Hiatus.

I'm doing a lot of work at the moment, and this has already caused me to minimise my activity on here. That's going to continue for the foreseeable future, so I thought I'd better raise my head above the parapet, admit the continuing absence (to myself as much as to anyone else), and tie up a couple of loose ends. 

First of all, I think I have twice promised to post some new poems up here, and on both occasions failed. A bit of serendipity now compels me to make good on that promise. My poem 'Time and The Sea' won second prize in the Rhyme and Reason poetry competition run by the Iain Rennie Hospice. It's only a small competition, but I like the work of the judge, Gerard Benson, very much, and entries are accepted from across the country, so I feel entitled to experience a teensy tiny iota of validation.

However, it also served to clarify a few things in my head. The fact is, I don't really see poetry as being the area I want to explore. As a reader, I love it to bits. But as my love of poetry has increased over the years, my sense of my own suitability to write it has diminished proportionately. I am convinced that writing good poetry demands an obsessional, microscopic devotion which I don't naturally have and which it would run against the grain of my nature to contrive. My temperament is too superficial. So, while I love poetry, and am massively pleased that someone somewhere whose opinion I respect thinks I've done something which is sort of alright-ish, I know in my heart that this is only the first step on a path up the near-vertical, slipshod shale of the Parnassian foothills - and it is a path which I probably shouldn't take. 

So, yes, I'm delighted, and I remain incapable of not writing poetry. But I am happy for it to be a private occupation, a dirty and secretive habit which I nonetheless take very seriously and from which I derive much (naughty) pleasure. It is in this spirit that I offer the poems 'Pulse', 'Vanishing Point', 'Opposable Thumb', 'Mobile', 'God', 'Mirror Stage', 'Hunter's Moon' and 'The Clouds'. 

The other thing to mention is that this competition also had a section for prose entries . I didn't place in this, while my wife (talented sort that she is) placed third. Despite losing, however, I still quite like my entry, so I've put that up in the prose section.

It's called Red Shift, and it probably requires some explanation. The overall theme of the competition was time, so I devised a massively over-complicated, possibly incomprehensible hypothetical conceit about an observation post at the farthest edge of the known universe at the end of time.

My preliminary supposition, for which I have absolutely no basis in fact and which I would love to have corrected by someone who knows about this sort of thing, is that when entropy (i.e. heat death of the universe, itself a contentious theory) sets in, time would break down from the outside-in. Hence this guy, as the human being farthest out from the centre (far out might have been a good title, actually), would be the first person to experience all the weirdness arising from time collapsing.

That's how the idea started. Then, however, I got all excited by my reading, and particularly by the principle of redshift, in which time and gravity are thought to dilate as they approach an event horizon such as a black hole. Light emitted from beyond the event horizon can never reach the people on the other side, so I postulated that, if the observer could not communicate out then his superiors wouldn't be able to communicate in, effectively isolating him in a discrete envelope of space-time. I also presupposed that shit would be pretty messed up even before the 'event', what with being so far out from the centre - hence the bit about supernovae recurring (which is meant to imply that time is jumping back and forth).

Of course, all of this science is implicit in the story, as there's simply no room for exposition of that kind (there was a 500 word limit and, besides, it would have been boring). Finally a message arrives but, doh, it's a message that has fallen through a convenient worm hole from another era which is not intended for the protagonist and therefore merely confronts him with the futility of everything, ever.

Well, there you have it. It's far too complicated, I pulled most of my hair out trying to balance expository needs with dramatic ones, and no one liked it. Enjoy!

Port-a-Pet

A gigantic blonde teenager sits diagonally opposite me. Her pink-blonde hair is clogged with dreadlocks and she is dressed from head to toe in black, including a Marilyn Manson hooded top and a pair of heavy, decorated biker boots. One of her eyes is blind and staring and the skin around it is a frozen slab of scar tissue, fissured with white stars of twisted skin. In her hands she is holding a small cardboard box labelled 'Port-a-Pet' in which sleeps her hamster. Once the train is moving she opens the box and then proceeds to gentle the hamster for the remainder of the journey. She does not think there is anything unusual about this because she long ago accepted that she must take love wherever she can find it.

What's the use of literature?

