Minority of One
There have been times when I have been really pissed off with campaigns on behalf of 'minority' writers, unable to see why any writer, their happening to be in a 'minority,' that that alone should see work of theirs in print.
During my writing lifetime there have been many minority campaigns – for Women writers, Black and Queer writers; with special editions given over to Northern, Welsh, immigrant, ex-pat and disabled writers.
Then there were the sub-divisions. For instance not all Women writers – this is their identifier, not mine – have belonged to the same grouping. Western women poets, no longer bound about by religious considerations or ethnicity, can and do write on any subject. Many Women writers however continue to protest their right to be heard, fulminate against the patriarchy, citing historical and cultural injustices as if suffering them now. Eastern women poets on the other hand, continuing to write from within their confining religions, slyly contemplate their life's absurdities and lament love's brevity.
Never having seen myself belonging to any grouping, of all classes and none, like Groucho as soon as someone sees me as an eligible candidate I do my damnedest to render myself undesirable. There is no class, no club, no movement I aspire to belong to. (Commentators can define movements: artists should not be confined by them.)
Candour has me admit that I have only myself to blame for my being in a minority of one. That is if I am looking for a culprit.
Candour also has me admit that there have been times when I have longed to belong to something worthwhile, and thus make me in my belonging a worthy individual. Never happened, always a membership clause too extreme or a fellow member too odious.
Old now I have lost the sense of who I am, who I might be, have been. In any crowd now I feel invisible, seen through/beyond. What I've done, where I've been, what I've seen of no importance to anyone, even to myself.
Happy to be just one? Resigned to being just one?
There is no intrinsic value being in a minority of one, no value or virtue in solitude.
Isolated in a barren landscape can grant an importance to one's every action, to one's every thought; or the same solitude can render oneself minute and one's every thought trivial and futile.
While a city crowd can make one just like everyone around one; and being less certain of one's self can also render one insignificant, isolated in another shoulder-bumped, toe-trodden way.
This is not self-pity, more self-resignation.
In the final analysis I am my art. As an artist – I alone have named myself such – but as an artist I have come to learn that we who call ourselves artists do support one another in our various and often ridiculous struggles. We leave it to critics to creep and criticise and even condemn. Because as artists we all know that art is process as well as product. Art is never certain where it is going or when it has arrived. Unless it is self-adornment, then it stays where it is.
Here I am.
© Sam Smith 30th April 2024
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Beyond 'Death With Dignity'
I call myself a humanist, but find myself out of step with Humanist UK in their campaigning for a change in the law to allow for 'Death With Dignity,' which I feel will have too few safeguards. Or that it will have too many to make it workable, and thus send those thinking it offers them or their loved ones an easeful end but instead gets them lost in bureaucracy.
Let me start simply.
As a mental health nurse I spent many hours attempting to talk patients out of their suicidal ideation. 'Better for everyone,' many said, 'if I wasn't here.' 'What has life to offer me but more pain?'
If any of those patients were eventually reconciled to an unsatisfactory life it had probably been due more to prescribed medication/treatments than to any earnest words of mine. I did however convince myself.
Put simply the job of doctors and nurses is to delay death. That is what society expects of them, to extend life. Which brings us to the nub, what kind of life? What quality of life? And, most importantly, who decides?
I have known multiple amputees crying out for death. I have known other amputees eager to embrace any new contraption that enabled them to make more of the life left to them. I have known survivors of suicide reconciled to their hurtful past and wanting to begin anew their life. And when my father, in the latter stages of vascular dementia, was in agony from an unmendable broken pelvis and was being kept going in a morphine trance, I asked his clinician not to, if possible, prolong his pain. Next morning he was gone.
So I do get it: how a terminal illness/condition can make what is left of life so intolerable that you, or those with responsibility for close family members, in all humanity want to see that life brought quickly to a close. But to make a business of it? To go abroad to buy a quick death?
Or remain here and endeavour to persuade clumsy, right/wrong legislators to define whose life is worth living? And then to leave the actual decision up to an unimaginative jobsworth getting all their boxes ticked prior to them administering the fatal dose? Or, even worse, leaving the fatal decision to someone in thrall to the ideology of Death With Dignity that they administer it with near religious fervour, disregarding any possible doubts the applicant[s] might have had.
There will always be, for a variety of circumstances, people in pain and suffering; and there will always be, I hope, doctors and nurses doing their best to alleviate that pain. And, because there are rightly checks on doctors and nurses, I hope and believe that any permanent alleviation of that pain will not be undertaken lightly.
That said 'helping' someone to die, removing their one life, must always be considered a crime. Or we ease the door open to more pathological killers like Harold Shipman or to nurses with a weird life/death outlook. If euthanasia is to be decided upon I want that decision to be made bravely, by that decision to have been thought through by someone at risk of losing their career and while believing that it still is, for the person before them, in all humanity the right thing to do.
Life and death is all chance, who met, how conceived, where/when/how born, how diseased, how dying. I'd rather trust to luck/chance that at my end, if in pain, a doctor will look on my death throes with a kindly eye and ease my going.
Assisted dying, euthanasia, does not require the blessing of simplistic legislation. We need to go beyond propaganda and prejudice, beyond hard cases, beyond both cold-eyed logic and sentimentality.
Politicians are not philosophers: would that they were. Politicians are, as has been amply demonstrated recently, the paid representatives of specialist interests. Or for the sake of votes politicians will take up the latest worthy cause. Let it not be Death With Dignity. Politicians are not too be trusted. Doctors are.
© Sam Smith 23rd April 2024
________________________________________________
While several thousand Palestinians, Israelis, Ukrainians, Russians, Sudanese and Syrians were/are being killed...
I mouse-clicked on one sign petition after another, so many petitions against so many killings. And the latest, having been signed and shared, this being my way of life, I wondered what next to write.
I did talk to friends and family about how awful were/are our current set of politicians in their support of the killings. In our Western democracies however most of the populace are without power. O we are allowed to organise marches, sit-ins, can sign petitions and make our opposition to these mass killings known. We also know that we will be, as we were in 2003, disregarded. Our politicians, paid for by interested parties, will continue to support the killings; and they will imprison those like Julian Assange who expose their war killings, their war industries and machinations.
And while the killings went on/go on I wondered/wonder what next to write.
The killings went on as we left British Summer Time and returned to Greenwich Mean Time. My old body clock was slow to adjust to the new waking times, meal times... The politicians continued to support the various slaughters; and I wondered what next to write.
While young men and women, draft-dodgers, refusers, went to prison or crossed borders; and the politicians wondered where to draw new lines in their 'solution,' all putting aside the knowledge that where previous lines have been drawn they have led to nothing but more trouble. Not only for Palestinians, but in Ireland, Kashmir, for the Maasai, the Kurds, Armenians, and in Myanmar, Korea...
I wondered what next to write as the killings went on/go on. As we left Greenwich Mean Time and returned to British Summer Time my old body clock was slow to adjust to the new waking times, meal times. I learnt though that Fabian means, literally, an evader of battle. Which has me wish that there were more true Fabians, and not only in our Parliament's official opposition.
I expect that I'll go on wondering what next to write while thousands more are being slaughtered to appease a general's vanity and increase the profits of war manufacturers. And right now I'm wondering what next to cook for dinner, what next to write; and I fervently wish luck, lots of luck, to all the draft-dodgers, refusers, and those rare souls, the seekers of peace.
