Burning down the Louvre: Argentina’s beautiful football up in flames (Argentina vs. Germany)

Sneijder finds his feet, uses his head, as Brazil lose theirs (Netherlands vs. Brazil)

Argentina celebrates football as a way of life (This cannibalises a bit at the start from one of my posts on this page, but is still a new article.)

On a different tack my latest Book Show post is also up, which includes a nice mp3 of my friend Julian reading Spanish poetry. Sounds nice, even if you don’t understand it. Find it here.

And in other writing news I’ve had poems accepted for the next issues of Griffith Review, Going Down Swinging, and Divan. So things continue apace at all points on the cultural spectrum.

Hey dear!
How are you? I hope that all nice for you.
I write to you, because I want to find man from Europe.
My name is Liudmila and I am 29 years old.
I from city Zelenodolsk
And I very beautiful and friendly woman and to search for serious attitudes.
In June I wish to visit the Europe.
But I have no friends in the Europe.
Also it would be fine, if we could have a meeting in your country.
I yet have not decided what country to visit, but it would be fine if you will tell to me more about the country.
In what country you now live? Tell to me more about the country?
It will be great if you will answer to me, so we can to have communication together.
If you will reply to me I will writing to you more about me and send photo of myself.
I want only serious and long relations, I hope you support me in it.
It will be interesting to me to learn that you think of it.

I hope to hear from you soon on my mail:  liudmila-malina@rambler.ru

Liudmila

The best part is that there’s a photo attached, of a generic attractive Slavic woman, even though they tried to use a photo as the lure to make you write back. ‘If you write to me I’ll send you a photo of myself. Here is a photo of myself.’ When I go to the Europe I will look her up.

In other news one of my poems will be in the next issue of Blue Dog, so keep an eye out for that if you have a literary inclination. And I have two new Book Show articles up. One is on the weird nature of Argentine patriotism via literary heroes, and somehow ends up talking about Lionel Messi, because it’s impossible not to think of the World Cup with everyone here living and breathing it. You can find it here. And the other is on trying to read Camus without looking like a wanker – it lives here. Let me know what you think, I’m still sussing out how best to approach these literature-based articles.

This is the the most accurate definition I have ever heard.

It’s no surprise really. Hyperbole and a Half is a website of pure gold. It also contains my single favourite blog post on the internet ever of all time. It is for people like its author and me and many of you – people who know correct grammar and suffer fits of incandescent rage at the retardedness of the internet and text message speak. If this is you, this post may save your life. So click here. You can explore the rest of the page from there. Godspeed.

Aside from those few days, the past month in BA has been pretty much what I wanted it to be. I could perhaps sum it up best by means of a real Homer Simpson moment: looking down while typing to realise I had a bunch of granola gummed together in my chest hair. Ladies, form an orderly queue to the left. You may infer from this that a) I’ve been mostly sitting around writing, b) I’ve not left the house that much, and c) the climate does not require me to wear anything more than shorts. Heat is my friend – that wonderful ability to sit in your own skin at any hour of the day or night.

The heat is thick, close, like it’s dancing with you to a slow song and wants to give you the mother of all hickeys. I sit and type late into the nights, by the burn of an old orange 40-watt tungsten globe, the open door and window funnelling a breeze, but even the movement of fingers on keyboard enough to keep my arms and shoulders damp. Moving up one set of stairs to the roof brings a full fresh sheen of moisture to my face. It’s these long sweaty nights that have me always craving another longneck. The glass in my hands, the cool press of it against my forehead. The chilly condensation building up to mimic my skin. The hiss of it opening, and the sweet-bitter bliss of that first long pull. I sound like a VB ad. But seriously – beer. Every time I eat I crave a beer. When I walk in hot and sticky in the afternoon I crave a beer. Even writing this post is making me want a beer. It’s ironic that I came to the home of cocaine in order to get hooked on booze.

The days are clear and green-gold through the canopy of leaves outside my window. Sitting around writing, with nothing else I have to do, has been a pretty wonderful way of passing time. I’ve also been hanging out a lot with my favourite Spanish teacher, the girl I mentioned some time ago. This has been a surprise – when I headed off for my month of adventuring I had resigned myself to that being the end of that. But she was still here when I got back, and happy to see me, though she reminds me daily that she’s not my girlfriend. Which is ok by me, in this relationship-loathing stage of life. Her name is Nora, she’s a dance teacher, and she’s ridiculously cute. This all makes a good incentive to study, and accordingly my Spanish is astronomically improved. She likes to get stoned and talk to me about metaphysics and religion and the changing states of matter and energy. Try that as a test of your second-language comprehension, especially on a two-roach handicap.

