CATARRH & PHLEGM
are visually, structurally and medically onomatopoeic.
That you know.
Catarrh & Phlegm are also fine pet names for slugs.
That you didn’t know.
OVERESTIMATION OF DEATH
This morning I heard that the Chilean government has reduced the estimated number deaths in the world’s most severe earthquake from 750 to 250. It offered no explanation, so let’s try and guess.
There is a global media obsession with ‘quantity of deaths’ in that every natural disaster, on the whole, equates to a two week tot up of bodies to sustain the world’s interest in a domestic tragedy and garner its support, emotionally, physically and economically.
What I’m getting at is do they feel less loved than Haiti because (thankfully) only a fraction of their people died? It’s as though the quality of human life lost is irrelevant. As news, it is all about the amount of deaths in as short a time possible. Mass shootings in malls rank high because of their drama, yet famine barely makes the margins because of its slow-kill omnipresence. Even wars slip down the pecking order as they span years and rarely are thousands of people killed within hours.
The depth of death has shrunk. It’s not enough to die alone. You need to die quick, dramatically and among several million if you’re to make the front page at CNN. So, on behalf of the human race, can we plead to all you broadcasters, to try and place death in its true proportion. And on behalf of every Chilean who died, let’s have 250 minutes of silence.
FOOTBALL -1 POLITICS -1
This is not some anti-Andy Burnham rant. It is a mild observation that footballers and politicians have lost the ability to speak their mind. They answer indirectly. This approach is governed by fear. It is a path rarely crossed as the line of questioning is often as dumb as the answers. Richard Nixon, and more recently Joe Kinnear, have spoken their mind, through provocation or otherwise, and experienced the toxic nature of the media. If only Tony Benn hadn’t hung up his boots.
BREAST-FED®©™
Like all ideas that arrive at 3am, this one is awful.
Nevertheless, let us make the business case for it.
Mother’s Milk as an organic certification scheme to equal that of the Soil Association, if you forgive the association with soil for just a second.
Run with the logic and you soon find breast fed babies may be smaller and uglier but they are less likely to grow up to be serial killers.
No more evidence m’lord.
See you again at 3.06am for another awful thought.
GEORGES ANGLADE & OTHER LIVES
Haiti has left us all numb. We cling to hope and occasionally hope delivers as it did today when Wismond Exantus was saved after 11 days beneath rubble.
For many others, we mourn. Tonight I heard that the founder of PEN Haiti, Georges Anglade and his wife Mireille Neptune were both killed in the earthquake. I had the great honour to exchange stories with Georges last year as part of the PEN Free The Word Festival. In memory of this astonishing man, I give you his story in its original form that sparked our written discussion.
Should you feel like donating before you read, text GIVE to 70777 and the Disasters Emergency Committee will donate £5. If you’re in the US, text CERF to 90999 and the UN will give $5.
Les Nourritures Célestes by Georges Anglade
La première image à me venir de l’association du ciel et de la terre est celle d’un marchandage qui plonge profond dans le catéchisme de mon enfance. Nous vivions et survivions par le troc au village de Matanzas et c’est sans trop de dépaysement que nous étions passés du terrestre au céleste dans la prière par excellence de la chrétienté à genoux, le Notre Père :
Que votre volonté soit faite. Sur la terre comme au ciel. Donnez-nous aujourd’hui. Notre pain quotidien.
Cette enfilade n’était certainement pas le quatrain le plus désintéressé qui soit. C’en était même indiscutablement le plus proche de nos pratiques marchandes. Du donnant-donnant. Aussi, c’est sans surprise qu’une fois de plus, en fin du XXe siècle, après quarante ans d’interruptions, le ciel et la terre reprirent leurs négociations dans la grande île.
À Jean-Paul II, il manquait un fleuron de diable à ses campagnes d’évangélisation et à Castro, il fallait un signe d’ouverture du bon dieu pour conjurer l’étranglement.
Derrière les pompes de cette double campagne de charme d’un peuple ravi d’être enfin courtisé, il y avait en coulisse des moments d’âpretés boutiquières dans lesquels les sherpas des leaders se disputaient les moindres retombées. C’est ainsi que courut le bruit dans tout le pays que ça discutait ferme, comme marchandes de poissons sur la grève, du prix de cette rencontre.
Déjà que pour la précédente visite à Castro, celle du Premier Ministre canadien, six mois plus tôt, un frisson perceptible annonçait que quelques étaux allaient se desserrer. Cran par cran. C’était au tour du Pape d’obtenir en échange une amélioration de l’ordinaire des Cubains.
Le rationnement en ces temps durs de chutes de toutes sortes, murs berlinois et rideau de fer, était de un poulet par famille et par mois. Ce ne devait plus être qu’un mauvais souvenir tonna l’illustre visiteur qui demandait avec insistance au moins cinq poulets par famille et par mois, afin de dépasser la poule au pot du dimanche des paysans français que réclamait en son temps Henri IV. Le pape ne pouvait décemment aller plus bas que le Vert Galant sans se déjuger.
