The Circumflex » Pre-2009

We apologise for the recent interruption to normal service…

John Bolland — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:41:13 +0000

We will try to do better….

Thin black line in a cliff…

John Bolland — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:28:45 +0000

A friend of mine, the musician Ken Slaven, took the fatalistic view, whenever prospects seemed more than usually dire, that, in the end, we’re all just a thin black line in a cliff. I have always respected Ken’s wisdom. It has an appropriately secular and grounded sense of eternity.

It seems, according on a recent article on BBC Radio 4’s Material World programme (30^th Jan 2008), that geological stratigraphers are embarked on a project to assert a new benchmark in the fine Vernier gradations on the world-cliff by declaring the end of the Holocene period and the dawning (around 1815) of the Anthropocene, the geological period during which ‘future geologists’ will discern the fingerprint sworls of human industry and social organisation on the geological record.

The distinctive darkness of industrial society’s thin line is, as in all geological discourse, characterised by differences in the composition of sedimentary deposits. What endures is an elemental flavour of metals, radiogenic elements and whatever persists over time of granulated polymerised hydrocarbons. There will, allegedly, be a lot of concrete – reef-like rashes of structure, accretions and agglomerations here and there – Shanghai, New York, Rio - and fossil remnants in drifts, one imagines, like a sea-bed litter of ammonites, trilobites and molluscs.

I question, however, the appropriateness of the term anthropocene. The distorted sedimentation patterns described are not the consequence of human activity per se (which has chuntered along for a million years or so before 1815) but of a process called capitalism (private or statist). It is this ‘social’ process, deemed as self-actualising and inevitable as climate in most current discourse, which drives the redistribution of metallic elements, the creation of plastics, the concentration of CO2 and the accretion of concrete. Wouldn’t we be better calling the epoch the Capitalocene? Given the unsustainability of an infinite process of expansion, Capitalism, in a world of finite resources, this at least has the virtue of bounding the epoch, imagining an upper bound on this stratigraphic layer.

The contributors to the programme, at one point, embarked on a somewhat silly debate over whether the anthropocene marked the end of geological history – after all, what could come after? Either we persist till the end of time (or we evolve) in the anthropocene or it ends with us. Presumably the aggressive colonising arthropods from the planet Zarg will not use this term to describe the preceding era (if indeed nomenclature is part of their ‘culture’). Anthropocene, Holocene, Cenozoic – the whole slab of marble will be binned in the same debacle.

At least Capitalocene, containing as does Capital its intrinsic limits, provides humanity with a get-out clause, a glimmer of hope that there is a paler phase beyond this lateral smudge of heavy metals, dioxins and polyurethane. Adoption of the term Anthropocene suggests a short-sightedness which ill-behoves geologists. Come on guys! Give us a break!

