Dear Life President,
One more thing pertaining to the flower-straightening slam: I would of course be very pleased and honoured to have my collision shared with other connoisseurs. In the meantime I am working on retroactively redefining the accident as a piece of performance art thus rescuing it from the cliche of the drunken driver and the hit and run yada yada.
As ever, your humble conn'sir
expat Andrew

Marnix petulantly stood up from the tackle and shot his knee up though the opponent's chin, her head flying up ten metres into the air, a great gush of purple blood spouting from the stump.

it was a poem like a dog whistle, too high-pitched for most ears; 4 members of the audience assumed the begging position.

graffiti climbed off the walls and waited on streetcorners, spitting

broomstick

"I'll hop on my bike", says H, who needs to come to the office to discuss something. Oh -key doe -key, sez I, so you're gonna hop on your ...(i nearly said BROOMSTICK!!! and H is not remotely witch-like; very nice woman etc)..bike

Hopping onto a bike / moped / horse is very tricky. HAVE YOU TRIED IT?

K1 zoekt K3
een half-pipe voor een mier is superklein, jongen

she was small, fat
no actually
not so small, very tall, huge, a man, skinny

een half-pipe voor een mier is superklein, jongen

Boiling

Steam of consciousness

declining a request for exemption

Dear X

Ok, I understand your situation
but I shall have to decline your request
I'm afraid. Fluency or native speaker level
is not the issue.

We have had quite a few LS students with English
as their first language.
This is because the LS courses
are skills courses rather than general English courses.

Although being a native speaker
is a clear advantage,
presentation skills are not automatically acquired
with English fluency.

Regarding the issue of you now
being quite an expert at presenting,
I don't doubt that your need for the course
may be less now, given that you have done many presentations.

However, if we were to set a precedent
by allowing you an exemption
on this basis,
we would in effect invalidate all our courses;

the rule is that we only give exemptions
if someone has done an identical
or virtually identical course beforehand.
Making an exemption is unfair to other students

which is sort of what
"rules are rules"
(a rather empty-sounding phrase, granted)
implies.

I am happy to explain this in person
but I am not open
to negotiation
I'm afraid.

Anal Finishing School

It's a great honour to be able to address you on this occasion. I'm pleased to see so many familiar faces here. For the last three months I have been, shall we say, rather hard to reach, holed up in Galway working on a project. I have however found time to write a series of poems which I intend to publish as a sequence in the Spring. Here is the second in the sequence.

it is entitled:

Anal Finishing School

Gazelle

Marnix has long legs, particularly the lower leg. It is an elegant leg, slightly inward twisted when he walks. A football mum (of Lars) said he ran like a gazelle. This I think referred to his bounce and lanky grace. It's a nice animal to be compared to.

I did some sets of press-ups at the outdoor skatepark, which is nothing like a park really. I put my feet on the bench. Although this put more pressure on my arms, it seemed less strenuous than normal, especially with regards to blood rushing to the head. There are no other animals that do press-ups.

Before leaving for the 'skate park' I told Willem I would be ready in 5 minutes. He placed an egg-timer clock in front of me of the kind that rings in a tinny way when time is up. I was ready 2 minutes before the 5 had elapsed. I twisted the dial to '0' but it didn't ring.

Mix-up

I mixed up my words and said to Willem, "I want to talk to some things about you."

Mystery

Where last night's dream of protestant gangsters in Brixton teaming up with skinheads from Queens came from is a mystery to me. They all lived in a house. I was allowed to see the room of one of the gangsters, with its iron grille window. He had some stereo equipment in it. Another gangster was educated.

Grains Moyens

Le couscous permet la réalisation de nombreuses recettes simples et savoureuses.

get up so I can kill you and cuss you

All the neighbours seemed to have walked to the back of their gardens to cough, on that mid-summer evening seasoned with screams from the ferris wheel.

Odd that, screams from a ferris wheel.

Danger

he was following a train of thought - a second train hurtled down the track and slammed into his back

5 summer questions

Why isn't my uncle in the Jackson Five?
Would I enjoy knutselen?
Would I refuse foie gras?
Will a lizard shed part of its tail to escape what it perceives as danger?
How long should a blog entry be to achieve a ruminative quality and at what point does it escape the character of a Twitter message?
What do the children impart to adults on holiday?
Can words have umami?
Which of these questions qualify as 'summer questions'?

