Sammerthwaite and the River of No Return Part one
ROBBIE
Tap tap tap tap tap.
Banal former painter, reject and dreamer
Has gone far as a politico and public screamer
He sharpens the scythe, harks the Messerschmitt's drone
Soon blood will follow his spittle on the microphone
England's ears cocked, for trumpet and banner
"We're not bloody ready!" and "For want of a spanner"
These are the cries and "who is to blame?"
Herr Hitler, not poor old Chamberlain.
Sammerthwaite, to register his protest, had moved into the greenhouse. He
had a small, if dark and atmospheric garden, dominated from the centre of
the waist-high 'lawn' by an old and crooked tree. Beyond this lay the
ancient greenhouse, whose murky panes were all, bar two, intact. Nearby the
wheel-less rusting corpse of an old Austin Cambridge was gradually being
overrun with the local flora.
After clearing out all garden detritus- he left the back seat of the
Austin in the greenhouse as a settee- he began to move the greenhouse, with
the help of Springer, an old roll top desk he'd bought in a flea market at a
local church hall.
"You is *mad* captain!" laughed Springer as they dragged the desk through
the weeds, "*mad*! To locate yourself in such a structure."
Sammy Sammerthwaite wasn't impressed either.
"This is some kind of protest, right Dad?" she asked as he extricated an
antediluvian camp bed from the imbroglio of coats and old household
miscellany in the cupboard under the stairs.
"I intend to remain quartered in the greenhouse and that's that."
"You'll freeze,"
He hoisted the camp bed under his arm and marched out into the garden, with
Sammy following.
"It's springtime, and I'm hardy enough. Besides which it may invigorate my
muse."
"Yes," she said as she followed him through the wilderness, "but what about
electric light?"
"Don't need it," snorted the poet, "Haven't you heard of candles?"
Sammy stopped, "Okay, if you're going to be ridiculous and wish to burn to
death, that's your own business."
"Ah," said Sammerthwaite, disappearing into the greenhouse, "you're catching
my drift at last."
After cleaning the windows and rigging up 'rug' curtains, Sammerthwaite also
moved down an old wind up gramophone that Sammy had discovered in the cellar
plus some heavy 78 records: The Warsaw Concerto, Cosi Fan Tutti and
Symphonie Fantastique. Now he felt quite content, sitting on a piano stool,
tapping away at the typewriter with Mozart crackling away like mad behind
him and the plaster bust of Berlioz looking at him from the top of the desk,
making real progress on his poem. He'd finally made it past Munich! He lit a
cigarette.
"I'll be glad to see the back of Chamberlain," thought Sammerthwaite,
comfortable that the worn out prime minister was only a few stanzas away
from resignation, "can't wait for Churchill- an easier rhyme."
He decided that he had, very late, discovered the pleasure of having a
garden. Not actually *gardening* but being in one. He went outside moved
further into the wilderness behind the greenhouse. In all the years he'd
been in the dingy ground floor flat he'd never bothered with the garden, but
he decided, it was charming.
A shady glass house, 'neath a leafy tree
A wild paddock for an old horse like me
A verdant grotto in the urban sprawl
All that's wanting is a rippling pool
And then Sammerthwaite heard a gurgle. At the bottom of the garden the
ground seemed to rise as if there once had been a rockery there. He placed
his coffee stained espadrilles carefully and moved further in. He knew there
was a fence right at the bottom, hidden from view in a wilderness of bushes
and trees in the garden of the Conservative club which lay behind. He heard
the gurgle again; then he heard a voice. Sammerthwaite climbed 'the rockery'
and looked into the pit behind. In amongst the bushes two people, a man and
a woman, were crouched looking down at something.
"Excuse me," said Sammerthwaite, "what are you doing?"
They both stood up quickly.
"Oh I beg your pardon, we're from the local college."
"Bit old for college aren't you?" said Sammerthwaite suspiciously.
"We work there, this is.an experiment."
"What are you doing?"
The man, with some difficulty, moved out of the bushes and brushed himself
off. He offered his hand to Sammerthwaite.
"Hi I'm Mike, and this is Barbara- we're tracing an offshoot of the river
Biddle."
"Oh really?"
"Yes," said the woman called Barbara with a beaming smile, "and part of it
is running through your garden."
"Good heavens, is there?"
He climbed down further; there behind the bushes was a very small stream,
the surface of which, hardly moved.
"Brilliant," said the poet, as he stared at the scummy green water, "would
you like a cup of tea?"
Mike and Barbara sat on the 'settee' in the greenhouse, whilst Sammerthwaite
sat at his desk.
"So, you see," said Mike, "we decided, as a project to trace this offshoot
of the river. We're concerned that parts of it may dry up. Add to that a
local firm is releasing chemicals into it."
"Really?"
"Oh yes, it's hard to get anything done about it- the guy who owns it seems
to be able to get away with it- freemason, brown envelopes etc."
"How terrible," said Sammerthwaite.
Springer, who had volunteered, arrived with a tray of teas and a stubby
joint protruding from his lips. He blew dragon snorts down through his
nostrils.
"Tea's up captain."
"Yes," continued Mike, "this fellow is a real Hitler character- we've wanted
to protest outside his factory but it's securely fenced in."
