Thank you, Father, for the acoustics lessons
after midnight, when drunken screams carry best,
and for introducing me to the arcana of ballistics
using living room chairs as convenient projectiles,
and for the blunt realisation that a bare fist
could easily punch through a bathroom door,
and for all the belt-enforced ethics classes
correcting my adolescent lapses of judgement.
Only after all that, you never told me
why you brought me here.
I brought home a used copy of T.S. Eliot’s collected works and cried
like Peter Kien on his wedding night—there was something tragic
about the torn and stained dust jacket and the dirty edges, as if Faber
and Faber had printed a hewer’s handbook—only to catch a glimpse
of a snob in the mirror.
They say that people won’t know how you feel
unless you tell them, yet it’s difficult to expect understanding
from those who dream of immortality—
where opulent octogenarians become the new youth,
leaving fingerprints in the linguist’s garden—
while all you’re looking forward to is for someone to tell you
what it means to be a proper grown-up.
Sometimes I return to the books of my youth.
They are the same and yet not quite,
partly because I read them in a different language then,
but also I have long since parted ways
with that whippersnapper.
In the comfort of our solitude,
there are no history books,
only diaries,
with no one to satisfy,
no difference to make,
so perhaps I should contract
some fashionable disease
as an excuse to stay in my room
and spend the remaining time
peeping at the next-door neighbours
from behind the curtain—
a family of magpies
going about their business.
After all, I’m mortal, like them,
and that’s the only hope.
kind of / sexy, all muscle & moves & luminous glow
‘Night Garbage’, Amy Shearn
Lilies are too morbid, apples too biblical—
am I drowning in literary obsession?
When I look out the window at orange vests
painting a disabled parking bay on the street,
I have to admit they might seem sexy,
but to be sure, I’d have to see
the garbagemen in Brooklyn first.
Whether you dream of finding out sandals
more interwoven and complete to impress someone
or to land a job as a court writer, once you decide
to let your verse out into the wild, you will learn
that in the transactional world of vernacular literature,
back-scratching is the foundation of the like economy,
and the algorithm is its angel of annihilation.
Which goes better with afternoon tea—
yellowcake or magpie?
Does a barber make the barbed wire
to crown a wooden head after the March equinox?
What’s my pleasure if you’re welcome
is never yours?
And so you explain the intricacies of English
for forty quid an hour, but truth be told,
the naive questions of a rebooted life novice
wouldn’t pique your curiosity enough
to answer the one he really wants to ask:
Oughtn’t you to be in love?
It may seem unfair to rate a film one hasn’t watched to the end, but after an hour of watching ‘Loving Vincent’, directed by Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, I simply can’t bring myself to finish it. A poor script and wooden acting with emotionless voices as if generated by AI made it painful to watch.
From my early youth I was an admirer of impressionism. To this day I fondly recall discussions about art with my literature teacher. For her, art ended with Impressionism; for me, this movement was the beginning of true art. So, that’s why I’ve wanted to see ‘Loving Vincent’ since I first heard about it, but only now did I get the opportunity.
I knew it was an animation and in the style of a Van Gogh painting, but I was not aware that it was a live-action film that was later repainted frame by frame—it’s more complicated than that, but technical details are not important here, and putting them aside, I’ve seen animations like this in the past, and neither then nor now was I impressed with the result. In fact, the use of Van Gogh’s painting style and the fact that individual frames were painted by hand by different artists made the result visually difficult to bear for more than a few minutes, mainly because of the flickering of every element. To be frank, I have sincere concerns that an epileptic person could have a seizure during the film.
I really can’t understand how this film got so many positive reviews and high ratings. The number of artists who took part in this project and the effort put in are impressive, I admit, but it’s not enough if the result is at best mediocre. But it just so happens that just before watching this film, I saw ‘Carrington’, directed by Christopher Hampton, so maybe my expectations were a bit too high, which is why the disappointment is all the greater.
hidden pilcrow 