NEW
MIETTES 2018
Rudolf Virchow, the hero of my
book, Heavy Years, figures in Karl Marx’s canon of progressives. As a
member of parliament, he represented national reformism, and Otto Bismarck,
soon became his chief opponent. At one point, the exchange of opinions became
so intense that Bismarck challenged Virchow to a duel. As the challenged, it
was Virchow’s business to choose the weapon, and his proposal got Bismarck to
back down immediately: the duellists would choose between two sausages, one of which
would be filled with a deadly poison.
1. Versettes
The Poet’s License
Beauty is truth,
says
the poet. I’m
putting my body on the line.
And love is the loot.
My right is divine.
So, share my sublime.
The Thinker’s
Penalty
says the savant.
Alas, I haven’t
found it, being new to
absolutes. The wrath
of the second thought
makes a mug of me,
and the truth ugly.
Not Me
I aspire to be patient
because the longer I wait
the longer I live. I hate
it. But my life was meant
for queues, and being late.
Credo
atheist
The ghosts in my life are invisible.
They whisper sweet nothings in my ear.
One into naught is indivisible.
In the other life there’s nothing to fear
for in it there is the persistence
of what is now non-existence.
Trotters Reveille
Up you,
lazy lout,
and get
your snout
out.
Snuff the air. Huff
and puff
to your trough
where
snow on the hill
melted
the pigswill,
so, it’s
nice and muddy. Pork,
dig in
with your pitchfork.
and
breakfast on the mash.
Today
you’re making a splash.
RIP
Fabienne (fermeture exceptional)
Fab-ul-euse!
You never said goodbye to us.
Loved your swagger without a care
even though you were in a wheelchair.
But your smile was beaten to death
by a hail fellow ill met.
Doghouse
The man bereft of love but for his dog,
who’s kept on an elastic lead, may hog
the pavement, and quite rightly trips me up.
‘Who are you to judge? We’re having a pup’.
Ordure
I’m composing sonnets
Throw me in the dump
Cordon Vert
In her cooking my mother didn’t take pride.
Saying, it’s all the same once it gets inside.
Blotched Limerick for Jenny
no doubt grows up to be the lout
Who downs his car window to shout
gibes at old men on bikes like me.
The ‘Oddity’
for as a doubter what I believe in
is the rocky road to a rough result
readers of the smooth find difficult.
As Socrates says it’s all to the good.
One must learn to take the rough with the smooth.
2. Crumbs
Confession
I’m not an intellectual. Merely an opportunist
of ideas
Angela Merkel's welcome to Trump (2017)
'Germany
and America are connected by values of democracy, freedom and respect
for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin,
colour, religion, gender and sexual orientation or political views. I
offer the next President of the US close cooperation on the basis of
these values'.
Paulo
Pasolini (1962)
History
of Trumpery
Dysfunctional
children
Court of Appeal Montpellier
A father who becomes a woman
Cocoricos at daybreak
Deodorants and silencers in the hen coup recommended.
L’Education
(non) sentimentale
The
French schools the nomination father and mother
has
been replaced by Parent 1, and Parent 2, respectively.
Inversion
Homosexuality is the physiological variant
produced by nature to control the birth-rate.
Self-satisfaction
‘The poor do not exist
because I can’t see them’.
Carbon emissions
The world’s black hole
is full of coal
Proust’s
faint praise
‘His character
excels his talent.’
Philosophic impasse
Knowing the difference between sentiments and ideas
is the task of philosophers, but sentiments spring ideas,
and ideas sentiments.
A confederacy of
solipsists
The restaurant is packed with families on vacation,
the young with their smart phones, the parents with
tablets.
The silence is unnatural. Nobody is talking.
Their fingers are dabbing the screens.
M. Hulot revolts. He grabs the plastic appliances
and put them in his pockets, and makes off…
He spends his holiday in jail.
head thrown back and neat-cut coiffeur, observes the art photos purposefully,
copying the Cartier-Bresson on her iPad probably for her students.
Retort
I’ll get back to you when you grow up.
Brexit
1
Enid Blyton meets Agatha Christie and decide to
live together in a desert island. Black Friday is washed ashore. It’s Boris
Bunting. Cook and eat him. He tastes horrible like Harry Potter.
Brexit 2
The Greeks had a word for it ‘akratic’.
Committing an act against your own interests.
Sur le
tard
I can no longer chew my toenails
Les
Gilet Jaune (2018)
are pulling the communication cord in a train
that’s broken down.
Reactionary
Wit
What’s so good about being awfully funny in
circumstances that aren’t.
Modern times
the
inane laughter of shared selfies.
Street Art
The door opened
And there she was before me.
Venus out of her shell
RIP
Madame Jeanne Thépot (93)
Litter-ature
on French TV
‘Le grande libraire propose une magazine
litteraire avec le seul mot d’ordre est le Plaisir. Au menu un plateau les
ecrivains connus’ (The book magazine offers a programme in which the sole
object is to give pleasure. The menu is a plate of famous authors).