"Yes," said Barbara, "he's gradually destroying the river wildlife," her
eyes moistened, "so many dead fishes. Plus there is the damage to the
banks."
Sammerthwaite felt himself getting annoyed,
"You hear that Springer? Another local firm behaving in a disgraceful
fashion and buying their way out of it."
"Aye, aye," said Springer offering the joint to Mike, who politely refused,
"these people should be put out of business. An if de council won't do
nuffin' then dey should be *run* out of town by de people."
"Trouble is," said Barbara, "that the people don't seem to care."
After Mike and Barbara had left Sammerthwaite went and had another look at
his bit of stream. He could barely see it in the evening light but he was
aware of the moisture in the air.
Riverrun, for all our good
Preserve the splashes we all should
Crouching here upon the sod
Paying homage to the river god
And the next day he announced to Sammy who was dressed in dungarees and
carrying an electric saw down into the cellar, that he was going to buy some
fish for his stream. He didn't wait for a reply, slamming the door behind
him.
I poor poet and mortal life giver
Doth tip some fish into the river
Let these Perch gambol and go
Into the ancient cloudy aitch two oh
The next morning they all lay dead, on the surface, and Sammerthwaite shed
tears- of rage.
--
Sammerthwaite- A Filthy Old Man or Modern English Poet?
http://www.geocities.com/overhearduk/sammerthwaite/index.htm
Overheard......inside the music business
http://www.geocities.com/overhearduk/INDEX.htm
High Spirits in the Countercultural Frat-House- A Secret History of Jim
Morrison
http://www.geocities.com/jimmozz/index.html.htm
ROBBIE tells it like it is.......
http://www.geocities.com/situationeeste/index.html
Martha Bridegam
ROBBIE wrote:
> "...this is the BBC home service, and now our serial...."
>
> Tap tap tap tap tap.....
Robbie, sorry to be dense but have I missed an episode? What is Sammerthwaite
registering his protest against? Sammy's drug project? And should we understand
that her project has something to do with poisoning the stream? And did we
already know he was writing a poem about Hitler?
"Tears of rage" is an intentional Basement Tapes reference, right?
And does "brown envelopes" refer to bribery?
/MAB
ROBBIE
Martha Bridegam <jo...@sirius.com> wrote in message
news:3AC9EF4A...@sirius.com...
>
>
> ROBBIE wrote:
>
> > "...this is the BBC home service, and now our serial...."
> >
> > Tap tap tap tap tap.....
>
> Robbie, sorry to be dense but have I missed an episode? What is
Sammerthwaite
> registering his protest against? Sammy's drug project?
Yes O gentle reader, Sammy- a silly choice of name for his daughter but I've
gotta live wiv it now inneye?- is building a skunk farm in the basement as
well putting into preparation other nefarious activities. I should have gone
into this further, but I thought I'd give the good readers of abg-o a break
from narcotics and have a bucolic intermission. I spoze it was part of an
experiment in shaving down exposition- I was too reapy (new word: I reaped
too freely)
And should we understand
> that her project has something to do with poisoning the stream?
No. I've just shoved her into the background a bit.
And did we
> already know he was writing a poem about Hitler?
I'll post the first one again- and risk wrath. He's writing a poem about the
twentieth century and has been, up until now, stuck at Munich.
>
> "Tears of rage" is an intentional Basement Tapes reference, right?
Well, I thought if ya get it, yer got it, so good.
>
> And does "brown envelopes" refer to bribery?
yeah.
I'll stop shaving off the exposition.
robbie
>
> /MAB
>
ROBBIE
episode of our serial...."
Sammerthwaite Erect
His name, I have decided, is Sammerthwaite. He lives in near squalor and is
writing a long valedictory poem about the twentieth century. He lives mainly
on dog biscuits, gin and cigarettes and hasn't taken his slippers off for
nine months. The wig he wears resembles a dying plant and he's widely
regarded as a homosexual. Sixty three; a dead tooth in the front of his
sneer.
Sammerthwaite, on a March day sitting on his fourth hand settee; trousers
down, legs apart, erection looking, through his reptilian eyes, Pisa like.
Women's hour on the radio in the background.
"Skew wiff," he murmured.
He gripped his penis and flexed it slightly. The head was purple, with micro
shavings of parmesan cheese around the hole.
"Parmagaiona" he murmured.
He looked at the hole.
"Jap's eye," he said. He exhaled some breath and smelled the updraft- stale.
He looked around the room. Large table, smothered with paper. Bookshelves. A
brownbloomed coffee percolator. Tatty pink walls. A photograph of himself in
Ostend in 1950. His eyes roamed to a corner. His book of poetry and the spy
novel he published under pseudonym in 1969.
The typewriter. Radio four in the background. He gripped his member and
imagined his finger up the anus of the girl in the bakery. Many a prod he'd
had in the bakery.
The semen spattered forth and words formed high in his head,
The grey juice
The geyser of man
Unwanted, now
Without a plan
Wiped away with a crusted tissue
This glorious grease, the poet's issue
Then it was a cigarette for Sammerthwaite. Everyone had been told to give
up, except Sammerthwaite. His doctor was a timorous Pakistani who smiled a
lot.
A dull and repetitive beat began somewhere behind the walls. Sammerthwaite
picked up a skittle and hit the wall repeatedly, snarling.
