Very pleased that my journal has now had well over 100,000 views and over 65,000 visitors. Thank you everybody. This encourages me to continue evading niches. Most views were for my poetry, then for my art and then for my politics. So it is proof that you don’t have to restrict yourself to one box.
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Tame as we may appear to be, Brits are good at
Anarchy. Much appreciated are the japes
Perpetrated by St Trinian’s and the training
In revolt offered by that riot-prone establishment.
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The Pistols got it right, and rough music
Spurs our charivari on – epitomised by Punch
And Judy. Fuck the system. Turn things upside-down.
Beat your pots and pans. Go rampaging
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Through the streets. Scandalise the magistrates.
Model your role on that “Merry Gang”
Which included Rochester and Sedley.
From a tavern’s balcony in Bow,
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Sedley and a pair of kindred spirits,
Shocked and delighted a crowd below
With blasphemous and obscene antics.
Sedley “showed his nakedness” – wrote Pepys.
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As if he were from thence preaching
A mountebank sermon from a pulpit,
Sedley said he was there to sell such triturate
As should cause all the cunts in town
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To run most hotly after him.
To prove it, Sedley chose to masturbate.
That being done, he took a glass of wine
And washed his prick in it.
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Then drank it off, took another and drank
The King’s health. Nothing protects
Our emphatic right to be eccentric
More than our juries. They can acquit who they please.
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And while some Lord Chief Justice
May opine that it is because of wretches
Like Sedley “that God’s anger and judgement
So hangs over us,” me, I don’t give a toss.
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So hangs over us.” Me, I don’t give a toss.
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Conventional once more, Warfare can nevertheless
Take the world as her stage. A period piece perhaps,
Featuring asymmetric tanks. Nostalgic gear
Of the Great War – what the Napoleonic ones were
To the Victorians. There in the national memory.
We thought nuclear deterrence safeguarded us
From another world affair. But we were wrong.
Anywhere can be the next proxy. Similar to the memory
Of abuse, the memory of war fascinates
Its victims. So should war be viewed as a trauma
The species suffers from, is indeed driven by?
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Boots on the ground. The martial poetry of it all.
Now we have entered the labyrinth knotted for us by Thucydides.
We’ll lose the next. And most of us know it.
The Rakshas are the mob. They run things.
And they’ve taken over our votes, ridding us of our rights
As they might strip some starlet of her modesty.
War is a racket, yes. And like most rackets
Built on lies. Deterrence is too vast to put a stop
To missiles though. Back to the trenches. Now plus drones.
A murmuration of them fills the sky.
Why are we so driven to make enemies?
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It’s the economy, stupid! Capitalism is based on
Consumption, and built-in obsolescence
Means you dump your fridge or stove or car
Or trainers, but what more quickly gets consumed
Than a bullet? Why, its very aim is to be fired.
Munitions are the best dish the system ever tasted.
No excuse. They have to be replaced.
To get Warfare started, you invest in propaganda.
Fear must generate nightmares for folks to get
Behind the effort necessary to ignite her.
So feed their paranoia, one flag at a time.
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It gets to be addictive. We monitor its theatres:
Parasitic vultures peering through our screens
While people actually perish. Ah, but that’s
Entertainment. Killing enthrals us. Flight or fight
A mechanism which affects our animal reality
So that we move in lock-step towards some massive sacrifice
Believing that our puny act will bring the beast down finally.
It’s a bit like running a gambling joint filled with
One-armed bandits. Those guys and gals
Tugging away at their levers, they have to truly believe
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That the jackpot will fulfil their wildest dreams.
As for the boss and his staff, they know their bonus giveaway
Is as nothing compared to what these bandits reap them in.
War is very chummy, see, with banditry,
Basically she’s ushered into play by the State behaving
As a criminal. And this keeps happening because
The State itself is staged. Yes, it’s a Shakespearian scenario:
Politician puppets glove the hands of the crooks
Who wield the actual power, endowed by the gains
From previous heists committed maybe centuries ago
By ancestors of those who stand to profit most from mayhem now.
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Very pleased to see this published finally in THE EXACTING CLAM MAGAZINE Issue 21
This text is called I do more deeply
Click on the link to read it. It was written in 1973-74 when I was invited to join the International Writers Program in the University of Iowa. So it was written more than 50 years ago! At the time I was engaged in systemic writing – composers Philip Glass and John White were friends of mine, and I wanted to see if I could do in literature what they were doing in music.
The text is a shortened version of a booklength piece called HOT DAMN – which is now a Heyzine book accompanied by my own drawings – contact me if you want the link to that complete text.
This shortened text was read by myself and two other very fine readers (a man and a woman) at my final presentation in Iowa. Each paragraph had a formula: one reader reading one sentence, the next reader reading two, say, and the third silent. Then there was a different formula for the next paragraph. There was a brilliant recording made of this – but that has disappeared. Dancers accompanied the reading.
See these images on SUBSTACK
See also Busts on Black
The Paris Years by the Brothers Quay – brilliant animation and musical synchronisation.
The Brothers’ works from 1979 to the present show a wide range of often esoteric influences, starting with the Polish animators Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica and continuing with the writers Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser and Michel de Ghelderode, puppeteers Wladyslaw Starewicz and Czech Richard Teschner and Czech composers Leoš Janáček, Zdeněk Liška and Polish Leszek Jankowski, the last of whom has created many original scores for their work. Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, for whom they named one of their films (The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer), is also frequently cited as a major influence, but they actually discovered his work relatively late, in 1983, by which time their characteristic style and preoccupations had been fully formed.[4] In a panel discussion with Daniel Bird and Andrzej Klimowski at the Aurora festival in Norwich, they emphasized that a more significant influence on their work was Walerian Borowczyk, who made both animation shorts and live-action features.
Most of their animation films feature puppets made of doll parts and other organic and inorganic materials, often partially disassembled, in a dark, moody atmosphere. Perhaps their best known work is Street of Crocodiles (1986), based on the short story of the same name by the Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz. This short film was selected by director and animator Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time,[5] and critic Jonathan Romney included it on his list of the ten best films in any medium (for Sight and Sound‘s critics’ poll of 2002).[6] They have made two full-length live action films: Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life (1996), produced by Keith Griffiths and Janine Marmot, and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes (2005), produced by Keith Griffiths. They also directed an animated sequence in the film Frida (2002).
I have just discovered a review written in Double Dutch Magazine for Donald’s poems published by Grey Suit Editions.
Donald’s page on the Grey Suit website is here.
Very pleased to have found this interview with Nick Wood from 1978
See also https://anthonyhowelljournal.com/2023/05/08/performances-in-the-seventies/
anthonyhowelljournal 