That daws may peck at it

John Bolland — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:40:37 +0000

Having watched three “well-intentioned” Hollywood products in the last three months -Syriana, Babel and now Blood Diamond I am struck by the queer distortion in these ‘liberal’ efforts to expose or at least explore the evil of the global condition (did I just say ‘evil’? iniquities would be a better term ).   And by exploring end them?
Each seem to exhort individual consumer and moral choice (Don’t buy diamonds!), presenting this as the only available recourse. As with climate change, individual responsibility rather than corporate and state ACCOUNTABILITY are the only permitted requests.
In otherwords, do NOT take revolutionary or even ‘parliamentary’ action against corporate interests – and accept this ‘Africa’, “a godforsaken continent – emblem for all raw material sumps and cheap labour pools.
My limited experience of Sub-Saharan Africa – for all its alarming otherness and shaming spoliation – leads me to believe it is at least a ‘god seeking’ and ‘god sustained’ continent. The congregations of Luanda sing louder than any I have heard in Europe. Despite the arch ‘in jokes’ which slip through, Blood Diamond presents Africa to its audience with less insight and more objectification than Conrad could ever be accused of.
I recall the “social issues” hype which preceded the release of each film (perhaps excepting Syriana) and I recognize that perhaps I do Messrs Clooney, Pitt and DiCaprio a disservice. I suspect provoking and engendering anti-Americanism was not their conscious intention. Yet in all three cases, the imperatives of the movie market are assumed to demand that the central protagonist be a handsome, active, white, American male. The fact that Blood Diamond affords itself the luxury of a white African character in the ambiguous role of Danny/Rick (notably Rhodesian not Afrikaans) does not deflect the viewers awareness of DiCaprio as an American representation.
Of course, I may be falling into the error of my own identifications (as an OWM myself – neither handsome nor active alas).
Surely, in Syriana, the hero is the Arab prince? In Babel, the Mexican maid and the Moroccan child are central. In Blood Diamond, it is Solomon who ‘wins through’.
But how can the poor, weak, southern, minor, female, coloured be an active principle of salvation?
The commercial conventions demand that the active physical principle of the narrative is, in each case, a white (sacrificial) male. A human (and deeply complicit) ‘liberal’ suffering in the context of iniquity who STILL does not take up arms against iniquity but waits –will not deflect the doom he recognises.
I personally felt these films (unhelpfully) provoked anti-American sentiment in the wider world rather than demonstrating the common humanity that I believed each strove to illustrate. I fear they reinforce a conceit within America itself that it is ACTIVELY doing something. In each case, it is implied that the South can find justice and reconciliation, as Solomon does in the conclusion of Blood Diamond, in a suit and tie in a white man’s court.    These ‘texts’ wear their hearts upon their sleeves yet mistake effects and seek to turn them into causes. Iniquity is not a cause. Iniquity is the result.

Shoddy

John Bolland — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:33:08 +0000

Whilst visiting London with my eleven year-old son to attend the Royal Society of Literature AGM and award ceremony, I took the opportunity between the zoo and the National Army Museum to visit Damien Hirst’s Beyond Belief exhibition in Mason’s Yard.
I have found in the past that my children “get” Damien Hirst and conceptual art generally far more and more willingly than representational art in the form of room after room of flat paintings. Can’t get them through the door of the National these days and Tate Modern is a challenge but they have carried with them the pickled sharks, bisected pigs and maggot-riddled sides of beef whilst completely discarding Holbein. (They are also partial to a bit of Grayson Perry)

It was a very pious event (security has its own piety) with queues of well-heeled it artistas forming up on the side of the White Cube in Mason’s Yard-corralled by a steel chain. It was a warm day but wondering about thunder. The first spots of rain were falling.
Tall elegant security guys (more capoeira than pugilism) batched the audience into the building in groups of 10 to spend two minutes (without bags) in the darkened room.
There are no steps, cables or irregularities in the floor,” they assured us.
Two minutes to view the physically brilliant object and then out.
The object is a diamond-encrusted human skull in a glass display cabinet. The room is pitch-black. The object did evoke refelction on the brilliance of human intellect, the sparkle of consciousness-the dazzle of being alive. Got that! Tick! (And of course deeply pretentious bling-bling!)
And I hope that was some of its intent. But the Aztecs had already been there.
Down-stairs, after the brief ‘audience’ (in silence), more interesting paintings of delivery by caesarean section – a neo-realist treatment of the surgical environment and an interesting interplay of painterly and photographic visual conventions (background figures blurred by movement in painting to create the illusion of stillness (focus) in the foreground figures (which is of course counter-intuitive).
The boy, as expected, had no patience for the still earnest of the paintings. He has no dread of death or awe of dazzle. Pace and terror are his only consolations.
Well that was shoddy,” was all he said.

