Meanings eluding me

If you see a phrase in this post that seems to lack good English language logic, don't be surprised. The Internet is full of surprises, and the lack of proper English is just one of them, though probably one of the minor ones.

Fender Telecaster musicians friend is a phrase which I've been trying to get to grips with for the last five minutes, and I'm wondering if it's poetry of some sort. I know what a Fender Telecaster is: an electric guitar (the kind that tends to obliterate other instruments when it's played). It's been around since the 1950s, apparently, and has been continually improved from its original state as a 'masterpiece of design and functionality.'

I'm not sure that the phrase Fender Telecaster musicians friend is a masterpiece of design and functionality, and the missing apostrophe annoys. It might work in its present state if translated into a foreign language where such curiosities are the norm. Maybe.

So is it poetry? After all poetry is a place where oddities of the language appear frequently. I came across just such a one this morning:

The heavy bear who goes with me,   

A manifold honey to smear his face...

I've been puzzling since what 'a manifold honey' might be, or why the line seems so at odds with normal language. Often such lines come right after repeated readings of a poem, or after you've memorised it and it suddenly clarifies itself when you least expect it. (I find this with poems by Les Murray, often, although sometimes certain lines of his elude me entirely, lines such as 

.....No one here will be

a visitor gnawed by lifelong celebration.

I have a rough idea what it's about, in the context of the poem, but it's by no means straightforward. However, that's the sort of thing you've got to take with poetry; it inhabits a language world of its own, one in which it surprises you by juxtapositioning words that don't like sitting beside each other, or wrenching the grammar around in such a way that you can't figure out a verb from a noun.

So perhaps what I should do is jot Fender Telecaster musicians friend into a notebook or file, and keep it until one day it suddenly decides it's the basis of a poem. (Though I think I'll be obliged to include the apostrophe, or risk my sanity.)

Lists

One of the things I love about Les Murray's poems is the way he frequently creates a poem out of a list. But in his case, it's not just a list of names that might or might not have a relationship to each other, it will be a list of hugely inventive metaphors for a particular item. Shower is a prime example. He takes the idea of a shower and provides a seemingly endless array of creative approaches to thinking about the simple shower. There's a typical Murray humorous ending to this poem as well.

I've known the poem Shower for some years, because it was one that I memorised. However, while reading through one of his collections I came across a poem called Broad Bean Sermon. This poem isn't quite like Shower in that it doesn't focus completely on 'explaining' the idea of a broad bean. This second poem does give a number of metaphors for broad beans, but also delights in the idea that no sooner have you picked them all than you find there are just as many still to be picked:

Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find 
plenty, and fetch them.  An hour or a cloud later
you find shirtfulls more.  At every hour of daylight
appear more than you missed:

It swings back and forth between the two themes. And here is just one section of his descriptions of the beans:

ripe, knobbly ones, freshy-sided, 
thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,
beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,
beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers
in the incident light.

The site where the poem appears online has 'freshy-sided' but in one of my books of Murray poems, it's printed as 'flesh-sided'; in another it has 'fleshy-sided'. None of these is clear as to the meaning, and which is correct? Maybe all of them; other poems by Murray have variations like this, depending on which edition of his books you're looking at.

In relation to this I want to direct you to a blog by Iain Sutherland, called The Ink Jester. Iain is a young friend of mine - he and I have known each other for years, since he was little.  As a child he played the dwarf in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (I played Mr Beaver) back in the early 2000s, when our church presented a dramatised version of the book. Iain's been experimenting with writing on his blog, and the other day he produced a list of 152 uses for a paperclip. It's not poetry, and not intended to be, but as a list of ideas it has some delightful moments.*

Later addition: I just rediscovered a short poem that fits into this post nicely...I've been working through my list of cuttings and found one by Jonathan Potter, called You and I.  In it, the writer details several things about the 'You' of the title.


*This used to be available online, but seems to have disappeared. 

