Julian Gough

There's an enjoyable discussion of spam poetry going on, over at the Guardian Books blog.  I just posted a contribution there, so I may as well repeat it here...

I'm a fan of spam. I like the way that, beset by predators, predatory itself, it evolves with furious speed. I like to have a dip into my spam box every couple of weeks to see the new trends evolving (like the recent "What a stupid face you have" / "You look so stupid in this photo" variations.)

Ben Myers is right on both points, it's a stunning resource for poets, but to make good poetry out of it you have to be a very good editor. Alive to nuance and resonance. I've been playing with spam poems for years. (Not just spam: this week, I wrote two poems I'm very pleased with, constructed entirely from the legal disclaimers on poetry websites.)

By using spam, and other internet debris, poets can essentially outsource free association. But the best comment on the perils of the method comes from W.H. Auden, in a letter to the poet Frank O'Hara, long before the internet:

“I think you (and John {Ashbery} too, for that matter) must watch what is always the great danger with any ‘surrealistic’ style, namely of confusing authentic nonlogical relations which arouse wonder with accidental ones which arouse mere surprise and in the end fatigue.”
-W. H. Auden

If your ear/nose/throat/soul (add to/delete as appropriate) are alive to authentic nonlogical relations, then spam and all the other digital junk of the internet are your friend. They can jolt you out of the deep groove of habit. The first and hardest step in surprising and delighting others is surprising and delighting yourself.

RTÉ Radio 1 (the Irish national broadcaster) will be nationally broadcasting little lumps of Jude: Level 1 all this week, from Monday to Friday. The short extracts will go out at 11.45pm each night (Irish time), and can be heard live, anywhere on earth, and probably far out into space, on the RTÉ Radio 1 stream. They are read by the brilliant Beckett actor Conor Lovett. (One of the select few actors - a band apart, a very special breed - who have appeared in both Waiting For Godot and Father Ted).

I would have posted this earlier and given you a bit of warning, but nobody had officially told me that it was happening, and I couldn't find any advance mention of it on the RTÉ website. Maybe it's a secret. Maybe I shouldn't even be telling you. (Or maybe I'm just not very good at navigating the RTÉ website...)

No, I've had another poke around the RTÉ website, and they've just updated the Book on One page (after the first episode had aired, naturally) to plug Jude. Ah, there is more rejoicing in heaven over the sinner who repents than over the goody-two-shoes who updates his website punctually.

And I've just noticed, Lucille Redmond in the Sunday Business Post previewed it, in their Radio Review section:

The Book on One this coming week sounds enticing. It’s Jude: Level 1, in which a Tipperary orphan sets off for Galway, ‘the Sodom of the West’, when the Mob burns down his orphanage. After facial surgery reconstructing him in the image of Leonardo DiCaprio (but for an erectile nose), he endures a chase through the Dublin of Ulysses. It’s to be read by Beckett interpreter Conor Lovett. 

A woman of great taste and discernment, Lucille Redmond.

Anyway, I  heard some of the first episode as it went out (the live streaming kept breaking up, I really must tinker with my internet connection... chase those storks off my chimney, hunt the voles out of the DSL box, unpeel the clinging vines from my cables), and the bits I heard sounded mighty. Sorry I couldn't warn you in advance about the first episode, but you can tune in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at 11.45pm Irish time for more, more, MORE of Jude's adventures across Ireland.

I  think he'll be walking through Tipperary, in the dark, tonight, and may well meet the mysterious Pat Sheeran, who will give him a lift on his motorbike to the Sodom of the West... I'm not sure where Jude will be tomorrow (possibly doing battle with James Bond super-villain Charlie Haughey, on Haughey's private island). On Thursday and Friday I do believe he'll be trying to preserve his innocence as he pursues former Supermacs employee, and his true love, Angela, through the Inferno of Dublin...

And if you like that sort of filth, you can buy the book here...

I've been having a great, nostalgia-saturated conversation with Rachel King's sister Naomi, over on the forum. Apparently Naomi's first ever gig, aged fifteen,  was Toasted Heretic in Clogs (the legendary pub in the legendary Galway Centre for the legendary Unemployed), in 1988.