Inexplicable absence

I have been inexplicably absent from this weblog for a couple of weeks.

Roofvogel

Are roofvogels strong? Willem asked me.
They certainly are. I am a roofvogel. The English word is 'bird of prey'. Say it. No, not prey bird, 'bird of prey'.
Bird of prey.

John Dory

I finally plucked up the courage to look up the English translation of zonnevis. It is John Dory, a deep sea fish that feeds on other fish. Judging by its white flesh and the gentle Dutch name, I had no idea it was such an ugly fish. Also, John Dory sounds placid and good-natured.

John Dory looks like a curmudgeonly fish, spiteful and opinionated. And yet, might he not reveal himself to be possessed of warmth, irony and empathy?

Wonder Pets come to the rescue of a skunk.
A child buys a lolly shaped like a dummy or a butt-plug.

Can I learn some German by reading Rilke in translation? I need some very fine chocolate.

Today the letter R

Tired of bread.
Will go for a week (maybe longer) without eating bread for lunch.
Today I ate raspberries and rollmops.

(That sounded like a Twitter message.)

After eating the rollmops, I sank into a fishy slumber for half an hour.

Dali

Benjamin called 'Dali' to me instead of 'Daddy'.
I shall wear a Dali-esque moustache and a snorkel and mask
and stand in a bucket of water in the garden
to lecture him.

Phallic lighthouse

Gerald said he, horny and pleasantly lost for words, sent the flame-haired beauty a photo of a phallic lighthouse.
"What other kind is there?" said the Green Knight, strangely woodenly.

Polski karsz

Polish cars cannot be recognised from a distance, particularly when their number plates are obscured. Where I live, there is a fair to middling chance that upwards of ten Polish cars will be parked in the Zuidoosterstraat at any given time. I count them.

Twenty years ago the Polish cars in Holland were few and far between but they were most probably boxy, crappy looking things.

"I don't like Risotto"

X sidled up behind her colleague Rita, an Italian lady, proud of her country's cuisine and culture.
"I DON'T LIKE RISOTTO! I FUCKING DON'T LIKE IT, YOU HEAR ME!", she screamed in Rita's ear, the angry aspirated consonants making the curly hairs near her colleague's earlobe tremble, like the pretty blue flowers of Campanula portenschlagiana in a June breeze.

Musci

I like to leave music playing in my room when I walk down to the other end of the corridor to make photocopies or pick up some fucking documents from my pigeon hole. I leave the door closed so as not to annoy my fellow-workers by allowing the music (usually electronic, Thomas Brinkmann currently) to escape disturbingly into the corridor, like a cloud of intoxicating or noxious gas.

I enjoy walking back down the corridor and hearing the rumble of music in the room as I approach the door. With Brinkmann, it sounds like a strange techno machine is going nuts behind the door, clicking, buzzing, booming, crackling and clanking. Pushing its membranes out in a compulsive trapped dance. Threatening to disintegrate yet always holding together.

Came out red

I dreamt that I drew a primary school teacher then started romancing or seducing her. When I poured what I thought was white wine into a glass, it came out red.

Thunk

When I am drinking a bottle of beer in the garden, I look forward to chucking the empty bottle onto the lawn. I will usually leave it lying there, sometimes for a couple of days, before slotting it back into place in the crate from whence it came.

I get great satisfaction from lobbing an empty bottle onto a soft surface this way. The flight of the bottle (usually a parabola) and the 'thunk' sound when it hits. These sensory pleasures combined with the faintly subversive gesture of throwing away a used object, both disrespecting it and 'loving' its heavy murky-coloured bottleness.

A similar though not as sweet pleasure comes from slamming an empty bottle, cup or glass down onto a wooden table. This might annoy (slightly) anyone with me who does not take kindly to sudden, loud noises. My pleasure is generally not lessened by this, as I tend to rationalise my action.

People who make a fuss about sudden noises are most likely those who are squeamish about certain foods.

Text Bananas

When I prepare Willem's sandwches and drinks for school, I usually put a banana in his bag. I write his name on it. The other parents write the names of their kids on their bananas.

Sometimes they do elegant curly letters and little pictures (stars or hearts or tiny spots).

