To coincide with both the new series of Twin Peaks and the publication of Chrissy Williams’ first full collection, BEAR (Bloodaxe Books), we’re re-releasing the long out-of-print ANGELA, a team-up between Chrissy and illustrator Howard Hardiman that marries Angela Lansbury to Lynchian surrealism and a Peaksy colour palette. If you’re finding modern life just a little too cosy and comforting, just set ANGELA on your bedside table and let the nightmares do their work.
The Ted Hughes Award nominated Finders Keepers is also entering its second printing, having become an endangered species itself in the bookshop. Nothing lasts forever, so get a copy while you can, on its own or in one of our book bundles.
Category: Uncategorized
The Saboteurs are in our midst!
It’s March, and that can, frankly, mean many things.
But for Sidekick Books it means something particularly important!
Yes, the most important indie poetry awards are back! With the exception of the Ted Hughes Award, only the Saboteur Awards explicitly recognise poetry anthologies and collaborations. These awards are nominated and voted for by you, the public! If you like the work we do (and Dr F takes credit for, and Bandijcat regularly derails), please take two minutes to nominate us for these incredibly important indie awards. We will be tremendously grateful. Three categories we would love your vote in are:
- Best Collaboration (Finders Keepers)
- Best Anthology (Birdbook IV: Saltwater and Shore)
and if you’re feeling particularly warm and fuzzy towards us:
- Most Innovative Publisher (um…)
Thank you, as ever, for your love and support. Nominate away!
All-new website!
You won’t believe how (unnecessarily) long this took me. Here we are, live at last – the new Sidekick Books website.
Bear with us while we work out the kinks, and if you encounter any problems, drop us a line!
‘Other Countries’, History & A Passable Introduction
This is what you call a passable introduction to the concept of history in the modern and postmodern age. Or at least that’s what I called it, elsewhere.
If you’re reading this, my guess is that you must have clicked on the link in my video review of Other Countries, the poetry anthology edited by Claire Trévien and Gareth Prior. I should start by saying this little article isn’t required reading for the review – it’s more like some side-stuff that I felt I had to specify (mainly to show that yeah, I’ve done my homework, I didn’t just caper into the review like a blindfolded kid swinging for a piñata).
In fact, this was meant to be the introduction to the review before I realised it was going to be longer than the goddamn review itself. But let’s start the way a proper essay is supposed to start – not with my proverbial verbigeration, rather with a short paragraph that is related to the topic and has some semblance of intelligence.
*ahem*
James Joyce’s Ulysses [what better book for that ‘semblance of intelligence’] must have, I don’t know, something in excess of 10,000 sentences. If I told you to quote a line from that book at random, and unless you’ve got a PhD on the guy and can recite Penelope backwards, chances are you’ll drop this little cultural bomb:
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
This is one of the most famous and widely-quoted lines from that particular novel. Now the fact that this particular shibboleth topped the other 9999 or however many there are in that grotesquely long book is indicative (I think) of how Modernism adopted the problem of history as one of its central literary and philosophical concerns. Or should I say, not ‘the problem of history’ but rather the Problem of History, because approaching history as a problem(atic) is kind of a shtick for the Modernists and their particular articulation of this Problem deserves something like a circled R or a TM logo next to it. But we’ll get back to that.
So for starters, and as long as we’re looking not at history but at the way we understand history, let’s break down the Joyce sentence.
a.) History is a nightmare
b.) from which I am trying to awake.
These two parts of the sentence are saying different things. The first part gives history a negative connotation – the topic means bad shit, because it’s more like a nightmare than a dream. The second part implies that history is deterministic, and it characterises the Problem of History TM as attempting to wake up – the trying bit is the really important verb there, not the waking up, because it brings focus on the tension between failure and success in volition, a.k.a. the struggle between determinism and free will. The problem of history is therefore how to abandon determinism and gain awareness and control of one’s own actions (where this implies, in that particular sentence, leaving history itself).
Given the status later invested on Ulysses, I think this next statement has some grounds: at some stage among the finer European minds it became commonplace to view history as something both negative and deterministic (perhaps, but not necessarily, negative because deterministic).
This is not to say that this was the only way of thinking about the subject – see the rise of fascism, which coincides with the year of the publication of Ulysses, as one example of a powerfully different understanding of history and its forces that coexisted (not exactly amicably) with The Problem TM.
But the Joycean approach is the one that became most pervasively linked with the humanities, pointedly with literature – which is why I think of it as a good starting point to discuss Other Countries and its particular approach to history. (For that matter, it’s also adequate to discuss much other contemporary poetry – including one that I reviewed some time ago and which still formulates The Problem TM).
But if I am right and Other Countries traces its own intellectual history to the Modernists (as championed by Joyce), then it’s worth investigating that point of view more in depth. The way this is done is, of course, to consider the history of that phrase on history (which itself represents the history of Trévien and Prior’s anthology on history… it gets convoluted). So, let’s.
