Billy Collins at the Edinbugh Book Festival

Last night at the Billy Collins poetry show
I took the last seat in the tent
beside a middle-aged American couple.

The husband turned to his wife and said,
“I wonder if anyone here will know
who you are.” The wife was silent.

And I thought this was exactly
the kind of thing that often happens
in a Billy Collins poem.

As I began to write it in my head
I sneaked a look, and felt disappointed
that I didn’t know who the wife was,

the shape of her face like a lizard
blown up to A3 by a photocopier
and pasted to every wall in the city.

Do you know who I am? it might shriek
to innocent passers by who know nothing
of poetry and probably don’t care.

And when Billy Collins takes the stage
and suggests that poetry might end
only when poets have finally compared

everything to everything else,
and at this, and everything else,
the crowd and I crease in laughter,

I realise I have never known him
beyond thumbnails on dustjackets
and a casual scratch of words in books.

Afterwards at the signing desk, he smiles,
asks pertinent questions, shakes my hand,
as if nothing could be more important.

He is like that incomparable something
which might remind you of something
hours after all comparisons have been made.

Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon performed at the Edinburgh Book festival on Saturday and was everything I expected – witty, warm and confident. He was good at delivering his poems, slow without being too slow, and able to speak clearly with just the right emphasis on each word. He gave the impression that every word mattered intimately, which should be the case in any poem.

He read mainly from his forthcoming collection, Horse Latitudes. I really enjoyed his previous book Moy Sand and Gravel, and this new one sounded as though it will be at least as strong. It’s hard to take in Muldoon poems after a single read, however well they are read. I kept wanting to ask him to stop and give me a minute to take in what I’d heard. He read the new poem on the front page of his website, for example, A Hummingbird, which used quotes from a post-divorce party (real or imagined quotes, I don’t know) and integrated them with the flight of a hummingbird through a forest.

He also read a 13-part Sonnet Sequence, (originally published in Botteghe Oscure) in its entirety, half at the beginning and half at the end of the reading. It’s so clever in its use of repetition and, although it’s dark in places, it’s also funny. Muldoon did comment that he saw “no reason why poetry shouldn’t be fun, whatever some people might think”. Who are these people?!

One interesting comment he made was that he already felt distant from his new book, even though it hadn’t yet been published. He’d written it and was already interested in the next book, and in the creative process by which it would come about, if it ever did. Once a poem was finished, he left it behind. It’s the writing of poems he loves.

The Writer's Life

I went to an Edinburgh Book Festival event yesterday evening about work. The panel featured four writers who talked about the tension between being a writer and holding a full-time job, having a family etc, and also about making the break to writing full-time.

The writers were Chris Dolan (novelist, TV scriptwriter, radio playwright, and several other things), Colette Bryce (poet), Linda Cracknell (short story writer), and Debbie Taylor (editor of Mslexia magazine and novelist). Their stories were interesting and varied.

Chris Dolan gave up his well-paid job one week and the next week discovered his wife was pregnant. That, in a sense, made it vital that he got paid writing work and also explains why he is involved in such a varied range of writing projects, but he sees himself as primarily a novelist – the novels don’t pay the bills though.

Debbie Taylor is about to give up editing Mslexia and become a full-time novelist. It’s what she wants to do and she doesn’t mind “being poor.” She was very positive about doing what gives you fulfilment, and at the same time was realistic and impressively articulate.

Colette Bryce said a similar thing – clearly poetry in itself doesn’t make much money, but fellowships, writing workshops, residencies etc help her to survive on a modest wage. She said to me afterwards that it was only after her first collection was published (on Picador) that commissions, fellowships etc really became an option for her. Before that, she just slogged away on a shoestring. She also felt that being able to say "I am a writer" was energising and confidence-building, rather than writing being a hobby or an activity slipped into the shadow hours.

Linda Cracknell chaired the meeting but spoke a little about her own experience. Basically being “a writer” doesn’t mean spending the majority of your time writing what you want. It’s all the other things – publicity, workshops, readings, paid commissions etc that help you to survive while you write what you want in between times.

So they all presented an unromantic view of the writer’s life. But none of them appeared to have any desire to return to their former day jobs.

Baroque Convents

How would you describe a baroque convent?

