released in March 2008.

"Le vent de l'hiver" is the first single release from the album. The video was directed by Olivier Dahan (director of Oscar-winning "La Môme", a film biography of Édith Piaf) and features Lila Salet as the principal actress (also to be seen in Benjamin Diamond's recent single video There is a Girl

Lions of the Work Week by Jeramy Dodds

2008-03-22T23:34:00.003+01:00

It was the year I subscribed to an absurd
amount of magazines, there were lions everywhere.
Lions at the tambourines, lions in the gate house, lions
up the sleeve of your bible black dress, you could set your watch
by the screams, the shimmy-shackle of claws
on the hardwood floor wore down your ears, ghosts
of lions fathered our kids, lions of the long grass,
Barnum & Bailey types, we knelt at the scimitar scar
on the tamer's breast as valets brought lions upon lions,
lions going at us with the violence of a clearance sale, my wife
comes home with a lion between her legs, antelope musk
hog-tied in her mouth, bed-lamp bright wounds,
a yoke of tear-jars tingling from her nicked shoulders,
lions cornered in her cranium, the wedding dancers slain,
their scattered organs like gobs of fruit, lions
at the chink in our amour, lions on the owls, lions
like labs, the house pets snapped, lions loaded for bear,
lions at the crypt ledger jotting down kills,
plaster casts of claws above our cancer ward doors, lions
past the curtains of our ribs, pant like whistling arrows,
starved lions, hair painted on their bones,
lions in the yard with kids, lions
at the midnight fridge, chicken on their lips,
lions at the watering hole bullying
for beer money, lions mowing through
the Foot Guard, Beefeaters, Dragoons,
standing in perfect pecking order
at my bedside, waiting for me to snap
the bones of my watch onto my wrist and dress
in their gift of slipper-thin armour.

+ + + + +

Jeramy Dodds grew up in Ontario, Canada. His poems have been translated into Finnish, Icelandic, Swedish, Latvian, Dutch and French and have appeared in a number of international journals. He is the winner of the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award, and his first collection of poems Crabwise to the Hounds, will be out this fall from Coach House Books (Canada). This poem, Lions of the Work Week and the illustration above Lounge Lions were recently published in Issue 9 of Upstairs at Duroc magazine which is now available from WICE.

This is part of a series of poems from invited poets. Previous contributors were Luke Heeley, Joe Ross, George Szirtes, Elizabeth Spackman, Ivy Alvarez, Rufo Quintavalle, Todd Swift, Michelle Noteboom, Beverley Bie Brahic, Ethan Gilsdorf, Amy Hollowell, and Choman Hardi. Illustration by Jonathan Wonham.

A house I pass every morning No. 7

2008-03-20T23:43:00.005+01:00

It's up to you
             how you decorate your life
                         with colours sad or gay.

It's up to you
             if you decide to smile
                         or just look glum all day.

Go and See

2008-03-16T16:24:00.005+01:00

Today, it seems an evident fact that volcanoes are formed from molten rock pouring out from deep inside the earth. We know from documented examples that volcanoes form little by little, starting as small upwelling mounds and steadily growing upwards into a cone shape by accretion of successive lava flows. Most of us have seen film of red hot lava flows on the television and the explosive dance of lava and ash on top of volcanoes. It follows from these observations that rock inside the earth is molten, and this is now a known fact: that descending inside the earth, temperatures increase gradually (around 200 deg C at 6000m for example) until, at around 35 km depth, rock begins to become fluid and we reach the base of the Earth's outer crust.

This first hand view of the action of volcanoes was something that most 18th Century geologists lacked. Consequently, their explanations of explosive volcanic action leant heavily on known mechanisms of explosion and involved the action of 'wind' as a medium for blowing material out of the earth and the mixing of petroleum or coal and sulphur inside the earth as an incendiary and explosive mixture. The idea of "wind pent up within the earth" went all the way back to the writings of Aristotle, Strabo and Pliny the Elder who lost his own life investigating Pompeii's eruption of A.D. 79 which overwhelmed Herculaneum and Pompeii.

According to Geikie's 'The Founders of Geology', the first significant insights into volcanic geology came from Jean Etienne Guettard (see 2 posts ago), who, during his extensive travels, first came to realise that the hills of the Auvergne are in fact a series of extinct volcanoes. His ideas concerning the origin of volcanos were the accepted ones of his day. He wrote: "For the production of volcanoes, it is enough that there should be within these mountains substances that can burn, such as petroleum, coal or bitumen, and that from some causes these materials should take fire. Thereupon the mountains will become a furnace, and the fire, raging furiously within, will be able to melt and vitrify the most intractable substances." In recognising the presence of volcanoes as an important generator of rock masses, Guettard became the originator of the Vulcanist party in the famous debate (Geikie calls it 'warfare') with the Neptunist party at the end of the 18th Century.

The Neptunists were a school of geologists headed by a German geologist called Abraham Gottlob Werner who believed that there was a distinct sequence of rocks that could be recognised everywhere in the world which could be related to a global inundation of the sea across the earth, followed by a slow withdrawal of the oceans to their present positions. They therefore believed that many rocks were originally created in the sea, including basalt which we now know is a fine-grained crystalline volcanic rock expelled from a number of volcano types.

And the originator of the idea that basalt could be formed by crystallisation in an aqueous fluid such as sea water? It was the same Jean Etienne Guettard who had shown that volcanoes once spewed lava across the Auvergne. Eighteen years after his ground-breaking memoir on the volcanoes of the Auverge, he published a paper "On the Basalt of the Ancients and the Moderns". Despite the fact that various writers had claimed a volcanic origin for basalt, and that he had found plentiful basalt in the Auvergne, Guettard insisted that: "basalt is a species of vitrifiable rock, formed by crystallisation in an aqueous fluid, and there is no reason to regard it as due to igneous fusion."

