Kazuo Ishiguro’s

Nocturnes.

Definition. Music. A romantic composition intended to embody sentiments appropriate to the evening or night; a pensive melody. A painting of a night scene. (from the French which meant nocturnal, from Latin nocturnus).

Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall is a collection of five short stories by Kazuo Ishiguro, and was conceived as a whole, almost as a piece of music in five movements, taking the format of a cycle, beginning and ending in Venice.

 

• Crooner. Is set in Venice and is told by a Polish guitarist playing with a cafe orchestra. One day whilst playing he sees this old time American singer, who was adored by his mother back in the eastern block. The singer co-opts him into accompanying him from a gondola, as he serenades his younger wife. This is a beautiful tale of commodity and relationship.

 

• Come Rain or Come Shine.This is a tale about an English foreign language teacher who is invited to the home of a couple he was friends with at university. However, there is an ulterior motive, as there are problems with the relationship, and his role is to attempt to patch up his friends marriage by being seen as inept in comparison to the high achieving superiority of the husband, his friend. This tale skirts the strange, sad and comic ending up on a lovely note.

• Malvern hills. In this story a young guitarist, after an abysmal lack of success in London, retreats back to his old stomping ground, and a spare bed at his sisters, working in her countryside cafe to pay for his keep. Whilst working in the cafe, he meets a Swiss couple, who are touring the hills after being inspired by the music of Elgar. The initial encounter doesn’t go to well, but he meets again them later, and is left reflecting on his own life.

 

• Nocturnes. A jazz saxophonist, whose career is floundering (possibly because of his looks), is convinced by his ex and his manager to undergo plastic surgery. Whilst in recovery at some private hotel, he meets what he describes as some vacuous female celebrity (the young wife from the first story). Both, with heads encased in bandages, stalk the corridors  of the hotel after dark – this story manages to be both absurd and serious, and features a hilarious moment involving the saxophonist, a turkey and an award statuette.

 

• Cellists. A young Hungarian cellist is charmed, and I’m using the word in its old sense*, by a fellow cellist, who is apparently a virtuoso American cellist, she offers to tutor him, to bring out the qualities she has perceived in him. He later finds out she cannot play the cello, but is so convinced of her own genius that she has never found a teacher equal to it. So to make sure it’s not damaged she has chosen never to realise it, to keep it safe. For her music represents some ideal that she would rather keep wrapped, than risk tarnishing it. Ultimately neither end up fulfilled, caught up in their everyday world, and the life hinted at in the music.

 

This is a really beautiful collection of stories, that will haunt you, that will leave you in a mood of quite contemplation, there are funny moments, really funny moments, but the overall feel is of some nebulous ache. These are mood pieces, an instant caught in amber, romantic and full of melancholy, and really beautiful.

   

  Relating it back to music they reminded me of;

 

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic 'til I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

"Dance Me To The End Of Love"

Leonard Cohen.

Kazuo Ishiguro

Contemporary Writers

Publishers

Nocturne in black & Gold, Whistler.

*Affected or protected by, bewitched.

On The Road To San Romano–Andre Breton

Poetry is made in a bed like love

Its rumpled sheets are the dawn of things

Poetry is made in woods

It has the space it needs

Not this one but the other whose form is lent it by

                 The eye of the Kite

                 The dew on a horsetail

                 The memory of a bottle frosted over on a silver tray

                  A tall rod of tourmaline on the sea

                  And the road of the mental adventure

                 That climbs abruptly

                 One stop and bushes cover it instantly

That isn’t to be shouted on the rooftops

It’s improper to leave the door open

Or to summon witnesses

 

                      The shoals of fish the hedges of titmice

                   The rails at the entrance of a great station

                   The reflection of both river banks

                   The crevices of bread

                   The bubbles of the stream

                   The days of the calendar

                    The St Johns wort

 

The acts of love and poetry

Are incompatible

With reading the newspaper aloud

                   The meaning of a sunbeam

                   The blue light between the hatchet blows

                   The bat’s thread shaped like a heart or a hoopnet

                   The beaver’s tails beating in time

                   The diligence of the flash

                   The casting of candy from the old stairs

                   The avalanche

The room of marvels

No dear sirs it isn’t the eighth Chamber

Nor the vapours of the roomful some Sunday evening 

 