Books, Bags and Barnaby Rudge

I was going past the Library yesterday, heading towards the Moray Place post office (crowded as usual, now that two post offices I used to use have been closed) when I found myself walking alongside the librarian who does the Interloans.   She commented that I hadn't used the Interloan service in a while, and I had to admit I hadn't.  (I used to be always ordering books through Interloan when I was in my last job.)  I said I was tending to read the Kindle mostly, at which she tutted a little (rightly so for one whose trade is in real live books), and that I was carrying my library of books in my pocket at the moment.

For many years I carried a backpack with me pretty much wherever I went, and there would always be at least one book inside, if not two.   I was reminded of this because the people who sell Jansport mesh backpacks have one style of backpack called the Book Pack.  I think basically it's just a backpack for school kids to carry their books and such in, but I've never owned a Book Pack, and am rather tickled by the idea of it.

When I went to Sydney a couple of weekends ago I didn't take a single book with me.  In the past I would always have had at least two or three - even for a weekend.  In fact, I don't know that I took any books to the States with me when we went over for my son's wedding - although I did bring one back.   Instead of paper books, I've been carrying the Kindle.  One of its many advantages is that if you find you're not enjoying one of the books you've got on it, you can easily switch to something else you haven't yet read that's sitting in your 'library' of books.  Or you can even dip again into something you've already read.

And another advantage I'm finding (and found on the dimly lit airplanes) is that you can crank up the font size until it's comfortable for your eyes.  At night I often read with a bigger font size than in the daytime - it overcomes the issue of older eyes struggling to focus on smaller print.

And a third advantage is that you don't have to hold a tightly bound book open against itself.   I'm slowly reading my way through one of Les Murray's poetry collections (The Vernacular Republic) at the moment, and apart from the print being too small (though not unreadable) the binding is very tight.  It can't be forced open too far otherwise it'll split - another disadvantage of tight binding.  However, the not inconsiderable advantage of real books is that you can take them in the bath without trepidation  -though I've never dropped a book in the bath yet.  I'm a lot more wary about taking the Kindle in the bath, though I have tried it.

As I mentioned in a recent post, I finished reading Ivanhoe recently.  It was the first Walter Scott book I'd read, and while some of it was quite gripping, some of it was rather turgid in style.   Since it's Dickens' bicentenary this year, I thought I should catch up on that writer again, and am now reading Barnaby Rudge, one of the few Dickens titles I've never read.   What a glorious difference!  Occasionally the more upper class characters ponce on a bit in their language, and Barnaby himself (a person with some intellectual disability, as we'd say now) has a tendency to the rhapsodic, but for the rest it's like a wholesome meal, or a dip in a cool stream on a hot day, or going to the circus after listening to a whole CD of serial music by Webern.  Dickens' prose is so alive, and his characters so delightfully drawn - and furthermore they speak in their own inimitable Dickensian way, a style that no other writer has ever quite achieved.  Many of them have that joyously bubbling humour in their speech even when they're at their most serious.  As you can see, I'm thoroughly enjoying this book.  (Sorry, Sir Walter!)

Emergency and depression

I'd never heard of an Emergency Medical Technician until today, when I saw Emergency Medical Technician Jobs advertised.   One of the jobs is advertised this way: Responsible for the pre-hospital care of patients who are in need of this care as a result of accident or illness, which sounds to me pretty much like a person working an ED or ER situation.  Which is what my new daughter-in-law does, even though she's not called an Emergency Medical Technician, but a Physician's Assistant.  No doubt someone can inform me as to the difference between these two; I'm sure there's enough of a difference for them to be classed differently. 


Admittedly my daughter-in-law can work in non-ER situations too, so perhaps that's an element of what is different about the two roles.  


Skipping through my clippings (that bit of rhyme is kind of appropriate to what I'm about to say) I came across a description of Australian poet, Les Murray, and his fight with depression.    It comes from a review of Murray's book, Killing the Black Dog: a memoir of depression.  At the age of 50, Murray fell into a deep depression, "occasioned, he believes, by the chance comment of an old high school tormenter who came to a local reading given by Murray and who “cheerfully recalled to me one of the nicknames she had bestowed on me 30-odd years previously.” (Murray had experienced a less severe depressive episode at the end of the 1950s.) Within days, his fingers started tingling painfully, and he later developed a sudden aversion to nicotine. He landed in an emergency room with what turned out to be a panic attack. A doctor sent him to the psychiatric ward, where his depression was diagnosed."