Well you might lean towards physical description in painstaking detail. Or you might try a psychological approach contrasting spiritual and material values. Or you could go for shape, contour, colour etc...
Eugenio Montale goes for “foam and biscuit”, and already I think I can see this place. Although I didn't see the dachshund coming, until it came.
This was written in the 1930s (my translation, blasted down this evening):

Towards Vienna

The baroque convent
of foam and biscuit
blocked off sight of slow waters
and ready tables, scattered here and there
with leaves and ginger.

A swimmer emerged beneath
a raincloud of midges,
asked about our trip,
spoke long of his own from beyond the border.

He pointed to the bridge ahead that we could cross
(he informed us) with a single toll.
He waved his hand, sank,
was the current itself…
And in his place,
a happy dachshund
sprang frantically from a kennel,
and barked,

a unique, fraternal voice in the humid air.

- Eugenio Montale

Click on Ros!

Help a fellow poet!

Chapbooks as Prizes

If you have a poetry chapbook, Jude Goodwin would like to hear from you. She has come up with the excellent idea of having chapbooks as prizes for competitions on her poetry board. I should add that they need to be available via PayPal.

A Dad / Daughter Poem

I've replaced the original poem posted here with a different dad/daughter poem. I'll leave the picture. Some people in the comments box feel that the picture is the poem anyway!

The Future

The future buries itself in green fields
or blows like ash down universal corridors.

It fails to warn the girl
stepping into a park
grey with bushes and shadows,
or the newborns smothered by a nurse
while their mothers slept.

I kiss my daughter, tell her I’ll be back
at 5. She holds me tight and then trusts me
to the wind, street-corners, traffic.

But the future has no sense
of fair play. It is blind as stone
and in thrall to its own reflexes –
sneaking glances over its shoulder,
paranoid there’s something out there
beyond itself.

Belonging - Ron Butlin

I don’t often write about fiction in this blog, mainly because I don’t read a lot, but I did think that Ron Butlin’s latest novel, Belonging was worth saying something about. Butlin lives in Edinburgh, but I’ve never met him or had any contact with him – in other words, this review isn’t just to do someone a personal favour.

The book begins with Jack and his partner Anna in the Swiss alps. They are supposed to look after the holiday houses on the resort, but instead they help themselves from the wine cellars and make out in the luxury rooms. Until a man falls from an apartment balcony and dies, and only one person sees what happened, a young French girl Thérèse.

Right from the start, I felt uneasy about Anna. On one hand, she was all new age, touchy-feely, always analysing every aspect of her relationship with Jack. On the other hand, she seemed to have deep-rooted problems, which she didn’t seem to recognise. And Jack is happier to run away from problems rather than confront them. The relationship. though passionate, always looks rocky.

So it is that he ends up with Thérèse in Paris, with her weird parents in Spain, and then in a hippie camp in the Spanish scrubland. In the sweltering heat, Jack enters a nightmare and must confront everything he’s previously avoided, and the ghost of Anna is never far away from him.

The plot races forward at a cracking pace, but you never forget that Butlin is a poet as well as a novelist. His descriptions of the landscapes his characters inhabit are more than just physical, but become symbols of Jack’s inner journey through an inferno. The images are multi-layered and work with poetic compression and power.

The book is also an interesting study of inner drives. Jack meditates towards the end of the book:

All my life: I’ve put one foot in front of the other as if there’s been nothing to stand on but this imaginary road – solid ground only when it criss-crossed someone else’s, especially a woman’s. Every step of the way has seemed the next step, the only step. So effortless and so inevitable…Is this how the damned recognise each other? By whatever’s driving them mercilessly onwards? By the ease with which they can explain away everything – even to themselves?

Ron Butlin does a sterling job of revealing the inner life of his characters through outward action for most of the novel. In the last few chapters I felt as though there was a little too much explaining going on, as if he felt the need to justify the motivations of Jack and particularly Anna.

I wondered about this because, even though Anna was a complex character, wholly at ease with her psychobabble in one way, but greatly disturbed in many others, and obviously capable of bizarre excess, I wasn’t totally convinced by her motivation for certain actions, particularly her sense that she and Jack belonged together, had been destined together. I don’t want to give away the plot by getting into too much of this. It didn’t really mar the book for me, which is exciting and luridly fascinating, but it strikes me that motivation sufficient to cause the reader to believe a character will act differently from what the reader suspects she should is one of the most difficult things for a fiction writer to achieve.