                     The figures danced transparent above the pools

                   The outline on the wall of a woman’s body at

                                         daggerthrow

                   The bright spirals of smoke

                   The curls of your hair

                   The curve of the Philippine sponge

                   The swaying of the coral snake

                   The ivy entrance in the ruins

                    It has all the time ahead

The embrace of poetry like that of the flesh

As long as it lasts

Shuts out any glimpse of the misery of the world

 

                

Andre Breton (1896-1966 ) was a poet and critic and a leader of the surrealist movement. Born to a family of modest standing in Tinchebray, Orne Department Normandy, he went on to study medicine and psychiatry, working in a psychiatric ward   through  WW1.  During this period he met  a devotee of Alfred Jarry, Jacques Vache, whose attitude towards the social norms and disdain for the traditional artistic aesthetic  was a major influence on Breton. Later as a writer in Paris, Breton pioneered the anti-rationalist movements in art and literature known as Dadaism and surrealism, which was a reaction to the disillusionment with tradition, that  marked the post world war 1 era. Being a keen student of the works of Sigmund Freud, plus his experimentation with automatic writing led to him formulating his Surrealist theory, expressing his views in Literature, the leading surrealist periodical, which he co-founded and edited for many years. His best creative work is considered the novel Nadja (1928), based partly on his own experiences. His poetry, in Selected Poems (1948; trans. 1969), reflects the influence of the poets Paul Valery.

pomes ALL SIZES

If you have a Poem/ Poet, you admire please introduce them to me.

@pomesallsizes

WHITE EGRETS by Derek Walcott.

Latin name -Ardea alba

Family - Bitterns and herons(Ardeidae)

The Great White Egret, is almost identical to little Egrets, but obviously they are much larger – around the same size as a Grey Heron. The identification features to be aware of are, black feet as opposed to yellow, and a yellow beak (in juvenile and non-breeding plumage), they also use a different fishing technique like that of the grey heron, living off fish, insects and frogs, caught by spearing with its long, sharp beak.

 

 

White Egrets is also the title of the Fourteenth collection of poetry from Derek Walcott. Born in St Lucia in 1930, he studied at the University College of the West Indies (Kingston, Jamaica). Walcott published his first poem at 14 and by 19 had self-published his two first collections - 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949) which he distributed himself. But it was his collection - In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962) exploring the Caribbean and it’s history in a colonialist and post-colonialist context that saw him gain an international public profile. He has since published eight collections of plays, a collection of essays, as well as his volumes of poetry, including an epic poem (Omeros), in which he invokes the spirit and people of his homeland through Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. In 1992 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, he is also an honorary member of the American Academy and the Institute of Arts and Letters.

This his latest collection won this years T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry,  the chair for this years prize was Anne Stevenson & she said that

"the judges felt that Derek Walcott's White Egrets was a moving, risk-taking and technically flawless book by a great poet."

In this collection of poetry,  “Derek Walcott treats his characteristic subjects – the Caribbean’s complex colonial legacy, the Western artistic tradition, the blessings and withholdings of old Europe (Andalucía, the Mezzogiorno, Amsterdam), the unaccommodating sublime of the new world, times cunning passages, the poets place in all of this – with a passionate intensity and drive that rivals his greatest work” .

Yet reading these poems you soon realise another figure stalks the landscape, that with the passing of time, there’s loss, there’s death, whether this is of friends, or the death of love, or just unrequited love, stillborn with regret. In these beautiful poems you get visions of a man looking back on his life, looking back with regret, with humour, but looking back from the perspective that this may be his last call, but this is a not a legacy, there is too much passion for that.

 

For Oliver Jackman

It’s what others do, not us, die, even the closest

on a vainglorious, glorious morning, as the song goes,

the yellow or golden palms glorious and all the rest

a sparkling splendour, die. They’re practising  calypsos,

they’re putting up and pulling down tents, vendors are slicing

the heads of coconuts around the savannah, men

are leaning on, then leaping into pirogues, a moon will be rising

tonight in the same place over Morne Coco, then

the full grief will hit me and my heart will toss

like a horse’s head or a thrashing bamboo grove

that even you could be part of the increasing loss

that is the daily dial of the revolving shade. love

lies underneath it all though, the more surprising

the death, the deeper the love, the tougher the life.

The pain is over, feathers close your eyelids, Oliver.

What a happy friend and what a fine wife!

