Very deep somewhere in that shriveled raisin I like to call a heart, I am missing blog-land. More shallowly, I am living an actual life in the physical realm. Rather than being one of those bloggers whose every post is on the subject of why she doesn’t post more, however, I shall forge onwards and upwards in the spirit of poetry and good humour.
Ten Things I Have Done Since Last Time I Posted
1. Watched Florence + the Machine play in Trinity Chapel. It’s literally a chapel. She’s literally Florence Welch. I’m basically certain that my biggest achievement in life so far was being one of a few hundred deadly hushed people listening to “Cosmic Love” in a friggin’ chapel. And it was free.- 2. Written an essay with the catchy title “Freedom and Loneliness in Melville’s ‘Bartleby’ and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn“. I love Huck. Did I say before about loving Huck? Go read the book and tell me you don’t love Huck.
- Bought a faux-fur jacket, a ridiculous snake-printed power-shoulder blouse and a fleece-lined grey zippy top in Penneys for under €30. I LOVE CLOTHES LA LA LA.
- Read all the sex scenes in Rabbit, Run.
- Watched the X Factor final, which for those of you outside the British Isles is basically karaoke with lasers; lol’d at Simon saying Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” is “not that well known,” (could he be less in touch with pop culture? what’s his job again?); and also but of course read stories about my beloved Jedward.
- Gone to War in Spy on Friday night. I don’t know who the DJ was, but she is officially my hero. And she told me my lipstick was amazing. Everybody go to War, it’s madness. Not real war, the club. Although I’m sure real war is madness too. Also when my three amigos and I came out of the club that night, someone shouted: “Hey look, it’s Girls Aloud!” No idea what that was about, but I bagsies being Nicole.
- Stayed up late for the following activities: watching Series Two of The Inbetweeners; teaching someone to play “
Redemption Song” on guitar; gossiping about boys; gossiping with boys; eating Petit Filous; thinking someone stole my Petit Filous when I actually just ate them all; eating a basin full of Coco Pops insted; watching Series One of The Inbetweeners; being compared to Girls Aloud. - Received four texts with *some text missing* at the most crucial moment of the text. Why always the crucial moment? Why?
- Had fake snow stuck in my hair, shoes, handbag, faux-fur jacket, and left eye.
- Missed home.
Luckily, Christmas approaches and end-of-term essays loom. Over and out, dudes and dudettes.
Turns out everyone’s favourite talentless twosome are TOTALLY FASHION MODELS OMG YOU GUYS.
That’s right, sceptical ladies and frankly indifferent gentlemen, Jedward are appearing in a spread in Grazia Magazine, of which I will naturally be purchasing, oh, I don’t know, four copies? Six? Eleven?
Lovers and haterz alike must at this point admit that those are some smokin’ hot twins right there. And wait, there’s more!
I always knew there was something about them. It just turns out that the something was “having a really pretty face”. Who knew.
Me. I knew.
Do vandals rock mikes? I thought vandals just vandalised things.
I know I’ve been posting way too much poetry lately, but my prose output is like literally zero, besides which, blame Walt Whitman, who is awesome, and also dead. College work has been a-piling, and prose really takes it out of you. To write and post this in the first place, I had to skip out on finishing Huckleberry Finn. Don’t give away the ending in the comments pleeeease, I love Huck so much already.
If you are inexplicably interested in what else I’m doing with my life and time, feel free to follow me on Twitter. I may just follow you back. Or alternatively may not. Mostly I’m speculating on what the twins from X Factor might be up to. Right now, I guess watching TV. Maybe eating some cereal. You can tell I would be good at Twitter.
The title of this poem is like a twofold reference. Points for anyone who gets either of the references, which are not at all relevant to the content of the poem. Yay, points!
Into the Attic
Because sometimes I am seized with something else –
it is not the sweat of early death
or social trade of flattened conversation –
but a kind of reaching
far out into the whiteness,
this is why I am writing.
I do not want to live after death
but I would like to live now.
Yes, I am afraid of voicelessness;
that I address myself to you, to you, always
and will never arrive; afraid of other things.
I separate myself from this,
hold myself separate and transparent like film
so that I can use the words I am given.
I am no longer metaphorical
standing for nothing, meaning only myself.
I am alive
and you may know this
because I am telling you.
Another Song
I have no self-identical meaning. I know.