Birth of a shark…

John Bolland — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:17:49 +0000

This title, stolen I admit from the poem in by David Weevil which I first encountered in A. Alvarez’s book The New Poetry when I was in my late teens, keeps circling and recycling in my creative consciousness. Sharks have always been a liet motif in my work and now some bright young spur has snapped it up more effectively (in my view) than Messrs Spielberg and Benchley ever managed.
I attended the Debut Authors Festival organised by Pru Rawlinson at the Traverse, in Edinburgh, on the 9th and 10th of June. I had attended a previous event in this series a couple of years before, reading at the Jam Session on Friday.
I am fascinated by the subtle distinctions drawn, in the publishing ‘industry’, among readers and by writers themselves, between new writers and debut authors. I am reminded of a comment over-heard at the Aye Write Festival back in February.
A small child enquired of his mother in the corridor “What’s a publisher?”
And his mother, crouched down beside her child, replied, “You have to be published to be a real writer.” There speaks a writer who has not yet the courage of her convictions I fear.
So we come writers, real or unreal, to festivals to hear the same advice from authors, agents, publishers and self-help gurus and to check out the new voices – the successful select(ed) who have achieved that subtle metamorphosis from tadpole to frog-not yet to Prince. At least for a brief moment they have become ‘real writers’.
I am aware of a number of author-acquaintances with no contract for their next book seem anxious. They know their status as “real” is extremely provisional. They are not yet real. It is in the gift of others and whatever passes for the muse in the modern world. We are only as good as our last (published) sentence. There is no such thing as an unemployed author. ‘Real writers’ earn-this is an element of the reality- only dead non-commercial writers have equivalent substance.
So, wriggling my long black tail and hoping my legs were budding nicely from the black-blob of my body, I attended two sessions at the birthing pool.
At the Love Against the Odds session on Saturday 9th, four new voices were introduced to a healthy audience of sceptical readers and, I suspect, unreal writers. Annie Freud and Priya Basil both read well from interesting and amusing texts.
Priya Basil’s novel- Ishq and Mushq – offered affectionate well-weighted prose – always surprising from one so young – and, I felt, honourable in comparison with Daljit Nagra’s poetry encountered at St. Andrews earlier this year. A good debut. Applause. She hops away, green as spring grass, into the undergrowth.
And Annie Freud’s exploration of the quirks and complications of the erotic and affective (The Best Man That Ever Was) was clever and insightful. Worth the asking price.
Alas, the other two debuts fell flat, I felt.
The act of reading aloud should indicate a deep affection and connection for the words a writer has selected and set, even where the reader is understandable nervous or unpractised. Julian West’s reading from her novel Serpent in Paradise suggested work engineered and rather than written, a text constructed from its notes not spun around an armature of research and insight.
James Hopkin admitted (with pride) that his text lacked narrative drive-;”It’s about the words”-and I to share that ambition-but the words must warrant reading.
I found the event cheering.
Two workmanlike voices I respected and felt deserved publication encouraged me to feel that there was hope.
Two dire efforts encouraged me still more.
Luck as well as effort determines which tadpole makes it to the bank.
Imagine my surprise, dismay and pleasure then to discover next day, at the Dark Imaginings session, a truly compelling voice.
First, an honourable mention to Jonny Glynn’s skilful reading of excerpts from his pacy novel, 7 Days of Peter Crumb. His reading compelled interest and attention but it was Stephen Hall’s manifesto-segment from his (first) novel The Raw Shark Texts which immediately connected.
Readers, I bought the book.
Hall is to be roundly excoriated as at clever, skilful, inventive author who has created an exciting, playful and intellectually stimulating text.
I HATE that he has achieved this and achieved this so young! (And I suspect there is no greater compliment one writer another.
I read the text over the course of a few days in July this year-and I do not read quickly. In the early pages some details irritate-too free with the compound adjective I felt – but the novel’s early and convincing evocation of paranoia (I know the territory somewhat) and incipient madness gives way to an ingenious serial reframing of detective, fantasy and adventure tropes whilst completely convincing the reader to embrace the very premise which marked the protagonists as “mad” in the first place. My hand was wet! Hall is a real writer. Take my word for it and failing that – buy the book. In fact-just buy the book. Enjoy!