The proof that basalt really was a volcanic product came from the subsequent mapping of the Auverge by French geologist Nicholas Demarest (1725-1815) whose tireless mapping of the Auverge produced incontravertible proof of the volcanic origin of this region, the various historic stages in the development of the volcanos and the proof of the volcanic origin of basalt. Although the debate between Neptunists and Plutonists as to the origin of basalt raged throughout Demarest's life, he took no part in it, making only allusion to the fact that the answer was clear enough "to those who knew how to look at the actual facts" and asking reproachfully "what would become of natural history and mineralogy, if every question were treated as that concerning basalt had been?"

According to Geikie, when any belated straggler from the enemy's camp came to consult Desmarest on the subject in dispute, the old man would content himself with the answer. "Go and see."

French Particularities No. 16: Cash on the Table

2008-03-16T14:24:00.002+01:00

Here are a few 'astuces' concerning the cash in your pocket translated from L'Itinérant, a magazine sold by the Parisian homeless for a cover price of 2 Euros.

In France, shopkeepers can refuse payments of more than 50 coins. If you have six hundred 5 Euro banknotes, you can spend them all at once, but no more than that since payments in cash of more than 3000 Euros are outlawed in France. Infringement can result in a fine of 15000 Euros to be shared between buyer and seller. Business transactions in cash must not exceed 1100 Euros.

Refusal to accept a payment in cash can result in a fine of 150 Euros. However, if you offer a 10 Euro note for a baguette, the boulanger has the right to refuse it. If the boulanger thinks you have given him a fake banknote, he has the right to ask for your identity papers and contact details and later pursue you for making good his loss if the bank note proves fake.

If you are in possession of a fake note, you should take it to the Bank of France where it will be confiscated. You will not be reimboursed, but you will avoid the possibility of a 7500 Euro fine for making a payment with fake money. Franc notes can be changed at the Bank of France until 17 Feb 2012.

If you have a damaged bank note, you can replace it at the Bank of France. If the note is very badly damaged, it may be necessary to analyse the note, in which case you will be charged for the analysis.

From: L'Itinérant (Premier hebdomadaire de lutte contre la misère et la précarité.)

The Rivers of France

2008-03-12T07:03:00.000+01:00

He thinks that the levels of the valleys are at present being raised owing to the deposit of detritus in them. The plains watered by the rivers are one vast sheet of gravel, the streams having changed their courses again and again, so as to flow in turn over every part of these alluvial tracts. The thickness of detritus brought down by the rivers gradually increases towards their mouths.

Archibald Geikie in "The Founders of Geology" describing Guettard's work on the river basins of France. Jean Etienne Guettard lived from 1715-1786, and is for Geikie one of the great unsung founders of geology. This is a tag from Lucy.

Sometimes by Choman Hardi

2008-03-04T00:50:00.000+01:00

She says: sometimes we glorify
a dead person, a short love affair.

Sometimes, she says,
we glorify a person because they are dead
we long for an affair because it was short.

Today is the day, she says.
There is no point in missing this sunshine
by remembering another,
no point in thinking yesterday was fine
as this moment is.

But as the clouds slide across the sky
she thinks of him
of that cold Christmas night
when she stayed awake
to watch him sleep.

There is no point, she says,
no point but she thinks of him.

+ + + + +

Choman Hardi has published three books of poetry in Kurdish, but now writes in English. Her first book in English, Life for Us is published by Bloodaxe. She studied philosophy and psychology at Oxford and later at University College London, and has recently completed doctoral research at the University of Kent on the mental health of Kurdish women refugees caught between the clash of cultures. She has recently moved to Paris.

This is part of a series of poems from invited poets. Previous contributors were Luke Heeley, Joe Ross, George Szirtes, Elizabeth Spackman, Ivy Alvarez, Rufo Quintavalle, Todd Swift, Michelle Noteboom, Beverley Bie Brahic, Ethan Gilsdorf and Amy Hollowell. Illustration by Jonathan Wonham.

Under Paris

2008-03-02T23:20:00.004+01:00

A couple of weekends ago, I had a visitor from America, the writer and blogger Joe Milutis who writes the New Jersey as an Impossible Object blog. It was great to meet someone with whom I have only previously communicated through the ether of the blogosphere. Incidentally, Joe has written a book called Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything which he told me all about. It sounds fascinating.

I thought it would be good to do something unusual when we met up, so I arranged a trip into the Catacombs. That's Joe standing by the memorial to Philibert, the only person to have died after getting lost in the Catacombs. Joe has done a good job of describing the visit on his blog, and he even has a short video of an impromptu poetry reading underground. Enjoy.

Poets from the Volcano

2008-03-02T00:30:00.003+01:00

Arenal
Originally uploaded by Clearly Ambiguous.

The 20th Century poet René Char made no secret of his admiration for his long-dead 19th Century predecessor, the young French poetic genius Arthur Rimbaud who completed his entire oeuvre before the age of twenty-one, then left France on a series of adventurous engagements in far-flung parts of the world, travelling as far as Java in the pay of the Dutch Colonial Army and working as a merchant in Ethiopia.

Char admired Rimbaud's decision to leave Paris. In his poem: "Tu as bien fait de partir, Arthur Rimbaud. (You did well to leave, Arthur Rimbaud)", he writes of Rimbaud the outsider, Rimbaud who "abandoned the streets of idlers, the taverns of lyric-pissers." He asks: "Si les volcans changent peu de place, leur lave parcourt le grand vide du monde et lui apporte des vertus qui chantent dans ses plaies. (If volcanos barely move, their lava travels the great emptiness of the world and bring to it the virtues that sing in its wounds.)"

In this metaphor, we see Rimbaud going out into the world as a stream of lava, bursting from a volcano, scorching the ground over which it travels. There is the sense of the departing lava creating a wound in the volcano, but also the idea of these wounds being worthwhile, becoming virtuous as the poems left behind in them begin to sing. The volcano is at once the city of Paris, but also the sum of French culture at the time: something static, that barely stirs.