Then he sat down. The typewriter. Clicks and taps. Cigarette smoke.
".The monomoustache of Vienna
whose ravings could be heard in Siena
Balled his fist and harangued the smiling dolts in Munich
Whilst Goering's fleshrolls quivered in his skyblue tunic.
War!!!!."
Pub?
In overcoat and slippers, Sammerthwaite hit the streets. Four quid in his
pocket. A cheap pint.
O'Rourke, the king of the betters. A gambling man; professionally Irish but
still someone Sammerthwaite could stand. O Rourke at the bar; paunch over
trousers and workman dirt on his boots; but he never went to work?
"In the year fucking two thousand," O Rourke was boozy woozy, "In the year
fucking two thousand and children stabbed on the streets of London. An evil
place this."
Sammerthwaite, dead plant wig at a state of disarray and a cigarette
between yellow fingers, cackled.
"Sanctimonious Irish priest routine? Fucking hell Eamonn, every mick in
London does the same act."
O Rourke looked up from his Standard.
"A poof with no hair, Mr Sammerthwaite, that's how you're perceived in this
backstretch of Londinium. No, a poof with fake hair. And you're drinking?"
"the sixty nine pence a pint intestinal washout. Brown's of Liverpool is
it?"
"That fucking crap. Sure you don't want Guinness?"
"Liffey water?" Sammerthwaite's dead, black tooth appeared momentarily.
"You wouldn't call it Liffey water if you'd seen the Liffey."
Sammerthwaite was making on it. A free pint of intestinal washout.
Buy a friend in need
A pint of mead
So that he does not go quickly
It's a friend indeed
Who helps your need
To stagger and talk thickly
It's a friendly creed..
To buy some mead..
And two office girls came in. O Rourke aroused; jowls red like dick red.
"I could do with a good spunk off," he said through Guinness effluvium.
The girls were all leg, shoe, lip and hair. Handbags, cigarettes and with
three young suits dancing a mating ritual with mobile phones and tidied,
greased down plumages.
"Mating season."
Sammerthwaite scratched his balls through his trouser pocket.
"Start a fight?"
O'Rourke's newspaper ruffled.
"Mr bald wig, you are more foolish than I thought. I doubt whether you've
the strength to get a bottle of whiskey out of the sideboard at Christmas,
never mind fisticuffs with three rugger buggers."
Sammerthwaite picks up a stool with a fluff top and cast iron legs up and
holds it at arms length. His green eyes fix O'Rourke's glassy Irish blues.
"Strong, see? Seventeen bricks, seventeen mick, mark you, seventeen, cross
ways."
The suits and the girl look across. O'Rourke tittered.
"Baldy, you might as well have taken your clothes off and jerked Uncle
Charlie awake for kit inspection."
Sammerthwaite's sweats at his temples.
"Stand by your beds,"
"Permission to carry on Sergeant Major. Another pint of the washout
Sammerthwaite?"
Then, on the way back, a rusty umbrella in the park. Sammerthwaite smoking
on a bench, with it opened over his head. The material in shreds, rain, thin
and industrial, drifted through on the wind and caught in his wig. The bench
was next to the lake. A flotilla of ducks out there in the smeary distance.
On the other side an angler, rod out, sunk, monk-like, in an anorak.
A broken portable roof
For a half pissed falsely accused poof
In front, the cradle of life decanted
Across the way a fisherperson dour, yet enchanted
He was erect again. Homeward direction; umbrella under arm; four stanzas
ready for the typewriter; four cigarettes and another erection; not a bad
day. He fenced at a the water fountain with the umbrella.
"Errol Flynn." He said, and giggled.
Martha Bridegam
ROBBIE wrote:
> ...I spoze it was part of an
> experiment in shaving down exposition- I was too reapy (new word: I reaped
> too freely)
...Whereas I have been reading Gertrude Stein today and find myself repeating
words in long elliptical sentences without commas because reading Gertrude
Stein has made me think how interesting it would be to write sentences without
commas.
(And, sheesh, is that lady ever stuck on herself. Poor Alice -- "Wives Of
Geniuses I Have Sat With.")
>
>
> And should we understand
> > that her project has something to do with poisoning the stream?
>
> No. I've just shoved her into the background a bit.
>
> And did we
> > already know he was writing a poem about Hitler?
>
> I'll post the first one again- and risk wrath.
OK, I'll oblige & be wrathy. (Cue close-order display of bad temper over
Episode I). There, now that's over...
Seriously, S. has changed a lot. He's much less Bukowski now.
> I'll stop shaving off the exposition.
Dunno. Maybe I was just being dense. Thx, anyway. Liked the early part with him
moving into the greenhouse & setting up his little world, with the jingle about
"an old horse like me."
/MAB
Tom Deveson
>...Whereas I have been reading Gertrude Stein today and find myself repeating
>words in long elliptical sentences without commas because reading Gertrude
>Stein has made me think how interesting it would be to write sentences without
>commas.
"...Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding. We can
represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously-reptilian length. Cut it
at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass
all through, and all along. It is weighted, projected, with a sibylline
urge. It is mournful and monstrous, composed of dead and inanimate
material. It is all fat, without nerve. Or the evident vitality that
informs it is vegetable rather than animal. Its life is a low-grade, if
tenacious one; of the sausage, by-the-yard, variety..."