© Sam Smith 15th April 2024
Jovial Witnesses
Granted not all life is performance. But still I laugh. A lot. Hens eating leftover spaghetti - always good for a laugh. I laughed reading Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition, at what is still being taken seriously in this ridiculous world. How we go from Fay Weldon's one murky confusion into another. Herman Hesse thought that eternity was just long enough for a joke and Henry Miller that men are the laughing stock of creation. Kjell Espmark sold everything for twenty laughs. Stephen Vizinczey believed that sex, like death, gives us our deepest experience of the Absurd. Gore Vidal once gave himself up to experience. John Updike thought no act so private it did not seek applause. Guillame Apollinaire got drunk drinking the whole universe. Albert Camus might have been a stranger to himself, but for John Clare the place he occupied seemed all the world, while Kyorai slept like a traveller in his own town. On the other hand Sidse Babette Knudsen believed that there was something healthy about being a foreigner. Carlo Rovelli said that you don't get to new places by following established tracks. (Fanatics are usually guided by rascals, Voltaire told me.) Albert Camus hated violence less than the institutions of violence. Umberto Eco met someone who wanted to make a revolution, but with police permission. Günter Grasse held that a citizen's first duty is not to keep quiet. Holderlin saw himself as a child with grey hair and Edward Thomas found himself content with his discontent. T S Eliot's beginnings never knew his ends. Phillip K Dick wondered where the past goes when it goes. Henry Miller didn't live in the moment, sometimes a little behind, sometimes a little ahead; and every time that Colin Wilson did anything he committed himself to the future. E M Forster thought it better to be fooled than to be suspicious. Francois Sagan said that you can despise what you love. Brian Aldiss's mind was like a rat in a maze, being both rat and maze. Judith Rossner's ambition in life was to have one unmixed feeling. Violette LeDuc thought that literature led to love, and love to literature. Marianne Moore said that languages are the supertadpoles of expression. Margaret Attwood said that wanting to meet a writer because you like their books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. Nikos Kazantzakis thought that women, fruit and ideas were some of the many joys of this world. Sex is the one subject, according to Robert A Heinlein, that everybody lies about. Poor Vicki Baum found life a lonely affair. Nicholas Lezard found some fine-sounding nonsense. Graham Farnel came up against the present state of well-informed perplexity. Martin Amis claimed that every life must have its holidays. Every hypochondriac is his own prophet, said Robert Lowell. Kurt Vonnegut once lost himself in the magic of capillary attraction. H H Kirst was firmly of the opinion that novels are governed by their own laws. Brian Aldiss believed that truth can arrive in as many forms as lies, Pablo Picasso that Art is a lie that makes us see the Truth, and Erica Jong that everything human is imperfect and ultimately absurd. Truth is only to be had, Virginia Woolf believed, by laying together many varieties of error. Carl Jung was of the firm belief that all great truths must end in paradox. Soren Kierkegaard wanted to exist in the truths he found. Wislawa Szymborska claimed that the unthinkable is thinkable. Meanwhile the rest of the world, Percy Grainger said, is dying of good taste. Margaret Drabble concurred, approving of everything new that was not monstrous. Ray Bradbury said that life is questions, not answers. John Fowles always found his own faults more interesting than other people's virtues. Tom Robbins held that a book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. Catherine Drinker Bowen said that happiness has no story. John Steinbeck said that any story has as many versions as it has readers. Margaret Drabble failed to get hers into a fit state for anecdote. M John Harrison inferred reality. Paul Theroux believed that one of his characters wouldn't say shit if he stepped in it. A megrim is both a headache and a scald-fish. Colette's very last word was “Regarde!”
8th April 2024
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The Journal: State of Play
Now that #70 The Journal has been posted out I am going to place The Journal on hold. I'm hoping that, once outgoings and income return to some sort of balance, I can open The Journal to submissions again. I don't however have a huge amount of hope.
The foremost reason for my closing The Journal to submissions has been the cost of postage. How the privatised Royal Mail can justify the increases is beyond me. Print costs have also gone up, but only in line with inflation. The excessive Royal Mail increases – 30% in a year - if not the result of chronic mismanagement, have to be profiteering; and it is the Royal Mail increases, one after the other within a year, that have brought The Journal to this halt.
I could of course raise The Journal's price to cover costs. But I feel that within a cost of living crisis £6.00 is already the limit that people are prepared to pay. And I know that raising the price again would cost me subscribers and send The Journal further into debt.
Having been run always on a not-for-profit basis I have never received any public money for The Journal. That is not to say that I haven't applied to arts bodies for grants. Unsuccessfully. Arts bodies during The Journal's lifetime have seemed to link grants either to the anticipated audience for a performance or to 'community' endeavours, or to a flavour-of-the-month social grouping. As The Journal has been avowedly international, non-parochial, from the off, no local money has found its way to us.
Privately some individuals have donated a few pounds here and there to help with running costs, for which I have been both surprised and grateful. Was not money enough however to now help keep The Journal afloat; and I can no longer afford to subsidise it out of my state pension and from the small amounts that I nowadays earn from my own writings.
Friends have suggested converting The Journal into an online version. While I have had my own work published in online magazines, and have been pleased to see my work there, grateful to the editors, I do so much prefer my writing to be on the printed page.
Through books, through print, was how I came to poetry. Through print is how I have been introduced to poets from around the world and from other times. Poets first spoke to me from the page, and on the page is where I try to make my poems come alive.
Although I am grateful to those online magazines that have used my work I am much happier when a print magazine takes a poem or two. Not only do I find reading poems on screens difficult – the size of print, background glare, altered format – online is so of-the-moment, hard to refer back up to a line, to study at leisure. Unlike books or magazines which are so easy to pick up again, mark a page, the very nature of screen reading doesn't let me tarry, drift off, look away, come back to a phrase... By the time I've absorbed the poem the screen has switched to 'safe mode', is showing old photos, is taking my mind elsewhere.
Print is how I came to poetry. If The Journal is to continue it has to be in print.
And here is where I confess that it is not only rising costs and my getting old that is making me take a break from tri-annual publication. Over the past couple of decades I have become aware of a disenchantment growing within me over trends in the general poetry scene.
Although I have organised festivals, have been happy to wait my turn at open mikes, have helped run poetry cruises, I have never myself enjoyed giving readings, have done so always only in the hope of selling a book/magazine or two.
When I was first published by Odyssey magazine editor Derrick Woolf pressed me for a year or more to read at the events he organised in Coleridge Cottage. I refused, said that I didn't see the point as I had no collection to sell. Having listened there to others reading I was acutely aware of how the person, how they spoke, interfered with my reception of the poem. The anonymity of print was what I wanted for my work.
Derrick however got a poem of mine accepted for that year's Forward Prize and I was invited to read it on Radio 3. A nerve-jelly experience that in itself was no encouragement. But having read in public I could no longer justify my refusing to read at Derrick's soirées. Then once I had a collection – To Be Like John Clare (Salzburg University Press, 1996) – I could promote that at readings anywhere and everywhere.
Print has always been my objective, is what has mattered to me. I want people like me, private people, people I am never likely to meet, to read my words. In like manner I was so pleased when David Gettman belatedly made my novel Sister Blister (Online Originals, 1996) available in hardback as as well as eBook.