SO, as concisely as possible – you can trace the notions that history is negative + deterministic to a few general cultural currents.
The notion of history as deterministic has a counterpoint – and in this sense is perhaps reactive – because our oldest (recorded) way of understanding history is based on the opposite idea: that individuals, in particular Great Individuals, are the ones who shape history. For convenience we can call this the Classical school of history and its roots start (at least) with Homer’s epics, at a time when the notions of history, myth and poetry were not quite as distinct as they are today. Read the story, and see what I mean – the events of the Iliad, which was meant at least in part as an historical recollection, are generally decided by the kings and the heroes (albeit guided by the gods), not by the movement of troops and seldom if ever by accident. The fact that other Classical historians, from Herodotus to Cassius Dio, took a more rigorous approach to the question of veracity and often discussed cultures and people as a whole is not enough to suggest that they diverged from or even questioned the central Classical tenet: History is shaped by Great Men (and, less readily allowed for, Great Women).
In fact, the person often considered the world’s first female historian, Anna Comnena, was largely a biographer (of her father Alexius I). The point being that history and the life of (great) individuals were geminate concepts, and they stayed that way for thousands of years (especially when the epics came in to contaminate the subject… it’s kind of striking how closely to each other Os Lusíadas and Jerusalem Delivered were written, and how closely both of them stick to the Classical model established by Homer).
Now the (relative) decay of this Classical paradigm – starting, one may hazard, somewhere in the late 18th Century, though no doubt the roots go further back – goes hand in hand with the rise of a number of intellectual schools that viewed Great Individuals as increasingly less important, Marxism being the most famous. (I say relative decay because Classical history still had its champions – John Stuart Mill, for one – but my impression is that by that stage the topic was kind of dead, and had no innovation, against the rapidly and continuously changing sciences of the history of collectivities, from Rousseau to Marx and Durkheim).
One (kind of inflammatory) way of responding to the Modernist take on history is to say that this is simply the humanities playing catch up to schools of thought that preceded it – remember that Marxism did not restrict itself (like it does nowadays) to the humanities, and that LaPlace’s Demon dates back to 1814. But of course that’s not true, because this cultural transition was part of a very gradual process that affected all areas of human understanding simultaneously, including literature and the arts. What I mean is that, as far as the humanities were concerned, there was a heightened sense that individuals were the product of circumstance in much the same way that astronomical events were seen as the product of physical forces (LaPlace) and historical events as the product of social forces. ‘The child is the father to the man’ etc. but you find this notion most pointedly in proto-modern novels: Stendhal, Balzac, Verga, Flaubert, Mrs Gaskell, Zola, Turgenev, or George Eliot. In fact, you could argue that the rise of the novel’s omniscient narrator – from the ashes of the epistolary novel – was in itself symptomatic of a cultural application of the assumption behind LaPlace’s Demon… that knowing and explaining everything is, at least conceptually, a possibility.
I should probably quote Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace herebecause it makes me look so clever because it’s so relevant. I don’t know if you’ve read that thing – it stands to a literature degree kind of like Cat Mario stands to this guy’s job – but that thing is a monument to determinism. It spends 1300+ pages telling you essentially that history goes its own way and that no man or woman can do anything to steer that. If you want quotes, I’ll give you the One To Rule Them All & In The Shadows Bind Them:
Kings are the slaves of history. – Tolstoy, War and Peace.
(Now – and to be clear – I don’t want to make a totalising argument here. I understand that these matters depend greatly on perspective, as you could argue – for example – that Homer’s use of the gods in the Iliad is metaphorical to say the same things that Tolstoy is saying, much earlier. Bear in mind that I’m just identifying general trends, not putting them on an altar at the exclusion of all others).
As for the notion that history is ‘negative’, this type of historical pessimism is grounded – in my opinion – in the same type of currents that later provided the groundwork for existentialism. This too includes Marxism, mainly for its open atheism, which – interestingly – it shared with some of its most outspoken antagonists too (Nietzsche). In this case tracing back a tradition is much more difficult because ‘pessimism’ is a much vaguer concept than ‘determinism’, and you can find it on whichever side of the fence you wish to construe it, e.g., you could make an argument that the rise of certain atheistic currents nourished the historical pessimism of Ulysses, because the possibility of transcendental salvation and redemption were being denied; hence the spiritual crisis that later led to existentialism. But it would be only too easy to point to Jansenism or Gnosticism as examples of religious pessimism that are every bit as bleak as anything written by Leopardi, Baudelaire, or Schopenhauer.
OY FRIGGIN’ VEY!!!! So what’s my point? Well, aside from the fact that I’m doing exactly what people always do when they deal with history – getting entangled in the enormity of the things I’m trying to disentangle – I guess I’m just trying to sketch something like a backdrop to contemporary discussions of history in the humanities, particularly in literature.