I’m living in another idiosyncratic house: a long open-roofed courtyard with a series of rooms opening off it, and a series of couples popping in and out of them as though it were Hobbiton, or some sort of Cuckoo Clock of Sickening Domestication. There’s a French girl with a Mexican boyfriend, a local guy with a Chilean girl, and a severely ex-pat Australian with a Peruvian girl. Down the back is an adjoined house where the Argentine who owns the place lives with his French girlfriend. The only singles are me and another French dude called Julien.  who spend half our time getting drunk, making loud noises, and generally bitching about how incredibly lame couples are. He spends the other half of his time talking smoochily on Skype to his girlfriend back in France, and I spend the other half of mine with my most assuredly non-girlfriend. “Stop kissing me,” she tells me, “I’m not your girlfriend.” Five minutes later she comes over and starts kissing me.

Julien is the Frenchiest Frenchman ever (sorry Phill): he’s perennially drinking white wine, with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, swearing at lines of code on his laptop. He speaks perfect English, excellent Spanish, and excellent German. The three French people stand around and casually speak fluent Spanish among themselves, not bothering with their mother tongue. I feel incredibly inferior, and once again curse our mono-cultural society. I speak categorically the worst Spanish of everyone in the house, and am always being brought up to speed. Speaking the best English feels more does like a character flaw to be confessed to rather than some sort of achievement.

A couple of good things on the literary front: a newly revised version of the Jimmy Cuzco poem that I posted a couple of months ago on this blog has been accepted by HEAT, which is pretty much my favourite of what I regard as the ‘establishment’ journals in Australia. So I’m pretty stoked about that. And a poem called ‘Coffee’ has been picked up by Famous Reporter, which is another publication I admire. It was my attempt to write a break-up poem that was more interesting than the average break-up poem. I might post it here if people are interested.

I have read back over this post and declare it to be informative, rather than especially interesting. But there should be more interesting stuff coming shortly. Better stories, amusing things, and essay-ish things on a few issues that have been on my mind, should all hit this page before too long. As long as I stay away from midnight empanadas. Pray for me.

********************************

PS: The truth of the above statement (”should hit this page before too long”) is also dependent on another factor. If anyone has tried to visit Wordplay lately you will have noticed that you can’t. This, I’m told, is because the site is cactus. Which means that we have to build it again. All of it. From the ground up. If anyone knows where to access firearms, my preferred option is to shoot myself in the face. In which case, no more blog posts. Let me know.

I believe you can still download the e-book here if you’re into that sort of outrageous smut.

photo by Eli Santana

]]> http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/2010/01/11/shut-up-and-kiss-me/feed/ 1 http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/2010/01/06/lie-before-e-part-2-time-travel-thumb-vultures/ http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/2010/01/06/lie-before-e-part-2-time-travel-thumb-vultures/#comments Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:37:06 +0000 Geoff Lemon http://heathenscripture.wordbuzz.com.au/?p=396 Ok, make sure you’re sitting down and breathing deeply. You may want a cup of tea with a slosh of Scotch to help absorb this. We know that Mr Fox uncovered the lie that was “I before E except after C.” When I first posted about this, we had several dozen rogue words, and a feeling there was worse to come. If you haven’t seen that first post, you will need to familiarise yourself with it here. Mr Fox and I have been investigating since. If only we had known how deep the rabbit hole would go.

Having taken the first step, we decided to involve the power of supercomputers. We found a website that analyses the databases of dictionary sites, and programmed it to bring us every word in the English language containing the fragment ‘ei’.

The results were staggering. 2826 words. I almost had a stroke (I was also downloading porn). But I told myself to concentrate. That could wait until later. So instead I removed all those words that contained ‘cei’, given they’re legitimate under the rule. This still left 2655 words. We could have presented that data as it was, but I didn’t want to massage any figures. (That could also wait until later.) The data in its most compressed form would be strongest, like carbon squeezed down into a diamond. So I applied our earlier criteria, and removed any variants based on a common root word. This included plurals, and variants modified by suffix (vein/devein, surveil/countersurveil), which took some weeding out. It was effective, cutting the original list down by 1933 entries – the word ‘weigh’, for instance, had 111 variants (deadweight, weightily, weightless, etc). But after all of this culling, with the broken bodies of variant strings lying twisted and bloody on the floor, we still had seven hundred and twenty-two words to which this ‘rule’, this fabrication, this sham, does not apply.

