Phantom Blog

August 2013

Viewing posts from August , 2013

A Tinker’s Cuss – Jim Wilson’s Blog, 30/09/13

Jim Wilson’s Blog, 30 August 2013

 

Last week I was writing about my brother and putting up poetry posters in Trenton, New Jersey. Then I went on to discuss prison and the catacombs below my apartment here in Princeton, New Jersey. I mentioned the interesting people one meets down there in the tunnels and I always write about the healing power of travel and facing the oncoming road. Nothing goes away unless one faces it and anxiety usually has an end, but I will never read poetry in public.

My brother died when I was fourteen as I mentioned. He tried to take a tractor up a ridge that was simply too much for him and the tractor. My father taught him how to drive farm vehicles when our family lived on a farm up the Pig Root near Ranfurly/Middlemarch/Dunback in New Zealand. This is getting on towards Central Otago and is one of the most beautiful parts of Aotearoa. My dad was a tractor driver/farm labourer and my mum did the cooking for the men.

The Bell family owned the land (‘Shag Valley Station’ or ‘Bell Station’) and they were pretty good people. Our family moved to Dunedin when there were three kids at high school and I was born there. I’m proud of being born in Dunedin because it’s a great city. My Uncle Les lived with us and he was shell-shocked in WW2, maybe at Alamein where he was, but he was also in Greece at Mt Olympus and that was no picnic either. He could barely string a sentence together, but he was a hell of a guy and he used to laugh a lot. He was a real ‘moral compass’. Before the war, he was in the merchant navy and my mum used to say that he had been in every prison in the world for drunkenness. Like I say, one hell of a bloke and not a bad bone in his body. Give me a drunk with a moral compass over a sober psychopath any day.

My Uncle Les was still able to work (he was the boilerman at Kempthorne Prosser, the big drug company) and he bought us our first television. He had a number of Ford V8s and Morris 8’s that he couldn’t drive because of his ‘condition’. My brother used to drive them and take me out with him and I’d be standing on the seat screaming for us to go faster. Colin did drive faster and too much was never enough.

My sisters liked ‘safe’ pop music like Elvis Presley around the house, but my brother, he liked Jerry Lee Lewis. I am eternally grateful as you can imagine. My dad liked Hank Williams, William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell and that is better still. Those artists/writers all serve to give you no delusions about life and all it deals out. They help you face reality.

A couple of days ago it was Janet Frame’s birthday in New Zealand. I still get messed up with the international-date-line and I have no idea what comes first and I don’t really want to know. Someone, usually someone on Facebook, will tell me these things in some kind of lecturing tone when I go wrong. Like I say, in this life seven people will cheer for you to get ahead and three people will tell you where you are going wrong and they will desperately try and hold you back.  It’s like they live for that. I faced all that on Russell Street, Dunedin when I was a kid and I still face it. But it’s better now. The only kind of freedom is internal, I reckon.

Anyway, Janet Frame. I have lived with Janet Frame all my life and she has always meant a lot to me. She came to mean even more about five or six years ago when I did my second course of interferon for Hepatitis C. At that point she got right into my bones and I’m sure she healed me even more than that horrendous drug did. Good literature will do that because it will tell you that you are never alone, not down in the catacombs, not ever. Not much can ‘follow’ you when you are on interferon, but Janet Frame’s writing always did.

She often wrote about matters/situations/places/feelings of which I know well: the train station at Palmerston in Otago (another uncle of mine owned the dairy there – he was the family success story), family dynamics, Oamaru, Carroll Street in Dunedin, Seacliff, the Occidental Hotel in Christchurch, the fear of putting your hand out to be published and so on and so forth. And sometimes just the general ‘Fear’. The scenario at the mental hospital in ‘Gorse is Not People’ I feel, having spent some time in both Cherry Farm and Sunnyside trying to drop a nefarious junk habit in the 1970s. When I read her writing I can feel and smell the walls in Seacliff. I’ve often been to the sea there and gazed out. Loneliest place on earth I reckon and I can still hear the sobs, every time a coconut.

A lot of people seem to have distorted views of writers/celebrities/recording artists and they write of them, and they ‘review’ (now there’s a word) them and often they are destructive as well. They sometimes hurt sensitive people to the core and I myself have been hurt deeply, even though I’m not suggesting I am either a writer, a celebrity or an artist. I’m just a song and dance man. Bridgette Bardot got to the stage where she was disgusted with the whole human race and then she never went out. It’s an act of courage to ‘go out’ and sometimes it’s not easy doing my washing down in the catacombs either.

I think Janet Frame was just shy and she couldn’t stand all the palaver. I’m with her. I also think Jerry Salinger was probably the same and Thomas Pynchon as well. These people often attract others who are overly interested and who pry and want, somehow, to suck on their success. They usually go looking for bad things and, lo and behold, they find them. There’s money in shit. I myself am guilty of prying as I have been up Jerry Salinger’s driveway (when he was alive) and I have had his wife scowl at me. I guess we are all guilty as we want something they have. I’d give my right arm to be able to write half as good as Janet Frame.

Anyway, here I am in America and I’m busy putting up poetry posters. I love it and if I don’t put up posters during a day then I figure that I really haven’t done well. I haven’t gone out there and shaken my fist at the sky and just thought, “you know, fuck it… It’s not El Alamein.”

I’d hate to end up like some of these Americans/Kiwis who sit on the couch suffering from celebriphilia and eating donuts and hurling abuse at the screen when Lindsay Lohan (or, pick a name) comes on. I don’t want to be one of these dudes who thinks they can write better poetry than Bob Dylan and didn’t he just copy it, anyway? Also, I don’t hate the US government nor any government and I’m not here to blow smoke up your ass. I just do what I do and, as my Uncle Les could sometimes struggle to get out, “worse things happen at sea”. He was right and there was a man.