I mention this specifically with regards to Other Countries (this was in fact meant to be my introduction, but it seems like I pulled a George RR Martin and quadrupled my own word-limit), because I feel its decision to discuss history through minority discourse – without acknowledging the limits of this decision, i.e. as though it were possible to treat the whole topic through those comparatively small lens – re-echoes The Problem TM. In particular it seems to buy into the notion that there’s a ‘dominant’ (and noxious, ergo pessimism) historical narrative that minority discourse can and should subvert. This has a trace of Marxism because it shares that ideological view of history as being organised according to a linear hierarchy (classes at the top & at the bottom – then, by extension, some narratives at the top & others at the bottom).
I’d argue that this is one of Marxism’s most obsolete positions – complexity science, which is increasingly being adopted to describe economics (and therefore is inextricably linked to history as a whole) shows that the most dynamic systems are those in which behaviour emerges spontaneously out of the interaction of a variety of forces, none of which need be dominant. Hierarchism is another form of the Classical tenet, except that instead of Great Individuals you postulate Great Classes, and you focus only on those at the expense of all else. Complexity theory seems much more intuitively linked to the behaviour of such undeniably complex systems as society, culture and history, and – crucially – it seems to include an inherent understanding of its own limits. But now I really am rambling (and colouring this introduction with my own biases and preferences). This was meant to be an introduction – probably more useful to exorcise the bits that couldn’t get into the review than as something that anybody is going to read (yes, I’m making this a habit) – and it has more than exhausted its function. Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur, let’s close it on that.
In fact, this was meant to be the introduction to the review before I realised it was going to be longer than the goddamn review itself. But let’s start the way a proper essay is supposed to start – not with my proverbial verbigeration, rather with a short paragraph that is related to the topic and has some semblance of intelligence.
*ahem*
James Joyce’s Ulysses [what better book for that ‘semblance of intelligence’] must have, I don’t know, something in excess of 10,000 sentences. If I told you to quote a line from that book at random, and unless you’ve got a PhD on the guy and can recite Penelope backwards, chances are you’ll drop this little cultural bomb:
History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
This is one of the most famous and widely-quoted lines from that particular novel. Now the fact that this particular shibboleth topped the other 9999 or however many there are in that grotesquely long book is indicative (I think) of how Modernism adopted the problem of history as one of its central literary and philosophical concerns. Or should I say, not ‘the problem of history’ but rather the Problem of History, because approaching history as a problem(atic) is kind of a shtick for the Modernists and their particular articulation of this Problem deserves something like a circled R or a TM logo next to it. But we’ll get back to that.
So for starters, and as long as we’re looking not at history but at the way we understand history, let’s break down the Joyce sentence.
a.) History is a nightmare
b.) from which I am trying to awake.
These two parts of the sentence are saying different things. The first part gives history a negative connotation – the topic means bad shit, because it’s more like a nightmare than a dream. The second part implies that history is deterministic, and it characterises the Problem of History TM as attempting to wake up – the trying bit is the really important verb there, not the waking up, because it brings focus on the tension between failure and success in volition, a.k.a. the struggle between determinism and free will. The problem of history is therefore how to abandon determinism and gain awareness and control of one’s own actions (where this implies, in that particular sentence, leaving history itself).
Given the status later invested on Ulysses, I think this next statement has some grounds: at some stage among the finer European minds it became commonplace to view history as something both negative and deterministic (perhaps, but not necessarily, negative because deterministic).
This is not to say that this was the only way of thinking about the subject – see the rise of fascism, which coincides with the year of the publication of Ulysses, as one example of a powerfully different understanding of history and its forces that coexisted (not exactly amicably) with The Problem TM.
But the Joycean approach is the one that became most pervasively linked with the humanities, pointedly with literature – which is why I think of it as a good starting point to discuss Other Countries and its particular approach to history. (For that matter, it’s also adequate to discuss much other contemporary poetry – including one that I reviewed some time ago and which still formulates The Problem TM).
But if I am right and Other Countries traces its own intellectual history to the Modernists (as championed by Joyce), then it’s worth investigating that point of view more in depth. The way this is done is, of course, to consider the history of that phrase on history (which itself represents the history of Trévien and Prior’s anthology on history… it gets convoluted). So, let’s.
SO, as concisely as possible – you can trace the notions that history is negative + deterministic to a few general cultural currents.
The notion of history as deterministic has a counterpoint – and in this sense is perhaps reactive – because our oldest (recorded) way of understanding history is based on the opposite idea: that individuals, in particular Great Individuals, are the ones who shape history. For convenience we can call this the Classical school of history and its roots start (at least) with Homer’s epics, at a time when the notions of history, myth and poetry were not quite as distinct as they are today. Read the story, and see what I mean – the events of the Iliad, which was meant at least in part as an historical recollection, are generally decided by the kings and the heroes (albeit guided by the gods), not by the movement of troops and seldom if ever by accident. The fact that other Classical historians, from Herodotus to Cassius Dio, took a more rigorous approach to the question of veracity and often discussed cultures and people as a whole is not enough to suggest that they diverged from or even questioned the central Classical tenet: History is shaped by Great Men (and, less readily allowed for, Great Women).