Guess who? # [look down page for answer]
# Wyndham Lewis [the proper one, not GO's journalistic bugbear] writing
about *Three Lives*
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Tom Deveson
>...Whereas I have been reading Gertrude Stein today and find myself repeating
>words in long elliptical sentences without commas because reading Gertrude
>Stein has made me think how interesting it would be to write sentences without
>commas.
And the *other* thing that GS reminds me of comes from Aubrey's Brief
Life of Ralph Kettell (1563-1643):
"...now Dr Kettel was wont to say that Seneca writes as a Boare does
pisse, scilicet by jirkes."
Reminds by contrast, that is.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
Tom Deveson wrote:
> Martha Bridegam writes
> >...Whereas I have been reading Gertrude Stein today and find myself repeating
> >words in long elliptical sentences without commas because reading Gertrude
> >Stein has made me think how interesting it would be to write sentences without
> >commas.
>
> "...Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding. We can
> represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously-reptilian length. Cut it
> at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass
> all through, and all along. It is weighted, projected, with a sibylline
> urge. It is mournful and monstrous, composed of dead and inanimate
> material. It is all fat, without nerve. Or the evident vitality that
> informs it is vegetable rather than animal. Its life is a low-grade, if
> tenacious one; of the sausage, by-the-yard, variety..."
ick.
Nah, I'd say it's more like being the butt of the "no soap, radio" joke.
>
>
> Guess who? # [look down page for answer]
<beats me...>
>
> # Wyndham Lewis [the proper one, not GO's journalistic bugbear] writing
> about *Three Lives*
"...That winter, Alice Toklas, Picasso, and myself took a villa in the south of
France. I was then working on what I felt was a major American novel but the print
was too small and I couldn't get through it...
...Picasso was a short man who had a funny way of walking by putting one foot in
front of the other until he would take what he called 'steps.' We laughed at his
delightful notions, but toward the late 1930s, with fascism on the rise, there was
very little to laugh about. Both Gertrude Stein and I examined Picasso's newest
works very carefully, and Gertrude Stein was of the opinion that 'art, all art, is
merely an expression of something.' Picasso disagreed, and said, 'Leave me alone.
I was eating.' My own feelings were that Picasso was right. He had been eating.
Picasso's studio was so unlike Matisse's, in that, while Picasso's was sloppy,
Matisse kept everything in perfect order. Oddly enough, just the reverse was true.
In September of that year, Matisse was commissioned to paint an allegory, but with
his wife's illness, it remained unpainted and was finally wallpapered instead. I
recall these events so perfectly because it was just before the winter that we all
lived in that cheap flat in the north of Switzerland where it will occasionally
rain and then just as suddenly stop. Juan Gris, the Spanish cubist, had convinced
Alice Toklas to pose for a still life and, with his typical abstract conception of
objects, began to break her face and body down to its basic geometrical forms
until the police came and pulled him off. Gris was provincially Spanish, and
Gertrude Stein used to say that only a true Spaniard could behave as he did; that
is, he would speak Spanish and sometimes return to his family in Spain. It was
really quite marvellous to see.
I remember one afternoon we were sitting at a gay bar in the south of France with
our feet comfortably up on stools in the north of France, when Gertrude Stein
said, 'I'm nauseous.' Picasso thought this to be very funny and Matisse and I took
it as a cue to leave for Africa. Seven weeks later, in Kenya, we came upon
Hemingway. Bronzed and bearded now, he was already beginning to develop that
familiar flat prose style about the eyes and mouth...
...We had great fun in Spain that year and we travelled and wrote and Hemingway
took me tuna fishing and I caught four cans and we laughed and Alice Toklas asked
me if I was in love with Gertrude Stein because I had dedicated a book of poems to
her even though they were T.S. Eliot's and I said, yes, I loved her, but it could
never work because she was far too intelligent for me and Alice Toklas agreed and
then we put on some boxing gloves and Gertrude Stein broke my nose."
From "A Twenties Memory" in Woody Allen's __Getting Even__
c/o MAB
b-g-o-b
<a...@devesons.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> Martha Bridegam writes
>>...Whereas I have been reading Gertrude Stein today...
>"...Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold, black suet-pudding. We can
>represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously-reptilian length. Cut it
>at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass
>all through, and all along. It is weighted, projected, with a sibylline
>urge. It is mournful and monstrous, composed of dead and inanimate
>material. It is all fat, without nerve. Or the evident vitality that
>informs it is vegetable rather than animal. Its life is a low-grade, if
>tenacious one; of the sausage, by-the-yard, variety..."
>
>
>Guess who? # [look down page for answer]
># Wyndham Lewis [the proper one, not GO's journalistic bugbear] writing
>about *Three Lives*
>
I for one guessed it was Lewis, but then again I think I might have
read it before. The Hemingway piece where he tagged him the Dumb Ox?
Stein has some fairly negative things, as I remember it, to say about
Lewis in the "Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas" which is nothing to
Hemingway's revenge, for want of a better word, on Lewis in A Movable
Feast.