Your death is like our friendship beginning over. 

 

 

I love this line – “then the full grief will hit me and my heart will toss like a horse’s head…” and this collection is full of  such images, rising from the  landscape, some remembered scene, told with a cadence like the sound of the shoreline, once remembered in an old seashell, and that memory, that repetition of images plays out over the pages, sometimes with a caution to the passion, sometimes just bursting with grief and regret………. and yet a gentle humour, a sly gentle humour.

 

Derek Walcott (Wiki)

Nobel Prize (Derek Walcott)

Contemporary Writers

What books have you read that have been hyped as literary and, in your opinion, were not?

"literary"? Literature has many definitions, but for our purposes what qualifies as "literary" is whether it focuses primarily on texts with aesthetic merit. In other words, texts that show quality not only in narrative but also in the effect of their language and structure.”

I started thinking about this and without a moments hesitation went straight for my comfort zone, that position we all have, like some big old comfy chair & with less than a seconds doubt reached, guns blazing for the usual suspects that I pull out when questions of this nature surface. Bang bang down went Dickens. Kerpow, next Austen and without even pausing, (bandanna askew) screaming with all the subtle nuance of a faux Rambo, I reached for a fresh bandolier before emptying both barrels into Potter & his ilk. But…… the question was still there and like some barghest, the Ladies of the Blue Bookcase had sent to trail after me, made me reappraise this stock response, made me pause & think what I really felt. Admittedly this hasn’t changed my dislike of the above mentioned brethren of Beelzebub, just made me aware that this had nothing to do with their perceived literary merit, which in my usual circuitous fashion has brought me back to the question – “What books have you read that have been hyped as literary and, in your opinion, were not?”- The simple answer is “ I haven’t any”. It’s not how I choose books, I may find out later that this book was the saviour of the human race, or that it was personally responsible for the extinction of several rare fauna, but at the time my decision is based purely on some ill-defined quality I saw in the particular book. In fact the term “Literary” can kill a book, there are stacks of books that are considered as though they were some giant edifice, Everest-like their climbing is a once in a lifetime feat,  “just not today”, or are thought of as too literary & “not for the likes of me” with the end result being what could have been a wonderful relationship with a book or writer is stifled before it has even a chance to blossom, this to me is the greater crime, we can all stand the disappointment of the odd overhyped script, give it a week and it will be replaced by a plethora of new titles, but a book ignored or placed  perpetually on the TBR, booked for a date sometime close to your last hail Marys, is a book close to it’s own death.

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Broom of the System.

David Foster Wallace

Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman’s great Grandmother has disappeared along with twenty five other elderly residents from a nursing home, leaving her confused and bewildered, I would even go as far as to say she was extremely discombobulated and emotionally stranded on the edge of G.O.D (Great Ohio Desert). This sets her out on a course to find her great grand mother, a women who  had an enormous influence on her life & who herself had been a student of Wittgenstein & had brought up Lenore to believe that words create reality, that ''All that really exists of  life is what can be said about it.'' leaving Lenore  convinced that she has no real control of her life. Would that this were her only problem, no this is just an addition to her world, her pet cockatiel - Vlad the Impaler -  has started speaking, and is now a TV star on some evangelical channel, a brother known as The Antichrist. Yet this is still only the pointiest tip of some giant iceberg, she has an on-going relationship with her boss Rick, vigorous part owner of the publishing firm of Frequent & Vigorous, a man who is so obsessed about her, but cannot rise to the occasion when he’s with her, telling her stories as a substitute for sex.

“Has it occurred to you that the “Road Runner” is what might be aptly termed an existential program? ……..I invite you to realize that this program does nothing other than present us with a protagonist, a coyote, functioning within a system interestingly characterized as a malevolent Nature, a protagonist who endlessly, tirelessly, disastrously pursues a thing, a telos --- the Bird in the title role --- a thing, a goal far, far less valuable than the effort and resources the protagonist puts into the pursuit” Fieldbinder grinned wryly “ The thing pursued --- a skinny meatless bird --- is far less valuable than the energy and attention and economic resources expended by the coyote on the process of pursuit. Just as an attachment radiating from the self outward is worth far less than the price the establishment of such an attachment inevitably exacts.”…….