In any case, if you want a brisk, hard-boiled, disturbing story, with strong three-dimensional characters and a poetic sensibility for description, this could be what you’re after.

George Szirtes, Osip Mandelstam, and Cesare Pavese - all in 90 Minutes.

I spent 90 minutes this afternoon at George Szirtes’s translation workshop at the Edinburgh Book festival. Obviously, 90 minutes isn’t going to turn me into a brilliant translator, but it was well worth going to. If he had been up since 4.30am to catch his flight, it didn’t show. He was as articulate in person as he is in his blog. Three things in particular struck me from the session:

1. We were handed a sheet containing six translations of Catullus’ 5th epigram, all completely different, one only four lines of trimeter, another seventeen lines of tetrameter! That really made me think about how far it’s possible to stray from the original text and yet still be a translation of it.

2. We were given a quatrain by Osip Mandelstam – in Russian! Fortunately also with a literal translation, and with definitions of some of the words. The Russian text was full of sound effects e.g. Voronezh-/ Uronish ty menya il provoronish/ ty vyronish. Even if you, like me, know no Russian, you can hear this constantly repeated “oronish” sound. Could we recreate something of this in English? In 10 minutes? Impossible? Too right, but that didn’t stop everyone having a go. Here’s my version – Voronezh was the place to which Mandelstam was about to be exiled:

Let me go, wish me back, Voronezh
You will ditch me or brush past me
You will wish me fallen or leash me back
Voronezh – a flash, Voronezh – a crow, a slash.

Well, that’s 10 minutes for you. What I found interesting was how far I was happy to stray from the original text at the level of precise meaning. After all, it was only an exercise. The word I translated “brush past me” really means “overlook”, for example.
Yet in translating from Italian, a language I know reasonably well, I haven’t been happy doing that. I always seem to want to get to the ‘real’ meaning of the text, but if the ‘real’ meaning sounds awkward in English or lacks rhythm or comes up short in some other way, I should maybe be bolder in creating a poem that renders the idea of the original without being slave to its precision. After all, there can be no ‘real’ meaning in a translated text.

3. We looked at a poem by Dennis O’Driscoll called Towards a Cesare Pavese Title. Pavese has a poem called Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (Death will come and will have your eyes).

Now that title in itself is interesting. We discussed what “have” might mean – that death will in some way present itself with the same eyes as the addressee? that death will appropriate the addressee’s eyes for itself? that the poet is looking in a mirror and referring to his own eyes? All those possibilities and more might suggest themselves to a translator or reader.

O’Driscoll’s poem interprets the line over and over again, each time accumulating meaning. It starts:

Death will come and it will wear your eyes.

Death demands the handover of your eyes.

Death eyes you, stares you in the face

It continues like that for 14 lines, each line an interpretation of Pavese’s title.

I was interested in this because when I first read Pavese’s poem a couple of years ago, I asked these same questions. I loved the poem, but couldn’t quite grasp who was being addressed. Then earlier this year, I decided to translate it and found out that the poem was discovered in a manuscript on Pavese’s desk in his Turin flat after his suicide. He had been in deep depression since his break-up with an American actress three months before. Some people think the “eyes” of the poem belong to her, others think they belong to all Pavese’s lost loves of the past. But the ambiguity is enough to make me think that all those eyes are contained in Pavese’s eyes too.

Geoffrey Brock’s Disaffections: Complete Poems of Cesare Pavese 1930-1950 set a new standard in Pavese translation, and I guess any new Pavese rendition will be compared with Brock. But here’s my translation anyway:

Death will come and it will have your eyes –
this death that joins us
from morning to evening, sleepless,
deaf, like an old regret
or foolish vice. Your eyes
will be a futile word,
an unvoiced cry, a silence.
You will see them like this each morning
when alone you bend
towards the mirror. O beloved hope,
that day we’ll also know
that you are life and you are nothingness.