I present none of your truth to you, yes, I know –
and yet I am, part of this beautiful irreverent mass
with you, with everyone. Something perfect is here in us
so what would be changed if you were to love me? –
You already do. We belong to and are one another.
Certainly our eyes have met
and we have smiled for the same purpose
(which is never the same)
and this is as much as I have done with myself.
I know you as I know myself –
both wholly and not at all –
but with trust and hunger. I am hungry always
and this is what is right.
How much we unknowingly share with each other
which could any day bloom to consciousness,
to a season of harvest, a great and mobile congress –
what hope I have for being seen and seeing!
How much we are doing and have left to do!
I have been a completely useless blogger for some time now. Blame college. I do mean to return and also catch up on all the excellent blogs I’ve missed out on over the last month or so, because I have missed them, but things keep interfering. Oh well.
This poem is also in places extremely similar to the last poem I posted. Think of it as an extended, completely different second draft. I basically just typed the last punctuation mark and posted it immediately, which may or may not be (read: definitely is not) a good idea, to make up for my lack of posting, yadda yadda yadda, here’s the poem.
The Undergraduate
She has settled like the yellow of autumn
into this new life: waking, walking to the tram
alone in the morning. White sunlight lies
neat and cold like snow on fallen leaves.
Life has opened its arms to her, suddenly,
and here is everything she looked for:
the measured solitude of city life,
the endless library, the panelled common rooms
with high windows over the green,
the crowded lecture halls.
Here are late nights, silly and half-drunken,
spent kissing or talking about politics;
the dog-eared volumes of poetry and
the college papers, the music on Grafton Street
at night, sometimes jazz, sometimes
The Ramones. She stands and smiles,
in gold-buttoned winter coat and beret
but never offers change. Instead, she’ll buy
envelopes, stamps, paper-clips
and coffee in a paper cup to finish on the tram.
When she gets home, her housemates are
sitting in the kitchen, playing poker with the boys.
She fills the sink to do the washing-up
and chats about nothing, wrist-deep in hot water
and apple-scented detergent. To belong
has maybe always been this easy, has always
lived in little things, the laughing and leaving
wine-glasses drying on the draining board.
She will not mind anymore the years she spent
in unhappiness and jealousy, in faded
magazine cut-outs; they served their purpose
and now she will no longer compose
sad, dreamy lyrics about places she has
never been; perhaps she will no longer
compose anything. Still, it is enough
to turn and dry her hands and say yes
she will play a game of poker, why not.
There will be time again for the things
she used to dream of; she will not wait
on them, but still they may arrive
amongst the hand-drying and the
games of poker, and there will be time
for this, too, and it does not worry her.
It is enough now to be happy.
She takes the tram back from college
with flocks of girls in coloured winter coats.
In the window she is reflected
a flat ghost over buildings and
the roadworks beside Harcourt station.
She will have to settle for what she is given,
or be lonely; she will take the posters from her wall
the locket from her throat, leave aside
the little pretences, stop falling in love with
strangers. She will feel ordinary things.
The tram ascends through Charlemont,
through sunlight neat and cold like snow.
Drunk last night she stood on the bridge and
watched the slow green river and felt
like Eve before the snake; she will turn away
from dreaming and be saved; she will turn
and show her small white hands; she will
repent. She will only feel ordinary things.
The tram moves bright and cold past
Beechwood, Cowper, into Milltown.
She is an ancient creature now.
She has always been ready.
“I know you.”
“Um – okay.”
“You play guitar. With a band. I don’t actually know you, I just know you, from seeing you. Play. I’ve seen your band.”
“Right. Cool. That’s five-seventy-five.”
“Oh. I –”
“Yeah, well I can’t just give freebies to people who’ve seen my band play.”
“What? No! I was – sorry, no, I didn’t want a freebie. I wasn’t, like. I was just saying it. Here. Sorry.”
He puts the money in the till and slides the change across the counter. “So you were being serious,” he said, “you really do recognise me.”
“Yes. What? Obviously.”
“Oh, okay. See, I feel bad now. It’s just I once gave a free sandwich to someone who said they saw my band and then word kind of got around and people started just pretending they knew me so they could get a free sandwich.”
“Oh! Oh, ha.”
“But. Obviously you weren’t doing that. So. I apologise.”
“It’s okay. Just one of those coincidences. I actually saw you playing last weekend in the Trifecta.”
“Well, thank you for coming. Did you have a good night?”
“No. But you guys were great.”
