matthew eggleton
February 12, 2009
Too soon, Matt. Way too soon. Words really don’t work here. So I rob a little and edit a little from my favourites.
Matt Eggleton, looking a bit like Barack Obama, at his wedding to Nansi, 28 August 2005
First, Linton Kwesi Johnson:
If I woz a Tap-Natch poet
like Chriso Okigbo
Derek Walcot
ar T. S. Eliot
I woodah write a poem
soh dyam deep
dat it bittah-sweet
like a precious
memari
whe mek yu weep
whe mek yu feel incomplete
like wen yu lovah leave
an dow defeat yu kanseed
still yu beg an yu plead
till yu win a repreve
an yu ready fi rack steady
but di muzik done aready
still
inna di meantime
wid mi riddim
wid mi rime
wid mi ruff base line
wid mi own sense a time
…
if I woz a tap-natch poet
like Tchikaya U’tamsi
Nicholas Guillen
ar Lorna Goodison
I woodah write a poem
soh beautiful dat it simple
like a plain girl
wid good brains
an nice ways
wid a sexy dispozishan
an plenty compahshan
wid a sweet smile
an a suttle style
…
And secondly, Mr Beckett:
folly -
folly for to -
for to -
what is the word -
folly from this -
all this -
folly from all this -
given -
folly given all this -
seeing -
folly seeing all this -
this -
what is the word -
this this -
this this here -
all this this here -
folly given all this -
seeing -
folly seeing all this this here -
for to -
what is the word -
see -
glimpse -
seem to glimpse -
need to seem to glimpse -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse -
what -
what is the word -
and where -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where -
what is the word -
there -
over there -
away over there -
afar -
afar away over there -
afaint -
afaint afar away over there what -
what -
what is the word -
seeing all this -
all this this -
all this this here -
folly for to see what -
glimpse -
seem to glimpse -
need to seem to glimpse -
afaint afar away over there what -
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what -
what -
what is the word -
what is the word
digress again
January 30, 2009
“But there are many who say Žižek’s a sell-out but it’s hard to know what they really mean in this particular time and place.”
“At least he never used Lacanian theory to help companies sell deodorant in Russia. Like I have.”
“If you buy a piece of cake and a cup of tea or coffee you can make a saving of £1.20…”
“It’s been shown, did you know this, that traders in the city produce too much testosterone. If there were more women, or all women, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. And the reason for this is that men tend to behave like sheep, in groups or herds if you prefer, and testosterone encourages this. Likewise, when things are going badly – now, for instance – they produce more cortisol and behave like frightened sheep. More women would resolve this problem. Or just people who are prepared to think as individuals, not collectively.”
“The reason old women have long slits in their ear lobe is because the ear and the nose never stop growing.”
“Well I ate dog poo as a child and it never did me any harm.”
truth appeal
January 27, 2009
Life sometimes feels like tortured repetition. A bit like going to the gym. But at least at the gym you get fitter. When it comes to politics, life feels like a running machine which keeps you running but makes you fatter, more depressed and more miserable until the rolls are seeping out from under your lycra trouser leg, over the circulating rubber, down the stabilising side and out onto the manmade fibre carpet. I’m thinking about the BBC’s refusal to broadcast the Gaza appeal for humanitarian agencies, which has had me yawning and yelling in equal measure. As a former employee and correspondent of the BBC World Service, the one thing that strikes me about all of this is quite the extent of the hypocrisy. It’s so alarmingly vast.