For everyone, death has a look.
Death will come and it will have your eyes.
It will be like renouncing a vice,
like seeing a dead face
re-emerge in the mirror,
like listening to sealed lips.
We will go down into the chasm without a word.

After the event, I went to find George Szirtes who was signing books in the Book Tent. Except he wasn’t, although a few of his books were sitting on a table in the corner. I wandered about the Book Tent for a while, and eventually found a couple of folk from the workshop who told me he had been in the Children’s Book Tent, and I’d missed him. Oh well…

Poetry or Prose?

With reference to the discussion on Scavella’s blog and to this discussion at Word Doctors, it’s not always easy to determine what marks the difference between poetry and prose. Have a look at the following three pieces, each set out as prose and as poetry, and guess whether the ‘prose version’ or the ‘poetry version’ is the real one. Feel free to leave answers in the comments box.

(If you recognise the pieces, and know the correct answer on account of that, don’t give the game away.) After a few days, I'll give you the answers and say who wrote what.

1.

A)

This – according to the voice on the radio, the host of a classical music program no less – this is the birthday of Vivaldi. He would be 325 years old today, quite bent over, I would imagine, and not able to see much through his watery eyes. Surely he would be deaf by now, the clothes flaking off him, hair pitiably sparse.
But we would throw a party for him anyway, a surprise party where everyone would hide behind the furniture to listen for the tap of his cane on the pavement and the sound of his dry, persistent cough.

*

B)

This –
according to the voice on the radio,
the host of a classical music program no less –
this is the birthday of Vivaldi.

He would be 325 years old today,
quite bent over, I would imagine,
and not able to see much through his watery eyes.

Surely he would be deaf by now,
the clothes flaking off him,
hair pitiably sparse.

But we would throw a party for him anyway,
a surprise party where everyone
would hide behind the furniture to listen

for the tap of his cane on the pavement
and the sound of his dry, persistent cough.

***

2.

A)

How rare these things are! To share the day with you – to people the earth. Whether to have a god or a goddess for companion in your walks, or to walk alone with hinds and villains and carles. Would not a friend enhance the beauty of the landscape as much as a deer or hare? Everything would acknowledge and serve such a relation; the corn in the field, and the cranberries in the meadow. The flowers would bloom and the birds sing, with a new impulse. There would be more fair days to us in the year.
The object of love expands and grows before us to eternity, until it includes all that is lovely, and we become all that can love.

*

B)

How rare these things are!
To share the day with you –
to people the earth.
Whether to have a god or a goddess
for companion in your walks,
or to walk alone
with hinds and villains and carles.
Would not a friend enhance
the beauty of the landscape
as much as a deer or hare?
Everything would acknowledge
and serve such a relation;
the corn in the field,
and the cranberries in the meadow.
The flowers would bloom
and the birds sing,
with a new impulse.
There would be more fair days
to us in the year.
The object of love expands
and grows before us to eternity,
until it includes all that is lovely,
and we become all that can love.

***

3.

A)

Years after my mother chose emptiness, at night I’d hear her at the piano planting chords, waiting for them to grow into something. She never advanced from childhood lessons. She’d crackle flat a dry page of Bartok or Anna Magdalena and make the house’s spine grow cold.
That was all her hesitant handfuls conjured – misery, a lonely beginner always beginning again, a weather of notes I wished would pass. They trickled onto my sheets in the dark, each drop telling how sad a woman could feel even to have lost what made her sad.

B)

Years after my mother chose emptiness
at night I’d hear her at the piano
planting chords, waiting for them
to grow into something.

She never advanced from childhood
lessons. She’d crackle flat a dry page
of Bartok or Anna Magdalena
and make the house’s spine grow cold.

That was all her hesitant handfuls
conjured – misery, a lonely beginner
always beginning again, a weather
of notes I wished would pass.

They trickled onto my sheets
in the dark, each drop telling
how sad a woman could feel
even to have lost what made her sad.

The answers are in the comments box. Here are the citations:

Number 1 is Surprise by Billy Collins from his collection, Nine Horses (Picador, 2002)

Number 2 is an excerpt from Henry David Thoreau’s Letters to a Spiritual Seeker (Norton 2006)

Number 3 is Piano Solo by Henry Shukman, from his collection, Doctor No’s Garden (Cape, 2002)

An Ending, the Edinburgh Book Festval, and Poetry Review

In case anyone was wondering, I had to abandon my series on experimental poets as the book was due back in the library. I felt I’d done enough anyway.