I am by no means alone in this preference. Cixin Liu recently said, 'Paper lasts longer than a computer.' Just think how much work now resides on out-of-date electronic equipment, unlikely to be ever retrieved. Or only with great effort. A book on the other hand can at any time be pulled off a shelf.
The emphasis in the current poetry scene however seems to be on performance alone. Performance for performance sake. Performance is now where arts funds, if any, go.
There are now fewer and fewer unfunded print magazines. Especially compared to the 1990s when there were so many, the fruits of desktop publishing, more than a few getting printed and put together at home. In those days one could readily find an editor who shared one's outlook, favoured a style, an approach, a subject matter. But that was pre-privatisation of the UK postal service, when such as Geoff Stevens' Purple Patch could get mailed out every month. And there were so many as productive – Martin Holroyd's Poetry Monthly, Eric Ratcliffe's Ore, Gerald England's New Hope International, Talitha Clare and Robin Brooks' Moonstone... and so on and so many more. The SF author and poet John Light even posted out an annual Light's List of magazines.
So much for the heyday of small press print and cheap postage. Nowadays it seems that performance alone is how most perceive and promote their poetry. And my own experience has me believe that a good performance/reading rarely equates to a good poem. Whereas a good poem can be let down by a poor reading.
Of the poems themselves so many seem to be in the first person singular; and while there can be artistry in performance, the vogue now being for self-expression, even of those poems making it into print, where are the poems that aspire to being a small work of art?
There is always that buzz after a reading, the applause, the bonhomie, a sense of camaraderie, an evening spent among like-minded folk; but nine times out of ten what was politely applauded were their own projected selves having been brave enough to stand out front and read. Thee will have been no real assessment of the poems themselves, no reviews, analysis as in a magazine. No rejection. At open mikes people can get up and say whatever they like, call that bunch of words a poem. None will get rejected, and rejection is a great teacher. As is a bad review, will certainly get you looking again at the work. And that reading, that performance will have been it, a poem's one and only outing, save possibly on a scrolled-by social media.
A poem's publication in a small press magazine like The Journal was once considered ephemeral. How much more ephemeral will have been its being read to a small audience?
© Sam Smith 11th January 2024
There have been times when I have been really pissed off with campaigns on behalf of 'minority' writers, unable to see why any writer, their happening to be in a 'minority,' that that alone should see work of theirs in print.
During my writing lifetime there have been many minority campaigns – for Women writers, Black and Queer writers; with special editions given over to Northern, Welsh, immigrant, ex-pat and disabled writers.
Then there were the sub-divisions. For instance not all Women writers – this is their identifier, not mine – have belonged to the same grouping. Western women poets, no longer bound about by religious considerations or ethnicity, can and do write on any subject. Many Women writers however continue to protest their right to be heard, fulminate against the patriarchy, citing historical and cultural injustices as if suffering them now. Eastern women poets on the other hand, continuing to write from within their confining religions, slyly contemplate their life's absurdities and lament love's brevity.
Never having seen myself belonging to any grouping, of all classes and none, like Groucho as soon as someone sees me as an eligible candidate I do my damnedest to render myself undesirable. There is no class, no club, no movement I aspire to belong to. (Commentators can define movements: artists should not be confined by them.)
Candour has me admit that I have only myself to blame for my being in a minority of one. That is if I am looking for a culprit.
Candour also has me admit that there have been times when I have longed to belong to something worthwhile, and thus make me in my belonging a worthy individual. Never happened, always a membership clause too extreme or a fellow member too odious.
Old now I have lost the sense of who I am, who I might be, have been. In any crowd now I feel invisible, seen through/beyond. What I've done, where I've been, what I've seen of no importance to anyone, even to myself.
Happy to be just one? Resigned to being just one?
There is no intrinsic value being in a minority of one, no value or virtue in solitude.
Isolated in a barren landscape can grant an importance to one's every action, to one's every thought; or the same solitude can render oneself minute and one's every thought trivial and futile.
While a city crowd can make one just like everyone around one; and being less certain of one's self can also render one insignificant, isolated in another shoulder-bumped, toe-trodden way.
This is not self-pity, more self-resignation.
In the final analysis I am my art. As an artist – I alone have named myself such – but as an artist I have come to learn that we who call ourselves artists do support one another in our various and often ridiculous struggles. We leave it to critics to creep and criticise and even condemn. Because as artists we all know that art is process as well as product. Art is never certain where it is going or when it has arrived. Unless it is self-adornment, then it stays where it is.
Here I am.
© Sam Smith 30th April 2024
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Beyond 'Death With Dignity'
I call myself a humanist, but find myself out of step with Humanist UK in their campaigning for a change in the law to allow for 'Death With Dignity,' which I feel will have too few safeguards. Or that it will have too many to make it workable, and thus send those thinking it offers them or their loved ones an easeful end but instead gets them lost in bureaucracy.
Let me start simply.
As a mental health nurse I spent many hours attempting to talk patients out of their suicidal ideation. 'Better for everyone,' many said, 'if I wasn't here.' 'What has life to offer me but more pain?'
If any of those patients were eventually reconciled to an unsatisfactory life it had probably been due more to prescribed medication/treatments than to any earnest words of mine. I did however convince myself.
Put simply the job of doctors and nurses is to delay death. That is what society expects of them, to extend life. Which brings us to the nub, what kind of life? What quality of life? And, most importantly, who decides?
I have known multiple amputees crying out for death. I have known other amputees eager to embrace any new contraption that enabled them to make more of the life left to them. I have known survivors of suicide reconciled to their hurtful past and wanting to begin anew their life. And when my father, in the latter stages of vascular dementia, was in agony from an unmendable broken pelvis and was being kept going in a morphine trance, I asked his clinician not to, if possible, prolong his pain. Next morning he was gone.
So I do get it: how a terminal illness/condition can make what is left of life so intolerable that you, or those with responsibility for close family members, in all humanity want to see that life brought quickly to a close. But to make a business of it? To go abroad to buy a quick death?
Or remain here and endeavour to persuade clumsy, right/wrong legislators to define whose life is worth living? And then to leave the actual decision up to an unimaginative jobsworth getting all their boxes ticked prior to them administering the fatal dose? Or, even worse, leaving the fatal decision to someone in thrall to the ideology of Death With Dignity that they administer it with near religious fervour, disregarding any possible doubts the applicant[s] might have had.
There will always be, for a variety of circumstances, people in pain and suffering; and there will always be, I hope, doctors and nurses doing their best to alleviate that pain. And, because there are rightly checks on doctors and nurses, I hope and believe that any permanent alleviation of that pain will not be undertaken lightly.
That said 'helping' someone to die, removing their one life, must always be considered a crime. Or we ease the door open to more pathological killers like Harold Shipman or to nurses with a weird life/death outlook. If euthanasia is to be decided upon I want that decision to be made bravely, by that decision to have been thought through by someone at risk of losing their career and while believing that it still is, for the person before them, in all humanity the right thing to do.
Life and death is all chance, who met, how conceived, where/when/how born, how diseased, how dying. I'd rather trust to luck/chance that at my end, if in pain, a doctor will look on my death throes with a kindly eye and ease my going.