That distinguished lecturer in linguistics at Trinity College Dublin,  Dr. Breffni O'Rourke, is also chatting with us on the thread. Breffni may be better known to some of you as Toasted Heretic's chiselled-featured rhythm-guitarist in those early days (and resident Sex God, till Barry Wallace, now of The Rye, joined and took over that important role). It turns out Breff has a tape of the gig. He's a fountain of knowledge, I'd totally forgotten that decade, let alone that night. Apparently the original title of the song "Charm & Arrogance" (later the title track of our second album) was "Everybody Wants To Shag Julian Gough". Who knew?

So if you're into the intimate details of a particularly obscure Toasted Heretic gig in Clogs pub off Dominic Street in Galway city in 1988 (a gig so obscure even I'd forgotten it), by golly you've come to the right place. Click HERE...

Meanwhile, as I was reading the account of the Ireland-Brazil friendly unfolding on the Guardian's minute-by-minute live report, and as I threw in the odd email pulling the Guardian journalist's Offaly leg, I read (in the 83rd minute of the live report... the match must have hit a dull patch), that I had been, em... involved with his wonderful sister a couple of decades back, in Trinity. 

As a result I am suffering an almost lethal overdose of nostalgia, and may need to do something terribly modern to get over it.

But by jingo, this is what the internet was invented for. Gathering round the global campfire, telling tales from the old days before electricity. Hurrah!

My site traffic counter tells me there's been a lot of visits to a rather obscure page on the Forum this week (the Good Lord alone knows why). The page discusses Toasted Heretic's 1991 hit single, "Galway and Los Angeles", so I thought I'd add these links for the various versions of "Galway and Los Angeles" available free on Youtube...

1.) The second version of the original video (slightly muffled audio, I think it was uploaded from an old VHS tape). There was an earlier, artier version of this video, which I prefer (one long take of my mouth singing, it gets hypnotic, and the lips, when closed, start to look like a leaf or an old sofa after a while), but I don't know where to find it. Brian Shanley shot the original, but the record company freaked out and wanted another version, so we shot some stills of photos by Aengus McMahon and cut them in to make this second version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BxIvxUvfIE


2.) Toasted Heretic playing "Galway and Los Angeles" live on the Late Late Show (RTE 1 television), 2007:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlSa21EmHkw&feature=related


3.) Toasted Heretic play "Galway and Los Angeles" live in Róisín Dubh, Galway, August 2005, on the Now In New Nostalgia Flavour tour... (Very dodgy one-camera version! This was an all-ages, alcohol-free gig, in the daytime, so that the band's children and the children of our original fans could come. Thus the kids doing the amusing hand-gestures down the front. We did a far more blood, sweat and alcohol-soaked gig in Róisín Dubh the night before, for adults only, so don't worry if this version doesn't tally with your memory of the Róisín Dubh gig you attended...):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BtXFOSw650


While I'm at it, this is our most popular video on Youtube... Toasted Heretic do "Stay Tonight" (off Charm & Arrogance), on the Den with Zig and Zag... in which I stand on Zig, and throw a lot of dollars in the air, Declan speaks fluent Guitar, and Zig and Zag provide rather lovely backing vocals...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4mWrMOm51E&feature=related

"I've been warned about you lot..." - Zag

Sick as a pig this morning.

Puked my ring. Scaldy hole.

 

You do not want details.

So, as I was unfit for real writing, I hung out on the Guardian Books Blog all day. Very enjoyable. At one point I was asked "Julian, are you on SSRIs?" so I may have been a bit too sick to be posting, but feckit. Mostly I argued about people's right to email poems to their friends without written legal permission from the poet's publishers (Wendy Cope is, bizarrely, against this right. I am for it... OK, it's a bit more complicated than that, but you'll have to read it, I'm not summarizing an all-day argument.) The discussion starts with a fine article by Oliver Burkeman, well worth reading.

And I helped slag off the Guardian's decision to publish their review team's Book of the Year recommendations as a 41-minute podcast instead of a list. 

If anyone wants to read all about it, or join in, here's the discussion of Wendy Cope Forbids You To Email That Poem... Put Down The Poem... Move Away From The Poem...

And here's a link to the (slightly less intellectually stimulating) People Slagging Off The 41-Minute Book of the Year Podcast...

And I'm off to bed.