Review of TONGUE STRAMASH

 A LOVE-LETTER AND A QUARREL

My review: 'TONGUE STRAMASH’ - poems in Scots' by the Poet in Residence of the Athletic Arms (the Diggers), David Bleiman

The collection can be bought at

https://poetrykilt.bigcartel.com/product/tongue-stramash

It includes lovely Scots lyrics such as ‘Watter-Mooth’ (River mouth) about the exchange of salt-water tides from the Firth of Forth into the mouth of the River Almond at Cramond where David Bleiman lives and his typically cosmopolitan translation of Villon’s ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’ which contains the heart-tugging stanza:

Whaur’s the hen in the fox’s maw (mouth)?

Whaur’s thon (that) laddie gane tae war?

An whaur’s the print o the deid dug’s (dog’s) paw?

A bairnie thraws a weet snawbaw, (child throws a wet snowball)

Baith thon craws flichter awa. (both those crows flutter away)

His use of Scots is, in some sense, a love letter to his Scottish home for 46 years. There is love in his tributes to the great poets in Scots, Burns and Fergusson and also in his thorough steeping and high competence in the Scots language.

The title refers to the din, or uproar of languages (to me, rather randomly, a goulash, a stew or simply a ‘bose’) that rings in his ears as a result of his heritage and history making the principal theme of the collection identity. For this reason it will be pertinent later to explore Bleiman’s antecedents and even his name.

A particularly significant ‘poyum’ in respect of identity is ‘Cargaes.’ Bleiman commits an act of piracy on the high seas, perhaps paying a sidelong tribute to it, whereby he hijacks John Masefield's 'Cargoes'. Finding that Masefield's exotic vessels are laden with the 'roostie' (rusty) English canon set out by Arthur Quiller Couch, he chucks the lot, Tennyson and all, overboard in favour of an imagined, raging Scottish poet struggling to get his 'melts (spleen) oan the flet white page'.

This alerts us to the fact that, as well as a love letter, this is, in a sense, his ‘quarrel with himself’ and a tricky relationship with the English tradition in which he finds himself located. Most of his other poetry is written in standard English and this collection shows that he finds that fuel for the quarrel for poetic and cultural identity are complicated things. For example, the Scottish poet and St Andrew's academic, Robert Crawford, in his biography of Burns, tells us that the Bard's favourite poet was one he shared with Byron; Alexander Pope.

On meeting David Bleiman in person and conversing in 'southron', I had lazily assumed him to be English, (he looks like an Englishman, quacks like….etc). His mother tongue is English because he was born in South Africa because Jewish-Lithuanian and Jewish-Viennese/Galician grandparents all made their way there, the latter as a result of the rise of the Nazis. At the age of seven his Progressive party activist father judged it wise to seek and find sanctuary from the apartheid country in the England. As a result 19 seminal, educational years were spent there. Since then he has spent 46 years in Scotland, marrying a Glaswegian but spending most of that time in Edinburgh. This explains the Scots. His Jewishness and the earlier story explain the Yiddish in the collection.

His 'Ma Makaronic Manifest' urges the inclusion of Scots, Yiddish, Polish, Cantonese, Spanish, Punjabi, Urdu and French in his 'clootie cloak' (patchwork cloth). This reminds me of Hugh MacDiarmid's process in 'A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle' where many European languages pop up amongst his Scots. Bleiman even ventriloquises Robert Burns making Yiddish/Scots 'luv' to a Jewish red rose called Reyzl Gershon. A glossary is provided.

He makes a profession of a certain rootlessness, declaring himself one of Theresa May's 'citizens of the world/citizens of nowhere' and an immigrant. He does not ‘identify’ as English but as British although it has to be said that this might tangle him with the Empire that brought 'Clarty (dirty) Scottish slave ship(s) blawin into Greenock.'

It is in 'Why Dae Ah Screive in Scots?' (Why do I write in Scots?) that we discover that, in David Goodhart's terms, David Bleiman has become a Citizen of 'Somewhere' because '...wurds will wander tae a mooth/whaurivver makars staun and blether.' (words will wander to a mouth wherever poets stand and chatter). 

In other words, because we are finite, the piece of geography and geology we hail from or light upon, eventually, always breathes through us. Identity and the need for it are difficult to avoid.

Stimulus and Response and the Three Cup Trick

The most noticeable technique of the left in recent times is a distraction one. An egregious event occurs which stimulates a response which would not have occurred had the initial event not have happened. Then the left make the story all about the poor qualities exhibited in the response and dare you not to make your main priority deploring them on pain of being impugned for heartlessness etc. Like the three cup trick they distract your attention onto the lesser evils of the response and away from the superior evil of the original egregious occurrence. They did this with October 7th and Jason Arday.

The Rapture

 We are blessed in this country that, for a pittance, we have a national broadcaster who provides us with such nourishing fare in the form of BBC Drama while steadfastly eschewing the taking of political positions. It subtly uses the idiom like an expert pianist to pluck our cultural strings and to lead us into good pastures. My fear is that I am too unschooled and obtuse a recipient to understand the fullness and subtlety of the riches on offer, to, shall we say, hear every wavering melody in its full significance. I offer you the characters from THE RAPTURE so that you can assist me by explaining what ingenious semiotics are at work. I know that most of them will have gone over my head.