Priyamvada Gopal, Dean of Churchill College, Cambridge, and Senior Lecturer to the English faculty, appeared on yesterday's Start The Week to publicise her appearance on an RSL lecture entitled 'What's the Use of Literature?' and explain why she believes the Coalition's education cuts will impoverish the humanities. Regrettably, her argument seemed to revolve in ever-decreasing circles of solipsism around the idea that reading English is useful because close reading, comparing texts and appreciating the nuances of interpretation is useful. She didn't at any point tell us what these skills are good for, and it wasn't hard to imagine the collective sigh of 'so what?' going up around the country. The whole thing felt like a missed opportunity to draw attention to something both important and, to my mind, relatively obvious. What she should have said is that the abilities the humanities foster - independent thought, rational analysis, synthesis of information, considered judgement and eloquent argument - are vital components of a civilised society. Indeed, I think the humanities are the only manmade construct which holds equal sway alongside our inherent capacity for love in the difficult and strange process of civilising ourselves. Without the humanities you wouldn't have democratic government, civil rights, free speech, religion and the freedom to reject it, the welfare state, the civil rights movement, Radio 4 or The Beatles. As for the person who sneers and says, 'yeah, but so what?' - well, the plain fact is that he wouldn't be able to say that if it weren't for the humanities, because dialectic (the resolution of disagreement through dialogue) wouldn't exist without Socrates. So science cannot flourish without the humanities, and vice versa. For example, a scientist working on stem cell research is doing important but controversial work. Now, he doesn't need an English graduate to sit there and tell him whether what he's doing is right or wrong, but his thinking on ethics is nonetheless informed by every book he's ever read and every teacher he's ever had. And the degree of ethical consideration invested in our actions is the barometer of how humane, equal and emancipated a person, nation or species is. Furthermore the skills which humanities teach are a useful commodity in their own right. Without them we wouldn't have the tertiary economy which is vital to a nation like Britain with its dwindling agriculture and industry. Finally, a novel or a poem is the vessel which conveys our essential humanity: these are the artefacts which teach us to empathise with others, to remember and to dream. Of course, a dream doesn't have any inherent value. But that's the point of dreams: they're free, and, being free, priceless.

Night Bus To Juréia

For the first few miles you weave down enclosed streets past smoked glass offices and busy cafés, large old houses converted into medical centres or ad agencies, expensive car dealerships in modernistic chromium showrooms, sprinklers turning over switchgrass lawns. Then you pass out onto Marginal: three lanes of traffic droning endlessly on either side of the Pinheiros river, a murky brown god hemmed between concrete walls. Beside the road, behind sagging wire fencing, loom the skeleton of a disused rollercoaster and last year’s carnival floats, the papier maché faces falling away to reveal the twisted frames underneath.

Now the city’s hinterland opens up before you: the low tenement housing sprouting satellite dishes and lines of laundry, the open-fronted bars, the castellated compounds of the love motels which cater for the truck drivers and homeward office workers. In the distance high rises float on the horizon like mirages, images from another world; here it is only piles of tyres or stacks of granite or swimming pools propped on their sides which reach towards the sun; here the favelas start to show, crazed mosaics of shape and colour, scavenged materials and dirt roads. Outside on the embankments, kids play beneath images of beautiful women in lingerie and men with white teeth in surf gear, placed there to infiltrate the dreams of the never-ending stream of moneyed traffic which passes by and never stops for them.

You must have fallen asleep. The jungle bored you, its impenetrable barrier of trees, purple-headed barriguda and cassava and Brazilian sassafras; the sad sight of men by the side of the road sheltering under tarpaulin, selling bunches of bananas or corn cobs or manioc root brought back from the waiting jungle. Now twilight is falling and you are approaching the first of the beach-ward towns. It’s a poor place, a rat-run of dusty streets. The shops are little more than stalls: knife sharpeners and key cutters, bags of concrete and toilet seats, hairdressers and discount clothes; all open to the street, all united in squalor. A man delivers giant brass collars from a motorbike. A kid pushes himself along on his bicycle, steel pins in his shin and his crutch grasped in his free hand. Fat women shout outside a bar. A gaudy sign offers express English courses, promising a ticket away from here.

Meanwhile the jungle waits on the edge of town to reclaim this outpost for its own; it has already overtaken the stained concrete shells of empty houses and abandoned chapels, some petrol pumps and street signs. As you leave it behind, the last thing you see is a girl in a truck-stop, bored, staring after the cars and air-conditioned coaches of the rich, wondering if she’ll ever escape the leering fat truck drivers, the endless nights, the cold eyes of older women.

Once darkness falls completely the roadside kiosks light up like toy castles, selling beer and cigarettes, soap and matches, paraffin and plastic toys from China. On a deserted stretch of road a couple sit on the wall beside a concrete bus shelter, she in his lap, the jungle silent and massive behind them. Their bus won’t arrive for hours. They’ve got absolutely nothing. They’re the most beautiful couple in the world.

When you arrive at your destination, you drink and swim and eat with the others, then walk down to the beach. The stars tremble and the Milky Way is a hot spray of weltering light. Frogs baritone-burp and cicadas bow their music to the waiting universe. You stand there half-drunk in the dark, the warm seawater on your feet. Phosphorescence lines the breaking waves and shimmers when you move your feet, so it seems that the horizon itself has been effaced; there is no up or down now, stars above and stars below, and you floating lost among them. Far out to sea a storm unfolds, the lightning among the clouds looks like the voice of God.

A Song of Chips and Gravy

*This image was kindly created for me by my brother-in-law, as I don't have Photoshop. I was only asking for something simple, something deliberately crap, but this actually looks as good as the HBO publicity shots - thus showing up the shittiness of this joke. Thanks, James.

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