Of course the list isn’t infallible – I deleted various retarded spellings (deinosaur, anyone?), and even now it includes Germanic words that I doubt are considered part of lexical English. Other entries are obsolete, and should perhaps be housed in a separate category, given the I before E rule was not taught in Chaucher’s day. I will require a university grant before I can go through and verify the derivations of all of these words, and the legitimacy of their place on the list. On the other hand, there may be more words as yet unfound, and the list does not currently include proper nouns, with the exception of names like Einstein that have been absorbed into the language as common nouns. Whatever the outcomes of these subsequent investigations, the mountain of evidence as it stands is incontrovertible.

I ran a similar analysis on a computer-generated collection of ‘cie’ words, those that flout the rule’s second clause. An initial list of 930 was reduced to 580 after eliminating variants. Of these, the vast majority were plurals of nouns that end in ‘cy’ (consultancy, redundancy, etc), constituting 493 of the total. To which the Federation of Filthy Lying English Teachers would perhaps argue that it was only one category of exception, so it didn’t really matter that much. Well, if it was only one category, then they should have worked that category into their rule, shouldn’t they? Oh, wait, except it didn’t rhyme, did it? It didn’t have a nice pat little rhymey bit. Superficial facile bastards! Besides, there are still 87 other words that don’t follow the rule. Stop trying to put the language in a box, you vultures. Vultures with sufficient manual dexterity to put things in boxes. Vultures with thumbs, and a need for order. OCD thumb vultures? This analogy isn’t really going anywhere.

But the important thing is this. Mr Fox and I have been making our objections known. We have been armed with this data for some time, although we’re only now making it public. But behind the scenes, the threat of a public revelation while the problem remained extant was enough to make the wheels start turning in the corridors of power. Yes, those corridor wheels. You know. Operated by vultures with thumbs. Shut up, you’re distracting me. So we greased the cogs of the vulture halls, and their thumbs of power opened the box of white flags to wave all of this under the carpet. We were driving them up their goat without a paddle. The authorities were so troubled by our findings, and by the prospect of being seen to have done nothing to oppose this travesty, that representatives of the British Government’s education department actually went back in time to June 2009 and ordered British teachers to stop teaching the rule. The reason? That there were so many exceptions it was effectively meaningless. In their words, “The I before E rule is not worth teaching.”

Oh, the sweet sweet taste of time-travel justice. The sweet clear ringing of the bell of truth being struck with the hammer of determination. And the sweet laughter of the children of the future, happy and secure in their salvation.

Height. Weight. Feign. Deign. Ceiling.

i have, in the dark and private space between my driver’s seat and centre console, a thin pale book of your poems. this car is parked behind my house, covered in snow, and it’s -30 outside. you can, of course, understand why i haven’t finished it.

i think it’s interesting that even though sam wareing is in germany, i am in northern canada, and you, as your blog just told me, are in buenos aires, facebook still allows us to “mingle”, per se.

i played in a band, years back, that sam liked. your kunst comment just appeared on my newsfeed, and i noticed your name.

i got chatting with you in the Great Britain a while back, and you gave me a pre-release (for want of a better word) copy of your poetry book.

forgive me for not going outside to the car to remind myself of the title.

on long road trips i randomly extract the book, and give it to the intrigued passenger to read to me. it’s moderately calming.

Admittedly it’s not the most lavish praise that one could receive. But it was also somehow immensely charming. And for me it answered again all those questions about why I write, why do I devote so much time and effort to something that is kind of a job, and kind of a career, but isn’t ever really a living. Writers get to reach out way beyond their personal spheres, and add a little bit of something to the lives of people they barely know, or have never met. The sense of reward in that – that somewhere far off in the world, my creations have played some small part in someone else’s happiness, and without me knowing the slightest thing about it – is wonderful and fulfilling and makes me deeply happy. I’m still smiling over this.

