Do nothing
As most of you will probably be able to deduce from the long gaps between entries on this journal, nothing much is happening in my life at present. A standard crawl through an average day involves me sending my CV to more agencies, attempting to ring and ‘bother’ more of the said agencies, reading a bit, writing a little, taking a walk to the shops for the sake of it, ringing Amanda, then listening to music on my stereo until late at night. This has pretty much been my daily pattern since I returned home. It’s really not worth writing about.
The agencies are being as pig-headed as usual - I realise one of them will cave in and give me a job one day soon, but the banging-my-head-against-a-brick-wall factor does little for the morale at present. Listening to inexperienced post-grads telling me how to run my career and desperately attempting amateur psychology would be funny were it not so frustrating. It’s worth noting that the very same use of amateur psychology saw me being seen as “an ideal civil servant, very quiet, considered and studious” over a year ago, a job I was swiftly fired from with the words “You are not Whitehall material”. That blot on my track record is also probably partly responsible for the present deadlock, and it's possible that part of the blame lies with the people scrutinising the track record. You can see why I privately sneer at the five-second judgements of HR folk and the dumb phrase “Yes people, you REALLY CAN tell what people are like from the way they walk into a room, and here’s how!!!!!”
Given all the above, it’s no surprise that I gave up this afternoon and went up to London to cheer myself up by buying some things I don’t really need (but have longed for some time to have all the same). The first of these items was the Animals That Swim “Best Of” CD. I don’t wish to spend too much time waxing lyrical about this band, since I am still planning to start an MP3 blog of buried musical treasures some time soon, and there’s no question that they’ll be one of the acts I’ll be wasting lots of time trying to convert people to. That said, they were an unorthodox bunch who arrived at the wrong time. The melodies were bright, bold and brassy, which should have been ideal in the mid-nineties Britpop boom, but there were no football terrace chants here. The lyrics were almost prose poems that emphasised the small and insignificant things in life - faded provincial towns, second hand shops, hospital stays. Rather than painting these scenes with bold strokes of black, though, the band seemed to celebrate them. Their uniqueness - and brilliance - stemmed from managing to be uplifting about the very things that lesser artists would doubtless reference in drab, condescending tones. The Australians have the Go-Betweens - I had Animals That Swim. When I was abroad, they were the one band who had the ability to make me feel homesick. They lionised provincial England rather than sneered at it, and walking around the seedier parts of London it’s completely possible to see the history and the glamour in the grime after listening to their work. Also, they were unique in that they refused to play the game in the usual way, booking performance poets for support slots rather than actual bands at times. Such things never go down well at the Church of Cool whose sermons are dictated by the NME.
I also purchased a Wire DVD of the band playing live in Germany in 1979. I have no idea what this will be like, but I look forward to finding out.
On top of that, and last but not least, there’s a new Roddy Lumsden poetry anthology out which serves almost as a ‘best of’ his last ten years of work. Truly, the man is the probably the best poet writing in the UK at the moment. For a long time it seemed as if he’d never get the widespread respect he was due, but he’s getting there now. To make matters more intriguing, thumbing through this book I discovered that he references Stamford Hill, The Fatima Mansions and Kevin Rowland, and living abroad in Canada. As such, much of his work accidentally references my life as well. I’ve never come across a poet before who I so much feel could be writing about my past and present, partly because a large number of the references are utterly familiar to me. Kevin Reinhardt accused me of ripping him off the other week, only to refer to a poem I’d written long before I’d even read any Lumsden. That really says it all. It’s more likely that we both happened to be ripping off the same people in terms of writing style, or coming at subjects from the same standpoint. If I could write really well, I’d write like this man. Of course, that poses something of a problem, in that (even taking personal development into account) nobody needs two of the same poet.
After I’d purchased my items, I went to meet my old friend Marcus in a bar on Berwick Street. We have a long history - when I was at university, we wrote and staged a play together which, to be fair, wasn’t much good. For one thing, it was unfinished and rush-edited at the point of delivery. For quite another, half the actors walked out on us, leaving us either abolishing large chunks of the play where they featured and rewriting the rest to a tight deadline (an unenviable task, I can assure you) or getting bad actors like me to play two different people where one would normally be enough of a struggle. Suffice to say, we had a rocky ride. Nonetheless, unlike most of my collaborators, we’ve kept in touch and are still good friends. Sometimes there’s something about sheer disaster that brings out the best in relationships, though he still gets upset when I say I feel the play, even as a written entity, didn’t work. These days, Marcus has given up entirely on writing (hopefully not on my account) and is shortly to become a racecourse referee. I wish him well.
