The 4th Annual World's Most Disorganised Poetry Festival

Dead Beat took part recently in The 4th Annual World's Most Disorganised Poetry Festival (their words not mine). This all happened in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Dead Beat extends his gratitude to the chief Disorganiser and very fine poet to boot, Ross Leckie.

Dead Beat knows you all wish you were there to have cheered him on. Well all is not lost. Thanks to Zach Wells there is a recording of the Saturday night program featuring that well known scoundral D.B. himself. Feel free to take a listen, D.B. is second up. Your cheers and applause precede you.


Click for chaos and mayhem

The Weird Guy Tells The Truth

So The Weird Guy gets onto Dead Beat.

"Thanks for the plug yesterday."
"No prob, Denny boy, you need all the help you can get. So what's with the sprawling book?"
"My opus, you know."
"Truth?"
"That's where fiction leads you."
"Tell me more."
"You're working with facts in journalism, but you're under all kinds of formal constraints; there are expectations. Their influence is subtle, but it's there; it's perpetual. Imagine the reader, imagine the readership. That's the pressure I always felt. When I'm writing for Esquire, my conscious thought is, I'm not writing for American Scholar. Because you're always allowing something to go to work on material that is factual, you're going to end up with a lie, it seems to me. Now if you take a lie and allow your desire for the truth, your duty to work on it, you'll end up with some truth—not fact, but something that gets you closer to the truth."
"So one big fat lie."
"You got it."
"So how come I haven't written my opus? I've told a few lies in my lifetime."
"Who would have believed it."

The Weird Guy

So Denis Johnson won the National Book Award for Tree of Smoke, a 600-page journey through the physical, moral and spiritual extremes of the Vietnam War. D.B. hasn't read it yet but has long admired Johnson's swagger and swarth.

Good to see Sherman Alexie making the grade too for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.

D.B. remembers Alexie well from his days in Spokane.

Anyway let us leave the last words to Jonathan Franzen, who won the National Book award six years ago for The Corrections and has been extolling Johnson for years:

"He's a weird guy. His fiction is great, but it's weird, and I was simply awestruck at the way he stepped up to write a Big American Novel about ordinary people. It's as if Paul Bowles started writing like Norman Mailer."

The Arrogance of Writing

Dead Beat mourns the passing of Norman Mailer.

Nevertheless he is reminded how much they have in common.

For a start, Mailer like Dead Beat completed his degree in Engineering. "I studied it for the first couple of years and realized I didn't want to be an engineer and I wasn't going to be a good one. But I stayed on and got my degree in engineering."

See, you could never tell if it was Dead Beat or Mailer speaking here. And what about here:

"You almost can't become a serious professional writer unless there is a built-in arrogance in yourself that you have something special about yourself. It's a vanity, and when the vanity is misplaced, as it usually is, it's sad, if not tragic. But once in a while you're up to your own idea of yourself. "

What Al Said

Dead Beat, as you know, always listen keenly to Al. But Dead Beat upped and left and forgot to tell his Al his whereabouts. So when Al finally tracks him down Dead Beat is all ears.

"Hey Dead Beat,

let me tell ya a story; a friend of mine calls me up and says "Al I've started back at writing poetry and I'm on a tear, I need a little advice, can you help me out?" I says "Digger (his last job before retiring was cemetery attendent) I don't read or write poetry, but the Guild should be able to assist you. Are you still writing using a rhyming scheme?" He says "Ya, you know I read some verse libre, but I found it vague, lacking substance, more metiphor than meat." I says "Digger, I think there is someone who can help, he says what he means and means what he says. Where you grew up in Northern Ontario and toiled in the shield as a hard rock-miner, this guy worked the mills of the Northwest Pacific." So I gave Digger a couple of books, one of prose,poetry and essays; the other a collection of stories that a friend gave me. It's been a while since Digger called and I made some inquiries into his whereabouts. I hear he loaded up his pack and left to camp out in Carver Country. `Tis a beautiful thing."

Dead Beat says to Al, "There could be worse places. There are no better."

Late Nights On Air - Elizabeth Hay

So last Thursday Dead Beat is sharing a bevvie with Elizabeth Hay and talking about the north. This Thursday Elizabeth Hay is the winner of the Giller Prize and Dead Beat is getting no share.

Story of his life.

Dead Beat Does Bliss With David Lynch

While Peter Greenaways's away, David Lynch comes to play.

Sorry Dead Beaters, I couldn't stop him.

Well okay. I did put my hand up and say, 'halt.' But maybe I was too meek.

"Dead Beat," he says, "don't get so stressed out. Greenaway's my pal. He likes my work - no story - you know how it goes."

"I'm just edgy these days, D.L. You know how that goes."

"T.M. D.B."

"T.M."

"Me and Donovan both."

"Isn't he dead?"

"Just mellow."

"So what's the deal?"

"We've been traipsing around Ireland promoting consciousness-based education and world peace. We aim to bring transcendental meditation to millions of pupils."

"Ireland?"

"Why not? You've got peace on your mind."

"Oh yeah, that. They haven't gone away you know."

"Tsk, tsk."

"So T.M. for kids?"

"Yeah. There is a treasury inside each one of us human beings... it's pure bliss, pure consciousness. It's a simple, easy, effortless technique. A 10-year-old child could do it. Dive within, transcend and ... experience this pure bliss, pure creativity, infinite intelligence, love, energy, power ... the engine that runs the universe."