During the seven odd years I worked for the BBC – both as a correspondent in the, er, ‘field’ and as a producer and sometime editor on the desk – I was always infuriated and intrigued by the amount of pressure we all were under to rely on information provided by foreign aid agencies (all Western, mostly British, American and French or Belgian or Dutch etc). The moment one of the big agencies – CARE, Save the Children, Oxfam, and any UN department – produced a report or issued a press release about yet another ‘worst humanitarian situation’ (they are, believe me, always the worst), the team would always want to run the story. Various reasons were and still are behind this: it’s easy to get an aid worker on the phone (even an ISDN line), they usually speak English, they will be concise, and free, and more often than not they are always willing to speak. Much easier to chat to pressperson X from the WFP in the middle of Darfur, than track down a local Sudanese who has intermittent access to a wobbly mobile phone and doesn’t speak a word of English. Such are the time pressures of modern day broadacsting, most producers and editors (culled to the minimum on each show) will go for the easy and reliable and cheap option. Aidworkers fit this description perfectly. Nevermind if their information is inevitably partisan. (No one knows everything: remember!) Even in the Africa service, for which I worked, and even among African staff, the accepted opinion was it was better to get information and an interview from a foreign NGO or the UN than a local NGO or civil society association.
Such is the overlap between the BBC and aid agencies, many BBC staff end up going to work for them. I could provide a long list of former colleagues who now work for the WFP as spokesmen and spokeswomen, as press writers and publicty experts. I know people who’ve gone to Cafod, all branches of the UN, Oxfam, and countless others. The attractions – particularly to the UN – can be summed up in one word: money. The UN pay ever so nice and you get a nice house in a sunny country with free education for the kids, plus extras for moving and extras for all sorts of other stuff. You might get a driver, you’ll definitely get a car. Etc etc etc. Even after all the horrible things I wrote about the UN and aid agencies, I was offered a job twice by the UN as a spokesperson.
Because of this link – between ex BBC staff and aid agencies – the BBC is even more inclined to interview its ex-reporters who now work for agency Y or Z. I used to chuckle so loudly when I heard former BBC reporters suddenly being ‘grilled’ by their former colleagues: they sounded exactly the same as they always had. Peas in a pod. This says a great deal about the BBC and the agencies, about the language used by all these organisations/corporations and their view of the world. The overlap grows and grows and grows. And another thing to watch and listen out for are the number of BBC reports which are courtesy of correspondent Z being taken care of and escorted by a particular aid agnecy: so the slant of the report favours the NGO in question, giving it international publicity and the BBC reporters gets cheaper travel and infromation… and everyone’s happy.
Except, perhaps, the ‘needy victims’… But anyway…
But what has also intrigued me about the explosion of debates on the BBC’s decision not to air the appeal is the anger, particularly from some on the Left. The sudden support for these aid organisations and their appeals raises, for me anyway, a series of questions: when does a western aid agency stop being a representative of the West and its hypocritical policies to help people it helped kill or injure in the first place? When should that aid end? At what point will the aid to Gaza cease to be emergency or disaster relief, and start to be some sort of controlling arm of paternalism? When does western aid start to blind us from the politics at the heart of, in this case, Gaza and the regional politics? When do we cross the line too far, to pity the Palestinians as opposed to assisting them in self-determination? I sense, in some cases, that there are some who are so loathing of the BBC (and believe me, I sympathise) that they forget other factors at play in all of this, other larger issues that deserve consideration.
limited edition
January 27, 2009
Typical, isn’t it. Some smart arse at Cadbury’s came up with this idea. A limited edition – while the recession lasts – in a sweet shop near you. I think I got one of the very first. I’ve eaten it already. Tastes just like the expanding markets version previously sold at the corner store. Although I’m sure the chocolate edging has thinned since I first started eating Crunchie about thirty years ago. It used to be easy to bite off each end and suck on the chocolate square slab as it melted into a sticky brown mass on your tongue (perhaps that’s why Mark Oaten had to find satisfaction elsewhere…), but I found with this particular bar that the first inch of the crunch came with it. Never mind.
And thank you DJ for the gift.
dreaming Sembene
January 21, 2009
Footage of the uninspiring and stilted dancing displayed by Barack and Michelle instantly reminded me of the late Ousmane Sembene’s superb 1975 film, Xala. El Hadji (pictured below, on the right) is a Senegalese politician, cursed with impotence upon the day of his marriage to his third wife.
Xala is really a satire depicting the failure of new governments in independent Africa. The impotence of El Hadji being the symbol for that failure, and the speed with which many new administrations failed (or were unable) to break away from the influence (and often, control) of the former colonial power. Xala also details beautifully, and hilariously, the greed of the first flush of independent Africa’s politicians. The film begins with the defeat of the French. Within minutes, two French colonial administrators (below), who have just fled the central governing office, are seen returning with brief-cases.