Ah, the panic attack.  I know these horrors well.  Murray would have up to four or five a day, as well as suffering from the “the 4 a.m. Show” in which you find “your troubles and terrors ripping into you with a gusto allowed them by fatigue and the disappearance of proportion.  I wonder why 4 am is such a significant hour for depression sufferers?   I know 4 am well, but the same process can start earlier at 3 am too.  Though I haven't suffered depression for some time, ordinary anxiety can bring on these early morning calls, when you wake with a snap and suddenly your brain is in full locomotion mode.  It takes quite a bit to get it to settle down again, although I've found that reciting old Psalms and poems I've memorised helps to distract the brain that wants to go and do something now!  The brain likes you to get up rather than lie in bed, and sometimes that's the only solution: getting up and taking a pen and writing down what is bugging you.  Writing it out of your head certainly helps. 


Another poet, Billy Collins, has an apt line regarding this in his poem Journal, where he writes:


And when my heart is beating
too rapidly in the dark,
I will go downstairs in a robe,
open it [the journal] up to a blank page
and try to settle on the blue lines
whatever it is that seems to be the matter.

Rhyme schemes - or not

Though I'm now using another blog to write specifically about poetry (and to include poems I've written myself), I've always included posts about poems and poetry on this blog too, so I'll continue to do so.

I've been reading Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled recently, and this time going through it in detail.  (I started to read it a few years back, after I saw it in a bookshop in England, but didn't go very far.)   In the section where he discusses rhyme, he uses that old system of detailing how the poem's lines rhyme by marking each line as a or b or c etc.   A common rhyme scheme, then, will be something like:
a
b
a
b. 

There are, of course, many more complicated schemes than this.   I've been reading through Les Murray's collection The Vernacular Republic: Poems 1961-1983.   I've delved into it in the past, and am already familiar with some of the poems because they come from other collections that I have, but this time I'm working systematically through it (from the end to the beginning, just to be different) and am intrigued by Murray's oddball rhyming schemes.  If 'schemes' is the correct word. 

Murray's poems are a mix of the witty and humorous (Morse, which tells the story of a Morse Code operator who does surgery on a man by receiving instruction by Morse from a doctor miles away), or the ones in which he plays with sounds and rhymes almost overwhelmingly (The Mouthless Image of God in the Hunter Colo Mountains - a crazy title that seems to have little to do with the poem which begins with the idea of a youth getting dogs to bark in the night), or the ones that philosophise about Art (Satis Passo), or ones that use foreign words and arcane English words or made up words (phallocrypt, single-bulged, cols, Orogold) that seldom or never appear in ordinary speech.   His breadth of language is always extraordinary, in fact. 


And then there are ones like The Smell of Coal Smoke which is a loosely biographical piece about his mother and grandfather.   In it he uses a common enough rhythm (though the lines are by no means always the same beat length) and mostly common language, and seems to be using a very common rhyme scheme:

aa
bb
cc
dd

This scheme comes a cropper in the second stanza where it goes to:

aaa
bb
c
a
c

The c rhyme happens to rhyme with the a rhyme in the first stanza....no doubt intentionally.

The third stanza has this scheme:

aa
bb
c
a
cc

Which appears to have nothing to do with the previous stanza, rhyme-wise.  The fourth stanza works this way:

aa
bb
cc
ab

Finally, stanza five works like this:

aa (a partial rhyme of frisson and Cornishman)
b
c
b
d
c (another partial rhyme, this time of Brown and soon - Brown has appeared more than once before)
d

Hardly conventional, and certainly disruptive if you think that he's going to go in a smooth direction, rhyme-wise.  It could be said that Murray doesn't know much about rhyme schemes.  It's more likely he does know and likes to break the mould.   Or that he's conveying something psychological by disrupting the expected flow of the piece, giving us a sense of how the boy who's 'narrating' the poem feels.   It's the same with the length of the lines, which sometimes are quite short, and sometimes seem to run out of breath.  You can read the whole poem here, and see what you think.