*

I’ve booked myself into a few events at the Edinburgh Book Festival. First, this Thursday, a workshop (20 people maximum) on translation with George Szirtes. I am in dire need of such a workshop! Then a Paul Muldoon reading on Saturday 26th, and Billy Collins (yes, really) on Monday 28th.

I surprised even myself when I realised I wanted the Collins ticket. I like some of his early stuff, which is often surprising, humorous, and intelligent, but he comes over to me now as a one-trick pony. The poems in Nine Horses, for instance, nearly all follow a similar trajectory – a simple everyday scenario for the first-person narrator, a slight lurch, and then the glorious, semi-surreal, shining moment – all told in a similar prosy tone.

However, I’ve heard he is a good performer, and it’s unlikely I’ll get many chances to hear him on this side of the pond, so I’m going. Maybe I’ll be convinced, maybe not.

C.E. Chaffin has written 500 words on Collins, an interesting point of view. I suspect that writing consistently like Billy Collins is far harder than it might look, but I tried it once and came up with a passable Collins imitation inside 30 minutes, so y’know…

*

The current Summer 2006 edition of Poetry Review is excellent – terrific poems by Don Paterson (translations from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus), John Burnside, W.S. Merwin, C.K. Williams, Sarah Wardle, Matthew Sweeney, Todd Swift, George Szirtes, and four francophone Caribbean poets in translation – Max Rippon, Aimé Césaire, Sony Rupaire, and Monchoachi; and fine essays by Elaine Feinstein, Michael Schmidt, and Ruth Padel. You can read a few of these online.

Get a copy somehow! I’ve been really impressed by Poetry Review since Fiona Sampson became editor about 18 months ago.

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Poetry Translation

Some of you will know that I translate Italian poetry now and again. Recently, I’ve been translating a poetry collection, Il Bar del Tempo, by Davide Rondoni, a contemporary poet from Bologna. The book won the Montale Prize in Italy in 1999. Rondoni is particularly concerned with time, the intersection of the spiritual and the temporal, and with family relationships.

Over at PFFA yesterday, a poster started a thread on translation. I’d just translated a poem by Rondoni, called Incinta, dice il test (Pregnant, says the test). It’s one of the few Rondoni poems to have been translated into English. In fact, it’s been translated twice, and now three times, thanks to me. So I’ve posted the three versions and compared the translations on the Pffa thread.

I’m no expert in all this and don’t claim to be a particularly skilled translator, but I found it interesting to compare the translations and think again about the original version as a result.

deleted poem

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Prostitutes into Sado in Edinburgh

Yes, someone arrived at this blog yesterday after googling "prostitutes into sado in Edinburgh." If you've enjoyed what you've seen here and have returned to read more, you will have realised that this is mainly a poetry blog. I hope you like poetry, but if you hate it, I hope reading here will give you the masochistic high you were seeking. Remember, Surroundings is always here to help, and I can direct you to poems that might be more suitable for your purposes if my poems don't have the requisite effect. Check out my links, for example.

I have decided to include this entry on prostitutes into sado in Edinburgh just for you.






But not really.

Quick Sonnets Again

Here’s all the 15-minute sonnet attempts so far. At least, these are the ones I know about. If I’ve missed yours, let me know:

Sorlil
Eloise
C.E. Chaffin
Julie
Harry’s 1st
Harry’s 2nd
Pffa thread

And here’s a second effort by me. I started off really quickly and thought I was going to do it, but somehow ended up taking 27 minutes. This clearly isn’t good enough. Next time I’ll have to try something easy, like a comic sonnet about a cat stuck up a tree:

My Soul

We’re only bones wrapped up in skin, unless
the soul exists. But what’s a soul, if not
a vibrancy that hasn’t yet been bought
by gifts, or sold out to false consciousness?

Many years ago I dressed in black
and smoked Gitanes. My soul wisped in the air
amid the indie disco gloom, a crack
in teenage existentialist despair,

but not a bright light or an open door.
I married once, then twice, and found that love
is fragile as a soul’s façade, and more
complex than any trinity above.