Another thing that made me happy recently was this: Sam Cooney’s review of the journal Cutwater, whose editors published some of my stuff. Another small victory, but a lot of satisfaction. Maybe this is the kind of satisfaction an engineer gets when he helps build a really good bridge. Of course we all know that the vocations are very differently valued, and we all know that writers aren’t the ones getting paid. But for me it’s a vocation nonetheless. Maybe that makes me a volunteer. But I figure I’d rather be a broke writer than a rich accountant. And I’d rather be a mediocre writer than a mediocre waiter, wondering exactly what I’ve achieved besides an impressive four-plate technique and an extensive DVD collection. I’ve made my choice and I’m happy with it. Because sometimes life throws you a biscuit. And sometimes you open a pack of Milk Arrowroot and find a mystery Kingston.

But generally, as we age, we start to realise just how many lies we’ve been told. They told us that drugs would make us crazy and criminal, but most of my friends just seemed to have a real good time. They told us that cracking our knuckles would give us arthritis by fifteen,  and here I type with fingers as limber as a Latvian gymnast.  I have written hundreds of thousands of words for the sake of writing, and probably millions in correspondence. But it says so much about the inherent trust we place in these figures, and the level to which they abuse this trust, that I had somehow reached the age of 27, with nearly two decades of rational questioning thought behind me, and still never consciously noticed the magnitude of this most abhorrent and enduring of lies.

I before E, except after C.

This is what they told us. If you think back, you can probably see them now. A dusty portable classroom, late afternoon, with beams of sunlight cutting through the motes in the air. Or a cold winter morning under fluorescent tubes. The carpet hard and corded under the palms of your hands where you place them behind you, bracing your weight. Your legs crossed like a good kid. And that teacher standing up there, whoever it was for you. A beard and corduroy pants, or a tied-up bun and a wicker basket under the desk, or, like the ones you fell in love with, a colourful skirt and a vivid gauzy scarf. They stand up there and they tell you the rule. I before E except after C. That’s how we spell, kids. That’s how it’s done. And that rule sank deep into you, into your skull plates and brain tissue, like radiation into Lucas Heights bedrock. To this day the phrase comes back at you, whole and entire. And to this day it is a lie, brazen and glaring as a brass band at full force in the noonday sun.

This is why you need smart friends. It took the enquiring mind of Mr Fox to notice the anomaly. He’d been chewing on it for some time, and he could think of plenty of words where it didn’t apply. Height. Weight. Being. Neither either nor neither obeyed the liars’ rule. The veil was lifted. Their heinous heist became forfeit. We would seize their reign at our leisure. Off the top of our heads, we came up with:

height, weight, being, seize, foreign, vein, reinforce, beige, veil, weird, sovereign, kaleidoscope, heinous, heist, forfeit, feint, leisure, their, neither, either, seeing, seizure, eight, atheist, heir, poltergeist, zeitgeist, reincarnation, feign, deign, neighbour, sleigh, feisty, rein, seize, stein, caffeine, freight, reiki, queueing, reign, hieing, kneeing, fleeing, teeing, peeing, freeing, decreeing, agreeing, geeing, squeegeeing, BeeGeeing (the act of impersonating the Bee Gees).

If you can think of any more obvious everyday ones, feel free to include them in the Comments section. No Googling, please. We also deliberately ommitted plurals and permutation strings like neighbour/neighbours/neighbourly/neighbouring/neighbourhood, in order to avoid falsely swelling the numbers. The evidence is damning enough. And we’ve avoided archaic words. But this list is not all. There are two more subset lists. In the words of Mr Fox, “These words are big offenders.  ‘Except after C’ my arse!  More like ‘especially after C!’” Bam.

society, species, science, ancient, sufficient, efficient, fancied, conscience, glacier, icier, inadequacies, democracies, captancies, concierge, deficiency, hacienda, jucier, bouncier, omniscient, conscientious.

We’ve realised that pretty much any noun or adjective ending in a ‘cy’ (consultancy, racy) will use a ‘cie’ to form its plural or its comparative and/or superlative (consultancies, racier/raciest). There must be dozens. So again, we’ll avoid those permutation strings. And finally, “there is no reason names should be an exception, otherwise it should have been “I before E except after C and except for names.” Viz:

Einstein, Tony Greig, Keith Richards, Rammstein, Frankenstein, Heineken, Neil, Budweiser, Timothy McVeigh, Carl Reich, Sir Walter Raleigh, Keira Knightley, Barbara Streisand, Seinfeld, Rachel Weiss, Heidi Fleiss (double jeopardy!), Carl Zeiss, Calvin Klein, The River Seine, George Speight.

Justice will be done.