Assisted dying, euthanasia, does not require the blessing of simplistic legislation. We need to go beyond propaganda and prejudice, beyond hard cases, beyond both cold-eyed logic and sentimentality.
Politicians are not philosophers: would that they were. Politicians are, as has been amply demonstrated recently, the paid representatives of specialist interests. Or for the sake of votes politicians will take up the latest worthy cause. Let it not be Death With Dignity. Politicians are not too be trusted. Doctors are.
© Sam Smith 23rd April 2024
________________________________________________
While several thousand Palestinians, Israelis, Ukrainians, Russians, Sudanese and Syrians were/are being killed...
I mouse-clicked on one sign petition after another, so many petitions against so many killings. And the latest, having been signed and shared, this being my way of life, I wondered what next to write.
I did talk to friends and family about how awful were/are our current set of politicians in their support of the killings. In our Western democracies however most of the populace are without power. O we are allowed to organise marches, sit-ins, can sign petitions and make our opposition to these mass killings known. We also know that we will be, as we were in 2003, disregarded. Our politicians, paid for by interested parties, will continue to support the killings; and they will imprison those like Julian Assange who expose their war killings, their war industries and machinations.
And while the killings went on/go on I wondered/wonder what next to write.
The killings went on as we left British Summer Time and returned to Greenwich Mean Time. My old body clock was slow to adjust to the new waking times, meal times... The politicians continued to support the various slaughters; and I wondered what next to write.
While young men and women, draft-dodgers, refusers, went to prison or crossed borders; and the politicians wondered where to draw new lines in their 'solution,' all putting aside the knowledge that where previous lines have been drawn they have led to nothing but more trouble. Not only for Palestinians, but in Ireland, Kashmir, for the Maasai, the Kurds, Armenians, and in Myanmar, Korea...
I wondered what next to write as the killings went on/go on. As we left Greenwich Mean Time and returned to British Summer Time my old body clock was slow to adjust to the new waking times, meal times. I learnt though that Fabian means, literally, an evader of battle. Which has me wish that there were more true Fabians, and not only in our Parliament's official opposition.
I expect that I'll go on wondering what next to write while thousands more are being slaughtered to appease a general's vanity and increase the profits of war manufacturers. And right now I'm wondering what next to cook for dinner, what next to write; and I fervently wish luck, lots of luck, to all the draft-dodgers, refusers, and those rare souls, the seekers of peace.
© Sam Smith 15th April 2024
Jovial Witnesses
Granted not all life is performance. But still I laugh. A lot. Hens eating leftover spaghetti - always good for a laugh. I laughed reading Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition, at what is still being taken seriously in this ridiculous world. How we go from Fay Weldon's one murky confusion into another. Herman Hesse thought that eternity was just long enough for a joke and Henry Miller that men are the laughing stock of creation. Kjell Espmark sold everything for twenty laughs. Stephen Vizinczey believed that sex, like death, gives us our deepest experience of the Absurd. Gore Vidal once gave himself up to experience. John Updike thought no act so private it did not seek applause. Guillame Apollinaire got drunk drinking the whole universe. Albert Camus might have been a stranger to himself, but for John Clare the place he occupied seemed all the world, while Kyorai slept like a traveller in his own town. On the other hand Sidse Babette Knudsen believed that there was something healthy about being a foreigner. Carlo Rovelli said that you don't get to new places by following established tracks. (Fanatics are usually guided by rascals, Voltaire told me.) Albert Camus hated violence less than the institutions of violence. Umberto Eco met someone who wanted to make a revolution, but with police permission. Günter Grasse held that a citizen's first duty is not to keep quiet. Holderlin saw himself as a child with grey hair and Edward Thomas found himself content with his discontent. T S Eliot's beginnings never knew his ends. Phillip K Dick wondered where the past goes when it goes. Henry Miller didn't live in the moment, sometimes a little behind, sometimes a little ahead; and every time that Colin Wilson did anything he committed himself to the future. E M Forster thought it better to be fooled than to be suspicious. Francois Sagan said that you can despise what you love. Brian Aldiss's mind was like a rat in a maze, being both rat and maze. Judith Rossner's ambition in life was to have one unmixed feeling. Violette LeDuc thought that literature led to love, and love to literature. Marianne Moore said that languages are the supertadpoles of expression. Margaret Attwood said that wanting to meet a writer because you like their books is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. Nikos Kazantzakis thought that women, fruit and ideas were some of the many joys of this world. Sex is the one subject, according to Robert A Heinlein, that everybody lies about. Poor Vicki Baum found life a lonely affair. Nicholas Lezard found some fine-sounding nonsense. Graham Farnel came up against the present state of well-informed perplexity. Martin Amis claimed that every life must have its holidays. Every hypochondriac is his own prophet, said Robert Lowell. Kurt Vonnegut once lost himself in the magic of capillary attraction. H H Kirst was firmly of the opinion that novels are governed by their own laws. Brian Aldiss believed that truth can arrive in as many forms as lies, Pablo Picasso that Art is a lie that makes us see the Truth, and Erica Jong that everything human is imperfect and ultimately absurd. Truth is only to be had, Virginia Woolf believed, by laying together many varieties of error. Carl Jung was of the firm belief that all great truths must end in paradox. Soren Kierkegaard wanted to exist in the truths he found. Wislawa Szymborska claimed that the unthinkable is thinkable. Meanwhile the rest of the world, Percy Grainger said, is dying of good taste. Margaret Drabble concurred, approving of everything new that was not monstrous. Ray Bradbury said that life is questions, not answers. John Fowles always found his own faults more interesting than other people's virtues. Tom Robbins held that a book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. Catherine Drinker Bowen said that happiness has no story. John Steinbeck said that any story has as many versions as it has readers. Margaret Drabble failed to get hers into a fit state for anecdote. M John Harrison inferred reality. Paul Theroux believed that one of his characters wouldn't say shit if he stepped in it. A megrim is both a headache and a scald-fish. Colette's very last word was “Regarde!”
8th April 2024
________________________________________________
The Journal: State of Play
Now that #70 The Journal has been posted out I am going to place The Journal on hold. I'm hoping that, once outgoings and income return to some sort of balance, I can open The Journal to submissions again. I don't however have a huge amount of hope.
The foremost reason for my closing The Journal to submissions has been the cost of postage. How the privatised Royal Mail can justify the increases is beyond me. Print costs have also gone up, but only in line with inflation. The excessive Royal Mail increases – 30% in a year - if not the result of chronic mismanagement, have to be profiteering; and it is the Royal Mail increases, one after the other within a year, that have brought The Journal to this halt.
I could of course raise The Journal's price to cover costs. But I feel that within a cost of living crisis £6.00 is already the limit that people are prepared to pay. And I know that raising the price again would cost me subscribers and send The Journal further into debt.
Having been run always on a not-for-profit basis I have never received any public money for The Journal. That is not to say that I haven't applied to arts bodies for grants. Unsuccessfully. Arts bodies during The Journal's lifetime have seemed to link grants either to the anticipated audience for a performance or to 'community' endeavours, or to a flavour-of-the-month social grouping. As The Journal has been avowedly international, non-parochial, from the off, no local money has found its way to us.
Privately some individuals have donated a few pounds here and there to help with running costs, for which I have been both surprised and grateful. Was not money enough however to now help keep The Journal afloat; and I can no longer afford to subsidise it out of my state pension and from the small amounts that I nowadays earn from my own writings.