In fact, the person often considered the world’s first female historian, Anna Comnena, was largely a biographer (of her father Alexius I). The point being that history and the life of (great) individuals were geminate concepts, and they stayed that way for thousands of years (especially when the epics came in to contaminate the subject… it’s kind of striking how closely to each other Os Lusíadas and Jerusalem Delivered were written, and how closely both of them stick to the Classical model established by Homer).
Now the (relative) decay of this Classical paradigm – starting, one may hazard, somewhere in the late 18th Century, though no doubt the roots go further back – goes hand in hand with the rise of a number of intellectual schools that viewed Great Individuals as increasingly less important, Marxism being the most famous. (I say relative decay because Classical history still had its champions – John Stuart Mill, for one – but my impression is that by that stage the topic was kind of dead, and had no innovation, against the rapidly and continuously changing sciences of the history of collectivities, from Rousseau to Marx and Durkheim).
One (kind of inflammatory) way of responding to the Modernist take on history is to say that this is simply the humanities playing catch up to schools of thought that preceded it – remember that Marxism did not restrict itself (like it does nowadays) to the humanities, and that LaPlace’s Demon dates back to 1814. But of course that’s not true, because this cultural transition was part of a very gradual process that affected all areas of human understanding simultaneously, including literature and the arts. What I mean is that, as far as the humanities were concerned, there was a heightened sense that individuals were the product of circumstance in much the same way that astronomical events were seen as the product of physical forces (LaPlace) and historical events as the product of social forces. ‘The child is the father to the man’ etc. but you find this notion most pointedly in proto-modern novels: Stendhal, Balzac, Verga, Flaubert, Mrs Gaskell, Zola, Turgenev, or George Eliot. In fact, you could argue that the rise of the novel’s omniscient narrator – from the ashes of the epistolary novel – was in itself symptomatic of a cultural application of the assumption behind LaPlace’s Demon… that knowing and explaining everything is, at least conceptually, a possibility.
I should probably quote Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace here
Kings are the slaves of history. – Tolstoy, War and Peace.
(Now – and to be clear – I don’t want to make a totalising argument here. I understand that these matters depend greatly on perspective, as you could argue – for example – that Homer’s use of the gods in the Iliad is metaphorical to say the same things that Tolstoy is saying, much earlier. Bear in mind that I’m just identifying general trends, not putting them on an altar at the exclusion of all others).
As for the notion that history is ‘negative’, this type of historical pessimism is grounded – in my opinion – in the same type of currents that later provided the groundwork for existentialism. This too includes Marxism, mainly for its open atheism, which – interestingly – it shared with some of its most outspoken antagonists too (Nietzsche). In this case tracing back a tradition is much more difficult because ‘pessimism’ is a much vaguer concept than ‘determinism’, and you can find it on whichever side of the fence you wish to construe it, e.g., you could make an argument that the rise of certain atheistic currents nourished the historical pessimism of Ulysses, because the possibility of transcendental salvation and redemption were being denied; hence the spiritual crisis that later led to existentialism. But it would be only too easy to point to Jansenism or Gnosticism as examples of religious pessimism that are every bit as bleak as anything written by Leopardi, Baudelaire, or Schopenhauer.
OY FRIGGIN’ VEY!!!! So what’s my point? Well, aside from the fact that I’m doing exactly what people always do when they deal with history – getting entangled in the enormity of the things I’m trying to disentangle – I guess I’m just trying to sketch something like a backdrop to contemporary discussions of history in the humanities, particularly in literature.
I mention this specifically with regards to Other Countries (this was in fact meant to be my introduction, but it seems like I pulled a George RR Martin and quadrupled my own word-limit), because I feel its decision to discuss history through minority discourse – without acknowledging the limits of this decision, i.e. as though it were possible to treat the whole topic through those comparatively small lens – re-echoes The Problem TM. In particular it seems to buy into the notion that there’s a ‘dominant’ (and noxious, ergo pessimism) historical narrative that minority discourse can and should subvert. This has a trace of Marxism because it shares that ideological view of history as being organised according to a linear hierarchy (classes at the top & at the bottom – then, by extension, some narratives at the top & others at the bottom).