They enter the offices of the new independent adminstration – the new African government feigning some shock – and immediately open the brief-cases, to display wads of cash. The new administration is swiftly smiling and nodding pleased little heads. One of the French men remains behind, and becomes El-Hadji’s right-hand man. In fact, he becomes his advisor, financier and minder.
So when I watched the footage of Barack at his desk for the first time signing executive orders, surrounded as he was by four or five officials (all white), again, I thought of Xala, and wondered what the great Sembene (below) would have been thinking now were he still with us.
I know what I’m thinking. And what I’m hoping. But for now, I’m keeping that to myself. I think BO should be given a chance – to prove us wrong, or prove us right, or prove once again what a masterly film-maker the late Sembene was, making films that were timeless in their interpretations of power, greed and humanity.
what a stink!
January 16, 2009
Three hundred and twenty-two people are outraged. Four of us gathered names for the top letter, and only just now have I noticed the letters beneath, including one from musicians and writers. And there are more, and more, beneath that. We don’t know if letters make any difference, but there is a sense of trying something. You cannot scream in a letter, and I would like to scream. To stand in Clowning Street and scream at Mr Brown and Mr Miliband and… anyone else passing. But a letter is better, perhaps, than no letter. I had an idea to bomb the Israeli embassy. I went on the march last week, took my two small bombs (Smiffy’s Stink Bombs: Break Glass Vial To Release An Utterly Evil Stench!!) and was so overwhelmed by all the people and the aggression of the police, forgot to let them off. Actually, I’d quite like to let one off in a supermarket, or a bus, because I’m damned sure noone would suspect a 4o year old woman gazing into space. Would I stand by and watch as small boy gets cuffed around ear? But of course! This is a basic lesson I learned whilst reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a book I became obsessed with when I was living in Angola and trying to understand Unita’s military strategy. (I even tried to write a From Our Own Correspondent about the book and what it taught me about Angola’s war, but the ed felt it a wee bit far-fetched for ‘our listeners’. Stick to the facts… or something like that…)
FACTS??!!
Elsewhere, foreign troops backed by the United States are evacuating Mogadishu. Never forget Somalia. Africa’s always the first to vanish at times like this.
a world hanging from my knee
January 15, 2009
I love this idea, this notion, of writing as a way of “getting traction” on this world (whatever it is). The tension, the stretching; you, the writer, at one end of taught wire, the heavy world swinging at the other. Once, an old lady in a wheelchair swung at the end of my traction. I awoke, my knee being pulled so hard, I felt someone was trying to yank off my leg. It was dark, I could not see what it was that heaved at the metal weight at the end of my bed, the weight which swung from the wire which was knotted to the skewer that had been drilled and hammered through the top of my tibia. I loved so much to pick at the scabs on either side of the skewer where it emerged from the flesh. Each day, a crispy-wet wodge of scab. And I loved so much to stab the needle into my stomach, to show pitying visitors. Watch this! Rats would have died, but the poison saved my life. The old lady was my neighbour. We talked a great deal. Sometimes, late at night when the lights had gone off, she’d awake, push back the sheets, lower her self to the shiny floor, and tiptoe around the end of my bed up around the side, and stand just about where my waist lay, just about at the point where I would stab the needle into the pinch of flab. She would place a square washing-up bowl on the bed beside me, she would lift up her long nylon nightie and pull it over her head and stand, naked, at my bedside, ghostly without the form of cloth to shroud her. She would place the nightie in the plastic bowl. While she worked, she whispered, communicating subtly as to what it was she was doing. Hisses and whirrs I learned to understand. After the communication, she would remove the bucket from the bed and lower it to the floor, and then she would lower her arse over the bucket and release a long stream of urine over its contents. As she pissed, she sighed. Ahhhhhhhhhh! Abruptly, she stood up, put the bowl back on the bed beside me, and proceeded to wash the nightie in her urine, lifting it up and down up and down, running it through her fingers as if rubbing together butter and flour for a round of pastry. Still whispering, still explaining, Hush hush, hush hush, The Nurses! Hush hush dear.
