Poems, by W.B.R.

The smallest books are often the strangest. From this comes a fleeting couplet that seemed charged with hope, and more than hope, called 'West Coast, Arran'. I hope it sticks with you as it has with me.

This land seems set about with wind and gale
That brings the strong seas leaping to her shores.

Holiday reading

A holiday reading update...

• I finished Wolf Hall at last.
• I was given both Imperial Bedrooms and Sunset Park by HRH for Christmas, which neither of us believe in.
• I was given The Quiet American by my mother for Christmas, which neither of us believe in.
  
• I am reading The Fruit Hunters and an overly foxed, 1953 copy of Captain Cook's Voyages in an impassioned return to non-fiction, which I somehow put aside as an ill-considered and ineffectual means to expedite my reading of Wolf Hall, which took six months anyway.
• Cosmopolis continues to break my brain. I wanted to kill myself on reading it this morning; fortunately, that's usually a sign that things are about to improve.
• I have cleared out my book stash, and made an exciting list of all the books I own that I've never read, and will aim to this year. Woo!
• All I seem to do is read and lie in the hammock. Thanks, in part, to this stupidly delightful weather.
  

And you? Holiday reading updates, please...

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Silence: redux

I don't know about you, but I can't stop thinking about this week's mind-blowing line:

It was a matter of silences, not words.

There's that old cliche that silence is golden, but what if it was the opposite?

What if silence were the blackest terror? What if silence precipitated danger, bodily harm, the kind of waiting that ends in a violent, unimaginable loss?

If that were the case, to embrace silence wouldn't just be isolating or lonely. It would be suicide.

To give in to silence would be to give up, to cease the struggle that has kept your face above the waves and disappear, sinking, irrecoverable. To let the icy black tide fill your lungs; to let your limbs, now deadweights, only drag you deeper. Nullification. Annihilation.

Annihilation.

Of course, it wouldn't be an actual suicide: like Eric in Cosmopolis, you'd be "alive", waiting corporeally for the sun to rise on another day, for the world to tick over and start up again.

The thing is, it wouldn't matter: you'd be sinking still, endless fathoms deep in suffocating darkness, waiting for the closedown of the last synapse, waiting -- always -- for the ultimate loss.

From this vantage, silence is a vast, unending death. A place in which we are perpetually poised on the brink of annihilation, and which itself annihilates by virtue of that fact.

Mind-blowing lines #23

Cosmopolis, by Don DeLillo, is well and truly blowing my freaking mind. Why? Well, look. Here's the opening. Tell me if you're still standing once you read this:

"Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five. What did he do when this happened? He did not take long walks into the scrolling dawn. There was no friend he loved enough to harrow with a call. What was there to say? It was a matter of silences, not words."

If you're still upright, you must be inhuman. Try this, from the scene where Chin is biting his nails:

"He was gnawing, grinding his teeth on the hangnail, then the nail itself, then the base of the nail, the pale arc of quarter moon, the lunula, and there was something awful and atavistic in the scene ... Why is a hangnail called a hangnail? It's an alteration of agnail, which is Middle English, Eric happened to know, from Old English, with roots in torment and pain."

Reminds me of a pair of sisters I know.

Most-loathed phrase, 2010

To put a year to this phrase is unkind (I believe it's my most-loathed phrase ever), but I feel like being topical.

My most-loathed phrase of 2010 is...

"Harvest the produce."

Actually, it's any combination of the words "harvest" and "produce", or variants thereof.

"Oh, innocuous," you say. I say not. Sure, your Stephanies, your Jamies and Maggies may be happy to blurt it out at random every time they pass a raspberry cane or an in-flower fig. But this sort of bourgeois, food-porn, rosewater-tainted-spectacles approach to the grow-your-own-fucking-food reality has no truck with me. No truck at all.

Let me tell you about my most recent experience of harvesting the produce.

It was dusk. Forget pretty cloud arrangements and breathtaking light; think: mosquitoes. For some reason I located the broad beans almost as far from the house as is possible without actually having to get out a machete and enter the bush, so by the time I arrived at the patch, which had taken a full six months of urging, praying, and loaded compliments to come to production, I had been brought to a near-faint, the mosquitoes having made off with most of my blood.

Unlike the food-porn writers, who spring forth into their pretty kitchen gardens with antique baskets or bowls that came from their mothers' (glowing, cosy, twee) kitchens, I had a clean steel bowl with me, as well as the bucket I usually bleed and pluck the slaughtered chickens into, but which is currently reasonably clean -- this so that I could shell said peas in said garden and bucket said pods for throwing straight into the compost which is, almost inconceivably, even further from the house than the broad beans.

So I started pulling beans from plants, kicking a trapdoor spider off my be-thonged foot and thinking I probably should have worn the steel-toed boots I nearly cut through with the chainsaw last weekend. As I pawed my way through head-high plants, one flicked back, landing something -- a dew droplet? I begged -- in the corner of my eye. I rubbed it: a black slug came away on my knuckle. I smeared it across my jeans and continued picking, successfully avoiding the earwigs that cascaded from the glorious white-and-black blossoms like shiny, bitey, oversized pollen, but not the fucking mosquitoes.

In the end I had a few of palm-fulls of beans. Having hurdled the garden fence, I threw the pods in the compost, and began wading house-ward through the grass. But the goat, outraged that I should be in the vegetable garden without him, held me up. By which I don't mean that he delayed me -- no, no. He stood before me, enormous, stabby horns akimbo, eyeing me and my steel bowl with relish. I took a step. He took a step. I said his name. He rose upon his hind legs, head down, horns up, nostrils writhing in an anticipatory delirium at approximately the level of my scalp. I screamed his name and cursed my thongs; I turned and ran...