I’d argue that this is one of Marxism’s most obsolete positions – complexity science, which is increasingly being adopted to describe economics (and therefore is inextricably linked to history as a whole) shows that the most dynamic systems are those in which behaviour emerges spontaneously out of the interaction of a variety of forces, none of which need be dominant. Hierarchism is another form of the Classical tenet, except that instead of Great Individuals you postulate Great Classes, and you focus only on those at the expense of all else. Complexity theory seems much more intuitively linked to the behaviour of such undeniably complex systems as society, culture and history, and – crucially – it seems to include an inherent understanding of its own limits. But now I really am rambling (and colouring this introduction with my own biases and preferences). This was meant to be an introduction – probably more useful to exorcise the bits that couldn’t get into the review than as something that anybody is going to read (yes, I’m making this a habit) – and it has more than exhausted its function. Vir sapit qui pauca loquitur, let’s close it on that.
Advanced Magic for Beginners by Joe Hakim (Video Review)
Our latest video review is up! Enjoy!
Toby Martinez de las Rivas and his Terror – OF SEX!!!
Or: everything you wanted to know about Terror, but I couldn’t find the space to talk about in my review
Considering I just spent a whole damn review talking about Toby Martinez de las Rivas (I can get the name right when I’m writing it) it might seem like overkill to go back to him this early. But in truth there is a lot of stuff in his debut that I wasn’t able to cover in the review, so I think a coda of sorts is warranted.
As I already said in the review, Terror is a very original piece of work and it’s hard to think of other poets in the UK who are doing something similar, other than perhaps James Brookes, who shares some of the historical concerns but writes in a completely different style. That said, there was one point in Terror where Toby reminded me sharply of another talented young poet in the UK, whose name I shall temporarily withhold for dramatic effect.
Who is our mystery wo/man?
Which English poet is most like Toby Martinez de las Rivas, the bard utterly unlike all other bards of his time?
We’ll get to that. First, though, a small preamble – of Terror‘s four sections, the one that did not find space in my review was the third, a brief pamphlet of prose poems entitled Renovatur. It’s actually a very interesting section – so interesting, in truth, that it’s worth treating it separately in this article.
One of the best things about the writing in Terror is that it’s incredibly subtle – Toby has an extraordinary talent for picking words that, strung together in the bead of a sentence, allow for a great variety of readings. Consider the following lines (I am quoting from Renovatur, as I will be doing without exception for the remainder of this article).
Do not turn from them though they waver & diminish in the fundamental blank of the eye, beacons of vacillate, scared light, or the unrehearsable memory of being born
The gravel beds beyond them, & beyond them, the cress beds
These lines are from a poem called Through the Window into the Garden that was His Last Sight. Starting from the title, and from the opening lines (which are about the birthday of Toby’s son), the poem seems to have a lot to do with the mirror processes of coming into and out of life. This concern is immediately followed through in the poem that succeeds Through the Window…, which begins with the line ‘I write this on the XVII of March, which is the day I brought you into the world to die’. (Toby’s poems seldom work in isolation from each other and this parallelism is not coincidental, but – I would contend – one of the poet’s most successful and conscious strategies)
While the ‘unrehearsable memory of being born’ is clearly connected to the above topic, what does the last line have to do with anything? ‘The gravel beds beyond, & beyond them, the cress beds’. There may be symbolic connotations to real gravel and cress that I’m missing, but on first examination it just looks a solid image in which to anchor the conclusion of the poem after much abstraction.
The line actually works on that level too, BUT – notice for a moment what other words re-echo within that line, by pure strength of consonance:
The grave beds beyond them, & beyond them, the cross beds
‘Gravel’ folds over into ‘grave’ and ‘cress’ folds over into ‘cross’. The line then takes on a whole new meaning, one that strongly connects with the rest of the poem, as the ‘bed of the grave’ lies inevitably beyond birth, and the cross – an overt religious symbol – lies beyond death itself. If you read it this way, the last line of this poem seems to lead quite naturally into the first line of the next.
So a verse that at first seemed to have been placed there almost arbitrarily conceals, in fact, a highly suggestive spiritual arc.
I made my case by this individual poem but I could take examples from almost anywhere. Terror is packed with astoundingly rich verse, the subtlety and ambiguity of which is – and here I must add my voice to the consensus – quite unrivalled in contemporary English poetry, at least from what I’ve read.
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| Somehow this image comes up when you Google “unrivalled” |
Now I wouldn’t be writing this article if I just wanted to spread Nutella onto Toby’s already well-buttered toast – and indeed the point is that this incredibly subtle language is a double-edged sword. What I mean is that Toby is able to use this language to adumbrate some enormously suggestive and inspiring ideas, yes, but on the other hand he can’t keep it from revealing those aspects of his thinking that are less appealing and grounded.
Allow me to elucidate. The opening line of the beautifully titled Pyropsalm goes like this:
Separate. Radically alone, even inside each other. Physical bliss equals extinction.
I remember that I was immediately struck by this because it resonates with an oddly naïve – even a bit childish – anxiety about sexuality and relationships. I mean, it may be heresy to evoke such a comparison, but the first thing that ‘Radically alone, even inside each other’ reminded me of was Linkin Park’s With You, which goes ‘Even though you’re so close to me, you’re still so distant’.