One night she did not undress. Instead, she stole the wheelchair that belonged to Helen, the woman across the ward, whose bed was occupied by an army of teddy-bears and dolls. Helen had rheumatoid arthritis. She’d had it nearly her entire life. She was 40 now, but the toys on her bed always made me wonder if she’d never grown up. Her body, useless and dependent, had kept her childlike forever, despite the pain and endless operations she’d survived: Helen understood suffering profoundly. So, as I was saying, the old lady stole Helen’s wheelchair one night, and tried to make an escape. Except the spoke of the lefthand wheel got caught in the metal weight that held my busted pelvis in traction. Hush hush, hush hush. She pulled back and forth, back and forth. I shouted at her to stop. She looked at me, the first time she’d ever looked me in the eye. Hush hush, she whispered, hush hush. She pulled and pulled and pulled and pulled. Until, eventually exhausted, she slumped into a deep sleep.
Eventually, the scabs cleared up. One day they came – three nurses – to undo the traction. The weight at the end of the bed was released, the wire loosened and unclipped. What proved more complicated was the removal of the skewer. I was offered an anaesthetic. Oh no! I said, I want to feel the release, watch the blood and scab spurt out. It will, they said, it will. And it will hurt too, they said. Never mind.
I keep the skewer in a pot. For kebabs, and stirring cocktails. It has a small knot in the middle which kept it stable in the centre of the tibia. The holes healed disappointingly quickly.
almost marching
January 11, 2009
For pictures of the demonstration, there are few better than those taken by the elusive Ellis Sharp, here. And I am lucky enough to know Pete Hallward who sent me a selection, including this fabulous picture:
I began the year – and ended the last – very much in the belief that there is no point demonstrating, for two reasons. The first, it seems to achieve very little. Look no further than the Iraq war. The second, our protests are abused by the likes of Condi Rice and Tony Blair etc who insist that our marching just goes to show what marvellous democracies the UK and US are. It is deeply abusive, this sentiment, and leaves me feeling dirty and desiring to scrub my intestines out with bleach and soak my brain in meths for a week. The last ten days or so, though, I began to feel that wasn’t good enough. I’ve got to do something, I thought. A long chat with an ageing neighbour – she, originally from Poland, of Jewish origins, and a loyal reader of the Morning Star – ended with us both concluding that we should really go to Gaza and put our own flesh on the line, prepared to be bombed, if we wish to make any true protest. But that isn’t going to happen this week, Lara, let’s be honest, she said. Indeed. So we agreed to march together. And we did. Or shuffle, anyway.
In a sea of tens of thousands it’s very difficult to march. And as the sub-zero temperatures set in, our ankles freezing and fingers curling in on our palms like red fortune fish, the shuffle turned into a determined limp down Kensington Church Street, left towards Top Shop, the Israeli embassy and Kensington Palace. Soon, we could not move at all being crammed in and unable to move backwards or forwards, only to raise our voices and shout Palestine! to the hoarse screams of the girl behind us, FREE! FREE! Many old and many very young were cramped between shops and iron gates on one side and flourescent riot police on the other. I wondered when Dr who might arrive and wondered whether my brain was losing power, as my mobile phone had hours earlier, its screen phasing in and out in ghostly shadowed slow-motion.