The feisty female psychologist in a wheelchair 

Her young black female patient endowed with prophetic gifts and wrongly accused of a heinous crime

Her gentle and empathetic support worker, Rafiq, whose alibi is only believed when backed up by a white man

A spooky white Christian evangelist who says he is taking away climate alarm for poor children and replacing it with “hope.”

The fat, white, male psychiatrist who does the bidding of the evangelist and undermines the wheelchair-bound psychologist

A fossil fuel company pretending to like sustainables with a white male CEO

A feisty black female climate activist leader

A wronged journalist working on exposing the Fossil fuel guys

A corrupt MP enabling the Fossil fuel barons for the sake of “growth.”

A black policewoman feistily leading door to door inquiries

Pearls before swine in my case; all assistance appreciated….

Ways of Seeing - John Berger

I have a memory of reading this book decades ago but have recently watched the four half-hour accompanying programmes produced by Berger which brought it back to mind. My impression is that it's very sixties/early seventies in sensibility in that Berger takes the part of a MARXIST MARTIAN astonished by the humanoid creatures he is examining for us. If he had known and understood what he and his fellow creatures were in advance might he have been less astonished? Or does he affect to be nonplussed in order to ' know again' the bleeding' obvious about western humans, as if he has just discovered them in the Brazilian jungle, in order to endow them with an academic mystique concocted by himself? In, for example, his examination of Gainsborough's 'Mr and Mrs Andrews', he declares himself to be terribly surprised to find that we are territorial animals who struggle for success and, when it comes, like to advertise the residential property and belongings it brings us and our families.  His astonishment seems a more extraordinary thing. Similarly, in the case of a mammalian species whose survival depends on sexual reproduction, he is surprised to discover that western art reflects that most women go about with a concern about how they appear to men. Evie tells me that to know this is still true you only have to go to Glasgow bus station on a Saturday night. Then he is amazed at the way in which adverts associate the products they are trying to sell with glamorous people with glamorous lifestyles. Whoddathunk? And he looks like Roger Daltrey but sounds like, if it's possible, an even more serious and portentous Malcolm Muggeridge.

https://m.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEA&search_query=john+berger+ways+of+seeing&ra=m

QU’EST-CE QUE C’EST? David Byrne at Edinburgh Playhouse

I was delighted and excited to pick up a late resale ticket on the day of this concert from the 'Who is the Sky' tour. That spoof Madison Avenue voice, a shock of white hair and the Norman Bates mien and 74 year old David Byrne was on stage at the Edinburgh Playhouse 50 miles from where he was born! A photographic tableau vivant behind him and surrounded by no less than twelve musicians and dancers, like Byrne himself, all sporting orange jump suits, and gyrating groovily across the space. It was a pot pourri mishmash of the Playschool Teletubbies, old Benetton ads, that Jaguar advert that almost finished the company off and the inside of Doc Brown’s head from Back to the Future. It all felt very modern with no drum kits, just four percussionists wearing their electronic drums on their hips on shoulder straps. Byrne fades in and out of a stage choreography which he has described as 'democratised' because it makes prominent at different times other musicians. He treats us to his trademark, appealingly Wordsworthian, childhood wonder and his Gregor Samsa-like bafflement on encountering that human condition thing. And, as you’d expect, musicianship of the highest order and highest discipline was a delight. The classic songs that I knew, And She was, Once in a Lifetime, Burning Down the House, Life During Wartime, The Road to Nowhere and Psycho Killers were all performed with a tight swagger and arresting visual interplay between the onstage complement and the video backdrop. I'll just mention, and you will be staggered, Dear Reader, that, completely unexpectedly for an American Rock musician living in New York, Byrne felt moved to communicate his political credentials to us! Imagine my wonderment! The word FASCISM was given a prominent namecheck in connection with footage of Italians singing to each other from balconies on Liberation Day during Covid (there were a strange number of references to the Covid era). David explained for us that the liberation was from Fascism that happened in Italy don’tchaknow? He told us that showing kindness and love is the most punk thing you can do at the moment and the way to ‘resist.’ There followed footage of clumsy ICE myrmidons clutching vainly at a wacky young fellow on a strange bike-like contraption running their gauntlet and getting away. We cheered. Oh how we cheered! Then he asked us to guess which member of the band had a degree in Astrophysics and took delight in inviting a black female to step forward and give us a twirl. We also learnt that four members of the roadie crew were home-schooled but were marvellous anyway. And, finally, a hoarding reading ‘MAKE AMERICA GAY AGAIN!’ was projected. Which brings us back to the Teletubbies mentality and the infantile packaging. Did I discover that, appealing as the music is, it is really the juvenilia of a 75 year old man who is still producing it and that this was the answer to Qu’est-ce que c’est? that I hadn’t realised until now? Perhaps I'm being too harsh on an extremely talented artist...

Managed to catch a wee video of Psycho Killers. I thought this stuff was the dog’s bollocks when it came out.