So I just received the recording from the most recent Wordplay, the final show, and listened through it. It’s all feeling a little bit emotional, really. There’s this…thing…that I made, and then there’s not. I’m a tragic nostalgic, and endings are always sad. But especially something that’s been such a big part of life. I described to someone today as like raising a child from infancy and then abandoning it by a highway because it became inconvenient. All the feeding and changing and answering questions, says the bad mother. It was just so much work… That’s why she skipped the country.

I spend three years living and breathing it. Obsessing about line-ups, pitching to performers, pushing promotion, rambling to people at parties. I got (some kind of) reputation on the back of it, got involved in the Writers Festival, got an OzCo grant. I got together with my girlfriend through Wordplay and that went two years and more. I made a few of my closest friends too, and have made a bunch of other friends who I firmly believe will become close ones. I pissed a few people off too, but that’s the inevitable collateral damage of being alive. There were friends who came to almost every show – Dutchie, Rahn, Sensible Man, Sally. My parents would show up to rep my hood, and Denice Smart, bless her heart, missed about one gig in three years. It was great how, within different groups of my friends,  some who were much less close to me were still often in the audience, moreso than closer friends. It  meant I knew they were there for themselves, not for me. We collected so many random professionals – teachers, office workers – who stumbled upon the gig but then kept coming back.

So I’m really proud of what we did. We gave them something completely different to everything else in their lives. And we did it well. It went from about thirty of my friends in Blue Velvet to repeatedly packing out The Dan with 150-odd people, half of whom I’d never met. We had top-shelf comedians, and rappers coming in fresh off headline tours, and we got them on with poets who most of the audience had never heard of, and would never have encountered. We gave the poets a crowd, and the crowd the poets, and a beautiful romance developed. They loved each other. So now at least those people know that they can enjoy poetry, and we performers have had that spine-tingling experience of a packed house hanging on our every word. The archive of recordings we’ve got online is pure gold, and we’ve had web surfers from 54 different countries tapping into it. We’ve given something to a whole lot of people.

And so that part of it ends. But that last gig – what a way to go out. I’ve listened through it and I’m still digesting. I mean, Mantra – what a mindfuck. My trusty videographer had told me by email: “Mantra rocked; loved the way he dealt with spiritual themes – it’s certainly very refreshing to witness an artist who’s dealing with such subject matter and I imagine that he’s in a bit of a league of his own here.” I think the G-train is on the money. And after some thought I can say I don’t think I’ve ever heard such tight construction and complexity from an Australian rapper.  Maybe Suffa in a few spots here and there, but even then not usually for such a sustained period. Mantra’s lines were delivered with complete poise, and the dude’s a comedian between tracks to boot. And it’s not like he’s doing some in-the-club track either, it’s metaphysics and humanity and a world of bigger thoughts.

I’ve been here for three-point-three billion
Ever since early bacterial beginnings
To the present multicellular material we live in
Till it’s all done and we in the ethereal dominion…

And I’ve always loved hearing Eleanor read but this was her best show – material with both consistency and variety. Equal access to humour and emotional depth. As she finished her last piece, I simultaneously let out a kind of strangled yelp of approval, like I did when Paul Chapman snapped that goal in the last quarter of the Grand Final, and at the same time actually cried a little. “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry”…but it never actually happens, does it? I had to take a moment and walk around the house before continuing. And these are my honest reflections, not even me trying to pump the thing up. Archie is always super-confident, and swings between the ridiculous and the meaningful as he pleases. “My love is like a parson’s nose…” kicks off some of the best rambling ever. And Briohny’s just one of my favourites. I think it’s because she doesn’t go round thinking of herself as a poet. It’s just a thing she does, usually when I make her and give her money. Which sounds like a different profession, but it’s all about the words, people. She’s so…normal. She just says “Hey. Listen to this.”

So anyway. It’s done. I’ve had a little sniffle. Exacerbated by the fact that everyone on the recording was saying nice things about me even though I wasn’t there. Totally warm and fuzzy, that experience. Except Anthony who insulted me continually, but that was entirely expected. So, to the people who applauded me, I applaud you right back, because we wouldn’t have had a show without an audience, we would have had five poets in a bar. Which is just the precursor to someone getting rolled. I’ve also podcasted that gig now, and if you weren’t there then do yourself a favour and click this link. It is in all seriousness , it will be the most productive thing you’ll do this week. They’ll take you places. You should go.

http://www.wordplay.org.au/index.php/podcasts/december_2009/