The Scots in St. Andrews

John Bolland — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 22:08:44 +0000

Shuttlebus – Fairmont St. Andrews hotel to St. Andrews Cathedral (ruin). On the in-car muzak – The Corries ‘sing’ Rise and Follow Charlie with the energy and pep of two geriatric convicts filing through a giant redwood with a blunt two-man saw. For the toorists I suspect. Eventually the boys (now long gone from the Scottish cultural scene) cannot sustain this lyrical abrasive any longer and switch to a dirge like Scots Wa’ Hae in ¼ time and a key of F-flat. Hail Caledonia.
Given my current wrestling with Scots as language in Line of Sight I was particularly interested in Scots writing as presented at the recent StAnZa festival. Trouble was, there didn’t seem to be a lot of it in evidence and what there was stalked by self-translation.
Poems in Scots – Janet Paisley and William Hershaw – St. Johns Undercroft. Recognising that the event paralleled the 100 Poets Gathering (so all the poets were being in the century), did the audience really have to have such a mothballed air – a good 30 years older than the average festival goes and with a tendency to mutter through the performances. The event began with a spirited sermon on Scot’s status as a language in its own right – hellfire and damnation on anyone daring to hint that it was only a dialect. Jamieson’s dictionary provided – it was asserted – proof incontrovertible of the language’s majority as a free-standing tongue. The MC – a very engaging guy who never introduced himself- also implied that Tagore might have used the word ‘jissom’ – which I found implausible – though his point was well made – the more used language lacks the aforesaid – is worn smooth and threadbare by over-use and consensus making – the power is in the minor languages, the languages still fresh, raw, beautiful – seams not yet mined out. General support – so far so good!
And – leaving aside my reservations on the poetic standing of dramatic monologues – Hershaw and especially Janet Paisley’s verse in Scots was powerful, flavourful, muscular, ruddy and hale. Janet Paisley’s commissioned Verse of Welcome to Edinburgh was a rich pudding of a poem (clootie dumpling) – over-generous with the big ticket Scots words – clamjamfrey and such – but a clever clebration of the language and its generosity. Imagine our dismay (therefore) when translation was repeatedly offered and foisted upon us by both poets. We can’t have it both ways! This was an audience that came to hear Scots and these were poems written first and foremost in Scots – as an act of identification/separation and as a means to access the ‘jissum’ in new/old forms. Why then bowdlerise and parody the music and muscle of these texts by rolling them flat (and that was exactly the effect!) – deflating them and rolling them flat into RP English – the new esperanto – the international exchange protocol – completely comprehensible and permutated into dullness.
Interestingly, Robert Alan Jamieson – a Shetlander – exhibited the same feartness – translating an excellent Shetlandic verse – Kennin – into English for his audience. Perhaps this is a moment of ‘politeness’ for the foreigners among us. But I think not. I think, beyond the music and the voice, we worry that we are not understood – lack faith in our insular convictions – but it’s alright – I can do it in English if I need to. Trouble is – we can’t.

StAnZa 2007 – Poetry vs Protean Voices

John Bolland — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 21:27:31 +0000