Tom Deveson
> Seven weeks later, in Kenya, we came upon
>Hemingway. Bronzed and bearded now, he was already beginning to develop that
>familiar flat prose style about the eyes and mouth...
And:
"...Here, in the unexplored dark continent, Hemingway had braved chapped
lips a thousand times..."
c/o Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Alan Allport
> ...Picasso was a short man who had a funny way of walking by putting one
foot in
> front of the other until he would take what he called 'steps.' We laughed
at his
> delightful notions, but toward the late 1930s, with fascism on the rise,
there was
> very little to laugh about.
That claim is especially preposterous. What, suddenly nobody laughed at
silly walks in 1938 because of Herr Hitler (who had a pretty silly walk
himself)? The Munich agreement made all banana skins and exploding cigars
instantly unfunny?
Alan.
Alan Allport
news:9adnus$aeo$1...@netnews.upenn.edu...
> That claim is especially preposterous. What, suddenly nobody laughed at
> silly walks in 1938 because of Herr Hitler (who had a pretty silly walk
> himself)? The Munich agreement made all banana skins and exploding cigars
> instantly unfunny?
Whoops, and it turns out to be a parody. Don't I feel a clod. Undoubtedly
the highest compliment that can be paid to Allen, anyway.
Alan.
Martha Bridegam
Tom Deveson wrote:
And:
"...I remember one night Scott Fitzgerald and his wife returned home from their
New Year's Eve party. It was April. They had consumed nothing but champagne for
the past three months, and one previous week, in full evening dress, had driven
their limousine off a ninety-foot cliff into the ocean on a dare. There was
something real about the Fitzgeralds; their values were basic. They were such
modest people, and when Grant Wood later convinced them to pose for his
'American Gothic' I remember how flattered they were. All through their
sittings, Zelda told me, Scott kept dropping the pitchfork..."
/MAB
Edward Belsky
1: I was totally umimpressed by Woody Allen's parody of Gertrude Stein with
two qualifications: (1) the title "A Twenties' Memory" was lovely (2)
parodies are murder. I can't think of any of Allen's that are any good
except for an occasional inspired line.
2. super-impressed by Wyndham Lewis' criticism of Gertrude Stein. I didn't
know he was different from D.B. Wyndham Lewis who had a regular column in
the News Chronicle under the name "Timothy Shy", but very glad to hear it.
3. Although I liked Wyndham Lewis' piece, I also liked Mab's dissent from
it --which dissent seemed rather apodictic for Mab--on the grounds that
reading Stein was in actuality more like being the victim of the 'no soap
radio' shaggy dog story. What I liked was how this dissent seemed
momentarily to be a literary quibble but turned out to be a way of breaking
our fall at the revelation that the Stein quote was a concoction of Woody
Allen.
4. Enjoyed Robbie's new Sammerthwaite installment especially because I like
irrepressible London rivers that everyone's forgotten about.
5. The piece on Timothy Shy, whom he groups with another columnist named
Beachcomber (J.B. Morton) from Beaverbrook's Express, is one of my favorites
bits of Orwell's writing. Here is a funny paragraph from it -- not a
pastiche -- for anyone who may have forgotten.
"Looking back over the twenty years or so that these two have been on the
job, it would be difficult to find a reactionary cause that they have not
championed -- Pilsudski, Mussolini, appeasement, flogging, Franco, literary
consorship; between them they have found good words for everything that any
decent person instinctively objects to. They have conducted endless
propaganda against Socialism, the League of Nations and scientific research.
They have kept up a campaign of abuse against every writer worth reading,
from Joyce onwards. They were viciously anti-German until Hitler appeared,
when their anti-Germanism cooled off in a remarkable manner. At this
moment, needless to say, the especial target of their hatred is Beveridge"
Edward Belsky
b-g-o-b wrote in message <3aca4b4...@news.es.co.nz>...
>
>>
>I for one guessed it was Lewis, but then again I think I might have
>read it before. The Hemingway piece where he tagged him the Dumb Ox?
Its interesting that the literary practitioners of the deadpan, faux-naif
I'm-just-reporting-the-facts literary style are all non-English.
Gertrude Stein
Hemingway
Andy Warhol
Jim Carroll (the 'good' Jim Carroll who wrote The Basketball Diaries)
e.e. cummings
Lots of American sixties examples
There is no English example.
Martha Bridegam
Edward Belsky wrote:
> 1: I was totally umimpressed by Woody Allen's parody of Gertrude Stein with
> two qualifications: (1) the title "A Twenties' Memory" was lovely (2)
> parodies are murder. I can't think of any of Allen's that are any good
> except for an occasional inspired line.
Oh, come on. OK, he's got a weakness for ending a sentence with a comic
gratuitous noun -- "...Other illicit activities engaged in by Cosa Nostra
members included gambling,, narcotics, prostitution, hijacking, loansharking,
and the transportation of a large whitefish across the state line for immoral
purposes..."
But we were howling last night over this one:
"...The mime now proceeded to spread a picnic blanket, and, instantly, my old
confusion set in. He was either spreading a picnic blanket or milking a small
goat. Next, he elaborately removed his shoes, except that I'm not positive they
were his shoes, because he drank one of them and mailed the other to
Pittsburgh. I say 'Pittsburgh,' but actually it is hard to mime the concept of
Pittsburgh, and as I look back on it, I now think what he was miming was not
Pittsburgh at all but a man driving a golf cart through a revolving door..."