The Glittering Prizes - Review

In ‘Alien’ human beings are horrifically subjected to the life cycle of another species in the same way as some wasps paralyse their prey so that they can act as hosts and nourishment for their larvae. In the film the humans are kept alive in a living death as part of a pulsating larder. In recent years the same has been done to BBC Drama. Still nominally alive and on our screens it is no longer an end in itself having been subjected to the requirements of social engineering and political activism. Watching the 1976 BBC series, ‘The Glittering Prizes’, free on Forgotten British Television on Youtube one understands the heights from which BBC Drama has fallen. Lord Oi Oi  invited me to re-watch a series I watched first time round as a 17 year old and to write a review. So here goes. 

I remember being rather dazzled by the often coruscating wit of the piece while being confused by much of the content. I hope I now have a better grasp on the latter. It seems to me that the series was often brilliant. It was a sociological and politico-historical record of the age it depicts. Rewatching it now I realise that much of it  also approximates to televised two-handers of taut Scandinavian drama proportions. This is especially true of Episode 3 where Adam Morris interviews Stephen Taylor (played by Eric Porter), an Oswald Moseley facsimile, who has been frothingly washed up on the shore by the tide of the Second World War like our own Ezra Pound.  In Episode 4, a brash and successful Australian from their Cambridge days (are there hints of Clive James?) exposes a prig who has needlessly subjected his family to penury by working in a rural Reform school for pious and high-minded reasons. This has real psychological and moral depth and the complexity and subtlety of the relation between the two men is very satisfying.

The series is flawed by certain contradictions though. The author, Frederick Raphael, was born in Chicago to well-off Jewish parents. The British father’s job with Shell Oil brought Raphael to Putney when he was seven just before the War. The boy was educated to a high degree at Charterhouse and Cambridge. It is fairly obvious that the series is a working out of autobiographical issues to do with Raphael’s Jewishness and the Cambridge milieu he swam in. Adam Morris, excellently portrayed by Tom Conti is his alter ego. The wit is Cambridge razor sharp but erring on the side of being over self-regarding. It seems there is nothing you can’t be ironic about and this fact becomes one of the problems Raphael struggles with; where is real seriousness located? Does real seriousness exist? Is it embarrassing to believe that it does? As an atheist Jew in an observant family in the swinging 60s how do  Adam and Raphael (presumably in the same predicament) address the issue of their Jewishness?  

These two problems come together at the beginning of Episode 6 where the wit is so sharp it cuts itself. Morris, now a successful author, addresses the small audience of some kind of Jewish society. He radiates heartless anti-Zionist contempt towards the audience, even to an elderly Auschwitz survivor, criticising them for their selfishness in demanding a homeland for post-Holocaust Jews while not demanding a homeland for Gypsies who also suffered in the Holocaust. The audience sensibly argues that the Jews have an ancient history in Israel and a religious culture while Gypsies do not. One could point out to Adam something that he seems to overlook, that Gypsies, by definition, are travellers without a homeland; a strange thing for one so clever to overlook. Then, later in the same, final, episode we discover that Adam carries around a photo of a Jewish schoolboy in school uniform with his hands up as he is being herded by Nazi soldiers. Suddenly seriousness intrudes and the constantly scathing and subverting ‘wit’ evaporates.

 

I think the problem was that Raphael was too 20th century and this made him conflicted. The wit is a simulacrum of the fierce adherence of the 20th century to a fashionably absurdist (Modernist?) outlook that undermines simple things or feels guilty about them; a clever, distancing wryness about them must not be abandoned. In spite of this his success, his happy marriage and his pleasing bourgeois life-style overwhelm him in the end and he has to embrace the lovely simplicity of it all. In spite of himself and his guilt in doing so, he is compelled to look on creation and say that it is good, even in reverse in condemning the Holocaust without reserve and exhibiting an allegiance to his lineage. He accepts his Glittering Prizes no longer able to be ironic about them, distance them or subvert them. He has overcome his guilt about his ‘privilege.’

As a footnote one has to say something about the treatment of women in the series. Raphael comes across as still being a 16 year old boy obsessed with hooters and apparently unaware that a person is attached to them. We constantly get the boys’ locker-room perspective on the matter. A Sociology lecturer casually tells a female student, mid-seminar, that her nipples are excellent before continuing to discuss time and motion studies while the student in question doesn’t bat a mascara’d eyelid. A brilliant academic, now turned alcoholic considers the lack of her cup-size a problem of greater proportion than her unfaithful husband and attempts to strip off in public. We even have a protest led by another female student who goes full topless for us. Women are completely sexually compliant and un-protesting (in spite of that protest!) as they might be in a 16 year old’s fantasy. It’s very seventies in this respect.

Pensées

Rationalist Law originating in the Enlightenment human mind has been made the Prime mover of reality rather than something that responds to reality. It has usurped creation. This is why our ability to govern is paralysed; it is hog-tied in Gordian knots of human thought. 

The opposition are at war with any cast of mind that believes it belongs somewhere or has an identity even though such things are required to frame the parameters of the human mind. 

Rationalist technocracy cannot allow common sense reality because it posits an alternate reality, one that only exists on a circuit board.