In another poem, Char addresses a different voyaging hero Antonin Artaud as follows: "Je n'ai pas de voix pour faire ton éloge, grand frère. (I don't have the voice to praise you, great brother." The poem seems to have an elegaic theme, but at the same time revolts at such a concept as elegy and, speaking of Artaud, states: "Pour nous, rien n'est changé, / Rien, sinon cette chimère bien en vie de l'enfer qui prend congé de notre angoisse. (For us, nothing has changed, / Nothing, if not this lusty chimera out of hell which from our anguish takes its leave.)"

Earlier in the poem, Char speaks of "a heart shared by us" that "kills, goes hollow and burns, / Then is reborn in the softness of the mushroom" and of "lightly chopping down a forest / With our entrails for an axe". As in the earlier poem to Rimbaud, there is a creative confusion between inner and outer spaces, the poet a phoenix-like force capable of devastating the physical world, but containing the idea that this devastation is really internal, and associated with the poet's own demise, the spilling of his own entrails.

Then Char commands Artaud to return to the same place from whence Rimbaud emerged: "Il suffit. Rentre au volcan. (It suffices. Go back into the volcano.)" In so doing, he writes a kind of formula for his ideal poetic character: eruptive, wounding and feverish.

The title of Char's most famous book "Fureur et mystère (Fury and Mystery)" might even have been made to describe volcanos which are always a source of fear for those who live near them and of mystery for those who try to understand them. And might not these features be also what Char admired in his "great brothers"?

Key of the Door, When You're 84...

2008-02-29T00:16:00.000+01:00

Today, my parents-in-law will attend the 21st birthday party of an 84 year old man. If you're wondering how this is possible, check the date.

Marc Riviere

2008-02-25T20:17:00.006+01:00

Browsing for poetry in the bookshop area of the Marché Dauphine at Saint Ouen today, I chanced upon a small shop which was just being opened up by its owner. He rolled up the metal shutters, then stepped inside and placed a record on a small portable player in the corner, a track by the Doors. Unlike most of the shops I had visited, this shop was dauntingly empty, selling an ecletic mixture of art, books and records. As I hung back outside, the owner gestured me to enter and look around, which I did.

His stock was an interesting mix that included a dadaist text written by Francis Picabia and small books detailing Antonin Artaud's experimentation with peyote in Mexico. Didn't Henri Michaux write a book along similar lines? I asked. Yes, said the bookseller, but he had a doctor on hand in case of problems.

There was also a book by Maurice Lemaître from the 1950s which had a record inside. The owner of the shop offered to play it on his small record player. When he had done so, a sonorous voice issued forth into the glass and iron arcade of the market: overstressed words something like the sound poetry of Kurt Schwitters, a voice repeating words that rhymed: Arnaque, Lac...

Maurice Lemaître was a member of the Lettrist movement in the 1950s, a movement that remains very little known to the English-speaking world, mainly because the works remain almost totally untranslated. The lettrist's idea of poetry was that it should be "purely formal, devoid of all semantic content". Which I take to mean it should be rather difficult to understand as language, more like a kind of music.

As I left the shop I noticed a black and white poster of a woman in a café holding two tea cups over her eyes like goggles. Her shirt was pulled open to reveal her breasts which, in some way, seemed to stand in for her eyes. I rather liked this cheeky photograph and I asked if I could buy a copy. The man smiled: that's my work he said. I am Marc Riviere.

Marc produced a book of his black and white photographs called "Up and Down" with publisher Ipso Facto in 1999. He would approach girls on the streets of Paris and ask them if he could photograph their breasts. He was surprisingly successful, gathering enough candid photographs to fill a book. The results are rather charming, full of a lively intimacy and humanity of a kind which is often absent from nude photography. You can see a number of photographs from the book here.

A house I pass every morning No. 6

2008-02-17T22:46:00.005+01:00

Small House

It was a small house surrounded by fields.
I'd pretend to eat sausages, drink imaginary tea.
One time a girl called Sophie came calling
and I practiced touching her knee.

I drove my tractor until all hours,
even ironed my own shirts.
Nothing seemed to come of it
though heaven knows I worked...

Bad days, I just sat indoors,
rain beating on the plastic roof above,
unhinged, aware of little more
than the need inside to be loved.

Failed by Design

2008-02-08T23:06:00.000+01:00

I rather enjoyed George Szirtes little rant here in which he requests that interior designers kindly redecorate the walls with... themselves.

He mentions Le Corbusier as a kind of father figure of this sect of clean living, faddish types, an architect of whom I have some experience, having visited the Villa Savoye, a house he designed in the Paris suburb of Poissy.

George is quite right in noting a sanatorium sterility to such places, as you can gather for yourself if you look at the photographs here. It is quite easy to imagine the owners starting off the day with a good long enema followed by a cold shower and a bowl of prunes...

The house has not the slightest human element but is adored by spiders who find corners to build their webs everywhere. It must drive the curators mad.

Slow Reading

2008-02-08T01:07:00.000+01:00

I am a very slow reader, partly because my window of opportunity is narrow (30 minutes on the RER train each day), partly because I tend not to use a bookmark and hence read over and over the same section trying to find out where I was before, and partly because I am just a bit slow.

I like to read slowly however, especially if the book is dense and packed with information as is the book I am currently reading: 'The Founders of Geology' by Sir Archibald Geikie - the book I mentioned a couple of posts ago here.

This evening, at around page 196 (the one benefit of not using a bookmark is that you turn yourself into a sort of living indexing system), I realised that Geikie had hit upon an important fact about geologists and, I suppose, scientists in general. In his observations on the relationship between the Swiss geologist de Saussure, an early explorer of the Alps and the man who bought the word 'geologist' into common parlance (as opposed to the previously applied term: cosmologist), and Hutton, the Scottish geologist who developed the important concept of 'unconformity' in stratigraphy.

Geikie characterises de Saussure as the man who climbs to the roof of the world and sees all, but makes only a small contribution to the advancement of geological theory. Hutton, on the other hand, is perceived as a man who does not need to climb, but is inspired by the work of de Saussure and who, by an act of imagination, applies his findings to a geological theory which represents a real advance in science.