I generally scrawl 'Willem' on the yellow berry.

But even when I write quickly, I take into account, albeit at a barely conscious level, nuances of letter type and handwriting style. Call it love, or vanity.

Marnix no longer eats fruit at school, so I cannot write on his banana.

blissed-out dreamy satisfaction

It is slightly frustrating that my wife does not walk around with a look of blissed-out, dreamy satisfaction on her face the day after a good bout of marital sexual intercourse.

Come to think of it, neither do I.

(why not?)

Therapy?

The Underground

I have just completed the Tilburg University employee survey. The final question asked for suggestions for new personnel policy.

I suggested a maze-like system of underground tunnels, caves and lakes be built, hundreds of feet deep. These would be used for recreational purposes like dreaming, writing and creating. There could also be caverns for breeding. There would be a secret entrance to Tilburg somewhere in the Stedekestraat, possibly on or near the site of the old La Poubelle.

This is unlikely to win me a Nintendo Wii

search

From a dream of last week:

I was unsuccessfully and rather frantically searching for a sheet of blank A4 paper, on which I was to write someone else's letter.

millefeuille

Daniel and I ate a millefeuille each on the shore of the River Thames, directly below the Royal Festival Hall. It was low tide, and very sunny. A millefeuille is always tricky to eat but these were especially so. They were like bricks. We stretched our mouths to silent howls to take bites of these confectioners' custard and flaky pastry double layered pastries, and, inevitably, some of it wound up on our fingers. We washed these in the grainy waters of the Thames.

On the way back, over Waterloo Bridge, we watched a fat river cruiser ferrying tourists westwards. As it passed under the bridge, Daniel said how nice it would be to drop a millefeuille onto the deck of the boat, or better still onto the head of a tourist.

The shock and anger partly dissipated by the satisfaction of tasting the sweet gooey mess picked off their head like sticky rubble.

"It's millefeuille! Hey! It's millefeuille!!"

porridge with golden syrup

I dreamt I was leafing through a magazine of my past, progressing through the 1980s until I was woken up by Benjamin calling 'mama, mama'. I walked shakily down the 'steps', formed by a judicious arrangement of IKEA cupboards, to the laminate floor and went to haul Benjamin out of bed and take him downstairs to breakfast, and, most likely, morning TV.

Earth-shattering

Spam e-mail advises me that there are 3 distinct ways to ensure that my partner has 'earth-shattering' orgasms.

Neither of us wants to shatter the earth in this way. Leave the earth out of it.

And what about my orgasms? Why is a validation of male sexual performance in terms of shattering things so important?

And what's with "give your partner earth-shattering orgasms"? It's not a gift in the same way that a book about gravel gardens or a CD by Johnny Cash is a gift.

Though generosity plays a role, orgasms require collaborative effort, not just what Woody Allen referred to as 'astonishing sexual technique'.

Over-styled people

The Rough Trade record shop off Brick Lane, the cafe, the general area.

"Are you often here?" I asked Daniel.

"mmmmNot really," he said. "It tends to get full of over-styled people."

Welcome

After months of nagging, mum and dad have finally had a broadband connection set up. Now they can read my blog entries, get to know a new and murky, glittering, blossomy, gradated side of me.

Hello mum and dad! Welcome to fast internet connections.
Watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBgf2ZxIDZk

The images have been altered and looped to match the beats of the song. Great.
Plus, it's me in the train, coming to visit you in England!!

xx

kthxbai

Daan is using a website of cat photographs with 'humorous' captions to get his morning pick-me-up. He's given up coffee.
Captions like 'kthxbai'.

Meltdown

Benjamin's little fucking beaming face, tousled blond hair, slight trace of snot under his nose, tiny teeth as I left him at the creche in the arms of an employee,
melted my heart.

Banoffi disaster

Marnix flipped the banoffi pie over onto the tablecloth. I was, briefly, livid. I thought he'd done it on purpose.

"What the fuck, Marnix?!"

He disappeared into the downstairs toilet and it was explained to me that he hadn't done it on purpose.

I apologised and gave him a big slice (which happened to be the bit stuck to the tablecloth after the flipping).