"Er, we don't really do 'bliss' here very often I'm afraid".

"You should do bliss D.B., you should do bliss. It will change your life, man."

"Are you promoting a book or something?"

"Eh, seen any good films recently?"

"You are. You're promoting a book."

"Greenaway's working on a good project."

"You're promoting a book. What's it called Lynch?"

"Greenaway's project?"

"The book, what's it called?"

"Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity."

"Donovan fell for that? Mellow Yellow."

Indivisibility Between Text and Image

Knock knock.

Who's there?

Greenaway

Greenaway who?

You're an imbicile Dead Beat.

Tell me something I don't know.

So begins Beat and Pete.

"Like I was saying: you have got to go very slowly. John Cage, composer, painter, and all-round thinker and cultural catalyst, said that if you introduce twenty percent of novelty into any artwork, watch out-you are going to lose eighty percent of your audience at once. He said you would lose them for fifteen years. Cage was interested in fifteen-year cycles. But he was hopelessly optimistic. The general appreciation, for example, of Western painting has got stuck around Impressionism, and that was 130 years ago, not fifteen years ago."

"So what to do?"

"Japanese hieroglyphs may be a good model for reinventing the desperately-in-need-of-being-reinvented cinema. The history of Japanese painting, the history of Japanese calligraphy, and the history of Japanese literature are the same-all grow and have grown together; what you see as an image you read as a text. What you read as a text, you perceive as an image. This was certainly my major aim and model in the film The Pillow Book. Get the Titanic sailing correctly before you worry about the deck chairs. Indivisibility between text and image. Eisenstein saw the possibilities back in the 1920s. His theories of montage assimilated the dual image-text role of the Oriental ideogram. No middlemen. Image and text come together hand in hand. Cinema does not seem to have wanted to learn from such an encouragement. We have encouraged ourselves to need perhaps too many middlemen, too many translators. Most of them lazy. My fictitious Japanese lover's less-than-great calligrapher is Ewan McGregor's Jerome, a translator. St. Jerome was the first major translator of text for the modern world-though his business was to convince us about Christianity. What is it that cinema is trying to convince us of? Christianity and the cinema both desire happy endings. Heaven and a golden sunset. Perhaps, sadly, in the end, cinema is only a translator's art, and you know what they say about translators: traitors all."

The Narrative Is the Glue

Greenaway swings by. "A few more things to say about text."
"I like text."
"I know you do. That's why you are a writer and I am a film maker. We all know that literature is superior to cinema as a form of storytelling. It empowers the imagination like no other. If you want to be a storyteller, be an author, be a novelist, be a writer, don't be a film director."
"We all do know that, don't we?"
" Cinema is not the greatest medium for telling stories. It is too specific, leaves so little room for the imagination to take wing other than in the strict directions indicated by the director. Read "he entered the room" and imagine a thousand scenarios. See "he entered the room" in cinema-as-we-know-it, and you are going to be limited to one scenario only. The cinema is about other things than storytelling."
"I think I'm getting the point now."
"What you remember from a good film-and let's only talk about good films-is not the story, but a particular and hopefully unique experience that is about atmosphere, ambience, performance, style, an emotional attitude, gestures, singular events, a particular audio-visual experience that does not rely on the story. Besides, nine times out of ten, you will not remember the story. And if you do, and you tell it, and you are talking in words, then you are back to literature, and the cinematic experience is not communicated that way. "
"You're right. You're right."
"For the moment we have not found anything better, and because we are lazy, the narrative is the glue we use to hold the whole apparatus of cinema together. There is much to say that D.W. Griffith, proud manufacturer of Intolerance, took us all in the wrong direction. He enslaved cinema to the nineteenth-century novel. And it is going to take a hell of a lot of convincing to go back, right the wrong, and then go forward again. But I have hopes. I do really believe that we are now developing the new tools to make that happen. Tools, as Picasso said of painting, that will allow you to make images of what you think, not merely of what you see, and certainly not of what you read."

So Greenaway makes his departure - exit stage left. And Dead Beat is left with his words. So too are you.

The distinction between cinema and writing. He has a lot to teach us, listen well.

Dead Beat is fuming at the mouth. So Dr Watson has upset many people with his "racist" views. I am sorry. I am sorry. Let me bring my old pal Dickie into the arguement:

"If Dr Watson is wrong he will be wrong scientifically, not ethically, and it is a scientific argument, not an ethical one, that will demonstrate his error. What is ethically wrong is the hounding, by what can only be described as an illiberal and intolerant 'thought police', of one of the most distinguished scientists of our time, out of the Science Museum, and maybe even out of the laboratory that [he] has devoted much of his life to building up a world-class reputation."

Yes Prof. Old Dr W. has been known for the odd gaffe, the unwelcomed comment, but let us look at this in a scientific way. Let the head rule the heart for once.

"The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity," Watson tells us. "It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this," he added, "is not to give in to racism."

"Science is not here to make us feel good. It is to answer questions in the service of knowledge and greater understanding."

I know, I know, Dead Beat you're missing the point. Watson is a loose cannon, he is not scientifically supported...

The earth is round, the earth is flat.

Maybe he is off the wall, but let us leave the vitriol behind, let us return to the realm of science. Let Dr. Watson offer his evidence, let the rest of us offer ours.