>
>
> 2. super-impressed by Wyndham Lewis' criticism of Gertrude Stein. I didn't
> know he was different from D.B. Wyndham Lewis who had a regular column in
> the News Chronicle under the name "Timothy Shy", but very glad to hear it.
This is herself on Mr. Lewis:
"It was about this time that Roger Fry had many young disciples. Among them was
Wyndham Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, tall and thin, looked rather like a young
frenchman on the rise, perhaps because his feet were very french, or at least
his shoes. He used to come and sit and measure pictures. I can not say that he
actually measured with a measuring-rod but he gave all the effect of being in
the act of taking very careful measurement of the canvas, the lines within the
canvas and everything that might be of use. Gertrude Stein rather liked him.
She particularly liked him one day when he came and told all about his quarrel
with Roger Fry. Roger Fry had come in not many days before and had already told
all about it. They told exactly the same story only it was different, very
different."
and later
"...He brought with him the first copy of Blast by Wyndham Lewis and he gave it
to Gertrude Stein and wanted to know what she thought of it and would she write
for it. She said she did not know."
>
>
> 3. Although I liked Wyndham Lewis' piece, I also liked Mab's dissent from
> it --which dissent seemed rather apodictic for Mab--on the grounds that
> reading Stein was in actuality more like being the victim of the 'no soap
> radio' shaggy dog story.
Comes from painful experience. I had a friend who subjected me to Gertrude
Stein Deadpan on and off from eighth grade through college.
BTW, when did you first hear the "no soap, radio" joke? I heard it around 1980
& the teller said it dated from the '50s.
> What I liked was how this dissent seemed
> momentarily to be a literary quibble but turned out to be a way of breaking
> our fall at the revelation that the Stein quote was a concoction of Woody
> Allen.
Purely by accident, I hate to admit.
>
> 4. Enjoyed Robbie's new Sammerthwaite installment especially because I like
> irrepressible London rivers that everyone's forgotten about.
Me too. BTW there's an irrepressible San Francisco creek under our street,
which the developer next door didn't pay attention to when he excavated his
vacant lot. So for the last month or so there's been an irrepressible green
scummy San Francisco pond in the vacant lot about eight feet below street
level. We complained when the mosquitoes started, so he sent in a bulldozer but
it didn't fill in the IGCSFP, only made it smaller. There is a city website
that recommends putting mosquito-eating fish in any standing water, but given
Mr. Sammerthwaite's experiment I don't think we'll try that.
At least the guys doing the window glazing over there have taste in music. They
were just singing along to "Imagine." (Yes, Paul, I know you think it's crap.
But *I* like it...)
/MAB, apodictic and sometimes even apoplectic.
Edward Belsky
Martha Bridegam wrote in message <3ACB89A9...@sirius.com>...
>
>
>Edward Belsky wrote:
>
>
>"...The mime now proceeded to spread a picnic blanket, and, instantly, my
old
>confusion set in. He was either spreading a picnic blanket or milking a
small
>goat. Next, he elaborately removed his shoes, except that I'm not positive
they
>were his shoes, because he drank one of them and mailed the other to
>Pittsburgh. I say 'Pittsburgh,' but actually it is hard to mime the concept
of
>Pittsburgh, and as I look back on it, I now think what he was miming was
not
>Pittsburgh at all but a man driving a golf cart through a revolving
door..."
okay I laughed.. It's a good routine....but not so hard as I did over the
Monty Python routine about competitive poverty -- "we didn't have a house,
we lived in a lake" -- that you reproduced for abgo in November, over which
I was in stitches.
>BTW, when did you first hear the "no soap, radio" joke? I heard it around
1980
>& the teller said it dated from the '50s.
I did not travel in the sophisticated circles that you did when you were 12
until I was 17 or 18.and had arrived at college. I was very isolated as a
kid, did not think I should presume on the basis of sameness of age on my
contemporaries and force them to take me in. I first heard the 'no soap
radio' joke in 1975 (I was born in '57 the same year Wyndham Lewis died, but
there was no transmigration of souls). It was told to me by a sadistic
friend who is now teaching Greek at Yale. For anyone who doesn't know, the
"no soap radio' story is a kiddie version of the Alan Sokal hoax. It's a
set-up. You dupe other kids into laughing at a story with a senseless punch
line, thereby exposing that their appreciativeness in general does not
necessarily attend upon understanding. I don't recall whether I actually
was put to the test but if I had been I would have aced it because I was a
ponderous-reactor type kid not an eager Johnny-on-the-spot. The same
friend
would entrap people in another way: a Chinese high school student had
boarded for a while with his family and he and my friend conspired to make
high school friends tiptoe past and show respect and make themselves
invisible as he went through various bogus rites of an entirely fraudulent
and syncretic religion. Believing in
the reality of the rites supposedly showed up the friends' uncriticalness,
but there's alot in life we have to take on blind faith. So I don't see how
they got off crowing about it.
Martha Bridegam
ROBBIE wrote:
> "...this is the BBC home service, and now our serial...."
>
> Tap tap tap tap tap.....