L’argument porta. Adjudication à cinq. Cette priorité au relèvement de la diète fut acceptée avec, en plus, le retour de la messe de minuit à Noël, pour célébrer la naissance de l’Homme-Dieu, et une procession sans entrave le jeudi de la Fête-Dieu pour faire le compte. Même ceux qui savent à quels marchandages se livrent les hommes de pouvoir une fois loin des caméras, tiennent cette passe d’arme pour un cas d’école. Un bijou de troc.
Le courant était continu entre les deux hommes d’une même génération, l’un et l’autre en fin de parcours, et l’on sentait bien qu’ils ne se quitteraient pas sans quelques secrètes confidences d’État de dernière minute, comme gage d’estime réciproque. Elles eurent lieu, comme souvent, au pied de la passerelle de départ. Chuchotées. Têtes collées.
Le Pape se pencha : Tu sais Fidel, Dieu n’existe pas et ce dernier de lui répondre : Tu sais Caroll, les poulets non plus.
Georges Anglade 1944-2010
SNOW FOLLOWS GULLS
Listen. If you are in the thick of it, listen. Now look. The gulls are where it’s at. The snow is on their tails. If the Met Office hooked up with the RSPB, they’d get it right. If they were here, they’d understand. At every window birds are singing. Three days back, one flew straight at the glass as if to impersonate a snowball. This is what snow does. It plays with the minds of birds, and birds with it. The drifts form nests and lay Siberian goose eggs that contain only the whites.
Yokelessness.
This is the saddest I’ve felt for a long time.
THE GREATEST FIELD ALIVE
has:
a tree in the middle-ish
a makeshift ladder nailed to it with inconsistent rungs
a horse staring at the ladder in contemplation that it can actually climb the tree
All this, I saw today.
PLEASANT FATALITY
Towards the end of a four hour train journey today, there came this announcement in a cheery voice:
“Ladies & gentlemen, I would like to apologise for the slow running of this service due to a fatality in the Maidenhead area. Have a pleasant journey.”
We tried.
KATIE PRICE, ZIMBABWE PRESIDENT
Not sure if you caught this story tonight but in a remarkable turnaround, Robert Mugabe has agreed to step down on condition that Jordan steps in. She agreed terms on the understanding that she will appear on the A3 banknotes. This has sparked a betting frenzy online with William Hill’s system crashing due to sheer volume of wagers. Here are the latest odds on other reported political posts up for grabs along with the bookies favourites:
Iran Defence Minister: Stacey Solomon & Olly Murs 4:1
Taliban HR director: Dale Winton evens
Head of Economics, Dubai: Alan Carr 8:1 on
Copenhagen security: JLS shoe-in
DEAR OULIPO, HERE IS MY PROCEDURE
I
am
one
hell
fired
mother
fucking
narrator.
We’ll get on.
Just feel it.
Ethereal us,
story-weaving,
slutty-brained,
dream-mongering,
make-it-up-as-we-flo.
Lie about spelling,
let letters fuck law,
and disarrangiolate.
Enough deception folk,
come now read down river.
Every day in one leap year,
I made and planted a shrine,
to commemorate the very day.
Two grandparents and one dog,
died, day fifty n’ two ninety one,
while one wonderful baby’s born,
seven pounds plus twelve ounces,
by name of Bess, day two ninety four.
Noday will you find a figure on show,
for figures are evil and lie like teeth.
Seek a shrine for the truth of each day
only ever a number written out as a word.
Three hundred sixty six galleries anew,
no listing nor libel under art in Time Out,
even if it clads a billionth of Tate Modern.
Banksy doesna care if we share a site or three
as everywhere outside is unequivocally free.
Common land is being bought and its soul is sold
to money men who fill the graceful gaps with dead.
Save the disappearing pockets of free range rust,
organic grime and man-made mistakes we long to love,
‘list’ them by grades of societal significance today,
as they so ‘list’ buildings of days past for days future.
Season on season, Mother Nature unveils new canvasses,
only there for a few months, lit by the sun for an hour a day,
begging, open to every eagle-eyed animal, but seen by so few.
This instruction manual leads us to shrines that survive
and so to mourn the ones that chose to die once they were seen.
All that remains where they once hung are pawprints of theft.
No-more-nails, screwed, tied, staked, wedged, super-glued, floated,
how something is attached to something is of so little meaning
until the shrine becomes a person and the surface becomes a cross,
cast iron stakes are driven through the palms and through the feet.
Have I hammered three hundred and sixty six Christs to crucifixes
of every denomination know to the King of carpenters, my good father?
Stealing shrines, perhaps, to you. But robbing the body of my son, to God.
Call yourself a chippy Jesus! All that was asked were four diddy nails,
still you lay there, with barely a writhe, when a wiggle would’ve freed you.
Oh Mary’s Boy child, you fictional fool. Stick to joinery and die like us all.