My soul is fickle, wound in song and string,
in vacancies that shadow everything.

Of course, the first stanza of that has a different rhyme scheme to the second and third stanzas. I've been playing about with it for another forty minutes or so, off and on, along with a couple of other poems, and it now looks like this - a regular rhyme scheme, and a little tightening. It's too early for me to say whether this has real potential or not:

My Soul

We’re only bones wrapped up in skin, unless
the soul exists. But what are souls, if not
mirrors resistant to false consciousness,
or fertile lands that haven’t yet been bought?

Many years ago I dressed in black
and smoked Gitanes. My soul wisped in the air
and greyed the indie disco gloom, a crack
in teenage existentialist despair,

but not a bright light or an open door.
I married once, then twice, and found that love
is fragile as a soul’s façade, and more
complex than any trinity above.

My soul is fickle, wound in sound and string,
in vacancies that shadow everything.

Listen...

A voice from Beirut

Quick Sonnet Challenge

C.E.Chaffin, in the comment-field of one of his blog entries, was lamenting the fact that many poets couldn’t write a sonnet in 15 minutes these days. I guess he is right.

I’d never tried this, but had a go. I failed. It took me 20 minutes. But I’m sure others can do better. In fact, people at Pffa’s Challenges forum already have.

Why not have a go? Post your sonnets on your blog. Then either link them to me (that obviously gets you bonus points!), or email me with the url so that I can take a look. I’ll try to link back.

The rules are:

1. You must write a sonnet within 20 minutes. 15 minutes gets you a bonus point.
2. You can’t think out anything beforehand, no choosing rhyming words, no gathering ideas or images – nothing.
3. No cheating.

Here’s my effort. I will have another shot soon:

The night he dragged his body up the slope
was like a death. The onward march of frostbite
slowed him down and his tick to telescope
his life into each momentary highlight
made him feel so small. It turned the brawl
within his head into a cough, a crack
in perfect thought. No time now to install
some explanation, or a zodiac
of routes that one might take. A born observer,
stung to action, he stooped to swallow wine,
untroubled by the threatened hangover
on the far side of dawn. Far out of line,
he climbed, although the stars alone were sane
to hang so high, loitering on the plain.

Edinburgh Festival: 'Stooshie at the Store'

My wife, Anne, acts with the Edinburgh People’s Theatre, an amateur company founded in 1943 and still going strong. She is performing in the festival fringe show Stooshie at the Store.

The blurb is:

It's 1959 and Edinburgh is celebrating the centenary year of St Cuthbert's Co-operative Association. Excitement mounts as the 'Divvie' (money) is due to be handed out to the members next week, followed by the annual Mannequin Parade at the Central Methodist Halls the week after.

But what happens when some of the 'Divvie' money goes missing and the principal mannequin is knocked down by a car? And who is the mysterious wee Shuggie Wright?

Saturday 5th (Gala Premiere) - Saturday 19th August 2006 at 7.45 pm (not Sundays).

Venue 17, St Peter's, Lutton Place

Ticket Prices: £8.00 & £7.00 (concession)

It’s a comedy, the acting is good, and people actually laughed (a lot) in the private test audience at the final dress rehearsal. So if you’re in Edinburgh for the festival, it’s recommended. Tonight’s show (Saturday 5th) is sold out.

Tommy Sheridan Victory at Trial

Tommy Sheridan has sensationally won his defamation action against the News of the World.The jury took 150 minutes to reach their verdict. Sheridan collects £200,000 for his trouble.

After Gail Sheridan's testimony a few days ago, I thought the case had swung in Tommy Sheridan's favour, especially after his summing up, which was emotional, humorous (he offered to strip off in court in case the jury wanted to check his body hair, after Gail had said he was "a monkey," a fact none of the women he had allegedly slept with had mentioned), and passionate.

But yesterday, the News of the World QC seemed to press all the buttons. Had 18 witnesses lied? Had they put their careers on the line to perjure under oath? Could a jury really believe that? Then he referred to Tommy Sheridan's "monster ego". This was a killer point, as the man obviously has a huge ego. No one starts a very left-leaning political party, becomes a public celebrity, and actually succeeds in winning 6 seats in the Scottish Parliament without having a huge ego. Sheridan's ego has always been his strength and his Achilles' heel, that feeling that whenever he spoke up for the poor and downtrodden, he had half an eye on how he was looking through the camera lens.