Robbie, is any of this stuff something you feel part of...
http://www.4thestate.co.uk/puritans/manifesto.html
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0112/frey.shtml
...other than, obviously, the no-poetry rule?
/MAB
Edward Belsky
>
>> 1: I was totally umimpressed by Woody Allen's parody of Gertrude Stein
with
>> two qualifications: (1) the title "A Twenties' Memory" was lovely (2)
>> parodies are murder. I can't think of any of Allen's that are any good
>> except for an occasional inspired line.
>
>Oh, come on. OK, he's got a weakness for ending a sentence with a comic
>gratuitous noun -- "...Other illicit activities engaged in by Cosa Nostra
>members included gambling,, narcotics, prostitution, hijacking,
loansharking,
>and the transportation of a large whitefish across the state line for
immoral
>purposes..."
>
>But we were howling last night over this one:
>
>"...The mime now proceeded to spread a picnic blanket, and, instantly, my
old
But this isn't parody. It's Woody being frank about a dilemma that most
people don't mention, which is what he's good at.
Tom Deveson
>Robbie, is any of this stuff something you feel part of...
>
>http://www.4thestate.co.uk/puritans/manifesto.html
Let's hope he doesn't.
I read all 474 pages of Matt Thorne's *Eight Minutes Idle* -- described
on the back cover as 'bold, sexy, constantly inventive...an addictive,
urbane treat' -- and found it boring, repetitive and unfunny.
*Sammerthwaite* is interesting, varied and funny (among other things).
Even though Matt Thorne himself chose *Eight Minutes Idle* as one of the
Top Ten New Puritan Books for some silly list in the *Guardian*, I'm
still not convinced.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
ROBBIE
No, that disagrees with me. Its a cuntish thing. It's written by braying
'clever' middle class arrogant pricks who think having their arseholes
licked is the height of sexual coolness. They're all writing the same book
basically. These new paperbacks that are big with bold covers. Its the same
book- written by someone aged between 25 and 35, they contain the same core
motivation: sacarsm, cocaine and relationships. Matt is the most common name
of this breed- they have little or no sense of humour, they are extremely
money motivated and their life experience amounts to sarcasm, university,
LSD in Goa or in the Ministry of Sound, cocaine- which makes them think they
are immensely potent and funny- more sarcasm, and loads of E. They are very
boring, wish to be movie stars and really need to be kicked in the bollocks
very hard and forced to confront major problems or life experience. They are
the sort of people who speed read The Great Gatsby- whilst preferring Terry
Pratchett. CUNTS all CUNTS.
>
> /MAB
>
ROBBIE
Tom Deveson <a...@devesons.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
news:lgAQ9BAh...@devesons.demon.co.uk...
> Martha Bridegam writes
> >Robbie, is any of this stuff something you feel part of...
> >
> >http://www.4thestate.co.uk/puritans/manifesto.html
>
> Let's hope he doesn't.
>
> I read all 474 pages of Matt Thorne's *Eight Minutes Idle* -- described
> on the back cover as 'bold, sexy, constantly inventive...an addictive,
> urbane treat' -- and found it boring, repetitive and unfunny.
> *Sammerthwaite* is interesting, varied and funny (among other things).
Cheers.
>
> Even though Matt Thorne himself chose *Eight Minutes Idle* as one of the
> Top Ten New Puritan Books for some silly list in the *Guardian*, I'm
> still not convinced.
Well said
>
> Tom
> --
> Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
ROBBIE wrote:
Funny, this all sounds like early Jay McInerney. What's new about it?
And waitaminnit, Rowland likes Terry Pratchett, and judging by a quick look in
a bookstore, Pratchett is kind of like Douglas Adams, so he can't be as bad as
these New Puritan folks, can he?
/MAB
ROBBIE
Nothing, I wasn't striving for originality, I was just making observations.
>
> And waitaminnit, Rowland likes Terry Pratchett, and judging by a quick
look in
> a bookstore, Pratchett is kind of like Douglas Adams, so he can't be as
bad as
> these New Puritan folks, can he?
I don't like Douglas Adams- he writes a bit like me at times I grant you,
but in general, he's far too student union bar for my liking.
>
> /MAB
>
Nigee
Martha Bridegam wrote:
> and as I look back on it, I now think what he was miming was not
> Pittsburgh at all but a man driving a golf cart through a revolving door..."
>
Go in the Coach & Horses and there is a man who will mime the doors on Paris Metro
trains interminably until Norman throws him out. This is absolutely true. Its
funny for about 2 minutes but starts to seriously wear after 10. As the well
dressed Moroccan said to me, "He is fucking crazy", and yet, and yet, they keep
letting him back and feeding him alcohol.
N
Nigee
ROBBIE wrote:
>
>
>
>
> These new paperbacks that are big with bold covers.
Yeah, my ex was a graphic designer so she frothed over them. I prefer the
stripped down Repo-Man thing myself. Food. Book. Girl. I like the idea of
the newish chain called Eat.
> Its the same
> book- written by someone aged between 25 and 35, they contain the same core
> motivation: sacarsm, cocaine and relationships. Matt is the most common name
> of this breed- they have little or no sense of humour, they are extremely
> money motivated and their life experience amounts to sarcasm, university,
> LSD in Goa or in the Ministry of Sound, cocaine- which makes them think they
> are immensely potent and funny- more sarcasm, and loads of E. They are very
> boring, wish to be movie stars and really need to be kicked in the bollocks
> very hard and forced to confront major problems or life experience. They are
> the sort of people who speed read The Great Gatsby- whilst preferring Terry
> Pratchett. CUNTS all CUNTS.