This seems to me a rather profound insight, and almost an iconic example of two types of scientist: the one profoundly interested in seeing everything, the other involved in the work of imaginative synthesis. The fact that two geologists are required to make the advance in science would almost seem to suggest that two brains are required: the one taken up with perception, the other with reimagining from basic principles, almost as if the mind of the perceiver was overwhelmed by the details and unable to function on the simple logical level required to build theory.

This is what I would call "being blocked by data". Standing on top of his mountain, de Saussure saw eveything and was able to understand little. Hutton, receiving a few morsels of de Saussure's description was able to create much that was profound from his few scraps because he was not distracted by the overall chaos.

This is not to suggest that de Saussure was not intelligent - his credentials and works prove that he certainly was, but there is a certain irony in the observation of Hutton's ability to advance further on less.

And if we go further back, we find other early geologists who more or less personify one or other of the roles. Some, such as the French geologist Guettard, who spent their lives gathering data but eventually were unsure what to make of it. Others like Buffon who spent little time gathering data but much time proposing possible histories of the world. Again, the roles are divergent, but equally necessary. Without one half or other of this coupled geological brainpower, geology would have advanced very little.

While Buffon's model of a history of the World (from start to finish in 35,000 years) has ultimately been proved incorrect, it represents an important first step in extending the history of the earth towards the billions of years that we now know to be the reality. It is important to remember the imagination (and courage) that this required in a time of religious doctrine and conformity which insisted the life of the earth was but a few thousand years.

What this shows is the importance of imagining to the advancement of science, even if the imagining is shown later to be several parts incorrect, the simple fact of an imagined fact is enough to put the process of testing and verification into effect.

A Week in Paris, Easter 1951 by Jon Wonham

2008-01-27T14:24:00.001+01:00

Paris Skyline & Eiffel Tower
Originally uploaded by greenmelinda.

In 1951, I was twelve years old. My father was manager of a small farm on the Surrey-Hampshire border and I travelled to school by bus every day. I attended Farnham Grammar School, having won a scholarship which allowed me to go there, rather than the local school. It was a boys school, founded in 1351, whose doors had been opened to non-fee payers by the 1945 Education Act.

Looking back to the decade in Britain immediately following World War II, with its austerity and rationing, it is perhaps surprising that I was able to join a school trip to Paris, or even that my parents thought it was a good idea. It must have signalled their belief that travel would further their worldly ambitions for me. The previous summer they had arranged for me, at the age of 11 years, to accompany my Danish aunt on a visit home. She had taken me across Denmark by train and over the Baltic to Sweden. My parents must have been excited by the new horizons travel opened up, and when there was a chance for me to join a trip to Paris they embraced it.

The trip was organised by two young staff members; Alan Fluck, the Music Master and Mike Foster an English Master. Mr Foster had won the Distinguished Flying Cross as a Lancaster bomber pilot during World War II. He brought his young wife on the trip. Mr. Fluck, a bachelor, was a brilliant and well-connected music teacher, who built up the school's choir and orchestra and put on a first-night performance of a Benjamin Britton operetta, at the school, in the presence of the composer. He was first cousin to the film actress Diana Dors, who was born Diana Fluck. One of his Farnham pupils, Jeffrey Tate, is now a world famous conductor. The trip was as much an opportunity for this "trio" to enjoy themselves in Paris as to educate their young charges!

We crossed the Channel from Newhaven to Dieppe, and then by train to Paris. Our accommodation was on the third floor of a traditional four storey building near the Palais-Royal. There were about 16 pupils and we sat four to a table for meals. Our days were brilliantly organised to witness everything the "trio" wanted to see. The April weather was incredibly warm and sunny, and Paris offered boundless sites of interest. To mention a few of the places: we climbed the Eiffel Tower, saw Napoleon's tomb at Les Invalides, were overawed by Notre-Dame Cathedral and walked the embankment and bridges of the Seine.

We got around Paris on the Metro. We bought 10 ticket cahiers and popped-up above ground at requisite moments. One of these visits, I recall, was to the Musée de L'Homme, in a spectacular semi-circular and much porticoed building just north of the Eiffel Tower, one half of which was NATO HQ, the other half the anthropological museum. The models and photos of naked natives were an eye-opener to us school boys.

Another visit, even more memorable, was to the church of Saint-Sulpice, near to the Luxembourg Gardens, on the morning of Easter Day. Our music master knew that one of the world's most accomplished and famous organists, Marcel Dupré, would be playing the organ on that day. Dupré's "voluntary" at the end of the service, which filled that magnificent space with breathtaking sound, was something never to be forgotten.

Thinking back, what astonishes me now is the freedom we twelve year olds were given to roam Paris at will during our free time. Myself and a class-mate, David Grey, wandered widely around Paris unsupervised in the evenings. I can recall the glitter of the Champs-Élysées with expensive limousines delivering fashionable clientele to restaurants and night-clubs. It seemed so exciting and glamorous. In contrast, Paris was filled with displaced and homeless persons, remnants of the terrible upheavals of the World War II, who were ever present, and subject to our constant curiosity on these wild excursions. The sight of a vagrant eating newly caught raw fish from the Seine, washed down with cheap wine from an enormous bottle, was a novelty for us. Shamelessly and thoughtlessly we threw uneaten bread rolls and water from the windows of our lodgings on to the homeless persons sleeping on metro ventilation grids in the pavement below, causing much agitation.

At evening meals, each of us was given a small carafe of red table wine. The "trio" imposed a restriction of one carafe between the four pupils on each table. Myself and David Grey decided to break the restriction, and by the end of a meal had consumed all of the wine on our table and about another six carafes from other tables. We were quite squiffy. This was discovered by the "trio" and we were gated, but surprisingly not severely reprimanded. The "trio", in fact, soon absented themselves for a night on the town while we played table tennis, badly.

Three years later, I visited Brussels and Bruges on a Vth form trip. Looking back, this early travel presaged the wider travel I later undertook during my career in the UN system. I am sure that my early experiences gave me confidence when visiting remote areas of the world . In 1950s Britain, very few people travelled at home, let alone overseas.