I am concerned about my swearing. The dessert was created in 1972 by British chefs Ian Dowding and Nigel Mackenzie. Dowding is adamant that a pastry base be used, not a biscuit base.

kutlul

There's no way I as a junior school boy (of 8 or 9) would have called a peer (or my brother Jacob, let alone Daniel, who was in nappies at the time) cunt cock (kut lul)

When did I learn to swear?
I recall being shocked when Uncle Paul said 'fuck' during a walk.
I was 16.
Now i swear too much

cunt cock fuck shit piss arse

The Anglo-Saxon ones are the best, though perhaps 'piss' comes from a Romance language.

My kids hear me swear I'm afraid. They copy and that's not good but I do tell them not to use the f-word.

"You're not old enough to use that word" I say "kutlul"

Ted Hughes's poetry conveys the force of Anglo Saxon words brilliantly. He used many short, frequently monosyllabic words, words which are concrete, compact and full of force and violence. Sometimes these words do battle with the Latinate words


Here's a poem of his:


Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.


I wonder if he swore a lot. Cunt.

2 songs simultaneously - more mash please

Now it's Thomas Bangalter and Bookah Shade mix.

Both great but together like kids seeing who can shout the loudest or dance the fastest.

Actually, this a great mash too. The tracks clash in just the right way.

"Indeed" (Omar)

Heron Scratch Heron

As I listened to Micheal Jackson ('She's Out Of My Life') last.fm and an RA podcast by Bookah Shade simultaneously, a heron flew over the P building, as if obeying an inner command, not given by the Sith. Now Burt Bacharach ('Bond Street') is on last.fm. Techno with pop, nice mash.

Mmm cheesey. Herb Alpert on trumpet?
Check it out.
Pure 1960s

Transluv Airlines

After the gig in Zaal 16, I went up to the guys in the band to tell them how much I had enjoyed the gig. I did not say that the music and especially the singing had reminded me strongly of Mark E. Smith and The Fall.

It is not always necessary to seek reassuring comparisons.

John Peel described 'The Fall' as "always the same, always different."

Transluv Airlines is a magnificent antidote to singer-songwriter music, should one need such an antidote. The antidote to Transluv Airlines is probably not music but lying in a meadow with wild flowers tickling your ears and lazy bees fumbling about, or lying face down in damp sand with the sun on your bare arse.

I am not sure that formal diction will cut it, when I am trying to say shit.

Piss shit arse fuck cunt cock.

Transluv Airlines

mixed feelings - an intensely boring diary entry

In conversation with Mark and Linda, I remarked "I have mixed feelings about that" with regard to something I now no longer remember. A work-related topic, an incident, etc. This remark about mixed feelings was uttered just after the waitress had brought our bill.

Perhaps she thought that I was saying I had mixed feelings about paying the bill. What is more likely, however, is that she understood my remark as belonging to another conversational context than paying the fucking bill.

I had no strong feelings about paying the bill, or my share of it.

mixed salad
mixed metaphor
mixed race
mixed-up

Commentary

Sometimes, drunk, I talk myself through the making of a late night snack. "We slice the bread and put it in the toaster, we take the cheese...."

Not reminding or guiding but heightening the performance of the food.

Rhubarb

I had to snap a kilo of rhubarb stems in order for them to fit into a plastic bag. They didn't snap clean. The dark pink skins frayed.

Cock

At the Whatnight gallery event yesterday evening at Wilhelminapark 53, one performance art exhibit was a man in a long curly silver wig standing on a small black podium, naked and with what I assumed was a Viagra-induced erect penis. I could not help but assess the size of the cock and I wondered if other people were also doing this.

I laughed when I first saw him. The wig and the poses he struck and the tattoos on his shaved groin (and of course his boner) reminded me strongly of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings, an example of which I have placed above.

A choir used to rehearse in a cupboard in the corner of the hall.

race

2 guys just raced each other down / up the not sure what I should call it.

concourse
terrain
campus
stretch
area

I was in my office listening to music.

They picked up their jackets and walked off. I would like to see more races at the UvT.

Last year on holiday in the Ardennes, a Belgian brother and sister raced past our tent for a week, puffing their chests out. The sister always won but the brother kept on trying.

Bees

I'm extremely envious of Willem's new T-shirt bearing the logo / text:

Honey Bees Cleveland.