I thought that swung the case back in the balance. I had no idea what the decision was going to be. In a way I'm glad that Tommy Sheridan has won. It's a kick in the teeth for the tabloid newspapers and that's no bad thing.

I noticed this morning's Daily Record reported that a leading Scottish writer is already writing a theatre script based on the trial and is going to offer the lead role to Tommy Sheridan himself! Sometimes real life feels too weird for words, even for words on a blog...

Until the play opens, we can look forward to the perjury trial of those under suspicion of telling bare-faced lies in court. That will be very, very interesting.

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Scottish Anti-Semitism

Euch!

George Szirtes in his blog entry of 2.8.06 (On Apologising) linked to an article in The Scotsman on Mel Gibson’s anti-Jewish remarks on being arrested for drunk driving. But the issue isn’t so much Gibson. Even the sherriff who arrested him (who is Jewish) felt that the booze was talking. We can think of Mel Gibson whatever we like.

However, the real issue is on the comments board at the bottom of the article. I wouldn’t have thought there was much anti-semitism these days among Scottish people. I would have thought it to be a non-issue. Of course, people may be angry about what the Israeli Government is doing in Lebanon and in the Palestinian territories, and it’s fair enough that these issues are vigorously debated. But the idea that people in Scotland hold hostility towards Jews, just because they are Jews, wouldn’t have struck me as realistic these days.

The comments have shown me otherwise. As examples:

Given the punishment the Jews are currently handing out to their neighbours I would feel that some dignified silence might be in order but we'd never get that from a jew…

pity they [the Lebanese] aren't as rich as the jews as then he [Mel Gibson] wouldn't have to grovel.

Mel only said what a lot of Europeans think about the Jews; that they start a lot of wars.

It must be embarrassing for the Americans to be dominated by the Jews in their own country. Fortunately in Europe although there are a lot of Jews we're not affected by them.

That said, what is really more offensive: [Mel Gibson] risking the lives of others by drinking and driving, or voicing an unpopular opinion about Jews?

That’s quite shocking, I think. There is racism is Scotland, which erupts in violence sporadically between white Scots and the large Indian/ Pakistani/ Bangladeshi community, and in some tabloid-fuelled hostility towards asylum-seekers, but I had honestly never before even considered that people still held these kind of views in Scotland against Jews. I can only hope they are a tiny minority, but they made up a significant proportion of those who entered opinions in the comments box.

Summing Up at the Sheridan Trial

Michael Jones QC has summed up his case for the News of the World in the Tommy Sheridan trial.

It doesn’t make good reading for Sheridan, although his own summing up to the jury was as passionate as we’ve come to expect from him. But I wonder if he is now feeling a tinge of regret at sacking his lawyers earlier in the trial. It’s all very well to conduct your own questioning of witnesses, but when you’re up against a top QC, you might want a top experienced lawyer on your side as well when it comes to knowing how to work on a jury.

I’ve no idea which way the jury are going to go on this case. It seems to me completely in the balance. One thing is for sure – when the case ends, it won’t be the end. The evidence has been so conflicting that the losing side will find themselves in court again, this time facing perjury charges and possible jail terms.

Couplet of the Day

I’ve been reading Sinéad Morrissey’s collection, The State of the Prisons (Carcanet, 2005).

There are a few humdrum poems in it, but most are of a high standard, some a bit special. The couplet that begins her poem Forty Lengths shows that even with something as mudane as a swimming pool, there are still ways of "making it new":

Before goggles, the pool was a catch of beleaguered heads
being raced against each other by omnipotence.

Gail Sheridan Speaks Out

Here’s an update on my post on the Tommy Sheridan trial.

Gail Sheridan, in the odd position of being questioned in court by her own husband over his alleged sexual affairs, was resolute, humorous, and uncompromising. She is the final witness, so there’s not long to go.

“If it was true, you’d be in the [River] Clyde with a piece of concrete tied around you and I’d be in court for your murder. You believe that right now.”

Will that be enough to save Tommy?