He laughs. “Hey, thank you. I think we suck. But that’s just me.” He cleaned the counter offhandedly with a damp cloth. “I’m surprised you even recognised me. I definitely wouldn’t recognise a guitarist from a band that I saw for a half-hour in a dark bar somewhere.”
“You’re very recognisable.”
“Oh yeah? I thought maybe you just had a really good facial memory. You know the way some people have really advanced areas in certain parts of their brain.”
“I don’t think faces would be my advanced area, really.”
“You’ve got to be at least pretty good.”
“I think you just have one of those faces.”
“Yeah. The advanced kind.”
“The word ‘advanced’ has stopped making sense now.”
“Already? That’s weak. I could say it at least another five times.”
“Do it.”
“Advanced, advanced, ad– oh no, you’re right, it’s gone.”
“Well. Thank you for my sandwich.”
“I didn’t make it. They make it back there.”
“Right. Well, thanks for letting me know that too. I’m sure that will come in handy.”
“I would like to take you out for coffee sometime.”
“Do people really do that?”
“No. But we could.”
“Technically, yes we could. Although that might be something of a busman’s holiday for you.”
“I don’t even drink coffee. I could have a Coke and just watch you drink it.”
“You don’t drink coffee. Now that is weird.”
“Look, if you were just flirting with me all this time because you have a crush on someone else from the band, then you totally blew your chances. I’m not gonna even think about introducing you. Who is it? Is it Steve? I’ll tell him you have AIDS.”
“I wouldn’t recognise Steve if he hit me in the face.”
“So it’s a date.”
Long summer clicks faintly to a close
on this, September sixth.
The girls have already left for college and
they call to talk about flatmates and olive oil.
Yours is the last term to start.
They do not ask for news.
You wander lonely; the town is dim and misted over,
cars move like ancient submarines
and streetlights come on early.
You hide in the bookshop among the magazines,
leaf through Mojo and the NME
until it’s dry. The girl behind the counter smiles
on your way out; she knows your brother.
On the walk back home, leaves crackle
in your ears like fallen pages.
Your sister comes home from school
bad-tempered in the evenings, saying there
is no news, now stop asking. You spent
six years in the same school, and remember
the tall windows, the litter of cherry blossoms,
the chanting of the choir from the music room.
All this is clear and curiously empty like
a camera moving through the Titanic: lonely, lucid,
taking in the steam-heat of the lunchroom with
that sweet thin smell of gravy,
the slanting light and plaster-casts of saints
but never voices; never friends.
The soft clap of the letterbox wakes you up
to these grey autumn mornings. Padding with
bare feet into the kitchen you remember
the day last year you took a train
to Dublin with the girls
and queued in the rain for the front row
until your lips were chalk-white and the doors opened.
You remember the posters Sellotaped in your locker
and the mixed CDs you made for each other
with the tracklists written on Day-Glo card.
That obscure fanatic, now a college girl with crumpled dresses
in a suitcase, bedroom walls pock-marked
with posters taken down and folded up.
The train pulls in at seven-fifteen. You shove your case
onto the luggage rack and shiver.
Dawn breaks over yellowed lake islands, drowsy farms,
and you unravel your headphones, even though
it’s hardly morning yet.
I skipped out on blogging at all yesterday, mainly because I was thinking about Kings of Leon’s little temper tantrum at Reading, and finally decided to post my thoughts on the issue. So this is that.
For those of you still unaware, and the many of you who care not a jot for the various goings-on of the Followills, bear with me for a moment: on Friday night, Kings of Leon headlined England’s Reading Festival, which they ended by announcing that they were “sick of Kings of Leon,” smashing their guitars and giving the crowd the finger.
Well, sure. You see, it’s not an easy life for a rock star.
The Kings are known by now as one of the hardest-working bands in rock; since 2003 they’ve been on a near-constant worldwide tour, taking minimal breaks to get their asses back in the studio and record what we’ve come to expect from them, ie solid gold. When they do not do so — as on 2008’s massively best-selling and critically disappointing Only By The Night — we call them sell-outs. When they mess up one show in their vast and all-consuming tour schedule, we threaten boycotts and cry arrogance and mourn for the days when they had bad haircuts and nobody liked them. We need something to worship, and when that something is not provided, four young men from Tennessee are to blame.