A question Doctor..  “Why doesn’t the coyote take the money he spends on bird costumes and catapults and radioactive Road Runner food pellets and explosive missiles and simply go eat Chinese?…..”

The piece quoted above, comes from a section titled an “idea for Fieldbinder collection” and is one of the tales threaded through Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman’s story. Which leads us to the heart of Broom of the System, this is a book about words and language, it’s obsessions are about communication whether with others, or with ourselves, with storytelling, with the art of storytelling etc., and again I’m just scratching the surface of the themes paraded, derided, held up for examination, held up, then shot down, laughed out, laughed with. This book is like “V” by Thomas Pynchon, or  “If on a winters night  a traveller” by Italo Calvino, half the fun of this book is in what the writer will do next and can he pull it off, and like the mentioned writers David Foster Wallace is not merely a tight-rope walker, he foregoes the rope as an unnecessary aid, or uses it as though it were a skipping rope, and you watch, and you watch, and you watch, wondering how he does it, wondering how he’s going to bring all the disparate strands, all the stories within stories, all the psychiatric transcripts, all the characters & their own tales together, and yet he does. By the £$£%(())*&^tr5 he does, in a way that is wonderful, bizarre, outlandish, bawdy, hilarious, fantastically inventive and just really funny.

Wallace stated that the initial idea for the novel sprang from a remark made by an old girlfriend. According to Wallace, she said "...she would rather be a character in a piece of fiction than a real person.” I got to wondering just what the difference was. This book is his answer, and what an answer.

This is a book by a writer whose reputation scares people, he was seen as some genius, who wrote books for other geniuses, but in reality he was a comedian, a really clever one, I’ll grant you that, but an exceptionally funny, rib cracking original comic. Next - Infinite Jest, and I can’t wait.

 

 

 

 

 

David Foster Wallace(wiki)

The Howling Fantod (DFW)

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Unrecounted

W.G. Sebald & Jan Peter Tripp

 

Pliny says

that elephants are

       intelligent & righteous

revere the stars

& worship the sun

& the moon

 

This is one of a series of Micropoems (33) in this slim volume by W.G. Sebald, each one is accompanied by a pair of eyes which are actually photo realistic lithographs created by Jan Peter Tripp. Some of the individuals featured are William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Rembrandt, Francis Bacon and Javier Marias plus various other people including Sebald himself.

Most of these poems are around the 20 word mark or less and although they do not have a direct relationship to the picture, act as a dialogue between the two, with some offering a possible greater clarity to us as onlookers than others, for example these are the eyes of Proust, and the poem featured is

 

But the time

in which darkness

prevails

that time one

does not see

 

Whilst others appear  to be merely chance, leaving you to form your own connections, your own dialogue with the images and lines on the page, like some interloper into the hermetic world of this small book.

There is also a great deal of  information here; the translator is Michael Hamburger, a poet in his own right,  who provides a translators note as an introduction to the work.

This is followed by fellow poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s  contribution, two  poems - one concerning Sebald the other Tripp.

Then almost like a bookend there is an  essay on the work of the artist, Jan Peter Tripp by Andrea Kohler

 

Which brings us nicely to the artist. Sebald has described Jan Peter Tripp's art as taking realism to an almost unimaginable extreme. In an essay about Tripp's work, Sebald talked of 'the role of the observer and the observed objects being reversed. Personally my first look whilst flipping through these poems and what I presumed were photographs,when the realisation dawned that these weren’t,that they had been created by the artist’s own hands, well I didn’t know what to think, I scrutinised them, I tried to sneak up on them, quickly casting glances, when I thought they weren’t looking. I failed and went back to the words.

In deepest sleep

a Polish mechanic

came & for a

thousand silver dollars made me

a new perfectly

functioning head.

'

Some books let you in from the turning of the title page, others leave you as though on the doorstep, a foot in the door, not sure of welcome, you’re going to have to earn your entrance. Unrecounted is definitely one of the latter, you’ll peruse the images and accompanying poems, eyes gliding off the eyes on the page to the words and back again, making connections, trying to  find routes into its dialogue but this is ideolectic, the patterns here are those of an individual, there probably are reference points, but like all reference points, they act as signposts to something - not the thing itself.

It is

as though I lay

under a low

sky and breathed

through a needle’s eye.

Wikipedia

W.G. Sebald

Jan Peter Tripp

Hans Magnus Enzenberger

Michael Hamburger