Spent last weekend, somewhat peripatetically, around the 10^th St. Andrews Poetry festival – StAnZa – billed as Scotland’s poetry festival. Having managed to avoid St. Andrews for the first 49 years of my life I find myself visiting the town twice in a month [In the discourse no-one can hear you scream].
St. Andrew’s, particularly on the weekend, was awash with poets listening to one another poetising.
I understand Germaine Greer announced some time ago that poetry was dead as a literary form citing, as evidence, that more persons were registered as poets (for tax purposes) in the US than the print run of the biggest selling poetry books. The idea that the number of writers exceeds the number of readers is indicative of the death of a literary form (of expression) rather than it’s burgeoning health is puzzling. Though I’ve always been a great admirer of Gee-Gee, I do wonder whether she feels people aren’t taking enough time out to pay attention to her.
Poetry is obviously NOT a spectator sport – it is, it would seem, a game of turns. This aspect of the sub-culture was particularly evident at the excellent but strange 100 Poets Gathering on the Sunday, 100 poets, 3 minutes (ish) each – strutting – in some cases literally – their stuff. An wonderful taster session for the poetically ignorant – an opportunity to put faces to names and (given the poetic fish-tank that was St. Andrews for that weekend) names to faces.
StAnZa also seemed to be taking the opportunity to expose the benighted Scot’s to international influence – hence what seemed a puzzling shortage of Scots poets at the events. The big name Scots seemed absent – Burnside, Jamie, Leonard, Patterson, Robertson – Jackie Kay in conversation but shining most in short story and monologue.
There was a lot of monologue in evidence – protean voices – the spoken word as poem (i.e. tidied into verse) and therefore allowed to jerk through quaint demotic bergamasks in the genteel parlour. I am not convinced a dramatic monologue is a poem – even if it is constrained to rhyme or speak in 3-second bursts. I can never figure out if the performer is liberating the oppressed or taking the piss.
Compare and contrast, for example, Jenni Daiches, Daljit Nagra and Jim Carruth. Jenni Daiches poem cycle ‘Smoke’ is an excellent gentle meditation on the crimes of the 20^th century, focussing on the German extermination camps of the 30s and 40s and the impact of that horror on surviving and succeeding generations. It is a beautiful dark work that left me with those wonderful splinters of imagery and sound that persist – ‘he cannot feel through fingers wrapped in rags’, a grandmother with a ‘head full of broken glass’. If I misquote from a week’s remove and one hearing, I am acknowledging the power and persistence of the words – and these are poems.
Narga’s work, in contrast, adopts a monologue form and exploits the freshness and fracture of English spoken (as though by) immigrant Punjabi’s – it celebrates the optimism and joy (jouissance perhaps) of striving, thriving Punjabi’s in a dialect of misunderstanding and slippery re-interpretation. It is a fresh, young and undaunted voice – and it fails to respect the struggle of its stolen masks – Daljit himself is not struggling with fragmented/ mescegnated language – Daljit is breaking language (breaking it anew) to offer us a vision of comic opera shop-keepers, honeymoon husbands, plump young wives…aw shucks! I can’t remember a single line. I remember caricatures.
Daiches would not, I think, claim to be speaking in protean voices – she is writing poetry. Narga claims an ancestral voice he has, in fact, slipped beyond – he mines his ‘heritage’ for amusements. And the theme of the unheard, marginal voice was carried over into the introduction of Jim Carruth’s work.
I did not know I knew of Jim Carruth. I had read one poem once – The man who hugged cows – and liked the poem and misplaced the poet.

Carruth writes real, deeply felt and understood poems from a point of view – a working rural point of view – not distinctively Scottish in economic or sub-cultural terms but Scottish in its landscape. Poems like Homecoming and Silence and Tapestry are beautiful, insightful and bitterly political poems celebrating and fiercely advocating a time, place and predicament. These people, marginal and central of the ‘life of the land’ as they are, are never not celebrated by the words. (My wife becomes a field is the most erotic poem I’ve read in a long while.) Having purchased (always a sign of something) 2 of Carruth’s published collections on the way out – Bovine Pastoral and High Auchensale – I thoroughly recommend the man’s voice – but it is not protean – it is authentic and it knows it is poetry.

Piling in on the side of the mad-men

John Bolland — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:12:01 +0000

Noted with interest the flurry of enthusiasm for things Baudrillardian as Jean grabs the cultural headlines one last time by shuffling off his mortal coil. Excellent summary of diverse Anglophone and Francophone responses to the same ‘objective’ events – Baudrillard’s death and Baudrillard’s work – in Click opera. Ignoring the side altar to Baudelaire – I always feel like a new kid in class not sure if he is out or in on a joke when that happens – I’m with Momus (I think) in believing that the Anglophone press just don’t ‘get’ the man and ‘pshaw’ at the paradigmatic Gulf War aphorism in a manner that looks plain foolish….Can the journalistic profession really READ in such a shallow manner?
The notion that what distinguishes Anglo-common-sensical (Hobbes and Reid) pragmatism from European (French!) idealism/ideology is that in Disneyland (the Anglophone world) ‘we’ can still discriminate between Snow White and the Evil Step-Mother …again…was I missing the joke here?
I think it’s interesting that no-one seems to yoke Baudrillard with Debord, especially in the Gulf War/9-11 context. With General Petraeus last week consistently referring to ‘sensational attacks’ – that is (presumably) high profile/visible/not-deemed-material – that is to say spectacular simulacra (Go tell that to the tortured and bereaved in Baghdad) it’s odd that the Pentagon gets it, incorporates it into its briefing to the world press and all the anglo-phone press can say is “Pshaw! Pretentious French balderdash!”