When he has outgrown it I might cut out the text and sew it into one of my T-shirts. But I might not do this, since it would deny Benjamin the chance to wear Cleveland Honey Bees when he is big enough.

But at the moment I do not need to decide one way or the other; Willem will wear the T-shirt at least until the autumn, is my guess.

in Sickness and in Health

My wife gave me the middle finger in the street.
"Did you just give me the middle finger?"
"No!"
"Did you just give me the middle finger? Did you? Did you?"

Pink

Emmelie painted the kitchen pink. This was something we hadn't discussed. She just did it while the boys were at school and I was at work.
I was non-commital in my response. My jury is still out on this one. The boys, however, are pissed off. They being at that stage where pink is sissy. They being boys.

Monkeys on acid, as Dennis leary once described his kids, often applies to my brood.

Roll Mops

I wavered at the fresh fish section at the god-forsaken supermarket. Rolmops or Zure haring? How much sourer would the latter be? And which would taste best tonight when I get home from quizzing at the Troubadour, not the the Chamber of Hell presided over by testy and charmless Frank but a backstreet tavern.

Brie de Meaux

I was not allowed to let the brie come to room temperature in our kitchen. Since the cellar and the shed are too cold, I was forced to leave it in the toilet.

Brie de Meaux is the real deal - ripe, stinky, pungent, farmy.

Extension Cable

H. cuddled a coil of orange extension cable in bed.

Smaart Appproach

Konieczny Lasselle [tenably@teclub.nl]
has suggested a "Smaart approach to arousal problems".

This individual, whose name for some reason reminds me of Kaiser Soce from the film 'The Usual Suspects' has sent me a link entitled "Definittive Ways to Keep Your Man or Woman Happy in Bed"

I will not assuage my curriossity this time. We can all learn and these ways may well be fruitful. However, I am consonantaphobic.

Happy Birthday (SCREAM)

Une nuit que j'étais
A me morfondre
Dans quelque pub anglais
Du coeur de Londres
Parcourant l'Amour Mons-
Tre de Pauwels
Me vint une vision
Dans l'eau de Seltz
B Initials
B Initals
B Initials B.B.

Crocs

I dreamt that mutant crocodiles were attacking. Some looked more human than crocodile. All were green and scary. I tried to hose them away but realised that this was futile since crocodiles are aquatic reptiles.

The hose I was using had a weak, pissy stream of water, rather like my shower. It was like trying to piss over a high hedge from the back of a long, dry lawn.

goedmaken

Emmelie went to wake up Willem to make up after a particularly bad evening (tantrums, bad behaviour etc).
"Schatje, ik kom het even goedmaken."
Not yet fully awake, he said,"When you have been blind, you need to learn how to see again."

clinical

I was biking across the stretch of patchy, squelchy grass in front of the Simon building listening to Surgeon, British DJ and purveyor of a clinical brand of the proverbial 'banging techno', on my iPod. Seeing a magpie in my path I barked at it and it flapped away to my right, landing a safe distance away. I did not scare it exactly but I certainly made it jump.

Though I am not saying the music definitely caused me to react to the bird in this way, I am reasonably sure that if I had been listening to some Debussy, I would not have barked at the magpie.

Yo, waddup Bird?

I went to see Onyx at 013.
Fredro Starr constantly referred to the audience as 'my real niggaz' and 'street niggaz'.

Now I'm a street nigga.

Warme Liefde

I was shelling pistachio nuts in the studio with Willem. I had put the iPod on shuffle and connected it to the hi-fi.

"Ai, Marieke Marieke..." sang Jacques Brel, as we munched the salty green kernels.
"I thought that was somebody in our house," said Willem.

Baby's hungry

Wytze grabbed the bowl of sweet potato and carrot puree from Linda.
"Laat mij het doen schatje; ik voel me anders zo nutteloos."

de stemming was opperbest

Ingrid said she did not think Menno Pot was deconstructing football chauvinism. He was chubby. I am skinny.

Later in the Cul, the DJ played an unadventurous and rather turgid selection of songs. I am seeing cliches everywhere, like pigeons.

Dirty pigeons at that.

FANITY

I passed a house
I liked it
They'd just had a girl, and there was a banner in the window
FANITY

Fanity.

Gijs van Schijndel's poetry made a dog bark at Zaal 16 on 10 March.
Not all live poetry can achieve that.