For an epitaph to this tale, I am reminded of the memorial service in Farnham Castle I attended a few years back for Leonard Evans, the Chemistry Master at my old school who had died aged 92. At the end I turned to chat to the lady sitting on my right. On enquiring, she said she was the widow of Mr. Foster. She vividly remembered the Paris trip she had undertaken in her twenties. Alan Fluck, apparently, had attempted to inveigle them from one musical event to another. It was, unsurprisingly, as much a happy memory for her as it was for me. A wonderful break from the uncompromising gloom of post World War II Britain.

+ + + + +

Jon Wonham is a retired Professor of International Transport who lives in Stroud, England. He divides his time between working for various voluntary organisations, reading and travelling.

Launch of Upstairs at Duroc Issue 9

2008-01-24T00:49:00.001+01:00

Launch of Upstairs at Duroc Issue 9.

Thursday 31st January 2008 at 7pm.

Hear new work by poets Joe Ross, Jeffrey Greene, Amy Hollowell, Linda Healey and Mark Terrill.

At WICE
20 Boulevard du Montparnasse
75015 Paris (go through big street door into courtyard)
Metro Duroc/Falguiere/Montparnasse

Go, My Sons

2008-01-15T22:47:00.000+01:00

Go, my sons, sell your lands, your houses, your garments and your jewelry; burn up your books. On the other hand, buy yourselves stout shoes, get away to the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest recesses of the earth; mark well the distinctions between animals, the differences among plants, the various kinds of minerals, the properties and mode of origin of everything that exists. Be not ashamed to learn by heart the astronomy and terrestrial philosophy of the peasantry. Lastly, purchase coals, build furnaces, watch and experiment without wearying. In this way, and no other, will you arrive at a knowledge of things and of their properties.

Petrus Severinus, Idea Medecinae Philosophicae, 1571.

Petrus Severinus, here quoted in 'The Founders of Geology' by Sir Archibald Geikie, was a Danish professor of literature and poetry, of meteorology and of medecine.

Snow Notes

2008-01-14T23:45:00.000+01:00

In the Alps again last week, this time for a week of skiing. It is the first time I have skied in the Alps, and I feel rather over-awed by the beauty and majesty of the place in Winter, despite the tracery of chairlifts and pommels which depart in every direction. The skier does his or her best to domesticate the mountains. There are half a dozen or so large vehicles working through the night to flatten the miles and miles of pistes each morning - so that when the skiers awake, refreshed, they are greeted by smooth, soft carpets of softly pulverised snow. Every support is provided in terms of their security: trees wearing padded vests, chasms and cliffs roped off. All is directed to the thrill of the descent, the possibility of total inclusion, even for children who have barely learned to walk.

I love skiing: to descend from the top of a mountain to its base in only a few short minutes gives a feeling of god-like omnipotence. One does so in a sort of concentrated trance, eyes more or less permanently fixed twenty yards ahead, trying to detect the crease in the snow that risks to send one flying. You feel totally saturated by the environment. Your mind utterly concentrated on the task in hand. You cannot daydream about poetry. And then you reach the bottom. You find another lift to take: a different destination, you sit back and take in the view, admire the shadow of the chairlifts on the snow, which look like musical notes floating restlessly up and down their staves.

As I sit there, I ponder the idea of risk. The risks that I take in skiing without any insurance; the risk I negated by buying snow chains (against the advice of my friend who said they would not be necessary, his concept of risk different to mine); the risk our friends took at New Year when they encouraged their children to propel fireworks towards their Portugese neighbours house; the risk that youths at the supermarket take on New Year's Eve, stuffing bottles of Jim Bean's into their jackets. The risk that I sometimes take when writing poetry, and other times do not take.

Because there is risk, and then there is the risk you take in not taking risk.

There is risk inherent in the world. We deal with it all the time, without even knowing that we are dealing with it. We do not know fully the risks that we face. To keep your eyes fixed on the present, this is a way of minimising risk. The poet who is constantly looking backwards towards the classical world and the poet who is trying to gaze into the future, to be contemporary: both are taking risks. But the risk is not of the same genre. T.S. Eliot: a young avant garde risk taker and an old reactionary risk taker.

The risks that scientists take. The scientist who explains things by reference to daily occurences compared to the scientist who explains things with theories completely out of the norm. Writers of classical antiquity who insist that mythological floods cannot have occurred because the presence of a calibrated daily tide are well known and established. We so often think we know, when in fact we know so little. Even when we think we know better than myth, indeed myth can know better than we do. Rivers that flow under the sea: they do in fact occur. When I see avalanches in the snow, I think of them, knowing that the same slumping and chaos occurs at continental margins, deep under the sea. Great avalanches of which we know or suspect practically nothing. None the less, great risks.

Our lives could be snuffed out in a moment, by the arrival of a fair-sized meteorite, the rapid onset of an ice-age. Everything disappearing under this immense whiteness, like the whiteness of a page. As if an empty page could erase everything that had gone before: Bluey white, grey shadows and black rocks, a cold, scientifically organised chaos in which the eye picks out shapes which were not meant to be there: notes on a stave, the shadowed face of child on a pillow.

Episode 36 (Bosquet) by Amy Hollowell

2008-01-03T21:20:00.001+01:00

Didascalie

(Dreams of a him rising, a rising hymn of Him. A he-swagger and thrust. And by Him beheld. Ancient strength of stones, endless wash and spray of fatherlover sea befairing Her. Yes but no! She is without and within withallready Her. Yes but no! Forwith Him two she is too. Yes but no! Forto Him she is giving of Her. And receiving. Arising a hymn of Him: Ça monte! Ça monte! Ça monte! It’s her song to sing now.)

Episode 36 (Bosquet)

Bamboo in the tallness grove instills
where freshly she intends.

An answer
stepping into
her:

Looking here a fall rustle
dryly and shoots,
here too a look
hollowing into crisp shortness
where a sundapple groove
is her am.