Beware the Machine

A friend had an incident with an exercise machine tonight rather like Bill Murray did in the film Lost in Translation. There was a short scene in that movie where Murray is trying to find things to do to fill in his time in Japan, so he goes on the treadmill machine. A female Japanese voice is instructing him in a rather sergeant-major way, and gets increasingly hyper about what he’s supposed to do at the same time as the machine increases its speed. Finally Murray is thrown off in a flurry of elbows and knees while the voice burbles on for him to keep on moving!!
My friend apparently got kicked off his machine, according to his wife. He then got up and it hit him and bit him at the same time. Her suggestion was that keeping fit was too dangerous.

Lost in Translation

I probably didn’t give Lost in Translation enough of a mention, since there were quality aspects to it. The Japanese/American interplay is often quite zany: the handing over of business cards at the beginning to Bill Murray by a half dozen people who are somehow involved with his next few days; the appalling prostitute who invades his room and nearly cripples him; the insane chat show host; the director of the commercial Murray is making who can’t say something simple without a hundred words – all in Japanese and at great speed. It’s then translated into almost nothing by his offsider.
Then there are the weird people whom Murray and Johansson meet in their night wanderings, strange people who seem to pour out their heart – in Japanese. Or the man who is a rather fat John Lennon imitation; and then his lady moves into the shot, and she’s Yoko Ono. And there’s the crazy starlet who can’t stop talking long enough to let anyone else speak, or the anonymous fourth person at the table with Johansson and her husband and the starlet, who talks enthusiastically in pop music-speak for a minute, asks her if she understands, and she says no. He might as well be speaking Japanese.
The humour is quiet and subtle, and because Murray underplays his character to such an extent even the mad moments, such as when he’s trapped on an exercise treadmill with a Japanese voice exclaiming at him, aren’t over the top. These are the qualities of the movie.
But there’s no storyline; almost nothing really happens except the revealing of a man’s life on autopilot, and a girl wondering why she married a young man who doesn’t seem really interested in her. Both of them find it hard to sleep at night and they meet accidentally and on purpose in various places in the large hotel they’re staying in. Both of them have lost their way for the time being, and really don’t find it by the time the movie’s over. While this is interesting, it’s not exactly stimulating, and as I said in the earlier post, there’s a great sag in the middle of the movie where eccentric Japanese night people take over but don’t really contribute anything to what’s going on. People wandering around Tokyo, or staring out of hotel windows, or drinking whisky in the bar, or doing karaoke are interesting, but only up to a point. Unless something moves in their lives, we’re left back at square one. Which I think is the problem – for me – of the movie. For all their meetings and odd conversations, we’re no further on at the end than we were at the beginning.

Sound for the Deaf

We’re babysitting a house at the moment that has a wide-screen tv, and I mean wide-screen. Full-scale action movies appear as they would in the cinema. However, with the benefits of such a system come the negatives: the remote controls. There are two required to get the DVD working, and they have more buttons on them than the computer keyboard has keys. Not only that, many of them have more than one function. And if you don’t get things in the right sequence you don’t get the movie – or even the tv channels as we’ve just discovered.
Last night we watched Lost in Translation, the Bill Murray/Scarlett Johansson movie about a couple of insomniacs in Japan. It started off well, with a quirky sense of humour, but seemed to lose the plot (there wasn’t much of one) in the middle, and sagged for about a quarter of an hour. When we first tried to play it we got closed captioning – that system that not only tells you the dialogue but also indicates the sound effects. Mission Impossible III is on at the moment – the sound effects would be along the lines of car crash noises, glass breaking, more glass breaking, even more glass breaking, many people going Ahhhh!, villain mutters under his breath, and so on.
Lost in Translation was considerably quieter, for the most part, and only required things like: shower noise, phone rings.