Pyropsalm, which opens with at least an element of simplistic sexual anxiety, then closes with these lines:
Its denotion of self: vertical, lowering, isolate. Unblent, unbearable in the tower of its resolution
How far have I fallen? My fontanelle is still open
A fontanelle, as per dictionary, is ‘a space between the bones of the skull in an infant or fetus, where ossification is not complete and the sutures not fully formed.’ So the final line can be read to mean a lot of things. As an image it brings to mind vulnerability, while philosophically one might read it to say that the mind is open to physical intrusion – possibly violation, echoing Toby’s concerns in previous parts of the book about ‘The body as image of the state, violated and violating’. In this case, the poet is conflating a physical violation with one of identity – the ‘denotion of self’, instead of being internally developed and explored, is entering Toby’s brain from outside and without permission.
So far, so obvious. But I think there’s at least one more really interesting way to read that line; in particular I am interested in what appears to be a very concealed, very silent ‘elle’, that is to say, French for the pronoun ‘she’. The word ‘fontanelle’ comes from the French and literally means ‘little fountain’; broken down, the words could be read as: ‘My fountain: elle’, where fountain is a source of water, so metaphorically a source of life.
You may say that this reading is about as stretched and convoluted as a rubber octopus. I’ll grant you that, taken in isolation, it sounds a bit crazy – and I probably wouldn’t have thought of it if ‘fontanelle’ weren’t such an uncommon word, one whose very presence commands reaction and active interpretation. Still, I feel it is at least somewhat validated by the context, over and beyond the teen angst in the opening line. The idea that Toby’s poem may be sub-textually privileging the feminine Other is consistent with the terror (what else) that the previous lines express when introducing the phallic signifier: a ‘vertical’ object, a ‘tower’, that is ‘unbearable’ because it contaminates and possibly violates his sense of ‘self’. Even the line ‘How far have I fallen?’ seems to fearfully conflate the self and the phallus – and we can get to this sentiment either by taking the ‘I’ as a phallic symbol in and of itself, in which case the line becomes a statement of impotence (‘How far has my I fallen?’), or simply by consonance: ‘I fallen : I phallus’.
The sentence ‘My fontanelle is still open’ can therefore be decomposed like this.
a.) My fountain: elle means that the speaker finds his sustenance in the Other, specifically the gendered feminine Other, as a classical case of compensation (i.e., his own sexuality is deficient).
b.) is still refers directly to the condition expressed in My fountain: elle, meaning that the condition is chronic. It points to the speaker’s inability to grow out of his dependence on the gendered Other (and by extension, the inability of his language to grow out of similar constraints of gender representation, i.e. gender as necessarily framed in a bipolar dependency relation).
c.) open, aside from the patent Yonic connotations that reinforce the sexual undertones of the line, also closes the poem on a statement of vulnerability – reiterating that the speaker’s condition is one of fear and need, not comfort or acceptance.
So – ‘My fontanelle is still open’, in reverse order, translates to:
I am vulnerable – [because] I cannot grow out of – my dependence on the other gender.
In brief, and for all their lyric transport, these are simply the words of someone who is unable to grow up. Now you may say that this reading is about as stretched as Jean Claude Van Damme’s legs when he does the splits. Judge, you may tell me, lighting up your pipe, your reading is far too abstract and far-fetched. You should stick a bit more closely to the literal meaning of what you read.
Ok then – let’s try that.
What is the literal meaning of ‘My fontanelle is still open’? Well, you say, inhaling from your pipe and blowing rings of scented smoke in the air, typically only an infant has an open fontanelle. So what he’s saying is that he is still an infant.
Wait a second, what’s this? The purely literal reading of the line comes to the same identical conclusion as the wildest abstract reading! In both cases, the poet is giving us the words of someone who can’t grow up. (Go sit in the corner, you and your pipe!)
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| Captain Sparrow, literally |
To be clear, I’m as conscious as anybody else that this reading sounds rather far-fetched. What I want to stress is that this is all, I think, validated by context – or at least in line with it – nor would I have ventured into the reading at all if I didn’t feel that it was corroborated by the rest of the book. Much like I wouldn’t allow for a sexual interpretation of the last line of Pyropsalm if it weren’t supported by the language of the rest of the poem, so I wouldn’t allow for a sexual interpretation of the poem itself if it were an isolated case in the collection.
It is not.