+ + + + +

Amy Hollowell is a poet, journalist and Zen teacher who lives in Paris. Her writing has appeared in a number of publications in Europe and the United States, including Big Bridge, Diner, Fourteen Hills, LUNGFULL and Tricycle, and she has new work in Upstairs at Duroc Issue 9. She is a former editor of the Paris-based review Pharos and the author of a book-length poetic work, Peneloping: Episodes in the Day of She, from which Episode 36 (Bosquet) is excerpted. In 2004, she founded the Paris-based Wild Flower Zen community. She is currently writing an experiential study of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Her writing and teaching can be followed on the Web at zenscribe.

This is part of a series of poems from invited poets. Previous contributors were Luke Heeley, Joe Ross, George Szirtes, Elizabeth Spackman, Ivy Alvarez, Rufo Quintavalle, Todd Swift, Michelle Noteboom, Beverley Bie Brahic and Ethan Gilsdorf. Illustration by Jonathan Wonham.

The Ant Analogy

2007-12-29T18:59:00.000+01:00

Regular readers will have noticed a hiatus in posts a couple of weeks ago. During this time I was working on an essay which discusses whether it is useful to make analogies between the societies of men and of ants.

That essay, The Ant Analogy, has now been published in the Insecta edition of the online literary magazine qarrtsiluni, edited by Ivy Alvarez and Marly Youmans.

You can read the essay here.

Update (13th Jan): A couple of science blog web sites have linked and commented on The Ant Analogy, the first of them being Bug Girl's Blog, the second Greg Laden's Linnaeus' Legacy Blog Carnival No. 3. Thanks to them for their interest.

A house I pass every morning No. 5

2007-12-28T11:00:00.000+01:00

Each evening, coming home, he would read 'L'idéale', the name plate fixed to his garden gate. Sometimes, he'd reach up and touch the letters which were slightly raised underneath the blue enamel and, so doing, would oftentimes be swept by a wave of nostalgia that could cause him, literally, to sway.

How he loved that style of writing, characteristic of a certain epoch when beauty was ever the ideal. He traced the letters with his finger: yes, it was really the perfect name: three short syllables that linked this house, this particular place and his own thought processes in a single conception of excellence.

He knew that to achieve the ideal was almost hopeless, that seeing the words written down like this might even bring a smile to the lips, but still he was prepared to take the risk. He had always imagined this particular name written on his garden gate, and in a world of give and take, this was one particular ideal that he was not prepared to compromise.

Whistling loudly to himself as the gate clanged shut behind him, he crunched up the gravel path, running his hand over the smartly clipped privet. What was for dinner tonight, he wondered. Absolute perfection would be sausage and chips, but he didn't want to get his hopes up too high.

Monsieur MC Solaar

2007-12-28T08:52:00.000+01:00

When I first came to France, I met a young American poet who was writing a thesis on French rap music. His favourite rapper, and prime example of 'poetry in rap' was MC Solaar who is now one of France's best known music stars. Here is an interview with MC Solaar by American poet Margo Berdeshevsky and here is a sample of work from his latest album 'Chapitre 7': a track called 'Da Vinci Claude', posted on YouTube in a bootleg version:

Even if you don't speak French, you can probably guess that the song is about cultural references mixed up in MC Solaar's head. The title of the song appears to refer to the book: "The Da Vinci Code", and, I suppose, Claude Monet, an artist like Leonardo Da Vinci. If you'd like to watch the original video, it is here but it lacks the charm of the bootleg version.

WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO DO IF I HAD A MILLION OF DOLLARS (OR PERHAPS MORE) by Elisabeth Klein

2007-12-23T03:49:00.000+01:00

(written end 1939, early 1940)

This prospect makes beaten the heart
of all human beings. And also I myself
I can't deny to be more than happy
to get into possession of this sum (I am not sure
that it will be sufficient) that me perhaps
would enable to transpose
a thought into reality
a thought that makes you laugh
perhaps at me.

For the begin I should buy a nice place
some where in the world, where spring never is ending.
On the spot I would let build
a sort of a little garden town,
each one of the little houses lead out
in a modern and comfortable way
had to serve to a particular purpose,
as there are sporting - school - bathing places,
modern study rooms and so on.

Having finished this first part of my project
I would go to look for poor little orphans
between one and six years.
This children had to be
of all classes of society and races.
I should engage teachers
that are well known with the requirements
of children's education, men of an ideal apprehension.
Then I should start my very task.

The children, brought up by clever, intelligent,
and good-hearted men, each of them
well instructed in a manner which is corresponding
with its inclinations and capabilities,
this children, by the time grown up,
ought to be the proof of my view of life:
are the bad qualities of mankind born with them
and inherited in them by their ancestors
to be effaced, if they have no possibility
and no reason to struggle one against the other?
Is the evil in the hearts of mankind
only caused and produced
by the struggle of life?

This question to see answered
would certainly pay the pains of a whole life.
But I doubt, my honourable benefactor,
that a one million of dollars will do
and therefore I propose you
to raise this little sum to let us tell,
one million of pounds
(if you agree!)

+ + + + +

Elisabeth Klein, a German Jew, was deported to Auchwitz, then transferred to Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in Alsace where she was gassed in August 1943, sacrificed to the skeleton collection of Dr Hirt.

The text above was written neatly in ink as an English study exercise. It was later corrected by someone in blue crayon with the exclamation 'Sure!' at the end. The original document (or a copy of it) can be viewed in the Struthof memorial museum.

The text here is the uncorrected one. I have tried to transcribe the words accurately from the original. The line breaks used above are my own.

Trees Probe the Sky

2007-12-23T01:31:00.001+01:00

Trees probe the sky
like aerials tuned in to sadness.

The shrubs and grasses at their feet
find them omnipotent.

One certain tree
on a pedestal of crumbling earth

starts to preach wildly,
transformed, craning towards God.

Even in an empty sky
there is so much to see.