The Beach is the most notable. People have tried to get me to read it. I
refuse. International dope-bores, whereby every country and culture is reduced
to "where can I get drugs and how much". Their interminable stories "And then
at the top of the pass my Llama went lame....". Cheerfully corrupting and
destroying native cultures.
N
Martha Bridegam
ROBBIE wrote:
Not meant to criticize this paragraph, which was a lot of fun to read, but the
folks in the movement -- as in how do these New Puritan dudelets *think* they
have advanced beyond early Jay McInerney?
/MAB
Martha Bridegam
ROBBIE wrote:
Are we gonna see more of the South London Lit-Crit One-Two around here?
/MAB
Tom Deveson
>Are we gonna see more of the South London Lit-Crit One-Two around here?
We've just done C Day Lewis's *The Otterbury Incident* -- a nice
children's book with memorable pix by Edward Ardizzone. What next?
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
Tom Deveson wrote:
explain?
/MAB
Tom Deveson
>explain?
ROBBIE and I found via email exchange that we had each, in our
chronologically wide-apart childhoods, enjoyed reading this subtle but
exciting adventure/school story quite a few times.
For Orwellians its interest also involves:
* the fact that it's written by a '30s poet, an ex-Communist and friend
of Auden, a forceful participant in the literary politics of the mid-
century
*the fact that it is about children who go to an 'ordinary' school, i.e.
a day-school in a town. The children go home in the evening to their
families and have adventures out in the streets. This may not seem very
world-shaking, but at the time of its publication [1948] it made the
book fairly original. [Geoffrey Trease, a very good writer for children
did similar stuff. He also wrote a pioneering book on the topic of
social reality and children's fiction which takes some points up from
where *Boys Weeklies* leaves off.]
* the fact, arising from the above, that it uses a child's-voice
colloquial first-person narrative [I know Huck Finn already did that way
back in the nineteenth century] of a similar kind, roughly, to Fatty
Bowling's -- bringing a touch of irony, a touch of melancholy, a touch
of poetry-in-spite-of-itself, a generous helping of realism, a sense of
mundane provincial lives being the place to look for human feeling and
excitement and yearning
* the fact that the Ardizzone drawings are as evocative of an era [here,
late 1940s] in their particular way as are the Rackham pictures that
Orwell mentions as redolent of an Edwardian childhood
There's probably more. ROBBIE can take over....
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
ROBBIE
I can't add much more than that really. Get onto Amazon Mab, and order it.
It's fun.
>
> Tom
> --
> Tom Deveson
ROBBIE
>
>
> ROBBIE wrote:
>
> > Martha Bridegam <jo...@sirius.com> wrote in message
> > news:3ACD315A...@sirius.com...
> > >
>
> Not meant to criticize this paragraph, which was a lot of fun to read, but
the
> folks in the movement -- as in how do these New Puritan dudelets *think*
they
> have advanced beyond early Jay McInerney?
>
Well the sad truth is Mab, that they probably haven't read any of him. I've
only read one of his books 'The Story of my Life' which, at twenty, I found
an absorbing read, and looking at it a few years later I picked up on some
of the heavier issues. What you have to remember about this crowd is that
their highest motivation is the cheap line, the flip metropolitan ennui
borne of having too much too easy. *They* would doth protest like fucking
mad but it's true, they might have had an emotional evening of 'where am I
going?' once, but I dare say they were merely worried about whether to go to
RADA, Oxford or India. 'New Puritan' pfui! What cunt thought that up? All it
is, is a depressing return to the old eighties routine of being smart asses,
young fogeys and essentially closed minded. Apart from anything else,
manifestoes, as I say on my Robbie site, are cuntish- if the twentieth
century taught us nothing else, it taught us, or should have, fuck
manifestoes, they're bad news. The trouble with young smart asses is that
they WILL NOT BE TOLD. I'm 30, but I'm beginning to see the light, people
ain't so different 'tween generation and generation, regardless of tellys
and computers and all that sideshow. Take this fella that is in the writer's
workshop that I'm in: he's about twenney four, but he's grown an unkempt
beard of old testament prophet proportions. He's written this political play
and he showed it to me. Every character was just a cypher for him to rant
politically- there was no energy in it, nor the sense that these were
actually people. Anyway, I gave him the benefit of this advice and he didn't
like it. "Ohhhh it might be better as a film script, ohhhhh I'll send it to
an agent, ohhhhh"
Wouldn't be told. Now if he gets published he'll be a monster of arrogance,
like these new puritans wankers, they've got lucky with cocaine and sarcasm
as a modus operandi and now they can't stop shouting about it. Time, and the
remainder bins, will tell.
> /MAB
>
Tom Deveson
>Time, and the remainder bins, will tell.
Good one.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
ROBBIE
cheers
ROBBIE
Nigee <N.J.N...@city.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:3ACDC12F...@city.ac.uk...
Exactly- coke cans and used tampons on the beaches of uninhabited islands.
>
> N
>
>