In fact, the Renovatur section of the collection stands apart from the others in that it bubbles over with more or less explicit sexual allusion everywhere. The number of lines you can quote that have some element or imagery of sex in there is almost overwhelming:
the leaf of the tongue, flickering in her mouth’s gospel (p.39)
I am the unpenned bull of the Lord / whose name confounds me. That is the hunger of women. (p.39)
the lamb might lie beside the vixen, at the nipple of the vixen (p.37)
the water struck by stars & streaked with filth (p.41)
the angel, must suffer us at its nudity (p.46)
the pikeish ventral tank, pillars of flame (p.46)
In my carriage of maleness, I am his radiant bride, bisexual as death. (p.48)
unearned wanting for his bodiless touch (p.48)
lead shot cascading in the broken well (p.49)
Mostly, these lines have in common a sense of unease and inadequacy, especially when it comes to discussing or including masculinity (or tropes thereof). Feminine eroticism is effectively hallowed (‘her mouth’s gospel’), metaphors to describe the phallus are threatening (‘pillars of flame’, the ‘carriage of maleness’ that is associated to ‘death’), and the physical reality that sex forces upon you – that is to say, the reality of confronting your own body and someone else’s – is infallibly brushed away: contrast the dangerous ‘unpenned bull’ associated to masculinity (the ‘Lord’), with the ethereal and apparently unsexed ‘angel’ (I say apparently – if the ‘elle’ in fontanelle is a ‘fountain of life’, then the feminine Other has already been established as an angel of sorts), and ask yourself why the speaker is ‘wanting for his bodiless touch’. Emphasis on the desire for something BODILESS in a collection where the word ‘body’ is everything.
So it seems that much of Renovatur is really about saying ‘I cannot grow up’, at least when it comes to the speaker’s relationship with the other gender. And yes, I do think this is a genuine and valid criticism that can be levelled at this part of the collection – and the reason I said in my review that the first and second parts of the book are awesome but this third part is so-so. It’s not bad by any means – on the contrary, the textual and philosophical richness here is real and rewarding. It’s just a shame that it should be held down by this sense of emotional immaturity that rather undermines the composed intelligence of the verse.
In this, Toby Martinez de las Rivas very much reminded me of another rising star of English contemporary poetry, and this would be – drum-roll – our mystery man, a.k.a. Sam Riviere.
It’s been a couple of years since I read Riviere, so he may just have grown into his shoes by now, but my conclusion when I reviewed his debut 81 Austerities was that the guy was very creative and intelligent et all, but suffered from a bothersome tendency towards infantilism, evident especially in his approach to sexuality. This is very much the problem with Renovatur – albeit not with Terror as a whole, and I can’t explain why this problem surfaces only in the book’s third section (parts one and two are, in my opinion, flawless, while part four suffers from other, more serious problems that I explore in the review).
Other than this particular weakness, Martinez has very little in common with Riviere – as indeed he has little in common with any other poet, barring superficial or (arguably) coincidental aspects of his verse. I’d agree with those praising Toby for his originality, as I for one haven’t seen anything out there quite like his work. That being said, I sometimes have the impression that when faced with the considerable difficulty of his poetry, some people respond with the Margaret Atwood line: ‘I don’t understand a word of it, so it must be good’. That’s the moment when praise just turns into hype, and in which I step out of the bus. I’d argue that the challenges posed by Terror are an invitation to engage and potentially disagree with it. If this means identifying some aspects of the book where it – or the arguments it forwards – are lacking in coherence or relevance, and also accosting Martinez to other poets in terms of his shortcomings rather than his merits, then I for one am more than happy to bite the bullet. There are many things that should, can and do terrify me, but sex – and for that matter masculinity – are not on the list.
Terror by Toby Martinez de las Rivas (video review)
Suzanne Collins’ “Catching Fire” and Linda La Plante’s “Wrongful Death”
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| Ain’t that scary |
Autrement, A Concise Reading Journal by the Judge
Airports terrify me. Not for the prospect of flying, rather because the only way to kill time in there is to go leafing in the bookshops, and these always seem to contain the most insulting samples of literature ever assembled in a single place. This is, I fear, an unfortunate necessity of our civilisation: whenever I have to go on a particularly long journey (eight plus hours, staying away two or three weeks), I have to take a book with me that a.) cannot possibly tire me, no matter how long I sit there reading it, and b.) that won’t be over and done with in just one hour. Airport novels are engineered for just that.
The thing is that there are almost no novels that can meet those criteria and still be good. I can think of George Martin’s Songs of Ice and Fire that do the job wondrously, and when I was a kid I could read Michael Crichton from dawn to past midnight. The problem with the former is the release date of his next book (see the self-fulfilling prophecy, when the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, when the seas go dry and mountains blow in the mind like leaves), and I’ve kind of grown out of the latter. So I go for whatever I can, crossing my fingers that it’ll keep my mind distracted while I sit inside that box ten-thousand feet above-ground.
Most recent reads: Suzanne Collins’ Catching Fire and Lynda La Plante’s Wrongful Death.
Golly. Did I steer that car into the tree this time.
(For what it’s worth, the journey was to Brazil – I was there for three weeks over the World Cup – and these books certainly did not live up to the rest of the trip, which admittedly is not a fair comparison as it would take one hell of a novel to beat an evening spent snogging a Brazilian girl).