+ + + + +

Note:

The image above is not a painting but an example of landscape stone. The person I bought this example from told me it came from Spain. It is similar to 'Paesine', a sedimentary rock formed some 62 million years ago and quarried in Tuscany, Italy. I have posted an image of paesine here. The rock is a kind of marly limestone called "Calcari alberisi" in Italy which has been quarried since the 16th century. When the rock is broken open or sliced, images can be observed on the surface which recall natural landscapes such as cliffs, the sea, towers, steeples, ruined villages, blue skies and clouds. This unusual aspect is due to mineralisation brought about by water which circulates through the rocks underground, penetrating between the calcareous beds and through irregular fine cracks.

Image and text © Jonathan Wonham

Bonnes Fêtes

2007-12-23T00:57:00.001+01:00

Riddle of the Sands

2007-12-15T00:37:00.000+01:00

I have posted a number of geological riddles on the Rewords Blog under the titles: 'Last Rites of Meteors' and 'Riddle'. I can't provide a direct link, because otherwise you'll see the answers in the comment box before you reach the end.

Upstairs at Duroc Issues 9 and 10

2007-12-14T01:50:00.001+01:00

Upstairs at Duroc Issue 9

The editors of Upstairs at Duroc magazine are currently considering submissions of poetry, fiction and art work for Issue 10, our 10th anniversary annual issue.

Anyone, anywhere, writing in English can submit work by e-mail. We will also consider translations, particularly of French poetry.

Issue 9 will shortly be available and features work by a diverse group of writers including Amy Hollowell, Rufo Quintavalle, Sue Chenette, Todd Swift, Donna Stonecipher, Joe Ross, Anne Talvaz and George Vance.

Further details and information about how to submit work is found here.

Get a Grip

2007-11-21T23:21:00.000+01:00

The Rewords group poetry blog goes from strength to strength, gaining new members and ever-loosening its grasp on strict reality.

My latest contribution is called Infinite Sets adapted after a poem called Apex by Amy Hollowell.

A house I pass every morning No. 4

2007-11-11T17:00:00.001+01:00

The Institue of SLEEP
Originally uploaded by JW.

This is the institute of SLEEP, an uninteresting, blank faced building. It is beginning to show its age. You can see that, above the door, the P has dropped off.

Built in the 1950s, the institute served as a centre for research until some fifteen years ago. Since then its main role has been in archiving.

As Elias Canetti once commented, sleep is the moment when man is most powerless. The moment when each of us lays ourselves open to being overcome. And yet sleep is a necessity. It seems that however powerful we are during our waking hours, it is still necessary to return each night to this state of powerlessness.

Well aware of this weakness associated to sleep, the government has invested considerable research into the phenomenon - but to no great end. Absence of sleep quickly leads to incoherence and death. It seems that sleeping and waking, power and weakness, day and night, are as important to the human as the inner struggle between good and evil which exists in all of us.

Perhaps the dualities of sleep and waking, power and weakness, good and evil form part of a complex balancing system which helps to regulate our lives. It is no accident that the director of the Institute himself recommended that research be stopped, that the investigative capacity of the Institute be effectively put to bed.

Rewords

2007-10-29T01:49:00.000+01:00

There is a new blog called Rewords which features the writing of several Paris-based poets. It is an ongoing project which intends to create new poetry using response, imitation, riff, interplay.

I have just posted a new poem called 'Glut', in response to one by Michelle Noteboom called Stainless Sunset with Interesting Water Loop.

Michelle has previously contributed a poem to Connaissances which is here.

From Language to Stone via Marriage

2007-10-25T07:00:00.000+02:00

Reading "Introducing Levi-Strauss" by Boris Wiseman and Judy Groves, one of those enjoyable cartoon philosophy books produced by Icon Books, I have been reminded that one of the fundamental analogies used by Levi-Strauss is that between the functioning of language and kinship.

Levi-Strauss believes that the key to understanding kinship lies not in the study of family units (mother, father and children) but in understanding various taboos related to marriage, for example the incest taboo or the commonly encountered taboo which has it that parallel cousins cannot marry (i.e. the respective offspring of two brothers or of two sisters) while cross cousins can (i.e. the respective offspring of a brother and a sister).

At the origin of this type of analysis is an analogy with a similar emphasis on relationships, but this time in the analysis of language. Such emphasis on relationships is found in the work of Saussure which simply states that the meaning of words is not found in single letter sounds or 'phonemes' but in the relationships between a group of 'phonemes', for example, the three phonemes which create the word B-A-T have no significance by themselves, only when they are related to form a word.

Levi-Strauss draws an analogy between 'phoneme' and 'family unit' and implies thereby that the 'family unit' is has no meaning without understanding what the relationship with other 'family units' is. This is because marriage in primitive societies involves reciprocal exchange of women within the tribes which builds strong bonds between the various clans.

What is more, Levi-Strauss argues that the development of such reciprocal systems of exchange cannot occur without the development of language. Here is a quote from the book: "In terms of human evolution, Levi-Strauss attributes to the emergence of language ("symbolic thought") a key role in setting into motion the entire system of reciprocity whereby women first came to be exchanged"... in some cases symbolically represented by the tribes' most precious material asset in the form of stone axes.

The last phrase in italics is my own. I have written much more about this subject here.

Teen Idols

2007-10-24T22:30:00.001+02:00

Chinese Teen Idols
Originally uploaded by JW.

When I got back to the hotel after my evening out in Beijing, I spent some time channel hopping on the TV. Several of the channels were directed at a youth audience, either offering soap dramas featuring hip youngsters or interviews with teen idols.

Fire Balloons

2007-10-24T00:11:00.001+02:00

Boat Trip
Originally uploaded by JW.

As we walked beside Beihai Lake, we watched young people drifting past in Sampans, some gently serenaded with quiet music played on an instrument that looked like a lute, others singing tipsily, wearing red devil horns on their heads and waving sparklers.

Suddenly, we noticed a flaming object falling from the sky and when we looked behind us we saw that there were more bright flickering objects in the sky, moving towards us from the other side of the lake.

They were fire balloons, carried on a gentle breeze that came from the North. Eventually, when their tissue canopies got too hot, the balloons would catch fire and tumble towards the ground, frightening, no doubt, whatever would be the Chinese equivalent of an armadillo, crouching in the shadows.