Friends have suggested converting The Journal into an online version. While I have had my own work published in online magazines, and have been pleased to see my work there, grateful to the editors, I do so much prefer my writing to be on the printed page.
Through books, through print, was how I came to poetry. Through print is how I have been introduced to poets from around the world and from other times. Poets first spoke to me from the page, and on the page is where I try to make my poems come alive.
Although I am grateful to those online magazines that have used my work I am much happier when a print magazine takes a poem or two. Not only do I find reading poems on screens difficult – the size of print, background glare, altered format – online is so of-the-moment, hard to refer back up to a line, to study at leisure. Unlike books or magazines which are so easy to pick up again, mark a page, the very nature of screen reading doesn't let me tarry, drift off, look away, come back to a phrase... By the time I've absorbed the poem the screen has switched to 'safe mode', is showing old photos, is taking my mind elsewhere.
Print is how I came to poetry. If The Journal is to continue it has to be in print.
And here is where I confess that it is not only rising costs and my getting old that is making me take a break from tri-annual publication. Over the past couple of decades I have become aware of a disenchantment growing within me over trends in the general poetry scene.
Although I have organised festivals, have been happy to wait my turn at open mikes, have helped run poetry cruises, I have never myself enjoyed giving readings, have done so always only in the hope of selling a book/magazine or two.
When I was first published by Odyssey magazine editor Derrick Woolf pressed me for a year or more to read at the events he organised in Coleridge Cottage. I refused, said that I didn't see the point as I had no collection to sell. Having listened there to others reading I was acutely aware of how the person, how they spoke, interfered with my reception of the poem. The anonymity of print was what I wanted for my work.
Derrick however got a poem of mine accepted for that year's Forward Prize and I was invited to read it on Radio 3. A nerve-jelly experience that in itself was no encouragement. But having read in public I could no longer justify my refusing to read at Derrick's soirées. Then once I had a collection – To Be Like John Clare (Salzburg University Press, 1996) – I could promote that at readings anywhere and everywhere.
Print has always been my objective, is what has mattered to me. I want people like me, private people, people I am never likely to meet, to read my words. In like manner I was so pleased when David Gettman belatedly made my novel Sister Blister (Online Originals, 1996) available in hardback as as well as eBook.
I am by no means alone in this preference. Cixin Liu recently said, 'Paper lasts longer than a computer.' Just think how much work now resides on out-of-date electronic equipment, unlikely to be ever retrieved. Or only with great effort. A book on the other hand can at any time be pulled off a shelf.
The emphasis in the current poetry scene however seems to be on performance alone. Performance for performance sake. Performance is now where arts funds, if any, go.
There are now fewer and fewer unfunded print magazines. Especially compared to the 1990s when there were so many, the fruits of desktop publishing, more than a few getting printed and put together at home. In those days one could readily find an editor who shared one's outlook, favoured a style, an approach, a subject matter. But that was pre-privatisation of the UK postal service, when such as Geoff Stevens' Purple Patch could get mailed out every month. And there were so many as productive – Martin Holroyd's Poetry Monthly, Eric Ratcliffe's Ore, Gerald England's New Hope International, Talitha Clare and Robin Brooks' Moonstone... and so on and so many more. The SF author and poet John Light even posted out an annual Light's List of magazines.
So much for the heyday of small press print and cheap postage. Nowadays it seems that performance alone is how most perceive and promote their poetry. And my own experience has me believe that a good performance/reading rarely equates to a good poem. Whereas a good poem can be let down by a poor reading.
Of the poems themselves so many seem to be in the first person singular; and while there can be artistry in performance, the vogue now being for self-expression, even of those poems making it into print, where are the poems that aspire to being a small work of art?
There is always that buzz after a reading, the applause, the bonhomie, a sense of camaraderie, an evening spent among like-minded folk; but nine times out of ten what was politely applauded were their own projected selves having been brave enough to stand out front and read. Thee will have been no real assessment of the poems themselves, no reviews, analysis as in a magazine. No rejection. At open mikes people can get up and say whatever they like, call that bunch of words a poem. None will get rejected, and rejection is a great teacher. As is a bad review, will certainly get you looking again at the work. And that reading, that performance will have been it, a poem's one and only outing, save possibly on a scrolled-by social media.
A poem's publication in a small press magazine like The Journal was once considered ephemeral. How much more ephemeral will have been its being read to a small audience?
© Sam Smith 11th January 2024
The Labour Party's failure to bring about substantive change
What follows is Chapter Fifteen of my novel Everyday Objects Repurposed As Art
Chapter Fifteen
Laptop, closed, is on the far right corner of the of-white camping table. His spectacle case, also black, is on the left-hand corner with, alongside, two spare push-button black biros. Directly in front of him is an A4 pad, unlined, with a third black biro placed diagonally thwart.
Preparations complete he perches on the front edge of the slanting forward camping chair. Reaching to open the spectacle case he is made aware of the large and small muscles in his back and shoulder. Even though he went to the sports centre and trained Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays on the rowing machine still his back and shoulders ache.
Spine held straight he unfolds the half-moon spectacles from their square of felt, hooks the spectacle arms behind his ears, clicks shut the case and returns it to the left-hand corner. The case came from an optician, the half-moon glasses from a cheap shop.
He places both hands on the edge of the table, looks at the concrete wall in front of him.
Now that he is about to start writing he is more nervous than when he woke yesterday morning. Is as nervous as when he paid cash for the verge-parked car. There was no going back then.
As now. No going back to before this moment. What he is about to write can later be altered, amended, thrown out and rewritten; but this act of beginning will exist, cannot be repeated.
“Title first,” he instructs himself.
Across the top of the page he writes, ‘Towards the Cataclysm,’ carefully underlines it twice and brackets a 1 into the top right hand corner of the page.
Sitting slightly back he looks at the title, says, “Bit off-putting,” and he writes after it, not underlined, ‘working title’.
“Let’s begin with generalities,” he tells himself.
Any instructions aloud to himself, comments on what he may have written, are not often complimentary. But for the moment, here at the start, he wants to be encouraging to his writer self.
“Details in due course,” he says to get himself moving, and doesn’t move.
Usually he pens an outline and introduction first in the hope and expectation that it will give him some feeling for the tone of the piece entire. Reverent? Critical? Sarcastic even? Ironic? The amount of research this time though seems to render an initial handwritten outline unnecessary. He feels that he should jump straight in.
“All,” he reminds himself, “can be undone later.”
This small table will suffer much scratching out before the final version of even the initial approach is decided. Does he have time for such an indulgence? When he knows that halfway into the telling of the tale, everything being so much simpler when broken down into its component parts, when laid out in a comprehensible structure, he can go back, often has, and changed everything.
“This won’t work.” he clicks off the biro. “Write then type. A nonsense. Duplication of effort.” He places the biro alongside its two companions, folds the A4 pad closed and, laying it atop the laptop, pulls the laptop to him. The A4 pad then takes the place of the laptop, which he opens and switches on. His hands are trembling.
“Need no plan,” he reassures himself. “Already thinking in terms of script.”