LIFE on staych,
GIVE IT UP forr
FANITY!!!

Icarus Schmicarus

A cyclist this morning, cycling hands free and flapping his hands up and down like wings, but then parallel to the bike. He crashed into a stationary car and flew up into the air, executed a double somersault and landed in a mound of sweet wet sand. His flabby buttocks cushioned his fall, but his composure was ruffled....

blog title: Adrian Mitchell poem

You can taste it in the bacon

I once told Daniel that my butcher was (and indeed still is) gay.
"You can taste it in the bacon," he said.

You can not.

OvErReAcTiOn

"You've bought a new phone charger????"
"Yes."
"Seriously?"
"Yes."
"That's insane. INSANE!!"

Crocodile identification

Benjamin was saying "crocodile! crocodile!" in the bathroom but all I could see was a triceratops. I scanned the shlef (SPECIAL KIND OF SHELF) below the morror (LARGE DEEP MIRROR) and spotted a tiny, bright green maggotty toy 'crocodile', about the size of a walnut. "Goodnight crocodile," I said, and patted its softly contoured bumps.

Though anatomically innacurate, somehow it conveyed an essential crocodiley essence to the 3 year old.

At age 3, a child can, among other things:


speak in sentences
be independent to primary care giver
easily learn new words, places and people's names
anticipate routines
be toilet trained
play with toys in imaginative ways
attempt to sing in-time with songs

and

recognise crocodiles

HOW VAGUE DOES A CROCODILE SHAPED IN MODELLING CLAY OR SKETCHED HAVE TO BE IN ORDER FOR BENNIE NOT TO RECOGNISE THE BEAST?
I'm going to try some really crappy sketches on him later on.

Teletubbies love each other very much

Watching 2 fools in teletubby suits walking towards me, it struck me that some people in fancy dress overcompensate for their ludicrous appearance, acting very normal and walking and behaving as if they are not dressed up.

Don't do that. If you are attired silly-ly, act silly.

orggasms

Sena Vanhoose has sent me an e-mail entitled 'more orggasms'.
Upon opening the message I was presented with a link
to a product entitled 'New Orgasm Enhhancer'.

What the fuckk is wrrong with the old one?


gg has morphed to a hh error.
Now that is sexy, Sena.

The Draft

Feeling energetic after a piss I yanked the door to the toilets open with such force that the ensuing draft caused the coffee vending machine to give a little panicky squeak. (the toilet door is just a metre and a half from the Douwe Egberts-stocked object).

Big Daddy Kane

You're just a butter knife
I'm a machete
(from 'Ain't No Half-Steppin')

What kind of knife are you?

(flick knife, fish knife, meat cleaver, pairing knife, steak knife etcetera)

Answers on a Coast Pard

Dark Side

Emmelie dreamt she was in 'The Wire'. They had tapped her phone and she was going to go over to the dark side. "That's Star Wars," I said

too expensive

one of the grocers at the market was charging 2 euros 75 cents for a smallish bag of basil
i said i had to pin some more money
then i went to another grocer and bought a larger bag of basil for 1 euro 50 cents

slime

I bought slime for Ties. He said that he wanted slime, when Emmelie asked him what he wanted. That's what she said at least.

They had run out of chicken livers in De Boerenschuur. No crostinis after all.

Do not confuse scandals with sandals when you are attempting to buy the latter.

Lean In

The Wire's David Simon: "When you lean in, I've got you." And he said a lot of TV makes you lean right back.

Poetry that makes you lean in.

Bright lamp light (or sunlight) on paper brings extra life to a poem. Like Mark Ford's stuff i was reading last night.

This Josh Wink RA podcast has a section in the mix that sounds like a radiator pipe being scraped.

Stare out owl

The palm is in the back garden, to recover.
I have 3 long 'to-do' lists sellotaped to my desk. They overlap, not like wet petals. Soggy boxes.
Bit by bit, they are driving me peanuts.
Some of my dried grapefruits are rocking gently above my head. Must be a slight breeze in here but I don't feel it.
Here's to choppy style.

In the spirit of Benbenek I'm tired of the phrase 'it ticks all the boxes'.

Omar's coming.

Create!!

