My poem ‘The City of Water’ is now up at Unsplendid, an online journal of received and nonce forms. It’s a sestina. Do read if you’re interested in that kind of thing. That kind of thing being poetry, sestinas, etc.
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My computer was down for six days and I suffered. I had to use computers in a common room and write by hand the rest of the time. I survived. But I’m glad it’s over.
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I went to see Ron Arad: Restless at the Barbican. Arad is an industrial designer, artist and architect. I don’t know anything about design or architecture really but I found some of it really fascinating / amusing including a strangely-shaped ping pong table which one could actually try out. Some pictures here.
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Before that, Patience Agbabi came to read at the university. She was warm, vibrant, very lovely. Her next collection is a retelling of the Canterbury Tales in poetry. Quite a challenge, I’m guessing. She’s blogged a little bit about it here. She’s also Canterbury Laureate for the year and the audience was quite large. The questions were similar to the ones asked back home — do you write for the page or the stage? what kind of research are you doing for this book? Patricia Debney who is a poet and writer herself and a senior lecture here asked about the fact that she often uses form and whether she finds this restricting. Agbabi said that using form makes things more interesting / challenging because it sets parameters that she has to work within, makes it less amorphous.
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Somebody read my horoscope and it was full of some troubling stuff. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before and I was all shrugs and smiles about it. But I was surprised at how it played on my mind all the way back in the bus from London to Canterbury. Nothing some wine and sleep couldn’t fix. But still.
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I was only reading poetry (and poetry-related essays / criticism) for the first month simply because there’s so much of it available here that I don’t get back home. I started missing prose though so have picked up a novel, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow. It’s quite gripping and very funny in bits. The protagonist is a conman who pretends to be a healer and diviner. I thought this was interesting:
As a novelist, Ngugi says he is very influenced by the “trickster” tradition. “The trickster character appears in tales all over the world,” he explained. “In West Africa it is Anansi the spider. Elsewhere it is Hare or Tortoise.
“The trickster is very interesting because he is always changing. He always questions the stability of a word or a narrative or an event. He is continually inventing and reinventing himself. He challenges the prevailing wisdom of who is strong and who is weak.”
Among other poets, I’ve been reading Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. Some of her poems here.
On the surface, Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head is about a bunch of tangled relationships. At the centre is Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a man who’s comically deluded about a vast number of things in his life. He’s sleeping with smart and sexy Georgie, a young academic who pretends to be much freer and easy-going than she is actually is. His wife Antonia is beautiful and elegant. Overall, he’s quite smug. Except, all kinds of things are going on around him that he’s unaware of, and as the novel progresses and more characters enter the picture, it’s hard to keep track of who’s fucking whom. So I can imagine the poor man’s bafflement.
Phyllis Bose did an incredible job bringing Gertrude Stein alive yesterday at Ranga Shankara. Her dramatic monologue Gertrude ran for nearly two hours. It had a simple set dominated by reproductions of famous paintings done by Bose herself and there was little movement. Yet she managed to hold interest. Part of the credit must go to the script, carefully woven together from Stein’s own texts and notes but a lot of it was the energy and intimacy she brought to the telling. The focus of the script was Gertrude’s famous friendship with Picasso but there was lots of other stuff in there–insights into Leo Stein (Gertrude’s brother) and Alice Toklas (her partner), anecdotes about the Saturday Salons, and Stein’s views on life and art. Bose was funny and convincing and, quite often, transporting. It was a pleasure.