I suppose this isn’t a ‘review’ as much as an exorcism. These novels have made me so cynical and morose that I’d be recounting them to my therapist, if I had one. Yes, I could dress this up as an intelligent discussion about the ‘airport novel phenomenon’ and what it means to literature, but the idea seems to me like that of studying tarantulas – I’m sure there are plenty of fascinating things to be learnt, but Christ, who the heck wants to go near those things?
Let’s start with Catching Fire. I picked it up because its predecessor, The Hunger Games, actually did its job more than decently as an airport novel. It’s not exactly a difficult book to explain: the set-up is old enough that you can almost hear Suzanne Collins yelling ‘Yabba-Dabba-Doo’ as she is pitching the novel. It’s so old in fact that this is one of its strengths – the dystopian totalitarian future that she represents in such crude detail is positively comforting, being after all a trope that was tired in the early seventies, and the plot is just The Running Man except that Arnold Schwarzenegger gets replaced by an angsty teenage girl (just about the most anti-Schwarzenegger type of character they could find, showing if nothing else that this plot can run pretty smoothly without giving two figs about its central character). Then from halfway onwards it’s just Rambo with something like a love interest vaguely shoe-horned into it and some references to Imperial Rome that nobody in the USA will have picked up (oh, the capital is called ‘Panem’, like panem et circenses, that Roman thing they used to say, get it? Get it? Clever!).
The fun in it, from my personal point of view, lay purely in reading about these characters slugging it out in the woods. Everything else is just an excuse to set up the stage. (Does anyone actually give a fuck about Prim?)
(I just typed that question into Google and found out – SPOILER ALERT – that in the third book she dies).
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| Prim and proper |
And even when they FINALLY get into the arena, the Rambo narrative is totally thrown out of the window in favour of these ‘alliance strategies’ they decide to undergo, which have them walking around in a goofy party comprising the angsty teenage girl, the romantic baker who always loved her, Edward Cullen with a trident, a mumbling hag piggy-backed onto the aforementioned vampire, and two genius idiots (not making this up) who can’t speak English. They don’t even fight each other much – most of the time they seem too busy stabbing the monkeys on the island (???). The narrative in Catching Fire feels less like Rambothan it does an episode of It’s a Knock-Out.
I eventually lost the novel somewhere in eastern Brazil – Vitoria, or Itabuna – and I can’t say I’ve ever felt so indifferent about losing a book in my life. I was at around page 330 and I might have been more engaged if I’d been listening to a cricket match that was being narrated by a GPS reader.
But I still had to confront the flight home, so I picked up one of those items that have always been completely arcane to me – a crime novel.
But the fact is that crime fiction is DULL. Even in the theoretically more digestible medium of film, I can never bring myself to give a crap as to why Dick Jones was killed with a marble elephant tossed against his balls or how somebody ran over the granny to inherit the stuffed Komodo dragon that she beats herself on the face with whenever she has to read a crime novel. This, to me, is the greatest of mysteries and the only one I’d really like to see solved – why the hell do people read crime fiction? It’s not just dull, it’s almost unpleasant, this sense of reading without being told what you want to know. And why not tell you anyway? You don’t feel any more satisfied once you found out it was Bob Rogers than you did before. Why not skip to the last page and just find out? (Well, because then you’ve thrown £8.99 into the toilet – there’s your economics).
But I told myself. ‘I’ve read so little, surely I talk out of prejudice’. These novels must at least be entertaining. And there’s nothing else in this bookshop other than ‘How To Make More Money’ by Rich Bastard (whose idea seems to be that I should spend it on his book) or graphic novels about Captain America, which cost about $45 and would scarcely last me an hour. So I picked up the first thing I could find – Lynda La Plante’s Wrongful Death.
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| Anna Travis, detective. Not looking too bad here. |
Together with the main detective, Anna Travis, they set off to investigate a fishy suicide.
And this is where the novel goes not just downhill but off the cliff altogether. The more I went into it, the less could I bring myself to care whether this guy had actually killed himself or whether he’d been murdered and why. It looks like perhaps his wife, or the wife’s sister, plotted to kill him – because, hmm, probably not for money as they’re already rich, some family feud of some kind I suppose OH GOD WHO GIVES A F –
The novel started losing me around page 50, but I managed to bring myself past page 200 (out of almost 500) before I was back home – and then I put WD on the desk and haven’t touched it since. I doubt if I ever will. I doubt, too, if I’ll ever read another crime novel, but that’s going to depend on whether my next substantial holiday is going to take place before or after George RR Martins releases his next book. The fact that both these things are set in a future more distant than Star Warsis a somewhat depressing prospect.
Josh Ekroy’s “Ways to Build a Roadblock”
Ah heck. Just read the review: Ways to Build a Roadblock by Josh Ekroy.