Willem has started a book called 'The Book of Willem'. It has 51 pages and these are tied together (it was too thick to staple).

He is reluctant to write anything in it. I'll force him to create.

I have reached episode 8 of the Wire Season 1.

Mos Def

Put More to BED

I'm keeping a record of who puts the kids to bed. I'll do it for a couple of weeks so as I can win one of our stupid petty arguments about who puts the most kids to bed.


e.g. "last week I put 15 kids to bed fuck nose"

Farmer

Willem's little Maoist classmate.

His blue farmer suit, little black cap and bag and red handkerchief round his neck.

Saint Saens' Carnaval of the Animals

Goats in cravats, stumbling on cobblestones in the old town, butting sexy girls in summer dresses in a summer evening, Antwerp.

Attic dormer window, steamed up, humidity affecting manuscripts.

broken bell

MY army BAG

My bag has been washed. The spilled cream is gone, all vestiges thereof.

The bag is starchy and stiff; it would hurt you to punch it.

I was drying it on a radiator yesterday and it fell off while I was watching Masterchef. I jumped,

thinking that there was an intruder in the house, (since the canvas noise was too heavy to be a

mouse).

SO WHAT

I do not like the taste of this tea, rooibos. Is it rose hip?
I was teaching English to tax inspectors from Rotterdam and I said that I did not like rooibos tea. "No'" a man said, faintly indignant, "That's from South Africa."

Brel

je prend un train à la banlieue

a highly useful thing to say when you are in certain situations

fragmented nurse

Naomi dropped a fragment of a nurse's costume on the floor. There was a wonkily stiched and charming red cross on the item of clothing, which was something to tie around the head but seemed like a shrunken and very kinky apron.

wave

Trapped in the middle of the road on my bike on the way to pick up my Prozac,

raised a hand apologise to oncoming cars for being a dangerous,

they must've thought I was waving at them in their SUVs,

fallen apples,

low acidity, starch, dreams of blank brown paper

xx

sit on kids

Daan asked me if I had ever sat on my children.

Only intentionally

absurdists

Ingrid Luyks said I should check out Kharms and Vvedensky, Russian absurdists

I used part of a lamp to cut out a circle of white bread as part of the process of making breakfast

A free range egg was fried in the hole

fire in the hold

the joy of text

inside out jumper and cream that did not freeze

i wore a jumper inside out yesterday.
Should i convince myself it was, at an unconscious level, deliberate, a bold
iconoclastic act?

no

A carton of cream leaked into my army bag. i left it outside and this morning the bag looked to have been frozen overnight, but..
the cream was still still sticky wet and shiny in the morn

rather beautiful and creamy

I'll hose it clean like Hercules, later

dubbel trippel

I'm bored of pils. I'm increasingly drawn to dubbel trappist beer.

A student of mine referred to someone who likes beer as a fan of the fluid.

ostriches and istanbul

Now, I am assuming that ostriches are farmed in a reasonably humane way. The meat is delicious. It's my new thing, and there's a recipe in "I hate hagelslag".

I just thought of Istanbul.

There's a smoky puddle in the alleyway.

Burgerij

The way Jacques Brel sings "Ik.." in his song "Burgerij" is great, the greatest 'ik' ever. Period.

en ikk...de ssuper arrroggganttt

Period?
Yeah, period.

vette burger clique
vette vieze varkens....

Go'a light mate?

10 or 11 years ago I was walking home up St Julian's Farm Road in West Norwood, south London. A bloke approached me and asked, in a strong south London accent'

"You wouldn't by any chance have a light would you?"

I would have expected him to ask, "Got a light mate."

I don't recall what I said to him. Maybe I said, "Nah mate, sorry" but I guess it was probably something like "I'm afraid I don't." More in line with his diction.

Reading aloud for taping purposes

I read poems for Mr Stovers yesterday. Most of it was in iambic tetrameter. It got slightly tedious hammering through the light verse, but there were a few more weighty gems among them (Hughes, Siegfried Sassoon).

I'm not a huge fan of strict rhyme schemes in poetry but I do like them in nursery rhymes.

He's a nice old fellow and pretty alert for 81

Battle in Ruimte X

What huge fun and what an honour to be able to step up to the mic with Nick J. Swarth on Thursday in Ruimte X.