 

Thank you Kemo Sabe.

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A Tinker’s Cuss – Jim Wilson’s Blog, 15/09/13

Yesterday in New Jersey I was racing that pissant Toyota Prius down I-95 about as fast as it could go when an incredible thunderstorm broke and lightning went zig-zagging across the sky. The rain began to beat down so bad that I had to take refuge in a truck stop and wait until the whole thing had blown over. It had become really difficult to see the road ahead and the atmosphere was turning black and the sky seemed to be closing in. Thunder was booming like it was Black Sabbath. I turned the stereo up and this is the one thing Toyota do very well: they allow you to escape. The weather kind of reminded me of growing up on Russell Street, Dunedin, where the sky also got pretty black. Back then there was nothing I liked to do better than go and play up in the bush when it was pelting down. I like those kinds of memories. I hold on to them and they guide me.

I had woken up in a feverish state of mind and I was off to put up some poem posters in Trenton, the state capital of New Jersey. I wished I was driving a V8, even a clapped out V8 like I have done so many times before. William Burroughs used to say “an old Ford will never let you down” and I know this to be true. Trenton is only about twenty miles from Princeton and the two are as different as chalk and cheese.

Trenton is an interesting city and if the local newspapers are to be believed it is in almost total disarray and I happen to like cities like this. The mayor has been indicted for something or other and is due to go to trial, every second real estate developer is in jail, the police chief is fighting with everyone and Governor Chris Christie won’t give anyone more cops. He can’t afford to as there is no dosh left for relief. In other words, it is a city abandoned by everyone except the fast food chains and I’d hate to be working the night shift.

In Trenton, there are reports of children wearing bullet-proof vests to play in the streets and a local social welfare reform group is saying that the reason people are becoming obese is that they are too afraid to go outside and exercise. Heroin is priced at an all-time low of $5 a bag and it is being sold on the steps of the local state government with brand names like “Permanent Vacation”. Two bags and you’re gonna blow like Ornette Coleman whether you want to or not. I say there are bad lieutenants in about one of every four cop cars. Hypocrisy rains down like thunder.
I don’t particularly like seeing the excitement of destruction in front of my very eyes, but I do prefer a little more of a Bohemian landscape as opposed to the corporate scenery around Princeton and where nothing particularly real is ever said or done. People in Princeton don’t seem to know how very wealthy they are and it is extremely common to see women climbing into huge Mercedes SUVs the size of Knox church with four or five designer store bags. Sometimes their husbands trail behind with the other three. The store below my small apartment sells cheese and they proudly state that the average American eats 40 lbs of cheese a year. I know.

I find Americans are often so self-absorbed that though they are incredibly well-mannered, they practically never listen to what you say. They haven’t been able to hear the Arab/Muslim world and they won’t hear you either. This creates incredible dissonance if you let it. And I don’t think they have got all this alone in the developing world either. I think the further you go up the scale of wealth and particularly in white, middle-class areas, the more you will see that people are doing very well thank you, that they have completely closed ears, and they may not even fling you a piece of cake. Auckland, New Zealand is very much like this as it becomes more and more of a millionaires’ playground.

I have found the only way to have a decent conversation with a lot of these self-absorbed types is to start jabbering on about Dan Carter right from the get-go and only then you may have a slight chance of coming away feeling refreshed. If you bring Merhts into the conversation it is also uplifting and sometimes even Jonny Wilkinson works. The biggest mistake you can ever make is to think that anyone is ever listening to you and so you must pleasure yourself. I often think of Zinzan’s drop goal and it passes the time of day in a less lonely way. You have to work yourself up to getting manic and then you have to start to jabber. Facebook is a happy hunting ground for this kind of shit.

When the weather cleared a bit and the sky brightened up, I got into Trenton and scattered a few poem posters by Kiwis on lamp posts and I truly whistled while I worked. I didn’t have any trouble and you just never know if the way the media is reporting things is the way it truly is. So what I try and do about most things in life is just keep my mind on rugby, poetry, coffee, dogs, and literature. For a while in Princeton I was streaming the New Zealand news shows on my computer each night, but I noticed that I began to feel a bit touchy and a tad disgusted after a few days. Then I switched off the television and now I feel much better. I don’t watch all those crime watch or crime shows either because they are mostly full of shit. I find shows like ‘Border Patrol’ to be beneath contempt. Sometimes I used to admire the suits of the news presenters but I never wanted them.

I was in another working class city last week, too. I had to go to Flemington, New Jersey to get a toothache fixed. I’m sensible enough to know now that if you travel to a poor part of town or to a poor city then you may get dental care at a much lower price. But in the case of Flemington and at this dental surgery, I was completely wrong. Over these past couple of decades, dentists have become very hungry and they want to sell all these new products and just as quickly as possible. This one dentist was working patients in about six different booths all at once and with about three or four assistants. He may as well have been on roller skates like he was Speedy Gonzales and he was out to drain everyone’s pockets to the maximum. I don’t know what kept him to the feverish pitch he was in, but I didn’t find it attractive. He took a cursory look in my gob and told me that if I didn’t get two teeth capped immediately, then I would need total hip and knee replacement surgery. In the end, I insisted on just the one filling. These people have a power over vulnerable people and they can get them to buy. So I never think the problem is just the corporates, the politicians or the banks, I think the problem is all of us. It’s very destructive.

 

I walked out and put up some poetry posters.

 

Thank you for sticking with me, Kemo Sabe.

 

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