Umph! pain resides in most of the great works
of the past. For example, Madame Bovary,
Lolita…Only a sadist would read them for pleasure.
Roland Barthes evidently has a lot to answer
for by allowing himself to be misunderstood.
Alouette
miroir
When I look into the mirror in half-light, I
see the boy eager to please. In full light I see the old man who isn’t
Match-making
mirrors
Madame La Pauvre looks in the mirror and asks, who is the ugliest in the town?
They see one another.
Trumpery
Make America grate again…
A
deserved death?
Student dies falling from the cliffs of Moher
taking a selfie.
Lady
Day and Mister Night
when youth was mine.
When truth was mine.
Sad am I, glad am I.’
Only Billie Holliday could lift from that ‘s’ to the ‘g’ and make you happy.
She was singing it in Monterey (1958) with Roy Eldridge.
John Hodge and Lester Young jumping in from time to time.
Life was running out of friends for her. But Teddy Wilson
accompanied her lovingly in her descent. Lady Day and Mister Night
(some say he preferred Ella but the music tells me not to believe it). She was dead in a year, riddled with drugs, and now is the Lady Déeese of everybody’s Underworld.
‘Hush now, don’t explain’.
‘The Nicotine Cat’
poem was inspired by Simone Simon (La Bête Humaine,1938), the white
angora who played with men like a ball of wool, unravelling them until they
were no use to anybody. Paula Rego in painting it for the cover of The Nicotine
Cat at and Other People, knew that instinctively…
Sur le
tard 1
I’m too self-conscious to enjoy myself.
Sur le
Tard 2
When I dream I’m in hell. Walking by a canal an
African migrant asked me to hold his sack, put a haircap over his face, and
stuck his head into the water and was sucked into the lock. I realised there
was nobody could do anything, and threw in the sack after him.
Sur le
tard 3
I won’t cause any trouble.
Nobody will keen ‘ochone’,
and I needn’t be noble.
is when you’re about to do something stupid,
you know it.
In careless youth,
it’s an after-thought.
Meurs:
Bras de Venus
Hanky-panky here leave a lot to be desired
Reading
Everybody reads a book differently. The
literary scholars may have found out how the author intended to be read. This
serves their students for exam purposes, but makes little or no
difference.
Vanity
As I have never thought myself wonderful,
vanity is the least of my character defects.
But I’m vain about my hair and always carry a
brush for when I take off my hat or it’s blown off in the wind. I restore the
crease and smoothen down the bangs. M caught me doing it and said your hair
looks better tossed. I didn’t believe her. And when I’m having a photo taken, I
slip into the toilet to brush before a mirror. When one is taken unawares the
disarray distresses me. At the barber, Marc-coiffure says as usual I suppose,
and laughs. I always ask for a poet’s cut, which means less off and the quiff
effect is maintained. But since I like to keep the shape the same the hair is
never allowed to grow long enough to be truly poetical. The point about vanity
is it’s never satisfied. I inherited the trait from father, a modest man, but
when he swam the hair was never allowed to get wet. I can see his overarm
cresting the waves with his great mane intact.
Literary
truth
I spell no lie.
Shirts
I buy them in the winter and during the summer
because I swim my muscles expand the shirts split at the back.
Autofiction
The author incarnates himself as a fiction.
Priority
I cut off people who interfere with my sleep.
Sante
Barbara
had her head cut off by her father who was subsequently
struck by lightning.
Barbara,
the lady in black
was
sexually abused by her father. Nothing happened to him.
She
sang her way out of it.
Sur le tard 5
Eugene Onegin’s Character
Tchaikovsky’s Eugene (1879) is more sympathetic than Pushkin’s
(1825). His rejection of Tatiana isn’t the careless behavior of a bored dandy.
His family is on the top scale of the nobility, while Tatiana’s are barely
above the level of peasants. As a progressive he was rejecting the feudal droit
de seigneur, having read Lamartine’s Graziella
(1849), a novel about a young nobleman falling in love with a fisherman’s
daughter who behaves beautifully, realizing it could never be.
Redemption by Default
Arthur Sullivan’s
meticulously wrought and melodious symphonies and oratorios fell on deaf ears.
But, when WH Gilbert put him to words, he hazarded a lighter note, and a
serious reputation became a joke. Still his contribution to classical music was
immortalised when, while staying with a music lover, Dr Schneider, in Berlin,
he dusted down the top of a cupboard with his hat to put up some books, and the
manuscripts of forty songs by Schubert fell on his head. ‘Rosamunde’ was one of
them. Good God, he said.
Goncourt Prize 1919
When defending the choice of Proust rather than
the War Hero’s novel, Leon Daudet
‘Le patrie? je lui merde quand il s’agit de
literature’.
Patriotism? I stuff it when it comes to
literature.
Shyly said
I’m not a genius but
sometimes I’m ingenious (or disingenuous, says the voice in my head).