And he knows that the script he is about to write will be but another beginning, the beginning of a process, that it will get worked over by producer, director and actors. If any. With more work, most of the real work, being done in the editing suite. First though he has to have a script as evidence, and it has to be an entire script. A script, a ‘concept’, indisputably his.
“We’ll jump straight in.” He has to wait for the laptop to fire up. Soon as he can he opens a new file. “So,” he places his fingers to start typing, “first things first. What’s best known about Aveling?”
[Picture of black-bearded GBS twinned with the one portrait extant of Aveling. Voice over]
George Bernard Shaw said of Edward Bibbins Aveling [running text], ‘The best way to treat with Aveling is to grasp him by the hand and throw him out the window.’
No love was lost between Aveling and Shaw. Although they did between them share more than one lover. Which in itself was remarkable as neither could have been called goodlooking. [slow pan over portraits]. Aveling in fact has been described as downright ugly.
[photo/caricature of Aveling?] Nevertheless both had their successes with women, due in large part to their literary and political connections. Both, for instance, had carnal knowledge of Annie Besant [pictures], which - no offence to the lady - probably wasn’t that difficult. Come the end though, in this lovers’ rivalry, it was Aveling who managed to set up house with the sought-after daughter of Karl Marx, Eleanor [picture].
“No no no. Gossipy, and nowhere near punchy enough.”
He is stalled.
“The suicide here? This early?”
Sitting back on the slanting picnic chair he digs his fingers into his beard. This is not quite, isn’t even close to one of the many forms he imagined the opening. As usual what had been complete in various versions in his mind as soon as the words start appearing on the screen the whole structure starts to change.
He dots a line under what he has typed, tries again.
Version 2
[Portrait of Aveling. Voice over]
There is a man largely overlooked by mainstream history. A man who in his time tried to persuade survival-of-the-fittest Darwin [portrait from the pound note] to admit to his atheism. A man who first brought Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’ [picture of a stage production] to an English audience. And a man who ended up the beneficiary of all royalties from Das Kapital. A man of whom George Bernard Shaw [blackbearded portrait] said....
“Nope.”
Another line is dotted under.
“Must, has to be, compared to the present. The present,” he instructs himself; and he unhappily sits back with his beard screwed up under his nose.
Edward Bibbins Aveling is but one strand of his preoccupation with turn-of-the-century, end 19th/early 20th century figures. What he wants, has wanted for some time now, is to show how that period formed our present.
Other characters of that period who have attracted him, who he has researched and written profiles of - Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Frank Harris, Leon Trotsky, Jack London - were themselves often at odds with and reviled by their fellow campaigners, were often mavericks even to their own causes. Like Aveling.
Like Aveling, he believes, they were reviled not because they held values ahead of their time, which they did, but because they lived their lives ahead of their time. And it is that which has got their names, like Aveling’s, held in such rank odour. The histories that they helped create judged them and found them notorious.
All of his characters have made mistakes, gone up blind alleys. What continues to make them attractive to him however is that they couldn’t be, wouldn’t be, owned. Not by party, not by person, not by corporation, and certainly not by their status quo. All were in pursuit of something other, be that to do justice to their chosen art form or in the promotion of social justice.
Mavericks, awkward sods, disreputable bastards, which has to include even the fickle Annie Besant. Mental mention of her as usual giving him pause. Should he next go beyond the reputation he has given her and take another look? Or let her be?
In search of awkward sods he has considered going beyond his period. He started an outline sketch of Henry Miller. But the further he got into his reading he felt it best to let Henry speak for himself, Henry already having done it so much better.
Closer still to the present he has looked at John Lennon’s life and work. But so have others, others who have probably been better placed to make sense of his life. Yukio Mishima’s too.
Then there are the mavericks still alive - Yoko Ono, Tariq Ali, Naom Chomsky, Michael Moore... Their being alive however makes a definitive treatment difficult. Should they end up ingratiating themselves with a corrupting establishment the work that he bases upon them will be completely undone.
He has asked himself why he should be drawn to misfits like these. He, for instance, often defends George Galloway’s latest indiscretion - if only to see from what angle his critics so despise George, their reasons usually saying more about them than about George.
What he has concluded is that he is attracted to these out-of-step characters because he is, like his characters, angry. Angry at the deceits practised by their, by his own, likeminded peers. Angry at the deceits those peers practise upon themselves. As with his bullish Frank Harris, more the radical newspaperman than the give-it-a-go cowboy. Now Aveling, a contemporary to Frank Harris, had journalism in his quiver too. So far as he is aware though Aveling entertained no ambitions to be a cowboy. Nor does he, though he identifies with them both.
Both men were as confounded by contemporary values and social constraints as he is by his. But how to demonstrate that? The periods will resist comparison. And he has been attracted to that period, peopled with influential personalities, because it has been largely overlooked by writers of historical fictions, be those fictions TV dramas or novelettes. Yet it is still this period, he believes, that is most responsible for the creation of today’s world.
It was Aveling’s successes, for instance, that led to the formation of the Labour Party. As it was Aveling’s failures that led to the Labour Party becoming closer to Machiavelli than to Marx.
Version 3
[Voice over. Footage of rough sleepers]
To us today what is important about Aveling is not his few successes but the consequences of his failures. If his international socialism had succeeded would we now be suffering free market boom-and-bust cycles, with the poorest among us getting ever poorer? Had his atheism succeeded [footage of bomb aftermaths] in creating a secular world would we now have this plethora of ongoing wars?
“Right. No assessment of Aveling. No pre-judgement. Has to be what follows from him.”
He has 75 pages in which to see that that happens. Edits, rewrites, can all come later. “Let’s see how this evolves.” He dots another line under.
“Time enough,” he says to the wall and future collaborators. “Time enough.”
The opening can be, and probably will be, changed later. When it comes to the production stages his won’t be the only hands moulding Aveling’s tale. And beginnings and endings are always the most open to discussion. The 70 pages of the body though, the core concept, will be his. Mangled as no doubt that body will be.
He wonders of this expectation of later editing is what has led to his slapdash approach to life, has resulted in an attitude, an assumption that everything can be corrected, can be made right later.
“Not this time,” he dismisses such thoughts, tucks his still bare feet up off the concrete floor, “Now... to that body.”
© Sam Smith 17th November 2023
https://rb.gy/m1j82
Authors Unseen
I have an innate distrust of larger than life personalities, prefer artists and authors to remain unseen behind their work. I even find small author photos a distraction. I don't want to know what they look like: danger being that they may remind me of someone I dislike and prejudice me against their writing.
When I come upon a big personality, like say Yorkshire Hockney, my first assumption is that his success has to be due to his being a sociable and well-connected type, at ease before a camera, an articulate showman. I consequently bend a critical eye to the actual work. And so far I haven't found anything of his to get excited over.
This prejudice can work the other way. Grayson Perry for instance: his being dressed like some weird doll I didn't bother listening to a thing he said. Got to be surprised therefore when I came upon one of his large pots and it did speak to me. I subsequently became more tolerant of his public persona. Although I would have preferred to chance upon his pots and not have had to reconcile the maker with his product.
Of contemporary artists I much prefer Damien Hirst's approach, his letting the works speak for themselves.
Same applies to authors.
Film and TV celebrities of course can't help but be on show. As I can't help, as a competing author, resenting their easy route to publication and sales. I would have had greater respect for their work had it first been published under a nom de plume. Can't though see a publisher being prepared to forfeit the sales that the celebrity's name alone would have guaranteed.