I only got the 3 poems ready on the day itself. They seemed to go down well.

Big shout out to all the poets / performers that night!!!

I felt utterly comfortable in Ruimte X.

The Hall of Fame

Funny listening to 60s and 70s hits while the lads skated.
It was a din in there.
Noisy, dirty, great.
Wish I could skate.

Never mind.

I saw a discarded cardboard beer container. Which cheeky youth sneaked beer in? I resolved to drink beer tonight.

protect and serve

I cycled home yesterday, a dog in the rain. I laboured to protect my yellow headphones from the rain.
My solution: raising the collar on my coat and hunching down on my seat like a a goblin.
I was listening to the Aphex Twin.

HIS ANGER AT BEING CALLED SUKKEL

Marnix spilled sugar puffs all over the cushion floor

little evil kitchens scattering into the dirty margins of the room

"sukkel!" I bellowed but not really mad

Marnix then sulked, like he was aggrieved, like, it was my fault? (Australian questioning intonation)

Willem licked them up

INAPPROPRIATE DANCING

My dad's retrospective exhibition

Dad, (Peter Cartwright) will be having a retrospective exhibition in Derby this year. I want to be there for the opening.

PRIDE!!!

http://www.derby.gov.uk/LeisureCulture/MuseumsGalleries/PeterCartwright+Retrospective.htm

A retrospective of Derby-born artist Peter Cartwright’s drawings and paintings as he celebrates his 70 birthday. The exhibition spans five decades of work by this important figure of late 1960s British abstract painting whose new work made a big impact at the London Art Fair in 2008.
“In my work I am preoccupied with the endless question of issues of abstraction and imagery. I make intense unpremeditated responses through drawing, to fragments, objects and situations, creating a stock of images that feed the working process.”

2 university reminiscenses

1. Liverpool; the tutor who was annoyed at my facile comment that an extract from Thomas Hardy expressed the 'same old transience' idea. "It's not just the same old transience!"
Fair enough

2. Keele: the tutor (Ian Bell) who sneered at my 'onanistic proclivities'. I was responding to a poem and had been over-enthusiastic about images, probaly in a gushing way.
An academic put-down.
They weren't too friendly at Keele, with the exception of Mark Jancovich, who is a great bloke. Richard Godden was ok.
I felt insecure because I was severely under-read in critical theory and Marxism.

appropriate punishment
Dante
Something for TV assholes
Meet the Fockers - Asssss----hooole!

in perpetuity for.....
Dr Phil
Must think of something fitting for this cunt

Said to Daan today ''I'm re-reading Ezra Pound". He said he had got the modernists (Eliot, Pound, Yeats etc) out of his system and much preferred post-modern poets.

2 by Pound


In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd
petals on a wet, black bough.

&


The Jewel Stairs' Grievance

The jewelled steps are already quite white with dew,
It is so late that the dew soaks my gauze stockings,
And I let down the crystal curtain
And watch the moon through the clear autumn.

I am noticing trees ina very general sense. Come spring, I'll start to pick out gingkos, elms and nut trees, figs.

I am noticing indoor things, like a brass candlestick in Meesters.

Here are some of the names that we have been considering for our advanced English course in the Language Centre. I think 2 of them might stand a slim chance of being adopted

English: Operational Command Force Go!
English: Fast track to Fluency
English: Dinner with the Natives
English: Approaching the Natives
English: Native Horizons
English: Extreme!!!
English: Evolution / Evolved
English: (Taking it) Up a Notch
English: Livin' It Large
English: Beyond the limits

I once asked Daniel 'Would you like to live somewhere for the rest of your life?'

His reply: 'As it's a certainty, it's pointless talking about desire'.

He is on the left in the photo:

Lao Tse

Today I set about gathering ideas for a poem, to be written in Dutch and to 'feature' the path past the pond that I can see from my window. I will need to do a little research into Taoism.

I will be eating soup this eveing but I'm tempted to grab some soup on the way home too. The later I leave the office, the less likely I am to get some soup.

Life

I once had a drunken argument in South London about value judgments in art. I was claiming that it was perfectly reasonable to say a piece of music or a work of literature or other art was better than another. (see the dog roll blog on my profile for examples of so-called 'bad art')

I was then asked to define what I meant by better.

I can't remember what I said.