On the other hand, there’s only so much pity one can summon up — especially given the current economic climate — for a bunch of spoilt man-boys who go to bed with supermodels and wake up in penthouse suites of five-star hotels. Let’s not forget that those ticket-holders at Reading, those front-row angels who stood crushed against the barrier with their last few hundred spent on this, their one holiday all year: these are the people who put Kings of Leon in the Four Seasons. And getting a mumbled “fuck you” as a reward isn’t a surprising source of complaint.
Lead singer Caleb Followill attempted to make up for this at Reading’s sister festival Leeds on Sunday night by dedicating early track “Red Morning Light” to the audience members “who didn’t just come for two songs”. Their open contempt for new fans speaks little about the crowd and volumes about their own discomfort with their new material. Queasy at the notion of having sold out, their solution appears to be hating whoever it was that bought what they were selling.
Caleb Followill has long been playing the tortured genius card, and while at moments like these it wears thin, it is this line between arrogance and self-disgust that has made Kings of Leon what they are. A former anorexic with heavily-rumoured drink and drug problems, and the lyricist behind most of the Kings’ work, Caleb is usually seen as the band’s most intriguing figure, and it is he who made Friday’s controversial onstage remarks. While the psycho-analysis of rock stars is rarely accurate and never useful, I’m going to do it anyway, and say that Caleb lashed out at the crowd because they are what they are, what any audience is: an accurate reflection of what his band has become. Kings of Leon’s continued and finally successful attempts to make it huge have left them stranded between fans they are quickly losing and fans they apparently don’t want.
So what of us? Those who spend our money on their records and feverishly wait at the computer until tickets come onsale? Well, I don’t think it goes too far for us to voice our disappointment: in fact, I think we owe it to them. The best of their music — the best of anyone’s music — is grounded in the universal experience of what it means to be human, and when you forget that, and forget that your fans are the people generous enough to share that with you, then you forget whatever it used to mean to be an artist. Reading was a disgrace to the name of Followill. And I care about those suckers too much to let this one go.
Update: Some video footage of the rant in question has now surfaced. My original thoughts on the whole thing have accordingly changed a little, but not a lot. See what you think. The transcript follows the video and obviously the whole thing is peppered with swears, so shield your eyes.
Caleb: [inaudible] Kings of Leon.
[crowd boos]
Caleb: Oh no, hey, it’s way too late in the set to fucking be saying that shit. I understand. We’re fucking sick of Kings of Leon too. But we get up here every night and we do this…
[crowd cheering]
Caleb: [inaudible] every night, and I stop being sick of Kings of Leon and I thank God for everything that I have. And so for all the people out there that don’t give a shit about us, I want you to know that I understand. But we worked fucking hard to get here. So anyone who has anything to say, fuck you. We’re the goddamn Kings of Leon!
It’s that time again! That is, the time when I tell you the three songs I’ve been listening to for the last week and you go “what? that song was released like a year ago! do you Irish not own radios or something?” and I’m like “um, no, actually” and then it turns out we do and I was totally lying to make you feel bad. Okay, that hasn’t happened yet. What actually happens is, I list three songs here and then you list three songs in the comments and then we feel validated. Try it and see!
1. “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love (Baby)” by Billie Holiday. This song was patently not released last year, since it was recorded back in 1936 and everything, but it is gorgeous. Holiday’s voice is like nothing else in the world, and she’s still the touchstone for many female vocalists today, from Amy Winehouse to Regina Spektor. Actually, Regina Spektor wrote a song about her. It’s called “Lady”. But that’s not one of the songs this week, so let’s move on.
2. “Flume” by Bon Iver. I had the pleasure of seeing Bon Iver perform in the Big Top at Galway Arts Festival recently, and they pretty much blew me away. If you think the strange, melancholy and deeply moving ambience of their music can’t possibly translate to a live gig in what is basically a glorified circus tent, then go and buy a ticket and be amazed. I was. There’s actually a gorgeous acappella version of “For Emma” knocking around on YouTube somewhere, so if you’re already a Bon Iver fan, I suggest checking it out to the maximum.
3. “The General Specific” by Band of Horses. This band were a big grower on me: at first I was underwhelmed by their underwhelmingly-titled album Cease to Begin and thought they were just one of those bands I’d never get into, like Muse, but less of a big deal. Then — slowly but surely — they worked their magic on me. Imagine a cross between Fleet Foxes and Kings of Leon’s first album. This doesn’t sound anything like that, but it does sound good.
What have you listened to this week?