Most authors prefer, I believe, to work at a remove, aren't show-people.
I for instance have never liked pop concerts, their working the crowd with big singalong screens and pyrotechnics. When I used to venture out small jazz venues were more my scene – there I could become involved with the music as it was being made. For the musical rest, classical and occasional pop, I have made do with records and CDs.
For several decades I followed the advice of small press publishers and other poets and – despite my never feeling comfortable there – I went along to readings. In the belief that it helped to sell books I even founded the Taunton Deane festival, ran a 6 week series of Brewhouse readings. I also helped run some poetry cruises down the River Dart, a mini-festival in Ilfracombe... The highlight of all that activity was reading several times with a jazz band in Nunney. Thereafter, moving around the country, and against my better judgement I carried on going to open mikes here and there.
The pandemic lockdown stopped all those open mikes, gave me time to reassess.
Looking back over the open mike years I had to concede that few books had been sold at readings, even when I had been the guest poet. So why do it? I had had to overcome a stutter to read. I am no performer, could get into a nervous state days beforehand. So why do it?
At open mikes the better readers are those who have perfected their performance. Performance of itself however is the very thing that I have always distrusted.
Those collections I was inspired to buy at readings, when I looked at them at home I often found them flat on the page, didn't come close to the author's reading of the poem. So did I learn that good/likeable performance doesn't equal good poetry; lively on the stage, dead on the page.
Back in the nineties and noughties, with desktop publishing seeing a new magazine or small press seeming to arrive every week, that was when print was dominant. Since the pandemic though the poetry scene seems to have become almost all performance, even online readings, and with fewer and fewer print outlets.
The lockdown brought home to me that I didn't miss going to readings. I did miss the chats with fellow writers, but not the readings themselves. The lockdown also reinforced for me that I have never wanted to pull faces and play tricks to please an audience. What I have always craved, in poetry and in fiction, is a readership. I write on my own for someone reading alone, private writing for private perusal, the page our meeting place.
Obvious to me why so many magazines and small presses have disappeared since the lockdown and Brexit – cost and difficulty of postage and, as said before, the few collections and magazines getting sold. Has become almost axiomatic to say that if a small press poet doesn't press their collection onto family and friends the collection doesn't sell and another not-grant-aided small press will go broke.
So where now? For us authors unseen?
© Sam Smith 8th November 2023
I have an innate distrust of larger than life personalities, prefer artists and authors to remain unseen behind their work. I even find small author photos a distraction. I don't want to know what they look like: danger being that they may remind me of someone I dislike and prejudice me against their writing.
When I come upon a big personality, like say Yorkshire Hockney, my first assumption is that his success has to be due to his being a sociable and well-connected type, at ease before a camera, an articulate showman. I consequently bend a critical eye to the actual work. And so far I haven't found anything of his to get excited over.
This prejudice can work the other way. Grayson Perry for instance: his being dressed like some weird doll I didn't bother listening to a thing he said. Got to be surprised therefore when I came upon one of his large pots and it did speak to me. I subsequently became more tolerant of his public persona. Although I would have preferred to chance upon his pots and not have had to reconcile the maker with his product.
Of contemporary artists I much prefer Damien Hirst's approach, his letting the works speak for themselves.
Same applies to authors.
Film and TV celebrities of course can't help but be on show. As I can't help, as a competing author, resenting their easy route to publication and sales. I would have had greater respect for their work had it first been published under a nom de plume. Can't though see a publisher being prepared to forfeit the sales that the celebrity's name alone would have guaranteed.
Most authors prefer, I believe, to work at a remove, aren't show-people.
I for instance have never liked pop concerts, their working the crowd with big singalong screens and pyrotechnics. When I used to venture out small jazz venues were more my scene – there I could become involved with the music as it was being made. For the musical rest, classical and occasional pop, I have made do with records and CDs.
For several decades I followed the advice of small press publishers and other poets and – despite my never feeling comfortable there – I went along to readings. In the belief that it helped to sell books I even founded the Taunton Deane festival, ran a 6 week series of Brewhouse readings. I also helped run some poetry cruises down the River Dart, a mini-festival in Ilfracombe... The highlight of all that activity was reading several times with a jazz band in Nunney. Thereafter, moving around the country, and against my better judgement I carried on going to open mikes here and there.
The pandemic lockdown stopped all those open mikes, gave me time to reassess.
Looking back over the open mike years I had to concede that few books had been sold at readings, even when I had been the guest poet. So why do it? I had had to overcome a stutter to read. I am no performer, could get into a nervous state days beforehand. So why do it?
At open mikes the better readers are those who have perfected their performance. Performance of itself however is the very thing that I have always distrusted.
Those collections I was inspired to buy at readings, when I looked at them at home I often found them flat on the page, didn't come close to the author's reading of the poem. So did I learn that good/likeable performance doesn't equal good poetry; lively on the stage, dead on the page.
Back in the nineties and noughties, with desktop publishing seeing a new magazine or small press seeming to arrive every week, that was when print was dominant. Since the pandemic though the poetry scene seems to have become almost all performance, even online readings, and with fewer and fewer print outlets.
The lockdown brought home to me that I didn't miss going to readings. I did miss the chats with fellow writers, but not the readings themselves. The lockdown also reinforced for me that I have never wanted to pull faces and play tricks to please an audience. What I have always craved, in poetry and in fiction, is a readership. I write on my own for someone reading alone, private writing for private perusal, the page our meeting place.
Obvious to me why so many magazines and small presses have disappeared since the lockdown and Brexit – cost and difficulty of postage and, as said before, the few collections and magazines getting sold. Has become almost axiomatic to say that if a small press poet doesn't press their collection onto family and friends the collection doesn't sell and another not-grant-aided small press will go broke.
So where now? For us authors unseen?
© Sam Smith 8th November 2023
Partial truths aggressively delivered
For a goodly while I believed that we had entered, that we were living through, the state that precedes revolution, the pre-revolutionary state of the pamphleteer.
Look back over any of history's uprisings and to what went before – in Russia, China, France, Cuba, or in any number of other unthinkingly cruel states. What went before was the growth of, often handwritten or covertly printed, pamphlets. From the left and from the right each promoted their own peculiar alternatives to the current corrupt authorities. Some of their ideas were ridiculous, were unworldly; but a very few did capture the public mood and did present a practicable alternative to the smug elite then in control.
Sound familiar?
I believed – I no longer do – blogs to be our present day version of those samizdat pamphlets. Blogs aren't.
Blogs are how some of us are now being allowed to let off steam. Governments may now complain of their lack of control, but throughout all of social media we are being allowed to shout at one another in threads that unwind to nowhere. Members of the corrupt elite still own the platforms which let those who would promote their cause, or themselves, with podcasts and the like, grimace and gawk out of our screens. The ineffectual rendered even more ineffectual? But didn't it feel good shouting into the darkness?
Come daylight we are presented with the same unassailable overpowering and warmongering nonsense as in all the days before. And while so many of these bloggers, these latter-day protestors, trained as consumers, seek only to clothes themselves in a readily recognisable identity, asking us to fork out for today's tee-shirt, there will be no revolutions.
© Sam Smith 29th October 2023
For a goodly while I believed that we had entered, that we were living through, the state that precedes revolution, the pre-revolutionary state of the pamphleteer.