We squeezed our bodies to the right and managed to reach the furthest side of the crowds, next to an alleyway blocked by more riot police. Between us and them, two sets of metal barriers hindered any possible escape from the heaving bodies, growing confusion and increasing fear that there would soon be a very nasty crush. In front of me stood my elderly neighbour, to my left two young children, no older than five or six years. I looked to a large policeman, Please, open the barriers, we are being squashed, we need to get out. Solid cement, his plastic visa pulled firmly down over his face, he said nothing. We might have been from different lands, unable to communicate; he might have been cardboard; or deaf perhaps; or suffering a diabetic hypo. He stared through us saying not a word. The crowd behind heaved, the barriers tipped, the man at my side put one of his chidlren on to his shoulders. Let us through! we cried. Let us through! The shouts for relief continued for many long minutes, the panic grew, tear gas exploded behind us, hoots and hurrahs, shouts and calls. Then the police moved forward, peeled back a barrier and perhaps ten or fifteen of them pushed in to the crowds, forming a line among us and closing the barriers behind them. Again, the crowd heaved and squeezed and I expected my body to be toppling onto my neighbour’s like a wall of bricks that might smother her forever, or the child standing scared at my side.
Again, we called and shouted to the police to open the barriers; again, they ignored us. Until a brave man from the Stop the War coalition came forward, said something to Blank Cop, and began pulling at the barrier and tugging and shaking and growling. J joined in and together they pulled the first barrier apart giving us a foot of space to squeeze through. And through we went, snaking and pushing, relieved and breathing as the space opened up. And then Blank Cop leapt on to the StW man, wrestling him to a wall and yelling at him, Do you want people killed! Do you want people killed! What what? J pulled at the policeman’s hands trying to peel him from the man who’d helped us out. Then we all pushed down the alley, scuffles breaking out behind. My ageing neighbour, fearless and furious, yelled at one policeman, then another. She stood her ground, didn’t move an inch. The copper shouted back at her, a half-terrified roar at her face. Then one of the cops asked us all what we Fucking Expected! and I wondered what he’d expected when tens of thousands protest peacefully about a massacre to which the British hold not some small responsibility.
We shuffled off, less and less able to walk, our ankles frozen, our faces pink and cranky, until we found a café. At last, somewhere to relieve my desperate bladder, punished for four hours with nowhere to pee, and we ordered hot chocolates and teas. But the lady behind the counter was cross: it was two minutes to five, and she wanted to go home. An anaemic lad waited for her at the table next to ours, keen also that she not dig into what she described as My Private Time! So she opened the door, letting the freezing fog of the night remind us that she would be disappearing at five. And my anger finally erupted and I yelled and shouted at her for her fucking private time which seemed such a luxury when you think of the bombing of the people of Gaza. Let alone the reality of the Rest of the World. Sulking but proud we’d made it, we marched down to Gloucester Road tube – close to where I once taught A level politics (extremely badly I should add) – and sipped at the remains of our coffee all the way to Manor House.
I remember now why we should demonstrate: because if we didn’t, this government would take the right away from us in a blink. And I salute those who stayed behind in front of the embassy, refusing to budge and who then became trapped by the police for another five hours in some cases.
Only one thing: Annie Lennox is a silly woman. For some reason, she’d been invited to speak at the rally at Hyde Park Corner. ‘It doesn’t matter which side you’re on,’ she told the crowds, as long as you care about peace. Rubbish! I shouted back at the skies above. Rubbish, Annie! What really really matters is which side you’re on! My friends laughed at me and others in the crowd looked around and stared. Go home Annie! I chanted, alone and furious. Go home! Go shout at your friends Bob and Bono who cry for Africa as you do, and stuff their taxes into havens. I wrote to Stop the War before the rally, begging them to overcome the notion that Chris Martin and Annie L add weight to the petition. They simply do not. Get the poppers off. They haven’t a clue of what they talk. May they go and weep into their pillows and feel guilt. That’s fine. But don’t lecture us about what matters for you don’t have a clue.
sausages
January 5, 2009
There is only one president at a time, said Barack Obama, or words very similar. And so the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, unable to get his view on Gaza, interviewed another man – an expert, we were told (of telepathy?) – about what Obama would be saying if he were prepared to say what he thought had he not said that he would not say anything until he is officially president.
Yesterday, we went to the Bacon exhibition at Tate Britain. It was the last day. A long queue had formed by 9.45am with perhaps 150 people lining tidily together. Then a shorter queue was formed, led by a short elderly woman dressed in an expensive coat and dark glasses. She held her membership card infront of her as if that made up for her revolting arrogance. So we took ours out and stuck it in J’s hat and faced her, staring and talking loudly about members and queues. We giggled as we sprinted up the stairs ahead of her ageing legs, and beat her through the doors into the first of 10 rooms. We were the second and third people to enter the galleries; she was the fourth. Indoors, the old bat pretended not to recognise me, my beret pulled off.