As for me, I’m still here, waiting for phone calls that don’t come, and most other people in my life are “busy”. This always seems to be the way things run. Pah.
The agencies are being as pig-headed as usual - I realise one of them will cave in and give me a job one day soon, but the banging-my-head-against-a-brick-wall factor does little for the morale at present. Listening to inexperienced post-grads telling me how to run my career and desperately attempting amateur psychology would be funny were it not so frustrating. It’s worth noting that the very same use of amateur psychology saw me being seen as “an ideal civil servant, very quiet, considered and studious” over a year ago, a job I was swiftly fired from with the words “You are not Whitehall material”. That blot on my track record is also probably partly responsible for the present deadlock, and it's possible that part of the blame lies with the people scrutinising the track record. You can see why I privately sneer at the five-second judgements of HR folk and the dumb phrase “Yes people, you REALLY CAN tell what people are like from the way they walk into a room, and here’s how!!!!!”
Given all the above, it’s no surprise that I gave up this afternoon and went up to London to cheer myself up by buying some things I don’t really need (but have longed for some time to have all the same). The first of these items was the Animals That Swim “Best Of” CD. I don’t wish to spend too much time waxing lyrical about this band, since I am still planning to start an MP3 blog of buried musical treasures some time soon, and there’s no question that they’ll be one of the acts I’ll be wasting lots of time trying to convert people to. That said, they were an unorthodox bunch who arrived at the wrong time. The melodies were bright, bold and brassy, which should have been ideal in the mid-nineties Britpop boom, but there were no football terrace chants here. The lyrics were almost prose poems that emphasised the small and insignificant things in life - faded provincial towns, second hand shops, hospital stays. Rather than painting these scenes with bold strokes of black, though, the band seemed to celebrate them. Their uniqueness - and brilliance - stemmed from managing to be uplifting about the very things that lesser artists would doubtless reference in drab, condescending tones. The Australians have the Go-Betweens - I had Animals That Swim. When I was abroad, they were the one band who had the ability to make me feel homesick. They lionised provincial England rather than sneered at it, and walking around the seedier parts of London it’s completely possible to see the history and the glamour in the grime after listening to their work. Also, they were unique in that they refused to play the game in the usual way, booking performance poets for support slots rather than actual bands at times. Such things never go down well at the Church of Cool whose sermons are dictated by the NME.
I also purchased a Wire DVD of the band playing live in Germany in 1979. I have no idea what this will be like, but I look forward to finding out.
On top of that, and last but not least, there’s a new Roddy Lumsden poetry anthology out which serves almost as a ‘best of’ his last ten years of work. Truly, the man is the probably the best poet writing in the UK at the moment. For a long time it seemed as if he’d never get the widespread respect he was due, but he’s getting there now. To make matters more intriguing, thumbing through this book I discovered that he references Stamford Hill, The Fatima Mansions and Kevin Rowland, and living abroad in Canada. As such, much of his work accidentally references my life as well. I’ve never come across a poet before who I so much feel could be writing about my past and present, partly because a large number of the references are utterly familiar to me. Kevin Reinhardt accused me of ripping him off the other week, only to refer to a poem I’d written long before I’d even read any Lumsden. That really says it all. It’s more likely that we both happened to be ripping off the same people in terms of writing style, or coming at subjects from the same standpoint. If I could write really well, I’d write like this man. Of course, that poses something of a problem, in that (even taking personal development into account) nobody needs two of the same poet.
After I’d purchased my items, I went to meet my old friend Marcus in a bar on Berwick Street. We have a long history - when I was at university, we wrote and staged a play together which, to be fair, wasn’t much good. For one thing, it was unfinished and rush-edited at the point of delivery. For quite another, half the actors walked out on us, leaving us either abolishing large chunks of the play where they featured and rewriting the rest to a tight deadline (an unenviable task, I can assure you) or getting bad actors like me to play two different people where one would normally be enough of a struggle. Suffice to say, we had a rocky ride. Nonetheless, unlike most of my collaborators, we’ve kept in touch and are still good friends. Sometimes there’s something about sheer disaster that brings out the best in relationships, though he still gets upset when I say I feel the play, even as a written entity, didn’t work. These days, Marcus has given up entirely on writing (hopefully not on my account) and is shortly to become a racecourse referee. I wish him well.
As for me, I’m still here, waiting for phone calls that don’t come, and most other people in my life are “busy”. This always seems to be the way things run. Pah.