Communist Poster Vendor

2007-10-22T18:53:00.001+02:00

Communist Poster Vendor
Originally uploaded by JW.

We drove to Beihai Lake which lies to the west of the vast Imperial Palace at the centre of Beijing. Here, on a Friday evening, we discovered crowds of mainly middle-aged Chinese waltzing on a paved patio beside the lake.

Along the lake front are a string of themed bars where young people sit outside at tables drinking cocktails or beer. Small shops sell weird and brightly coloured tourist knick-knacks.

Behind the hectic waterfront with its bright lights are quieter streets where I discovered this snack bar selling posters from another era.

Tiananmen Square

2007-10-22T00:04:00.001+02:00

Tiananmen Square
Originally uploaded by JW.

My geographical sense of the centre of Beijing is somewhat dreamlike since I have only driven around it at night. Here is the vast empty space of Tiananmen Square. Its smooth surface seems to glimmer like black ice.

Opera at the Laoshe Teahouse

2007-10-20T16:17:00.001+02:00

Opera at the Laoshe Teahouse
Originally uploaded by JW.

We were invited by our Chinese hosts to have dinner at a restaurant in Beijing called the Laoshe Teahouse. Each evening, the restaurant houses a theatrical show which consists of a series of short sketches by musicians, actors, comedians and dancers.

Here are two characters from traditional Chinese opera, enacting a scene in a room which is entirely dark. We have to imagine that they are unable to see each other. The man in black is trying to assasinate the man in white. Because the room is dark, he doesn't realise how close he is coming to that defensive sword.

Beijing Central Station

2007-10-19T23:21:00.000+02:00

Beijing Central Station
Originally uploaded by JW.

Driving down into central Beijing after a day in the office, we pass many buildings with brightly lit facades. This is Beijing Central Railway Station. For a central railway station, it seemed very quiet.

I expected to see lots of people riding bicycles here in China. In reality, there are perhaps more than in the West, but not many more. None of the bicycles seemed to have lights, which must make them rather a hazard. No doubt this absence of lights is a throwback to a time when there were less cars everywhere.

Rush Hour Beijing

2007-10-18T21:32:00.001+02:00

Rush Hour Beijing
Originally uploaded by JW.

Beijing was not at all as I had expected. It is a thoroughly modern city, similar to large cities I have visited in America. Cars are everywhere, mostly very modern (a lot of VWs), and at rush hour they jam up the wide roads. On every side are tall apartments and office buildings, some with interesting pagoda-like designs.

Hills around Beijing

2007-10-17T23:50:00.001+02:00

Hills around Beijing
Originally uploaded by JW.

I haven't been posting much lately because I've been travelling quite extensively. My latest trip was to China. I bought a little digital camera before leaving in order to record what I saw there, staying in Beijing. I'm going to post a picture every day over the next week. This first image is taken from the aeroplane on the approach to Beijing. Beijing lies on a flat plain and these are the mountains which border the plain to the west. It is around 7 a.m. in the morning and mist is lying in the valleys.

Live Poets Society, 16th Oct 2007

2007-10-02T01:45:00.001+02:00

16 Oct at 8pm: LIVE POETS season with exciting readings by Michael Lynch, Jonathan Wonham, & Moe Seager. With introductions by the organizer of the 14-year series, John Kliphan. AT: The Highlander, 8 rue de Nevers, 75006 Paris. Tel: 01 43 26 54 20, M°s: Odéon, St Michel, or Mabillon. Donation: 5 E.

Headlines from Childhood by Ethan Gilsdorf

2007-09-25T08:08:00.000+02:00

Drinking, smoking mom gives birth to “normal” boy
Clueless toddler makes “hide the salami” joke
Lamby found under snow bank in May: The shocking details

Neighborhood boys crucify sister to pine tree
Living room study: Dog farts cause drowsiness
How to eat zucchini: “Glass of milk” secret revealed

Walk to corner store: Not exactly “miles”
After divorce, sad family eats omelets, yogurt shakes for dinner
Recovering Mom tosses buttered roll

Julia Child ignores squabble in New Hampshire home
Boy catches falling television: “Wheel of Fortune” saved
Area teen speechless after fourth orgasm

Mr. Bonnacorsi: Does he really hump lab station?
Gov’t report: 1,023 PB&Js eaten since 8th grade
In historic agreement, woman lets ex- inside house

“Left on red” dooms driving test
Gymnastics, jazz dance still considered “gay”
Beer, Playboy gift from aunt: Sending wrong message?

D&D, A/V club: “chick magnets”?
College-bound senior technically still virgin
High school musical proves even geeks can sing

+ + + + +

Ethan Gilsdorf lives in the Boston area, where he makes his living as a freelance journalist, poet, critic, editor and teacher. His articles, poems and essays have been published in dozens of magazines, newspapers, guidebooks and literary journals world-wide. The winner of the Hobblestock Peace Poetry Competition and the Esmé Bradberry Contemporary Poets Prize, Gilsdorf has been awarded grants from the Vermont Arts Council and Somerville Arts Council/Mass Cultural Council, and residencies at the Millay Colony, the Hall Farm Center for Arts and Education, the New Pacific Studio and Vermont Studio Center.

His poems can be seen in Poetry, The Southern Review, The North American Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Poetry London, plus anthologies like Future Welcome; Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry; Outsiders: Poems About Rebels, Exiles and Renegades; Radio Waves: Poems Celebrating the Wireless; and In the Criminal's Cabinet. Gilsdorf was also the Paris regional coordinator for Poets For Peace/United Poets Coalition. He is co-founder of Grub Street's Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP) in Boston. For more information visit his web site.

This is part of a series of poems from invited poets. Previous contributors were Luke Heeley, Joe Ross, George Szirtes, Elizabeth Spackman, Ivy Alvarez, Rufo Quintavalle, Todd Swift, Michelle Noteboom and Beverley Bie Brahic. Illustration by Jonathan Wonham.