Beans in the grass, swearing, and threats of death ensued. It wasn't as bad as the time he head-butted my arse, somersaulting me through the wilderness like something from a Loony Tunes re-run, but still. By a small miracle obviously orchestrated by a suitably amused yet wry deity, I was able to recoup my losses and make a salad that involved -- yes! -- the hackneyed mint, marinated fetta, and olive oil. And boy, was it worth it.

No, frankly, it was not. Except for the fact that the beans were beyond fucking compare and I once again managed to prove my endless humanity and humility by not killing the goat.

This, my friends, is what harvesting the produce is all about. Enough with the sun-drenched footage, the birds crying in the hedgerows and the wind rustling the leaves. Think: bare-knuckled fight for survival, and you'll be closer to the mark.

Word of the Day #3: adelocity

adelocity, n. a measure of unknowability; the degree to which something or someone is obscure or unclear. adelocious, adj.

From the Greek adelos, meaning unknown.

It will come as no surprise that this term was commonly used in sentimental prose and poems written around the 18070s-90s. Thurston Scythesley, a popular British poet of the time, used the word freely in his works. This example comes from his epic Twelve Greek Loves, published by Faber:

Oh Thessaloniki,
Home of my sweet Eugenie.
She of the sun-gold skin,
wild hair,
budding lips,
and infinite adelocity.
When will you release me,
oh Thessaloniki?

Such recent (and florid) examples divert us from linguistic origins which appear much older and less ethereal. It was Pierre Neige, the renowned Undertaker of Reims, who is widely regarded in etymological research circles to have first used adelocity in print, in his Practical Embalming, a pamphlet that was copied and distributed among new recruits to his business in the years 760-70:

After death, the eyes often become marred by a milky sheen of great adelocity, and the colour of the eyes can be no more seen. By this time the remains of the spirit have most certainly left the body, and the draining of fluids can begin. If the eyes remain coloured, have the priest bless the body before embalming commences.

Despite this evidence, there is some argument as to the first actual usage of the word and its variants, since written evidence of it is rich even as early as this. While etymologists and linguists are constantly at work on the question, it seems the history of the word adelocity is in fact adelocious.

That ain't Jimmy

Jimmy Wales. This is the name of a gangster, a cockney ne'er-do-well with a chip on his shoulder and a greasy chip packet in his pocket.

Jimmy Wales is the name of a dangerous man, a man who'll do what the circumstances require, and what fate necessitates. He's not a man who dallies, nor the type to hesitate. Jimmy knows what he needs to do, and he does it.

In short, gentle reader, Jimmy Wales simply cannot be the man pictured in the above ad, which comes to us from Wikipedia. That guy's name is surely Thorn Blane or David Bureaux or Cavendish Slatesly or something. Perhaps it's White Male #567-a. He sure as hell is not Jimmy Wales. Come on. How could a low-grade hit man produce such a web-age wonder as Wikipedia?

Unless that's a disguise, and below the visage pictured, his stomach bulges out, balloon-like, and he's wearing snakeskin shoes and a pistol wedged into his waistband, this guy ain't the Jimmy I know.

Have you read more than six of these books?

Sometimes, I think Facebook is merely a replacement for those chain letters that used to submerge social circles in primary school for heady weeks on end.

Currently, friends on Facebook are inviting me to identify from a list of 100 books how many I've read, and started but not finished, in reference to a damning Guardian article that said the average moron had only ever read six of these great tomes.

The thing is, I can't be bothered proving the Guardian wrong. There are a few things you should know.

1. I didn't read a book until I was approximately 13 and was required to do so for school.
2. I haven't reveled in your "classics".
3. I haven't read widely, partly since if I like a book, I tend to re-read it a billion times over instead of getting a new one.
4. Like movies, books tend not to stick with me unless I read them a billion times over.
5. In all honesty, I really prefer to look at the pictures.
   

In short, I probably wouldn't remember which few of the 100 books I'd read. I can guarantee it's more than six, but it's not 100. Most likely I'd spend hours working through the list thus:

"Thomas Hardy ... didn't he write something set in ... the country? I read that one! Was it Tess, though? Who knows? Ooh Catcher in the Rye. I've read that a billion times: *tick*. Now, Salman Rushdie. I'm sure I read The Satanic Verses when I was 14 or so, but what the fuck happened in that? All I remember is a chapter entitled Ell Ow En, Dee Ow Enn..."

And on and on.

Question: what value is the reading if there is no memory of it?

(Hint: you can substitute any transitive verb you like for "reading" in that sentence.)

Mind-blowing lines #22

Today: a mind-blowing excerpt from Ghosts, by Paul Auster.

Ready?

But the present is no less dark than the past, and its mystery is equal to anything the future might hold. Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next. There are certain things that Blue cannot possibly know at this point. For knowledge comes slowly, and when it comes, it is often at great personal expense.

[finding home]

[The dull thud of shots
on a country morning
soothes the aching child in me

(raised on fear
and fist fights,
and headlights
menacing the black walls
of a thousand endless nights).

The fired shot
finds home and finishes:
the struggle stops;
the heart stills.

The sound--
suspended over summer fields
--vanishes.

There is no grim tomorrow,
no hard aftermath:
just a pause that dissipates
and lets the daylight win.]