Bacon’s bodies and mouths heightened my awareness of my own loathing to many people, especially art-gallery-goers in London. Complete lack of interest or awareness or knowledge perhaps of what the barely helpful booklet called ‘the sense of dread pervading the brutality of everyday life’.
David Cameron said this morning on Today that he’d like to shake Gordon Brown. What of the desire to shoot them both? DC will be quoted throughout the day, though we should be grateful that at least it will be for something he did say – however pathetic and hypocritical – not for something someone else said he would have said were he more willing to speak before the date when he said he would speak.
What of the desire to shoot the Pope?
Or just send him away, for God’s sake. Or cut out his tongue, at least? ‘Well, of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses.’ Thank you Mr Bacon. Did you hear that, old Pope?
I wanted to stand in Room 5 and scream and rage and attack. The rooms filled up with yummy mummies, male couples calling out to each other and us to display their superior knowledge of The Painter, bored children dressed like daddy in corduroys and trying to answer his question and show interest, and parents holding up their babies in front of Head VI as if willing their offspring to become famous wealthy artists at some stage – oh, pleeeease! – later in life. It does work, Will! It does! The babies themselves already aware of their role and how to play it: look cute in flowery rural smock dresses and talk about peepee and painting in cutesy squeaky voicey.
His paintings ‘reflected a combination of Cold War anxiety, an air of personal menace emanating from Bacon’s sometimes violent affair with Peter Lacy and the wider pressures associated with the continuing illegality of homosexuality’. Oh, Pope! Oh, Pope! It’s 2009, and still. And still. And still people seem to be more concerned by their own appearance at the Bacon show than the art. If you are a member you get a free copy (without glossy) of the Observer and/or Guardian. The preferred partner. People pack out the members’ café too to read the stuff that attempts to paper over the very cracks Bacon chipped into. Why don’t they stay at home? Read it in bed? Instead of filling up the space so we can’t see the paintings even if we were the second and third through the doors. Some, only slightly less offensive, spent long periods gazing at the Bacon posters in the Tate Shop. I kid not! The real thing just a few feet away, and they were gazing, head cocked, at prints, or bags of prints, of mugs of prints. Instead! Should there be a vetting process for the Tate? For any art? Keep out the trash that seeks only to buy the product. Have they really taken Brown at his word? Are we of the same breed? Even those old enough to have lived through The War? Have they forgotten everything so quick? Is the only worry worth worrying for the need for a woman to be named after a man, still?
We are meat, but masking as intelligence. But we are only meat. Birth, copulate, death. Bacon (what if he’d been called Francis Sausage?) was right, of course. And I felt so sad later, to go see this at the kind invitation of my good folk, and to leave wondering why – HOW? – they included a “native Indian” who was a non-character of cliché who says barely anything and does very little and has no use whatsoever other than to play out the role that Tracy Letts (a he, I presume) was content to limit her character to. 2009. And only here. Is this the real world? This tiny corner of Western Europe, where Annie Lennox says she’s not taking sides on Gaza but’ll sing her heart out for anyone and lecture South African black women about HIV AIDS and how to defend themselves against their evil, dangerous men? Where her friends, like Bono and Bob, are busy tax-evading? Does she lecture them, too? Or do they share financial advisors, whilst telling us about hope? Hope!
Times like this, I long for Luanda. Don’t mistake this for something profound! Know better. The other has gone. We’re all merging together like the form and paint of Bacon’s art. My longing is a failure of memory, a nostalgic longing for an earlier state of ignorance, the state I was in before I saw the war and heard Hain. Perhaps that’s why I spent last night dreaming of Chuck Palahniuk and the lobster’s heart, an alcoholic friend, and the mouse in our wall (which grew and burst out through the plaster and attacked J as we slept).