Look back over any of history's uprisings and to what went before – in Russia, China, France, Cuba, or in any number of other unthinkingly cruel states. What went before was the growth of, often handwritten or covertly printed, pamphlets. From the left and from the right each promoted their own peculiar alternatives to the current corrupt authorities. Some of their ideas were ridiculous, were unworldly; but a very few did capture the public mood and did present a practicable alternative to the smug elite then in control.
Sound familiar?
I believed – I no longer do – blogs to be our present day version of those samizdat pamphlets. Blogs aren't.
Blogs are how some of us are now being allowed to let off steam. Governments may now complain of their lack of control, but throughout all of social media we are being allowed to shout at one another in threads that unwind to nowhere. Members of the corrupt elite still own the platforms which let those who would promote their cause, or themselves, with podcasts and the like, grimace and gawk out of our screens. The ineffectual rendered even more ineffectual? But didn't it feel good shouting into the darkness?
Come daylight we are presented with the same unassailable overpowering and warmongering nonsense as in all the days before. And while so many of these bloggers, these latter-day protestors, trained as consumers, seek only to clothes themselves in a readily recognisable identity, asking us to fork out for today's tee-shirt, there will be no revolutions.
© Sam Smith 29th October 2023
Quotidian
If as author one has simply and accurately described or conveyed the ordinary then one has succeeded in one of art's precepts – that a work of art should induce a sense of wonder when contemplating the ordinary, the everyday.
In trying to explain, or just to describe the taken-for-granted, can lead one to make the most extraordinary discoveries. What can compel anyone, for instance, to go queue in Oxford Street for the Boxing Day sales? What state of mind, of denial even, knowing that there very rarely is a genuine consumerist bargain to be had, and – if challenged – readily accepting that likelihood, yet still they make sure they arrive early to claim their place in the queue. Can it be that they simply enjoy queuing? Are thrilled to be but one of the stampeding crowd?
Not extraordinary by any means. Just one more digression. Which can happen when one considers the unremarkable.
More importantly the ordinary can be confused with that other workshop precept, Write of what you know. At face value that is reasonably good advice, even though it would seem to negate imagination. As one must be aware of one's limitations at the same time one shouldn't limit one's aspirations. Where then fancy and fantasy?
When authors don't write of what they know but have picked it up second-hand, via films or other fictions, one very soon espies the falsity in their descriptions of the day-to-day lives of different people. I gave up reading JK Rowling's Galbraith novels when it came to her version of the inner life of an ex-soldier. The same old tropes.
Writing poorly of other than what they know, or even writing of what they know in the accepted fashion, takes new writing nowhere, having it become obvious very quickly that the author has nothing new to say. And by its dictionary definition a novel should be novel.
Why does some writing appear false? Poor research possibly, or an unquestioned acceptance of cultural tropes, prejudices even.
A downside of basing your fiction on what you know could be that your writing will only be appreciated by those who have shared your experiences. My having worked with the mentally ill I, for instance, very quickly despair of inaccurate, usually exoticised, descriptions of what used to be referred to as lunacy. Even should an author not have first-hand experience of a subject they should at the very least have looked beyond others' possibly faulty imaginations, past filmic versions, and have consulted non-fictional accounts.
The same applies to comfortable middle class authors writing of what they assume to be working class life and attitudes. Their galactic distance from us has their ignorance ring out with the cracked bell falsity of career politicians pretending to support a football team.
© Sam Smith 11th October 2023
If as author one has simply and accurately described or conveyed the ordinary then one has succeeded in one of art's precepts – that a work of art should induce a sense of wonder when contemplating the ordinary, the everyday.
In trying to explain, or just to describe the taken-for-granted, can lead one to make the most extraordinary discoveries. What can compel anyone, for instance, to go queue in Oxford Street for the Boxing Day sales? What state of mind, of denial even, knowing that there very rarely is a genuine consumerist bargain to be had, and – if challenged – readily accepting that likelihood, yet still they make sure they arrive early to claim their place in the queue. Can it be that they simply enjoy queuing? Are thrilled to be but one of the stampeding crowd?
Not extraordinary by any means. Just one more digression. Which can happen when one considers the unremarkable.
More importantly the ordinary can be confused with that other workshop precept, Write of what you know. At face value that is reasonably good advice, even though it would seem to negate imagination. As one must be aware of one's limitations at the same time one shouldn't limit one's aspirations. Where then fancy and fantasy?
When authors don't write of what they know but have picked it up second-hand, via films or other fictions, one very soon espies the falsity in their descriptions of the day-to-day lives of different people. I gave up reading JK Rowling's Galbraith novels when it came to her version of the inner life of an ex-soldier. The same old tropes.
Writing poorly of other than what they know, or even writing of what they know in the accepted fashion, takes new writing nowhere, having it become obvious very quickly that the author has nothing new to say. And by its dictionary definition a novel should be novel.
Why does some writing appear false? Poor research possibly, or an unquestioned acceptance of cultural tropes, prejudices even.
A downside of basing your fiction on what you know could be that your writing will only be appreciated by those who have shared your experiences. My having worked with the mentally ill I, for instance, very quickly despair of inaccurate, usually exoticised, descriptions of what used to be referred to as lunacy. Even should an author not have first-hand experience of a subject they should at the very least have looked beyond others' possibly faulty imaginations, past filmic versions, and have consulted non-fictional accounts.
The same applies to comfortable middle class authors writing of what they assume to be working class life and attitudes. Their galactic distance from us has their ignorance ring out with the cracked bell falsity of career politicians pretending to support a football team.
© Sam Smith 11th October 2023
Sense & Society
We inhabit a society, a world culture, where so much is designed to mislead, be that to the worth of a product, actual goods or software, or political parties. We learn to, we are taught by experience, to distrust.
With such a peculiar state of mind, wrought by this world culture, by corporate hypocrisies, by slogan-slinging political parties, small wonder that some individuals feel that the only clear-cut solution can be to pick up an assault rifle and eradicate some of their fellow consumerists.
In our cosmopolitan societies people struggle to both understand and to make themselves understood. While in corners of monoculture way too much is taken for granted. Everywhere a disappointment. Even those you have some sympathy with do themselves a disservice by overstating their cases.
Art offers no sanctuary. Especially not here in elitist UK.
Up until the twentieth century, save for a few notable exceptions, the British art world was populated – going by their utterances – by spiteful homosexuals, back then the detritus of a sadistic public school system. ('Public' in this British context means expensively private.) In London's 1950s art circles this homosexual predominance became known as the pink union. And this wasn't homophobia as such from heterosexual artist[e]s, rather the resentment born of being shut out of any closed shop, private club, clique.
Any art made elsewhere, by the excluded, became but expressions of burdened perplexity. Take one of my heroes, James Baldwin. He was doubly, if not trebly excluded – by his homosexuality from his family, by his colour from white American society; and he further estranged himself by detailing the processes whereby he became persona no grata. His writings however still made some/more sense of this world for me.
Knowing that my confusion means that I am a thinking animal, still I long for certainty, to know that this or that opinion is incontrovertible. Yet I hesitate, as I articulate that longing, knowing that any such certainty must lead to bigotry. And who wants to be a bigot?
© Sam Smith 29th September 2023