In praise of axillary russet

John Bolland — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 07:02:15 +0000

N is for Nabokov.
I started out on Invitation to a Beheading. I found the first 2 pages interesting. The nowhere/notime setting was a bit alarming but the immediate seizure of the reader – our protagonist already tried and sentenced – beginning at the end. I was disposed to take an interest (at least for 30 pages). But then I noticed ‘translated from the Russian’. Ah.
There are rules you see – to this game/ this project – terms of reference.
Non-Scottish novels written in English as a ‘first’ language. No translations.
Scots novels follow on from Z – the second half of the year – and then the delicate business of novels in translation (the tricky choice of author AND translator).
I had been avoiding Lolita. Too obvious a choice. But there she was. Back to Nabokov.
Reading Vladimir Nabokov’s writing is (with the possible exception of Austen’s) the most pleasurable and engaging experience in the A-N so far. The work is clever, fluent, cheeky, knowing and seductive, ironic and honest. An unreliable (and mischievous) writer writes in the guise of an unreliable narrator about forbidden desire and I recognise in his elaboration, excavation – in the archaeology of Humbert Humbert’s predicament – the city-plan of my own covert being – a different set of erotic and emotional tropes perhaps but the same ‘queer’ dissonance and angry insistence on the right to this authentic appetite. Just as Paradise by A.L. Kennedy perfectly (for me) validated and re-articulated the nature of my addictions, so Lolita maps and celebrates the nature of desire, its brimfulness and enchantment and predatory innocence.
Nabokov’s pre-emptive apology for Humbert’s stylistic excesses in the early pages is naughty – and the use of ‘chameleonic’ 20 or so pages later surely goes too far. I had to look up ‘axillary’ and I was rewarded – the artful filtering – the fog of words in which writer/narrator obscures the juicy suchness of desire – returns this jewel of a word, jewel of a phrase, jewel of an image – axillary russet.
I’ll stop for now but will return to this book soon and with the anticipation of reading pleasure.

You are old Father William…..

John Bolland — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 17:12:07 +0000

In a frenzy of enthusiasm I added a string of posts to this blog over the last 24 hours [ In the Discourse- No-one can hear you scream] presenting various takes on the speakers and behaviours at last weekend’s Crime Fiction Masterclass at St. Andrews University. Now…I am still struggling with all this meta-tagging, blogbot, Googlemastery, WTF shenanigans so, to see what effect that burst of energy might have had on the visibility of johnbolland.net and all his works out in the blogosphere and related circles (empyrean or inferno?), I googled what I thought were reasonable key words (I put them in the box myself!). Imagine my surprise (Go on! It’s not that hard!) to discover that I was not top ranked despite the queasy specificity of my search criteria….in fact I was not even listed in page 1 (Back to drawing board!)
Top ranking for my criteria [Rankin, Mina, St. Andrews] went to paolomanolo.livejournal.com. Spooky!
Well – not really…Paolo was at the same event…wrote about the same people…photographed the same people….filmed the same people…spoke to the same people…got his books signed! AND provided links to all and sundry. A model blogger Paolo. Fair play, as they might say in Ulster…meaning something less friendly.
The issue I would like to draw the attention to, if anyone is reading this, is the fundamental differences in the narrative, performative and critical assumptions evident when Paolo’s blog and my own are compared and contrasted.
Paolo’s blog is rich, referential, involved, enthusiastic, personal, self-disclosing, erudite, detailed, colourful and provocative. Paolo, writing I guess with half an eye on folks back home in the Philippines(?), is informative and interested and wholly uncritical. Paolo is in the swim of the culture, he is in there splashing with the ducks, he has brushed with celebrity and he is generously sharing his experience with his audience.
John Bolland, in contrast, is throwing rocks in the general direction of the pond from a stand of osiers some feet back on the muddy shoreline. From his place of concealment he lobs pebbles, half-bricks, Tesco trolley’s, old prams…the odd book reference. What a sad bookish old man?
I tell myself coherence will come…but maybe that’s just the King across the water.
Gaun yersel’Paolo. I’d love to know if there was a Rebus for Metro Manila.